Something is really fishy about the LA teacher's case involving seniority and layoffs

dsc

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Sat Jan-22-11 08:22 PM
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Something is really fishy about the LA teacher's case involving seniority and layoffs

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/21/los-angeles-teacher-layoffs-seniority_n_812464.html?ir=Los+Angeles

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of students at three troubled middle schools in south and central Los Angeles, which have traditionally had high turnover of teachers and administrators.

Because of that turnover, a large portion of their staffs are recent graduates who expressed a desire to work in urban schools. However, layoffs over the past two years meant that the untenured teachers were the first to receive pink slips.

More than half of the teaching staffs at Edwin Markham, John H. Liechty and Samuel Gompers middle schools lost their jobs. At Liechty, 72 percent of the teachers received layoff notices; at Markham, the layoffs included almost the entire English department along with every 8th grade history teacher.

Students were taught by a revolving-door succession of substitutes who served as little more than babysitters, the lawsuit said. One substitute gave each student a C because she simply didn't know what grade to give them, the suit said.

In contrast, schools in more affluent areas of the district, where staffing is traditionally much more stable, lost far fewer teachers.

end of quote

OK here is the problem. In any district there are a certain number of teacher positions that the district decides to hire (based on enrollment, funds, and the priorities of the district and or state). Once that total number is set, the teachers are distributed to schools based on the enrollment at the school. If a school has 1% of the students in a district it gets 1% of the teacher positions. If it has 10% of the students it gets 10% of the teacher positions. Then the school goes out and hires teachers to fill those positions. They do so by the usual means, interviewing candidates and offering positions. In times where teachers have lots of options districts may have to go to great lengths to find teachers in times like these often not so much. But once that is done, you have your staff and away you go.

Apparently for years the turnover in these three South Central schools was very high leading those schools to having people with very low seniority when the layoffs came. So those schools had the most people laid off. But they didn't lose, or at least shouldn't have lost, such a disproportionate number of teaching positions. Say the total number of teacher positions in LA dropped by 10% without any real change in enrollment, then a school which had 10% of the teacher positions before the layoffs would have 10% of the teacher positions after the layoffs regardless of how senior its staff was prior to the layoffs. Even if every last teacher in that school were to have been laid off they still should have been able to hire displaced teachers from other schools (ones where no one got laid off but they lost teacher positions). Given how bad it is for teachers in CA I can't see that huge numbers of LA teachers chose to quit instead of taking jobs on those schools and even if they did, then the lower seniority teachers would have been hired back. In no case should these schools have been filling those positions with subs.

So what likely happened. LA played games with the teacher position numbers and screwed those schools. Seniority had nothing at all to do with it.