Steinberg bill on teacher layoffs in jeopardy
Protections for low-performing schools
A bill that would end the disparity in teacher layoffs in low-income, low-performing schools and resolve a lawsuit against the state and Los Angeles Unified is stuck in an Assembly committee with two days left to act on legislation.
SB 1285 is a priority of Senate pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, its sponsor. The stalemate puts him at odds with Assembly Speaker John Perez, who controls which bills exit the Rules Committee. The outcome will be a gauge of Perez’s loyalty to the California Teachers Association, which opposes the bill as an infringement of seniority-based layoffs.
The bill would require that the percentage of teacher layoffs in schools in the lowest three deciles on API scores – about the worst third of schools – be no higher than the average for all schools in their districts. That’s not the way it has been in many urban schools, where the last-in, first-out layoff rules, as generally required under teachers contracts and state law, have created a churn of young, less experienced teachers in low-performing schools.
In May, a Los Angeles County Superior Court judge issued a preliminary injunction preventing layoffs in three Los Angeles Unified middle schools named in a lawsuit brought by civil rights attorneys with the Public Counsel Law Center and the ACLU. In 2009, between half and three-quarters of the teachers at Samuel Gompers, Edwin Markham and John Liechty middle schools received layoff notices, because they lacked seniority, and most eventually lost their jobs, leading to unfilled vacancies and emergency hires. Many of those teachers had been hired and given extra training as part of the schools’ reform efforts.
In his decision for a preliminary injunction, Judge William Highberger said that the school district actually had the power under the state education code to prevent disproportionate layoffs when they clashed with students’ fundamental right to an equal educational opportunity – but that the district hadn’t exercised its authority. Steinberg’s bill would clarify that districts have that obligation.
Highberger’s preliminary injunction applies this year to only the three middle schools, but what’s happening to them is common throughout the state, so SB 1285 would have widespread application. And, with the state’s fiscal problems expected to continue, many districts, including Los Angeles Unified, are anticipating more layoffs next year. Without the bill, inequities would persist.
SB 1285 would not change tenure or the seniority system. It would simply require that the percentage of layoffs be no higher in low-performing schools. So some jobs of mostly new teachers would be protected in those schools, while in schools with mostly veterans, some teachers with more experience – five, six or seven years perhaps – might get pink slips. One of the outcomes of the bill might be to entice more veteran teachers to seek jobs in low-performing districts, where they would have more job security.
Precedence for the model
The CTA argues that SB 1285 would lead to larger numbers of teachers getting layoff notices, as the district tries to determine who is protected and who isn’t, but it’s not clear why this would be the case.
CTA also says that deciles, based on API scores, would be a poor yardstick for applying the law, in part because school rankings change from year to year.
Decile rank is an imperfect measurement, but it’s easy to calculate and there is a history of using it. The settlement in the Williams case, requiring state monitoring for new textbooks, school repairs and hiring of qualified teachers, applied to Deciles 1-3 schools.
The 2006 Quality Education Investment Act or QEIA, which CTA negotiated with Gov. Schwarzenegger to settle a funding suit, is funneling $3 billion over seven years to Deciles 1 and 2 schools for small classes, extensive teacher and principal training and more guidance counselors.
So CTA now finds itself in the contradictory position of fighting a bill that would prevent massive teacher turnover in the same schools for which it argued better trained teachers were needed.
SB 1285 has the support of a number of civil rights organizations, including Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Greater Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Urban League, the state NAACP and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
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Does the CTA have a proposal to fix this problem that doesn’t involve spending more?
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John, Not sure why you paint this as a civil rights versus labor issue — it is not. Most school districts and management organizations oppose this bill as well. Reasons include: (1) Severe over-noticing is very likely to happen in the first year of implementation because the average layoff calculation methodology is complex from an HR operational perspective and districts will need to give themselves a cushion the first year in particular. (2) It will not achieve the intended result. At the Assembly Education committee hearing, the ACLU student plaintiff described the problem as being one of rolling substitutes — but turnover DURING the school year is actually a very different issue than layoffs, which cause turnover BETWEEN school years. (3) If, as many experts such as Linda Darling-Hammond believe, years of experience is an indicator of a HQT then preventing more experienced teachers to teach in these high need schools may actually do a disservice to the children there. …I realize this is an op-ed, not a news article, but I hope your next piece returns to the balanced reporting that I typically enjoy on this blog.
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The absence of higher seniority teachers in some schools is because new teachers transfer out of them the minute they get the chance. How about a program that will attract and retain the best in these schools so that we have more senior teachers in them? Nowhere in Steinberg’s bill does it guarantee that a new teacher protected from layoffs has to stay in her school. We’ve got to make our schools attractive when they are hard to staff, and I don’t mean by just paying teachers more money than their colleagues (which, by the way, Los Angeles does).
