How Should the Layoffs Work?
Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City said this week that fiscal woes could force him to lay off more than 6,000 teachers. We hope the number will not be that high, but there will have to be layoffs. The question is, how will they be done?
We would prefer to wholeheartedly endorse the mayor’s proposal for laying off teachers based on performance instead of the current seniority rules. But the system that would allow the city to make fair and objective performance-based layoffs is clearly not yet in place, and we are skeptical that the city will be able to produce one in the next few weeks before the budget ax falls.
New York is one of 15 states that have laws requiring that the most recently hired teachers be laid off first.
Mr. Bloomberg has instead proposed a nonseniority system that would make layoff decisions based partly on student test scores for some teachers and give principals considerable latitude to decide whom on their staffs to let go and whom to keep.
The city has begun to use students’ performance on standardized tests to evaluate teachers. But critics of the mayor’s layoff proposal rightly point out that about only 11,500 of the city’s 80,000 teachers have gone through such an evaluation. And a provision of the plan that would give principals greater discretion has raised suspicions about favoritism and unfairness.
Joel Klein, the schools chancellor, says the nonseniority system would allow the schools to keep promising young teachers instead of laying them off en masse. But a new analysis of city teacher performance data by The New York Times suggests that younger teachers would still be let go in large numbers. The Times’s analysis suggests that young teachers need five years in the classroom before they can do their best work.
Mr. Bloomberg and his team are right to argue for a performance-based system. Seniority is a very blunt instrument. New York’s students — who will already pay a high price for the layoffs — will suffer even more if good teachers are let go and bad ones kept on based solely on how many years a teacher has held a job.
City Hall should work with the union to implement a comprehensive, transparent and rigorous teacher-evaluation system. And it should start working now to persuade the State Legislature of the value of such a system. But barring some unforeseen developments, the city may have no choice but to conduct layoffs this time using traditional seniority rules.
The New York Times
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