Opinion

Bottom of seniority, top of the class

With federal stimulus money dried up, many school districts will have to lay off teachers. Nearly everywhere when this happens, the newest teachers, rather than the worst ones, lose their jobs. Political leaders would like to get rid of last-hired-first-fired policies so that the best teachers stay on the job, but that means taking on the unions, which can feel like political suicide.

That’s surely what it looked like in Washington, DC, where former chancellor Michelle Rhee dared cross that line. She laid off 266 teachers in 2009 — for the most part the worst, not the newest — and that move was one of the biggest reasons former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty got bounced from office and Rhee resigned as chancellor.

Does that mean mayors such as Michael Bloomberg should ignore their instincts on what’s best educationally? Not at all.

What happened to Rhee in Washington may have been a public-relations and political debacle, but as a policy decision it was hugely successful. She got rid of some her worst teachers and swapped in better ones, a strategy that accounts for the significant academic gains Rhee made there.

For once, education researchers are spot on: Effective teachers mean everything. Today, despite all the fallout, Rhee has no regrets about that decision. She’d do it again.

The Washington story started when Rhee got word that her budget had to shrink. Council members, to avoid teacher layoffs, decided Rhee should cut back her summer school program. But in DC, where the mayor has control of the schools, it wasn’t up to the council to make that decision.

To Rhee, this was a classic showdown over the purpose of schools: employ adults or educate kids? Summer school was a powerful educational tool, whereas there was no reason to keep teachers who weren’t needed. Rhee restored the summer school budget and moved forward with layoffs.

Unencumbered by contracts or laws, Rhee had free rein to choose whom to let go. Some people lost their jobs not because they were bad teachers but because they taught in underutilized schools or low-demand subjects. But Rhee made sure that the majority of the firings were based on effectiveness alone.

At that time, the district’s new teacher evaluation system wasn’t ready to identify weaker teachers, so Rhee asked her principals to make those decisions. She figured that they knew which teachers were least capable of helping their school make required academic gains — gains that were required if the principals were going to keep their jobs.

Rhee thought her plan was solid, but the execution was messy. Some teachers were escorted from their classroom and fired without given a reason. One of the 15 laid off at one high school was a popular guidance counselor who served on the executive board of the Washington Teachers Union. Protests there got so bad the police were called in.

The biggest morass came when Rhee gave an interview to Fast Company magazine, in which she revealed that some of the teachers laid off had hit kids and were sex abusers. She failed to say how many, leading Rhee critics to accuse her of painting all of the laid-off employees as thugs and deviants. Later, Rhee specified that one teacher was laid off due to sex abuse charges and five for corporal punishment reasons. But by then the damage to public opinion had been done.

Ultimately, the Fast Company fiasco proved to be a sideshow. Union officials — from not just teachers associations but also allies such as the AFL-CIO — focused street demonstrations on something more meaty: the upending of the comfortable tradition of seniority-based layoffs. As it turns out, their fears were justified. Today, politicians in several states are demanding an end to seniority-based layoffs.

These politicians sense a unique opening in public opinion. Parents instinctually understand what researchers already know. After roughly the fourth year of teaching, seniority has little effect on who’s good or not. Last-hired-first-fired policies mean that more expensive teachers stay on the payroll, even though they may not be any better than their newer colleagues.

National teacher union leaders seem to sense their vulnerability on this issue. Rather than defend seniority-based layoffs, they insist the real issue is avoiding layoffs at all. Or, they answer indirectly. “In no other profession is experience deemed a liability rather than an asset,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation’s largest teachers union. “Teaching is a complex profession, and experience matters.”

Yes, but nobody is arguing that teachers get worse with experience, only that the best teachers aren’t always the most experienced.

We haven’t heard any good defense from union officials of last-hired-first-fired — perhaps because there aren’t any. If you want to the best teachers on the job, you find a different way to allocate layoffs. For political protection against what Rhee experienced in Washington, districts should announce the grounds for layoffs well in advance.

For this to happen in many places, contracts and even laws have to be changed. It won’t be easy. But for students, it’s imperative.

Richard Whitmire is the author of “The Bee Eater: Michelle Rhee Takes On The Nation’s Worst School District” (Jossey-Bass), out this week.