School districts are doing what they always do as a way out of financial crises. They look to the source of money generated by laying off personnel to solve the problem, never mind the issue of “last in, first out.”
up-scale suburban elementary school
As an example, in the up-scale suburban district of Los Altos, California, about 100 teachers are scheduled to be laid off, making class sizes rise even though the district has long touted its small classes.
All in spite of research showing how layoffs make things worse. See this blog’s post on February 24, 2010, titled “Short Term, Long Term.” The May 20, 2010, article “Teachers Facing Weakest Market for Jobs in Years” by Winnie Hu, New York Times, says “the recession seems to have penetrated a profession long seen as recession-proof.” No kidding!
Not only are lay offs imminent-an estimate of 150,000 or more personnel nationwide, but jobs are not being offered. One presumes class size increases are the answer. Students aren’t going away. Who’s going to teach them?
In this day and age, the layoff idea gets mixed up with the controversy about poor-performing teachers. The ACLU-Southern California press release for its suit filed in Superior Court February 24, 2010, against lay offs in 3 lowest-performing middle schools in Los Angeles areas of Watts and Pico Union explains that lay offs seeming to be “a budget-related issue, underneath that is the teacher tenure policy that is under attack” by superintendent Cortines, Governor Schwarzeneggar et al.
To others, lay offs take on the quality of a civil rights issue. Why should LIFO-”last in, first out”-be the school district’s policy when research shows that high-need schools in a district like Los Angeles have the newest teachers. Whether they are fabulous or poor-performing, the teachers are gone each year a district faces a financial imbalance. How can those schools establish a stable core of teachers, use resources to increase test performance, and train high-quality teachers–all of which is guaranteed in the state Constitution?
ACLU/SC won an injunction May 13, 2010.
Which leads to the suit filed May 20, 2010, in Alameda County Superior Court, by the California School Boards Association (CSBA), the California State PTA, and the Association of California School Administrators (ACSA) as well as nine school districts up and down the state and 60 students. The suit seeks to overhaul the finances for school funding to “provide the resources to actually deliver” on the mandate of what schools must teach and what students must learn.
Over the past 40 years there have been several decisions and initiatives, Proposition13 (1978) being the most well-known, and Serrano vs. Priest (1976) and Proposition 98 (1988) being influential, that have set California’s untenable education budget. The plaintiff’s argument is that “school funding is unstable, unreliable, irrational, and overly restrictive,” according to Jill Tucker and Marisa Lagos in “Suit could force major changes in school funding” San Francisco Chronicle, May 21, 2010. About 70% of similar “adequacy lawsuits” have succeeded, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
In California, this suit will take years to work its way out of the courts, and one can only hope the legislature will resolve this systemic problem before the court decides for them. One can expect that lay offs will continue to the detriment of schools and students, tenure-evaluation-compensation will keep being fought over, and stop-gap measures will be found to keep schools going, until the economy perks up and state money, that is taxes, rises to “normal.”
