Last Teacher In, First Out?
City Has Another Idea
Younger teachers in New York like Marisa Raff, 28, are at risk in a last-in-first-out layoff system.
By JENNIFER MEDINA
Peter Borock, 23, is in his second year teaching history at Health Opportunities High School in the South Bronx. It could be his last.
Jennifer S. Altman for The New York Times
Ms. Raff is a teacher at River East Elementary in Manhattan. As many as 8,500 city teachers could be laid off this year.
With New York City schools planning for up to 8,500 layoffs, new teachers like Mr. Borock, and half a dozen others at his school, could be some of the ones most likely to be let go. That has led the schools chancellor, Joel I. Klein, into a high-stakes battle with the teachers’ union to overturn seniority rules that have been in place for decades.
Facing the likelihood of the largest number of layoffs in more than a generation, Mr. Klein and his counterparts around the country say that the rules, which require that the most recently hired teachers be the first to lose their jobs, are anachronistic. In an era of accountability, they say, the rules will upend their efforts of the last few years to recruit new teachers, improve teacher performance and reward those who do best.
“Nobody I’ve talked to thinks seniority is a rational way to go,” Mr. Klein said. “Obviously there are some senior teachers who are extraordinary. You recruit young talent you think is good for the future, and to just get rid of that by the numbers seems to me to be a nonsensical approach.”
This month city officials persuaded lawmakers in Albany to introduce a bill that would allow the city to decide which teachers to let go, although its chances of passing are slim. Similar legislation in California, where thousands of young teachers have received letters saying they could be out of work, moved forward last week, backed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Arizona abolished seniority rules last year, and this month its Legislature banned the use of seniority if teachers are rehired.
Unions argue that administrators want to do away with seniority protections so they can get rid of older teachers, who are more expensive.
They say that without seniority safeguards, principals could act on personal grudges, and that while keeping the best teachers is a laudable goal, no one has figured out an accurate way to determine who those teachers are.
“There is no good way to lay people off,” said Randi Weingarten, the former leader of the city’s teachers’ union, who is now the president of the American Federation of Teachers. “But to be opportunistic and try to rush something through without knowing if there’s some degree of objectivity and a comprehensive and valid evaluation system is appalling.”
Indeed, even if school districts switched to performance-based layoffs, younger teachers could still face big losses.
Several studies have shown that teachers just beginning their careers are more likely to struggle than more experienced instructors. And a New York Times analysis of the city’s own reports on teacher effectiveness suggest that teachers do best after being in the classroom for at least 5 years, though they tend to level off after 10 years.
“You want to keep a rookie who looks good relative to other rookies, even if it’s not that great relative to all other teachers, because they are going to turn into a really good teacher,” said Douglas O. Staiger, an economics professor at Dartmouth who has worked with the city on teacher quality studies. “The question is: Are our current methods good enough at figuring out who those teachers are? I’m not sure where you draw the line on that.”
Mr. Klein frequently cites the teachers’ contract in Washington, D.C., as a model. Last year, when the Washington schools chancellor, Michelle A. Rhee, laid off nearly 300 teachers, she was not bound by seniority.
The fight to end seniority rules could be Mr. Klein’s most uphill battle yet. He is fresh off a deal with the union to speed the process of firing teachers accused of wrongdoing or incompetence, including the ending of warehousing such teachers in what are known as rubber rooms.
But he continues to struggle with the union over his desire to lay off so-called absent-teacher reserves, teachers whose positions have been eliminated because of school closings or classroom shifts, but who are entitled to full salaries because they have not done anything wrong.
But the reserves account for only 1,050 teachers, a small percentage of the number that could lose their jobs if proposed state budget cuts are enacted.
So the chancellor has tried to increase parent support for ending seniority by releasing projections showing that layoffs would be disproportionately concentrated in the South Bronx, where many young teachers begin their careers, and the East Side of Manhattan, where a boom in the student population has led to a large number of new teachers.
Some of their positions would be eliminated, and those that remained could be filled by more senior teachers from other schools.
Mr. Borock, the Bronx teacher, said that the layoffs would discourage newer graduates from entering the profession. “If you have a number of job opportunities, as many of us did, and you have a nagging feeling in the back of your mind that you could lose this job really quickly,” he asked, “why would anyone want to go into that?”
He joined a group created recently by other young teachers, Educators for Excellence, to lobby against seniority rules, taking on their own union.
At River East Elementary School in Harlem, half of the teaching staff has fewer than three years of experience. Alison McKenzie, the principal, said she was worried but believed that some of the young teachers would be protected because many were certified in bilingual and special education, two areas with a shortage of teachers.
Ms. McKenzie said she could not imagine losing in “these tender situations” a teacher whom she has supported.
Seniority is an article of faith for trade unions, which say that it protects against the whims of employers and provides stability for employees. Ms. Weingarten said that more experienced teachers were also better equipped to deal with other effects of budget cuts, like larger classes and fewer supplies.
Arthur Goldstein, the chapter chairman of the teachers’ union at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, said that Mr. Klein and his supporters were trying to pit teachers against one another.
“I understand how they feel — I lost my job four times and nobody ever helped me,” Mr. Goldstein said of the younger teachers. “I don’t have a principal who is crazy now, but I’ve had other principals who would have fired me in a New York minute. It had nothing to do with teaching — things he would take as a personal insult.”
Ending seniority was easier in Arizona, where Republicans control the Legislature, than it will probably be in New York, where Democrats are in power and the teachers’ union still has influence.
In California, where unions are also fighting the bill to end seniority-based layoffs, State Senator Gloria Romero, a Democrat from East Los Angeles, said that it was crucial not to “waste a time of crisis.”
“There has to be the willingness and the conviction to fight for the most vulnerable,” Ms. Romero said, “even if it means going against some of the most powerful allies that have funded the Democratic Party.”
In New York, Eric T. Schneiderman, a Democratic state senator who represents Upper Manhattan and is running for attorney general, said that veteran teachers had little reason to worry.
“It wasn’t just dead on arrival, it was dead before it was put in the mail,” Mr. Schneiderman said of the legislation. “It does open the conversation about how to ensure there are quality teachers, but the idea of giving the administration total discretion to pick and choose who is fired with no standards is not going to fly.”
Limited data on teacher effectiveness in New York City suggests that a purely performance-based system would not favor younger teachers.
In 2008, New York City began evaluating about 11,500 teachers based on how much their students had improved on standardized state exams.
A Times analysis of the first year of results showed that teachers with 6 to 10 years of experience were more likely to perform well, while teachers with 1 or 2 years’ experience were the least likely.
The analysis could not account for differences in the makeup of the 11,500 classrooms, like how many of them had large numbers of students with learning disabilities.
Mr. Klein has said that if he has his way, principals will be able to use a mix of factors, including student test score data and classroom observations by administrators and other teachers, as well as their own “vision for long-term planning.” He compares the decisions to what private business managers are able to do when making staffing decisions.
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