Layoffs scaring off future teachers
Many of the 26,000 teachers in California who got pink slips in March may have their jobs back by August, if their colleagues agree to furloughs or give-backs and if districts pass parcel taxes next month and come up with other savings. Los Angeles Unified alone has rescinded two-thirds of the 3,100 layoff notices it issued two months ago.
But the damage to the teaching profession will last beyond the disruptions and uncertainty of the next few months. In a paper issued this week, the Santa Cruz-based Center for the Future of Teaching and Learning openly worries about the impact on the future supply of teachers that California will need over the next decade.
“The current rash of layoffs most certainly will harm morale and, even more important, the downstream effect of pink slipping on the teacher development system is already evident,” the Center concludes in “Who will be left to teach?”
Fewer people are pursuing teaching careers. The Center noted that the 52,000 enrollees in teacher preparation programs in 2006-07 were down a third from the nearly 78,000 in 2001-02. And the numbers apparently have continued to fall since then, prompting cutbacks in admissions into programs at a number of California State University campuses.
But a shrinking supply of new teachers will soon be out of phase with a surge in demand, regardless of the state’s fiscal problems. Over the next seven to 10 years, because of baby-boom retirements, there will be a need to replace one-third of the teacher workforce, 100,000 teachers. Plus, elementary school enrollments are projected to rise by 170,000 by 2015, creating a need, assuming an average of 25 students in a classroom, of 7,000 more teachers.
The Center makes three policy recommendations to mitiage the effects of massive layoff notices and to provide a pool of available teachers in coming years:
- Better coordinate the state budget process and layoff notifications so that districts don’t have to prematurely give notice to more teachers than necessary, creating morale problems and driving prospective teachers from the profession. Gov. Schwarzenegger is proposing to move back the notification date two months, to May 15, in SB 955;
- Remove the cap on teacher preparation programs in the CSU California State University system so that
all qualified applicants can pursue teacher training; - Create incentive programs that encourage teachers to take assignments in high-need schools and in areas of shortage, such as special education, mathematics and science.
Not mentioned by the Center is another idea in SB 955: eliminate seniority in determining the order of layoffs. Giving principals, particularly in low-achieving schools, the ability to lay off based on merit, would at least give new and less experienced teachers a fair shot at keeping their jobs – and not send the signal that it’s futile, no matter how good you are, to keep your job if you are a relatively new teacher.
Since seniority-based layoffs disproportionately tend to effect low-income, low-performing schools, some education groups are calling for making passage of Sen. Tom Harkin’s proposed $23 billion education jobs bill contingent on dropping seniority-based layoffs, or at least encouraging school districts to use part of the money to encourage early teacher retirements. That, too, is a good idea.
Mr. Fensterwald is urging schools districts to push out & purge older, more experienced professional teachers (who earn higher salaries) to replace them with newbie teachers & temp TFA interns at a discount price. Think of the increased profits charter school operators could pocket with all newbie & temp/intern low-paid teachers, skimpy benefits, no costly electives (in terms of supplies & specialist teachers, such as music, art, etc.), larger class sizes also ($$$), and all non-union labor! Hmmm… Doesn’t this sound reminiscent of the way the newspaper industry/media corporations (the San jose Mercury News) pushed out-purged experienced journalists, including Mr. Fensterwald in recent memory? However, let’s clearly observe the sleazy situation here which involves BOTH age-ism and sexism (devaluing & undermining older women) too! Hey, let’s just posit the question — Why should middle-aged women (some of whom have spouses, and some of whom are divorced or never married) be employed at all as professional long-time, dedicated teachers –and why should they be paid anything! They should all do unpaid volunteer work, stay home in the kitchen or become nuns — how dare they be employed as experienced education professionals!
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I (Mr. Fensterwald) did not get pushed from the Mercury News. I took a buyout so that I could begin The Educated Guess to promote discussion on issues such as these and I enjoy the debate the blog has created except when my positions are mischaracterized. I am not urging districts to purge older, more experienced professional teachers (who are my contemporaries and include my wife, who is not, in my mind, overpaid). I do believe that tenure should not protect teachers who are ineffective and that seniority status should not automatically shield them from layoffs (and I do not favor layoffs of teachers). I believe there should be financial incentives to encourage veteran teachers to transfer to low-performing schools, so that these schools are not decimated by seniority-based layoffs. A Superior Court judge obviously agrees with me; he declared, with a preliminary injunction, that the seniority-based layoffs in Los Angeles Unified violated the rights of students at three middle schools. Not all new teachers are terrific. But those who are need to be protected, celebrated, and paid more than the step-and-column pay schedule promoted by teachers unions allows. Your charges of ageism and sexism are just plain silly.
