Nearly 40% of the nation’s public school teachers work in states where their performance cannot be used to determine whether they should be let go, according to a new report released this month.
The report, entitled, “The Case Against Quality-Blind Teacher Layoffs,” argues that teacher performance should be a major factor considered by states as they look to shed payroll in the coming years.
Currently, fourteen states, including California and New York, have laws protecting teachers based on the length of their careers. Roughly 1.25 million teachers come from these states. 32 other states have laws that do not require teacher performance to be considered. Instead, these states leave the decision up to local districts.
Only three states — Arizona, Oklahoma and Colorado, plus the District of Columbia — require teacher performance “to be a major factor in layoff decisions.”
The group behind the report, The New Teacher Project, is a national organization seeking to change the way teachers are evaluated. In its report, the group contends that in order for states which have big budget deficits to avoid mass layoffs, reforms are desperately needed.
“Quality-blind layoff policies threaten to make this year’s layoffs catastrophic,” says the report. “Talented new teachers will lose their jobs while less effective teachers remain. More job losses will be necessary to meet budget reduction goals, because the least senior teachers are also the lowest-paid.”
In a story published Tuesday, Washington Post writer Ezra Klein called the report “chilling,” and blamed the policy on teachers unions which negotiate such policies. Klein added that unless unions agree to reforms, they will be unmercifully vilified, if and when states decide to drastically reduce education budgets.
According to the report, 1.1 million teachers work in states that face deficits of 10% of more. As a consequence, TNTP predicts that as federal “stimulus” funds begin to dry up, states will have no choice but to tighten their belts and slash spending.
As a solution, the organization has been lobbying states to consider factors other than tenure when deciding which teachers to let go. Under the group’s “Smarter Teacher Layoff System,” states would use five categories — performance, attendance, classroom management, experience and extra school responsibilities — to determine layoff order. The report states that “layoffs that consider performance would dismiss the most ineffective teachers,” and shows how “students taught by an ineffective teacher make 2.5-3.5 fewer months’ worth of academic progress in a year than they would with an average teacher.”
Already, a reform movement has begun in five states where legislatures are examining measures that would do away with valuing seniority over other factors in cases where layoffs might occur. In addition, just last week the head of the country’s largest teachers union proposed switching to a policy that would likely encourage groups that have lobbied for reform.
In a speech in Washington, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten unveiled a four-tiered plan that included a proposal to place a greater emphasis on teacher evaluations when determining layoffs. “In the cases when teachers are deemed to be unsatisfactory…it must trigger a support process,” Weingarten said. She recommended giving low-performing teachers a year to improve, whereby failure to do so would result in termination within 100 days. It should be noted, however, that Weingarten’s plan would require an independent arbitrator to rule when a group evaluation is split.