A Middle Ground on Seniority Policies � The Quick and the Ed

A Middle Ground on Seniority Policies � The Quick and the Ed

A Middle Ground on Seniority Policies

by Rob Manwaring

The back and forth in the last couple of weeks over seniority layoff policies goes something like this. When districts are forced to lay off teachers based on seniority policies, those layoffs happen disproportionately at schools serving low income students. Research has shown that high rates of teacher turnover impacts the achievement levels at schools. This results in a civil rights issue because of the disproportionate impact that these policies have on the most disadvantaged students. (SeeNational Journal discussion and new CRPE report for more details on the debate and research).
On the other side, the best argument seems to be that districts do not have good teacher evaluation systems, and until such evaluation systems are in place, any policy for teacher layoffs other than based on seniority would end up being arbitrary and could actually discriminate against veteran teachers because they are more expensive. In the long run, clearly districts need to improve the quality of their teacher evaluation systems for a lot of reasons including this one. Then the debate devolves into a fight over what are the right measures for an evaluation system. Over the next couple of years, we will learn a lot about measuring the effectiveness of