Ripple Effect of Teacher Layoffs
With the budget forecast still bleak, school districts across the country are bracing for potentially deep cuts in their teaching ranks. New York City’s mayor has estimated that some 4,675 educators could lose their jobs, while Rhode Island’s governor recently sent notice of possible termination to every teacher in the state.
While many of the warnings may not be acted upon — school systems routinely overstate likely reductions at this time of year — when layoffs do occur, they cause a chaotic annual reshuffling of staff members that forces thousands of teachers to change schools, grades, or subjects, the New York Times reports. This chronic instability, called “teacher churn,” is often lost in the policy debate over seniority rules. Yet it compounds the devastating effect of sweeping layoffs by hurting school cohesion, undermining student achievement, and rupturing ties with parents.
Seniority-based layoff policies creates more turmoil than is publicly recognized, experts say. Most people think school districts lay off teachers starting at the bottom of a long seniority list. But in many districts, teachers let go from one school have the right to take the job of junior educators at other schools. “As a result, the harm of a single layoff can be multiplied, as a cascading process of ‘bumping’ begins,” said a February study by Education Trust-West, a nonprofit group that was critical of California’s seniority-based layoff policies.
Quyen Tran, a 30-year-old teacher in the New Haven Unified School District south of San Francisco, knows this turmoil well. She has been pink-slipped in the spring four of the five years she has taught, but called back to teach every year. She has taught five subjects and grade levels in three schools, getting bumped from her classroom by more senior teachers in each of her first two years, then twice bumping junior teachers herself. The Times report says Ms. Tran received her fourth pink slip this month.
Filed under: K-12 Education News
Tags: Education Policy, Public Policy, Teachers
