Base Staffing Decisions On Teachers’ Impact

Strategy 1.5: Make all staffing decisions based on teachers' impact on students.

StudentsFirst will aggressively challenge policy makers to remove barriers to hiring and retaining the best teachers in all schools. StudentsFirst will fight against "forced placement," ensuring that laws never coerce a district to place a teacher in a position against the will of the teacher or the school leader. Additionally StudentsFirst supports the elimination of "last in, first out" staffing policies.

Students do not benefit from being assigned to a teacher who does not want to be there and whom the school leader has been forced to accept in spite of his or her best judgment. Yet, because of seniority rules, teachers are commonly "force placed" into positions without the consent of the teacher or the school leader, especially in urban districts. Even worse, seniority rules sometimes "bump" junior teachers out of positions for which they had specifically applied and been selected.

In other professions, placement is decided through mutual consent: Candidates apply for positions and the person considered the best fit for the job is offered the position. If the offer is agreeable to the applicant, he or she accepts. Forced placements are yet another example of devaluing teachers as professionals and of prizing process and some adult interests while shortchanging students.

As mutual consent policies take hold in education, districts will need to address the contingency of a tenured teacher unable to obtain a mutually agreeable school placement. An adults-first approach would continue to compensate such a person indefinitely until a new position is found. Of course, this approach fails to benefit students. Consistent with their hiring needs, school districts must have flexibility to implement sustainable solutions, such as offering severance, or defined grace periods, or other options for unplaced teachers who have earned effective ratings. Districts must also be able to remove ineffective teachers from the system.

If staffing decisions were based on the needs of students, districts would obviously make every effort to keep the most effective teachers in place. Unfortunately, current laws and policies often force schools to make placements based on how long a teacher has been in the system. These policies take several forms, such as:

• "Seniority transfers," which allow senior teachers to claim positions from other teachers regardless of their fitness for the position;
• "Excessing rules," which dictate that the least senior teacher will be displaced whenever a school reduces the number of teaching positions; and
• "Last In, First Out (LIFO) layoff rules," which require districts to terminate the most recent hires when layoffs are required.

Put into practice, the combination of these rules often produces devastating results for students. When fiscal pressures require layoffs, these rules force layoffs among the most junior, lowest-cost teachers, requiring districts to terminate more total teachers to cope with the budget pressure. These teachers are often concentrated in the worst performing schools, maximizing disruption in those schools. And, because tenure does not correlate with effectiveness, these rules often result in ineffective teachers instructing children while higher performing, less senior teachers lose their jobs.

Seniority-based staffing also deters promising candidates from choosing teaching as a profession — an especially serious problem as Baby Boomers in the current workforce approach the retirement age. Prospective teaching candidates might be confident they will perform well in this extremely challenging and demanding profession, but could reasonably balk at becoming a teacher when they know they could arbitrarily lose their jobs at any point to someone more senior, regardless of their contributions or performance for students. For many school districts, attracting highly capable teachers now is critical to avoiding future teacher shortages caused by waves of retirement.

Districts and states should address these seniority rules urgently not just because of their attenuated relationship to student performance. The prolonged economic downturn will likely force districts across the country to reduce teacher counts over the next couple of years. By making sure districts can keep their most effective teachers, changing these rules could allow districts to improve average teacher performance and increase student achievement in the face of financial pressure.