Seniority-Based Teacher Cuts Drive Out More Than Just the Laid Off

On March 10, hundreds gathered to the layoffs for educators in the San Diego Unified School District. If passed, the cuts could eliminate 1,500 employees, but here's the kicker: Deciding who goes will have nothing to do with teacher performance. According to a contentious policy called “Last In, First Out,” (LIFO) the decision will be based entirely on seniority.

Because of LIFO, many of our freshest and most inspiring teachers are let go every year, instead of those who may not be performing on the same level.

Former controversial chancellor of D.C. public schools and founder of the grassroots movement Students First, Michelle Rhee points to evidence proving that seniority-based layoffs leads to firing some of the most highly effective educators. Rhee also notes how unbalanced LIFO is against poorer schools because they often have new teachers. “Because of LIFO, we lose the best educators in the neighborhoods that need them the most,” the Students First website reads.

When I ask several local teachers their thoughts on LIFO, all of them agree it's a poor policy. They bemoan its effects on classrooms and communities as a whole and also give me insight into the traumatic toll the strategy takes on educators.

Debbie Elliot, an elementary school teacher in Escondido, told me, “It’s devastating to be pink-slipped annually; getting called into the principal’s office in the middle of instruction to be handed a pink slip and then sent back to your class and expected to continue with your day, which you do because you’re a professional. This has happened to me five years out of the past seven.”

Both Elliot and Derek Suzuki, orchestra teacher at Oak Park Elementary School, talked about how many terrific teachers think of quitting the profession because they can’t face the lack of performance-based job security. When combined with other devastating cuts—like the ones that took away the music magnet Oak Park has had for over 20 years—it becomes increasingly difficult to keep morale up. “When it comes down to it, I really feel that the only reason that new teachers stick it out is because they truly care about the kids,” Suzuki said.

One common thread among the teachers I spoke with, however, is a real concern for what the alternative to LIFO would be. All of them feel the testing metrics currently in place to evaluate teacher performance are sorely lacking. 

Alex Kajitani, 2009 California Teacher of the Year and lauded Rappin' Mathematician, teaches at Mission Middle School in Escondido. He co-wrote a piece in The San Diego Union-Tribune warning about replacing one flawed system with another. Kajitani points me to Finland, one of the highest ranking countries in education, which he said is “well-known for making policy with their teachers, and yet we don't seem to be interested in following their lead.”

Another large concern for Kajitani is the current trend in education reform of scapegoating teachers, rather than the deeply flawed and underfunded system as a whole. Both he and Elliot sent me the same hilarious clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, whose mother is a teacher. Stewart asks to see the teachers among his viewers privately, does his patented swivel and looks directly at a side camera, telling them, “You are destroying America … You, with your chalk-stained, irregular Loehman’s blouses and power-steering Hyundais.”

The message from Stewart and from these hardworking educators is clear. Allowing ineffective teachers to stay, when the often best and brightest are constantly in fear of losing their job, is enough to make many of them want to walk away for good. But blamers be warned—the idea that just getting rid of bad teachers will fix a system riddled with bureaucratic, budget and assessment problems will not solve anything, and it may just end up pushing these already undervalued teachers even closer to the edge.