The history of "LIFO"

05-12-2011

Blog by Dana Goldstein/Lady Wonk

Mike Bloomberg's plan to lay off 4,100 New York City public school teachers is really about his fight to abolish teacher seniority protections. The mayor hopes that by forcing the first widespread job cuts on the school system since the 1970s, he will build political support around his proposal to lay off teachers according to merit, without regard to how many years they've spent in the system. I believe a fair layoff system would evaluate teachers based on multiple, clearly-defined measures of effectiveness (classroom observations, lesson plans, student portfolios, student achievement data) and then use seniority as a tiebreaker. Such a system would protect excellent, experienced educators who have demonstrated a longterm commitment to the classroom, while also saving the jobs of the most talented newcomers. That said, I see two major problems with Bloomberg's plan: First, New York's current teacher evaluation system is sub-par and the new system does not take effect until September. The new fiscal year begins July 1, and layoffs would need to get done before then. Second, we're talking about such a massive loss of teachers--a cut of more than 7 percent of the jobs in the system--that every school community in the city will feel the pain, with larger class sizes, fewer electives, and fewer staff to supervise extracurricular activities. At this scale, cuts shouldn't be seen as an "opportunity" (Arne Duncan's term) to cut dead wood; they ought to be understood as a crisis. So how did we get to this point? (more...)

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