LA lays off effective teachers
When Los Angeles schools lay off teachers, performance doesn’t count, reports the Los Angeles Times. Seniority is the only factor. Schools with young staffs have been hit hard by layoffs.
At John H. Liechty Middle School opened in 2007 in Los Angeles’ impoverished Westlake neighborhood with a seasoned principal, dozens of energetic young teachers and a mission to “reinvent education” in the nation’s second-largest school district.
The students had come from some of the lowest-performing schools in the city. But by the end of the first year, their scores on standardized tests showed the most improvement in English among district middle schools and exceptional growth in math, according to a Times analysis.
. . . But when budget cuts came in the summer of 2009 — at the end of the school’s second year
Nothing new about differential pay
Paying some teachers more than others has roots in Western civilization, writes Rick Hess.
In the Greek city-state of Teos, for example, elementary teachers were paid 600 drachmas for the first grade, 550 for the second, and 500 for the third. Equally noteworthy is that the Greeks also paid instructors differentially depending on the subject taught. Teosian archery and javelin teachers were the lowest-paid teachers, at 250 drachmas per year; literature teachers earned 500 to 600 drachmas; and music teachers were the highest-paid teachers, at 700 drachmas.
. . . In Athens, meanwhile, both the Sophists and the Philosophes charged tuition as they saw fit,