By John Fensterwald - Educated Guess | http://bit.ly/gBjv1Y
3/31/11 • Parents in Oakland who want to know how many teachers received layoff warnings this month, by school, can find this information in rich detail. The Oakland Unified district has created an interactive map on the district’s web site, with a pin for every school. Each lists the number of teachers warned and the percentage of teachers that represents, along with a profile of the school, by ethnicity and standardized test score ranking. There’s also a spreadsheet ranking every school by percentage of the 656 teachers, counselors, and administrators who got pink slips.
Oakland Unified is the exception. Most districts don’t publicize this information, for fear that parents will find out that a system of layoffs based on seniority creates vast disparities, with schools staffed largely by new teachers, which are often in low-income neighborhoods, getting slammed.
Not only do districts not have to inform parents, they don’t even have to tell the state. This year, Superintendent Tom Torlakson asked districts to let his office know the size of projected budget cuts and the number of staff layoffs, and most have complied (you can see updated figures here and here), but they were not asked for a school-by-school breakdown.
As of Tuesday, the issue has become critically important. In past years, most teachers with preliminary layoff notices weren’t laid off. Though they spent some anxious and demoralizing months not knowing their future, at least they got their jobs back, after districts worked through bumping rights and resignations. But this year, with the breakdown in negotiations to put $12 billion in tax extensions on the June ballot, K-12 schools are facing billions of dollars in cuts (anywhere from $2 billion to $5 billion without additional revenue); many of the estimated 20,000 teachers who have gotten layoff notices statewide will likely lose their jobs – even if voters pass initiatives in November for more taxes. So it’s important for parents to know now the turnover they can expect in their schools by September – and to lobby their school boards to consider the impact between now and May 15, when the layoff decisions are final.
This month, Los Angeles Unified reached a settlement with lawyers for Public Counsel Law Center and ACLU of Southern California, representing low-income children, to spare 45 schools, both low-performing and those showing an academic turnaround, that would likely have lost most of their staff to layoffs. Although layoffs by seniority is the state law, districts have latitude to exempt teachers in high-demand areas, such as special education. And, in a ruling critical to the LAUSD case, a Superior Court judge ruled that districts also can act when disproportionate layoffs jeopardize children’s right to an equal educational opportunity.
Few districts have followed LAUSD’s example. (Most copped out, on the grounds that the case is still on appeal.) Sacramento City Unified protected a half-dozen priority schools that are in the process of a transformation, along with math, special education, and some bilingual teachers. Pasadena Unified is protecting high school career technical education, its linked-learning programs.
Last year, the Senate bottled up a bill authored by Senate President pro Tem Darrell Steinberg that would have protected low-performing schools from disproportionate layoffs. Without data showing these effects statewide, senators made an uninformed decision.
In its report Victims of the Churn, which documents the effects of massive layoffs in low-income schools, Oakland-based Education Trust-West recommends, “The state should collect and share data on teacher dismissals, by school and district, so that policymakers and local communities have accurate data to monitor and address reduction in force patterns.”
As long as layoffs happen – and the Legislature can pass a budget to prevent them – that’s certainly reasonable.
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