Cash-strapped cities threaten to close schools and fire teachers

School's out

Mar 10th 2011 | CHICAGO AND NEWARK 

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Out for ever

TANISH ABLE loves her daughter’s teacher, but is not happy with her school. According to a leaked proposal, Dr Martin Luther King Junior Elementary in Newark’s grim West Ward may soon be closed and replaced with an independent charter school. Ms Able is delighted at the prospect: “They should be in here already,” she says. The plan, though still in draft form, is said to call for some of Newark’s failing schools to be phased out and others to be consolidated. Existing and new charter schools might even share buildings. As cities wrestle with falling budgets and poor results, similar things are happening across America.
Newark’s school system, under state supervision since 1995, is failing its pupils. Pupil performance lags the rest of New Jersey by over 20 points. Dropout rates are abysmal; only 22% of students finish high school in the normal four years with the pass in a state exam needed to graduate. But a $100m donation to the city’s schools by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, is helping to fuel change.
Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor, though not in charge of the system (it is in effect run by the state government), devoted nearly half his recent state-of-the-city address to education. “There will never be a great Newark unless there is a great public-school system in our city,” he declared. He proposed a longer school day and more control for school principals as a way to improve pupils’ performance. He and Chris Christie, New Jersey’s governor, who wants to end teacher tenure, are working together to improve Newark’s schools.

Across the river in New York City, the mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is threatening to cut 4,675 teachers from his payroll unless their unions show some flexibility and he gets more cash from the state politicians in Albany. The lay-offs would affect 80% of the city’s 1,600 schools. Some schools could lose half their teachers because of a policy that requires the last teachers hired to be laid off first, regardless of merit.
New York is not alone. It is illegal in over a dozen states to lay off teachers for any reason other than seniority. The union denounced the lay-off threat, calling it a scare tactic. Mr Bloomberg is making some headway: a state Senate bill eliminating “last in-first out” (LIFO) was passed on March 1st. Unfortunately, it is unlikely even to be considered by the state Assembly.
Desperate to fill a $40m hole in his school budget, Angel Taveras, the new mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has gone even further. Unable to eliminate seniority rules, on February 22nd he issued letters firing every one of the city’s 1,900 teachers. Although most of the dismissals will be rescinded over the next few weeks, some will not, and some schools will be closed. “He is driven by financial desperation, not ideology,” observes Chester Finn of the Thomas Fordham Institute, an education think-tank. Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s education secretary, is meanwhile calling for flexibility and wants the effectiveness of teachers to be considered before they are fired.
Neither Providence nor Newark has plans to close anything like as many schools as Detroit may have to. The beleaguered city has seen pupil enrolment plummet by more than 50% in the past decade, as residents move elsewhere in search of jobs. Falling state aid and dwindling local property taxes have only reinforced the trend. The school system needs radical restructuring. Robert Bobb, the school district’s emergency financial manager, has tried several policies to try to balance the books, including closing 59 schools. Last month the state approved a plan to shut an extra 70 schools over two years: that would mean half of the remaining schools in Detroit disappearing. Mr Bobb thinks that is overdoing it, and that it may simply drive more pupils away.
The Economist