Civil rights attorneys aren’t the only ones opposed to a teacher layoff system based strictly on seniority. Teachers themselves apparently aren’t crazy about it either.

“A Smarter Teacher Layoff System” – a report this month by The New Teacher Project – included a survey of 9,000 teachers in two unnamed urban districts. Seventy percent of  teachers in one district and 77 percent of teachers in the other, including most of  tenured teachers, said that factors other than just seniority should be considered in a layoff.

In both districts, teachers rated classroom management, teacher attendance and instructional performance based on evaluations, as more important factors than the number of years that a teacher has taught in the district or total years of teaching.

The survey, if it accurately reflects views of teachers in California and nationwide, calls into question the teachers’ unions staunch defense of the current system. Indeed, they may be out of touch with their own members. And with upward of 20,000 teachers in California due to get layoff notices by the end of the week and with Gov. Schwarzenegger calling for an end to seniority-based layoffs, now is time to deal  squarely with the issue.

Last month, the ACLU of Southern California and other attorneys sued Los Angeles Unified and the state, charging that budget-cut inspired teacher layoffs violated rights of African-American and Hispanic children in three low-income, low-performing  middle schools. The teaching ranks at those schools, made up largely of new teachers, had been decimated by layoffs.

The New Teacher Project report acknowledged the disproportionate effects of layoffs on the most vulnerable children in high-poverty schools. But it said that “quality-blind”  layoffs “demean teachers by ignoring substantial differences in performance.”  They result in many more teachers being laid off than would be necessary under different rules, because the district saves less money per lower-paid, new teacher. But most importantly, the report concluded, quality-blind layoffs hurt students “by depriving them of excellent teachers who are forced to leave simply because they have not taught as long as others.”

Last year, Arizona passed a law prohibiting the use of seniority in layoffs. Schwarzenegger said he would push for that this year in California. But a credible system doesn’t have to ban seniority – it should treat years teaching as just a minor factor. That’s what The New Teacher Project did in creating a hypothetical scorecard, with a point system using the criteria that teachers had recommended in the survey. Years in the district were given a 10 percent weight. An effective novice teacher could outscore an ineffective veteran but not an effective veteran.

While acknowledging that it will take time to put a quality evaluation system in place, the report concluded, “Districts cannot afford to wait, and they do not have to wait. They can implement quality-based layoff rules using information that is already available to make significant progress toward their goal of retaining their best teachers during layoffs.”

By John Fensterwald on March 7th, 2010