The decline of California's public education system -- once one of the country's finest, now near the bottom in most national rankings -- owes to a wide variety of wayward public policy choices. One that has a particularly deleterious effect on some of the Golden State's worst schools is the practice of laying off teachers by seniority, so that the most junior instructors are the first to be relieved of their employment, regardless of classroom performance. This is particularly noxious for underperforming urban campuses, where young, energetic teachers (often with special training) tend to be the only instructors capable of turning around flagging institutions. Now, in San Francisco, precisely that kind of progress is being snuffed out through union opposition.
As the lede of
a story in the San Francisco Chronicle puts it:
Dr. George Washington Carver Elementary School's test scores have consistently been the worst in the state year after year.
Parents have shunned it. Teachers have fled it.
Until now.
This year, Carver's attendance and test scores are up, and every one
of the 24 teachers wants to return next year to the Bayview school,
Principal Natasha Flint-Moore said.
And yet, 14 of those teachers - nearly 60 percent - have been told they can't stay.
They were among the 210 low-seniority district teachers to get a pink
slip this spring as the district struggles to cover an $80 million
shortfall over the next two years.
As the piece goes on to note, there are exceptions under California law where seniority-based layoffs can be avoided if the teachers in question can be shown to have special skill sets the school needs. However, that decision isn't made in a vacuum. California's teachers union establishment opposes any deviation from the seniority system and in San Francisco they got a local administrative judge to agree with them, meaning that many of these inspiring young teachers will be on their way out the door.
This passage from the Chronicle piece is telling:
... The United Educators of San Francisco argued that
it wasn't fair to bypass teachers in the Superintendent's Zone [the zone for low-performing schools like George Washington Carver], when
teachers at other struggling schools would not be exempt.
The district's plan implied that students at one school were more
deserving of keeping their teachers than those at another school, said
Dennis Kelly, the union's president.
"You've got to have an impartial procedure for handling these things if you have to do them," he said.
Kelly is right to note than an objective system would be nice. But that system would probably pass out pink slips based on classroom performance rather than length of employment.
