History of IDEA
Jeannie Oakes, Founder and Former Director
Youth Voice in School Finance
NEW REPORT: Los Angeles' road to A-G for all
Without Dollars and Sense Powerpoint
Past Educational Opportunity Reports
More Than Meets the Eye
- 05-14-2010
-
By UCLA IDEA Staff
As Gov. Schwarzenegger announces his revised budget with deep cuts to essential services, a court ruling on Wednesday highlighted the impact of cuts on California’s public schools. Los Angeles Unified School District officials cannot lay off teachers at three of its lowest-performing middle schools to address its budget deficit, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge ruled (Los Angeles Times). The class-action lawsuit was filed in February on behalf of the students at Samuel Gompers, Edwin Markham and John H. Liechty schools, alleging that the high number of layoffs was negatively impacting the students’ education.
As many as one third of the teachers were laid off last year at those campuses, serving mainly low-income, working-class and immigrant families. By contrast, schools in more affluent neighborhoods lost fewer than 15 percent of their teachers.(Reed vs. State, LA Weekly)
Following last year’s layoffs, the school could not recruit more experienced teachers at Gompers, Markham, and Liechty. As a consequence, many of the positions were filled by long-term substitutes. Sharail Reed, a Markham eighth-grader and plaintiff in the suit, said the substitute teachers babysat more than anything else. “It was a waste of time, like lunch in a classroom,” said Reed, who has yet to catch up on the work she missed (LA Weekly).
The governor unveiled today a revised budget with $20 billion in cuts. Nationwide, cuts like these are threatening thousands of teachers' jobs and the Obama Administration threw its support behind a Senate measure that would provide $23 billion to states to avoid massive lay-offs. (Washington Post).
There are a number of reasons for low-income schools being more susceptible to layoffs, but two factors seem to underlie this pattern. First, higher-income schools are generally better resourced and offer more desirable learning and teaching environments. Given the choice, LAUSD teachers tend to gravitate to high-income schools with better working conditions and away from low-income ones.
A second underlying factor relates to the networking of parents, administrators, and faculties at higher-income schools. Not only do these community members and school professionals have more leverage to make sure their schools are well maintained and staffed, they often engage in informal recruiting—ignoring or finding loopholes in traditional hiring practices.
This pattern of recruiting inexperienced teachers to staff lower-income schools is roughly a century old and consistent with broad social norms that can’t be blamed on teachers, their unions or seniority policies. The problem is worse and more visible during these times of budget shortfalls, but fundamentally not different. Speaking of the segregation of Mexican students in Los Angeles schools, a district official said in 1928, it was necessary to place a teacher in “the foreign, semi-foreign, or less convenient schools. After a few more years of satisfactory service, she may be placed in the more popular districts”(Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation).
In the early 2000s many teachers were hired with emergency credentials and assigned to low-income and difficult-to-staff schools. One result has been a negative spiral of less-qualified teaching staffs who are less capable of overcoming difficult school challenges. In turn, schools become less attractive to recruit highly-qualified teachers. Then, when layoffs are enacted, these schools are further impacted because so many of the staff are targeted for elimination.
Los Angeles Superintendent Ramon Cortines was pleased with the ruling, saying that officials should have the flexibility to look beyond seniority when it comes time to make difficult staffing decisions. “I think you need a mix of people in a school that means very new teachers as well as mid-career as well as seasoned,” he said (KTLA).
Teachers have taken the brunt of criticism for failing schools, including attacks on seniority and tenure privileges and protections (NPR), but union President A.J. Duffy said the district failed to enact its own policies to provide a good mix of teachers and a safe environment at those schools. The district needs to create “schools that are safe and secure and clean and healthy, with true administrative backup and support . . .” Duffy said (KPCC). “If [the three middle schools] had those things, there would be no problem with retaining teachers there.” This will be much harder to accomplish now that budget cuts have deteriorated conditions at many schools across the state (New American Media).
Print this