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John,
You may recall that my wife is in the last throws of her teacher credential program. In addition to her coursework, she has had to sit for half-a-dozen-plus exams (each one costing around $70 a pop). Yet aside from student teaching and the hope that she will have both a good mentor and effective administration to guide her, there is no standardized review, no videotaping of her teaching methods or actual pedagogy in action. And of course the existing teachers 15 years older never had to endure any of this — and I met more than one lemon in my school days. The standards push of the last 10+ years has created huge barriers to entry for new teachers. Some of these are good; many are excessively burdensome. As for the layoffs: I would continue to assert that pain-sharing and pay reductions are the best way to deal with budget constraints — hold a lottery so no one group (old or young, high paid or low paid) has an advantage. School districts need mechanisms to purge ineffective teachers, but using the budget and cost-cutting as a driver is a pretty lame excuse for making the tough decisions, whether in schools or corporations, which should be done regardless of the plenitude in the coffers.
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But don’t you think that eliminating all job security in the teaching profession will discourage even more high-quality prospects from entering the field at all? And that’s on top of the blame, contempt, punishment, disparagement, deprofessionalizing and all-around disrespect with which the teaching profession is constantly showered these days. Blaming and disparaging teachers is the fad of the moment — the equivalent of my 16-year-old’s nose piercing — but aside from being malicious and wrong, it’s a fad that will do serious long-term damage — to schools, children and all of society. (At least with my daughter’s piercing, only her own nose is at risk if anything does go awry.) … John S. Leyba, I too am married to a newcomer teacher. He looks with bafflement and dismay at the hostility his former colleagues in the press heap upon his new profession — the notion that it’s littered with lazy, burned-out deadwood (he is less inclined than I am to get just plain angry). “I’m just not seeing that,” he says, meaning the horde of lazy, uncaring burnouts envisioned by the editorial writers sitting in their echo chambers. Ironically, of course, some of those journalists who still cling to what’s left of their jobs are likely to be career-changing their way into the classroom soon themselves. Reality will bite.
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John,
Parallel to the enrollment drop is the number of new teachers earning credentials, decreasing for the fifth straight year; a cumulative reduction of 22 percent (Teacher Supply in California, 2008-09, Commission on Teacher Credentialing).
FYI, beginning July 2008 all elementary, middle and high school teacher candidates need to pass a new Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA) to demonstrate that they have the knowledge, skills, and abilities required of a beginning teacher in California public schools. As a part of this assessment, teachers are videotaped presenting a lesson to a class of K-12 students. This taped lesson is used to assess the teacher’s skill and abilities in a real classroom situation.
Anne Padilla
Commission on Teacher Credentialing
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Teachers seems to live in some kind of alternative universe that’s hard to understand. Lack of job security doesn’t discourage other potential professionals from becoming doctors, lawyers, and engineers. In fact, nearly every job in society carries less job security than teaching.
And some professionals, particularly lawyers, face worse disparagement than teachers.
Can anyone explain why teachers seem so inflexible and thin skinned?
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“GET SCHOOLED” — Read this article by Maureen Downey
in which she quotes Diane Ravitch: “Education has become
a search and destroy mission and teachers are often the targets” ….. the endgame of the deliberate public school teacher-bashing & undermining agenda is to induce as much privatization and edu-profiteering as possible within the next few years. The “Starve the Beast” framework has been deliberately fomented (read Hoover Institution articles from the past decade) in order to force down the salaries/wages & employment benefits of the middle class, especially targeting state & local government workers & the civil service sector. Privatization is the name of this game. Research the following for starters: KAPLAN corporation for-profit educational programs & testing services (which is owned by The Washington Post); The Parthenon Group private equity consultants; the so-called Billionaire Boys club & their ubiquitous toy think-tanks;
Hedge Fund honchos & scamsters who are suddenly hot for teachers (pliable, easily manipulated non-unionized newbies & temps), hot for gaining title to taxpayer-funded school property (buildings/real estate), and hot for profit-mongering online homeschooling & school-business schemes with loose oversight — see this shocking, cautionary news article “A Charter School Travesty” about a situation occurring now in California –
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/united-teachers-of-ara/a-charter-school-travesty_b_566487.html