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The state (and federal government) have invested billion of dollars in turning around its low performing schools including the High Priority Schools program, QEIA schools and the $400 million of School Improvement Grants made last week. To not protect the teaching staff at those schools from destabilizing mass layoffs seems crazy. Such layoffs effectively start the turnaround process over, and you may as well just throw the school improvement funding away.
While the state should eventually allow districts to use teacher evaluations to inform their layoff decisions, until districts are able to strengthen their evaluation systems, this bill seems like a strong stop-gap measure. And, while it may lead to some additional pink slips being given in the spring, it would result in less teachers actually being laid off in total. That seems to have not been mentioned in the debate.
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The reason schools in distressed communities are more heavily impacted during layoffs is that these schools have a very high turnover rate period. That is a fundamental problem. The reasons have been researched. Teachers leave these schools because of poor leadership and lack of resources and not becaus of a difficult student population. To what extent does the Steinberg bill deal with those issues? Not at all.The reason the pink slips are flying now is because of CA’s chronic underfunding of schools. Certainly, the budget situation impacts this, but CA started the economic crisis in the bottom five of the fifty states in funding per child. Yet another fundamental that Steinberg fails to deal with. The LAUSD was under court order to see that seniority was “balanced” in certain schools and LAUSD leadership failed to deal with this. Steinberg’s soulution? Silence. Why would responsible teachers’ union leadership support this legislative farce?
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Gary: The issue here is not choice but concentrated the lack of it –the laying off 50 to 75 percent of teachers who have no say whether to stay or to transfer from their schools. This perpetuates instability where the problem is not leadership. Of course, funding is an issue; it’s the cause of layoffs. But given the funding crisis, the current layoffs by seniority method sticks it to the must vulnerable children in the state. The Steinberg bill addresses that issue directly.
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> Judge William Highberger said that the school district actually had the power under the state education code to prevent disproportionate layoffs when they clashed with students’ fundamental right to an equal educational opportunity – but that the district hadn’t exercised its authority.>
That is true. This past year, a decision by an administrative law judge upheld the right of the Alhambra school district to retain equally credentialed, but low seniority teachers, currently teaching at a continuation school, over those with seniority, but lacking the same on-site service.
The newer teachers serving the targeted students, with on-site service time + PD Inservices, were deemed “more competent” than the ones with seniority. The district did not have to charge anyone with incompetency.
Layoffs are a distasteful part of an administrator’s job. It’s understandably easier to seek solace under the pretext that seniority is ironclad. Where is the outrage for some administrators?
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The ironic thing about SB 1285 is that while parents at most “low performing” schools and their advocates complain there aren’t enough experienced teachers working there SB 1285 would keep the less experienced teachers there instead of replacing them with more experienced teachers that are displaced from other schools because of drops in enrollment or budget cuts. When you understand the reason teachers are laid off today is because budget cuts necessitate larger class sizes that affect all schools in a district, the vacancies created at the lower performing schools will be filled with more experienced teachers moved from other sites. This bill is almost counterintuitive.
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John: You state: “But given the funding crisis, the current layoffs by seniority method sticks it to the must vulnerable children in the state. The Steinberg bill addresses that issue directly.” My point is there are so many new teachers at given site because: Lack of leadership and resources have led teachers to bail from those facilities as soon as they have seniority (which only makes coommon sense); and, the LAUSD administration
failed to comply with a court order to make sure there was a better balance of seniority at the schools. Both of these are management issues. Steinberg is attacking teacher seniority. Time to bring the accountability to where it belongs. Recall the EdTrust charge that kids in high poverty schools were being denied access to experienced teachers because research shows experience and quality of teaching go hand in hand. The Steinberg bill will insure that less experienced teachers, and less expensive teachers will be at those schools. So who’s sticking it to the kids? And please don’t suggest that the very management teachers are trying to get away from are going to be the objective arbiters of who gets to stay and who gets pink slipped. Personalities, and cost factors, will count. That’s what seniority rules are intended to circumvent. Seniority is the only objective measure. Mangament currently has the right to “skip” if program is negatively affected by layoffs.
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Thank you, Gary for your incisive comment.
I would only disagree on one point: Teachers leave these distressed school because of poor leadership, lack of resources AND a difficult student population. I, and so many of the best teachers I know, left a high-poverty school precisely because the 7th principal in 10 years had neither the leadership skills nor the experience to deal with a huge, difficult Title 1 population. That, on top of having to buy our own classroom supplies and paying for most things we needed to do your job, and then dealing daily with students who have not been fed, bathed, paid attention to, or parented (much less read to!) is just too much stress. Could you do that year after year after year, while just barely paying your own bills on the teaching salary?
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