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As the spouse of a longtime Chronicle reporter who left under the same circumstances that led John Fensterwald to leave the Mercury News, I can attest that many newspaper staff members were not individually being “pushed” to leave; the employers bid adieu to many veterans with genuine regret. But that said, the reason for the buyouts IS to encourage higher-paid veterans to leave, both to reduce the staff and to allow for their replacement with lower-paid newcomers. While the motivation is economic, not ageist, the buyouts do target older employees. I believe that the widespread caricaturing of older teachers as lazy, burned-out deadwood — and the parallel exaltation of newcomers as eager, high-energy and full of effective new ideas – is also motivated by economics, but it does have an ageist and sexist impact, as so many older teachers are women. There’s a lot of societal contempt for middle-aged women that makes it even easier to characterize veteran teachers with such negative and undeserved mean-spiritedness. (I saw that contempt coming from the left here in San Francisco when a poster in a political discussion on a Green Party blog branded our most senior Board of Education member, then running for re-election, a “hag” and a “crone.” That enlightened progressive, by the way, was called out and checked by a Green Party and labor leader who’s transgendered.) Disclosure that I am speaking as a middle-aged woman, probably needless to say. … I agree that there should be significant financial incentives to teach in hard-to-staff schools. I also agree that “ineffective” teachers should not be protected by tenure. But in my experience, it’s not “tenure” that protects problem teachers; it’s ineffective management – the same thing that keeps problem employees in their jobs in the newspaper business and throughout the private and public sectors, for that matter. … 2contango, try comparing doctors’, lawyers’ and engineers’ pay to teachers and then ask again why talented people might need a little extra incentive to go into teaching. It’s true that lawyers in the abstract are showered with an awful lot of hostility, as are teachers, though a key difference is that lawyers are very well-paid in return. They’re also not expected to magically fix every possible problem resulting from social inequities and blasted as “ineffective” when they can’t achieve instant miracles.
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The current Newsweek has published a rebuttal by one of its own staffers, Raina Kelley, to the cover story it ran a few months ago attacking teachers, putting full blame on them for the challenges facing public education. Kelley’s piece doesn’t mention that what it’s rebutting is a Newsweek article, bizarrely — of course I recognize that that was likely her editors’ decision, not hers. (And by the way, I read Kelley’s piece free online, since the attack on teachers was the last straw for my family and we let our Newsweek subscription lapse, though both my husband and I have subscribed to it for pretty much our entire adult lives. It was the tipping point in demonstrating just how far once-respected Newsweek has fallen.) http://www.newsweek.com/2010/05/28/in-defense-of-teachers.html
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I’ve heard these same “alarming” trends discussed and seen the initiatives to make teachers out of private sector college graduates for years and I’m still just…confused.
Explain this to me.
In 2001 you had 78k enrolled in teacher preparation.
In 2007 you had 52k enrolled to become teachers.
Presumably you had enrolled between 52k and 78k pre-service teachers each year between 2001 and 2007.
And you’re worried that in the next TEN YEARS you’ll need 100k (plus 7k if you have the growth you hope for)teachers. But this year you laid off 26k? Hmm, I may only be certified in English and Biology, but your Math does not support your concern. If anything, prospective teachers aren’t being discouraged enough. Wait until they start hearing about the 100’s of applications for every open position that has become the norm in this country.
I’ve been looking for a permanent position for ten years and in every case I’ve lost the job to someone right out of college, without exception …something like 150 job now. They’re cheap, they’re cute, they’re malleable…and ridiculously expendable.
Rather than throwing money at getting more people to become teachers, why don’t we spend our time and money supporting great teachers. You know, those die-hard student fanatics who survive the gristmill and still continue to teach come heck or high water?
Better yet, let’s try elevating teaching to a PROFESSION so we can do more than just wear the title for special occasions. A TEACHER is not just a warm body with 40 credits and a pulse.
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What about the HUGE disparity between the salaries of classroom teachers and all of the nonsensical “program” administrators? Perhaps administrators should be the one’s to take pay-cuts as well. Why is it that the teacher must always bear the brunt of what is wrong with EVERYTHING in education????? If teachers must take yet ANOTHER cut of some sort then perhaps it would be just as helpful to shorten the gap between what teachers and administrators at the district level earn to manage useless programs.
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BOOM, baby.
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Hmmmm-maybe because unlike lawyers, doctors, and engineers, the teacher comes off of five to six years of preparation, countless hoops to jump through thanks to NCLB, all for the privilege of starting out at 36,000 a year. Talk about thankless. Anyone who goes into teaching is NOT doing it for the money OR job security-they are doing it because they feel called to make a difference.
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Jere, in response to your first question, the answer is because teachers are the primary expense in education. As well they should be. But anytime anyone looks to ’save’ any money of consequence, they look to the largest expenditures to get the most ‘bang for the buck’ in cuts.. kids be damned.
Steorling, right on.
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There was a time older teachers had value. Many times Kids will respond and learn more from them. Older people don’t all the time need to be put out to pasture. Why is it always about how long some one has been on the job. Where does the value of learning come in at for the next generation? Some things are beyond my understanding.
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