The National Council on Teacher Quality has some thoughts about teacher layoffs and the practice using seniority in making the decisions (you get no points for guessing what they think). NCTQ is an organization with a longstanding history of producing headline-grabbing sort-of-research papers. Here are some of their highlights:
NCTQ is the group that once declared that college teacher programs are too easy, and their research was (and I swear I am not making this up) to look through college commencement programs.
NCTQ is the group that cranked out a big report on teacher evaluation whose main point was, "It must not be right yet, because not enough teachers are failing."
NCTQ used to create the teacher prep college rankings list published every year by US News leading to critiques of NCTQ's crappy methodology here and here and here, to link to just a few. NCTQ's method here again focuses on syllabi and course listings, which, as one college critic noted, "is like a restaurant reviewer deciding on the quality of a restaurant based on its menu alone, without ever tasting the food." That college should count its blessings; NCTQ has been known to "rate" colleges without any direct contact at all.
NCTQ's history has been well-chronicled by both Mercedes Schneider and Diane Ravitch. It's worth remembering that She Who Must Not Be Named, the failed DC chancellor and quite possibly the least serious person to ever screw around with education policy, was also a part of NCTQ.
NCTQ depends on the reluctance of people to read past the lede. For this piece, for instance, anybody who bothered to go read the old IES paper that supposedly establishes these as "bedrock" techniques would see that the IES does no such thing. Anyone who read into the NCTQ "research" on teacher program difficulty would see it was based on reading commencement programs. The college president I spoke to was so very frustrated because anybody who walked onto her campus could see that the program NCTQ gave a low ranking was a program that did not actually exist.
And yet, they remain firmly ensconced in the e-rolodex of many education reporters and policy folks.
NCTQ was headed up for almost twenty years by Kate Walsh. Had a long phone conversation with her once; seems like a nice person. She stepped down last May, to allow for a "fresh set of eyes" (Walsh is my age, so retirement is not a surprise).
Her replacement is Dr. Heather Peske, whose credentials are right in line with the very reformstery organization: Education Trust, Teach Plus, a "Future Chief" at Chiefs for Change, Broad Academy Fellow. Her bio includes the phrase "after having started her career as an elementary teacher" and having seen the rest of her credits, you'll have already guessed that what she means is that she spent two years as a Teach for America temp (though it appears she did spend a whole year in a classroom on her own after that).
The article itself is from Patricia Saenz-Armstrong, an economist who started her career in Peru.
She starts from a not-unusual premise-- decreased enrollment and the expected drop in funding when ESSER funds run out will probably lead to layoffs.
How should those be handled? Not with seniority, she writes. Getting rid of LIFO (Last In First Out) has long been a dream of reformsters, who have often leaned toward a high-churn model where teachers move in and out quickly (like TFA temps), thereby not running up big pension bills and high salaries, not to mention not sticking around long enough to start that whole collective action thing. Some atempts have been made to argue for tying teacher retention to test scores (Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders is making that argument again in Arkansas) but the problem there is that test score data is crap, and running it through some kind of Value Added Model does not reduce its crapness.
For the past couple of decades, however, any small sneeze in the education world will be greeted from somewhere in the great reformster chorus with, "Well, actually, we could solve that problem if we just got rid of LIFO."
This time the argument is an old favorite-- LIFO means that layoffs primarily affect the diverse ranks of newer hires, and therefor these policies are a threat to the diversity of the teacher workforce, and we need a more diverse workforce.
The piece includes a sample of the usual NCTQ research shortcut. This time, to show that LIFO is really common, the researchers scanned the policies of 148 of the largest school districts in the U.S. That's a questionable approach, because, for instance, New York City schools and Chicago schools are unlike any other districts in their state. On the other hand, I think we can all accept that LIFO is the prevailing model in the vast majority of U.S. districts.
It's a prevailing model because nobody has ever proposed a model that works any better.
First, teacher experience is positively connected to teacher effectiveness. It takes a teacher about 5-7 years to really get a handle on the work; a handle, it should be noted, that they can best find if mentored by an experienced teacher. That's why it's absurd to call yourself a teacher or education expert or educational thought leader after you've spent two years in a classroom (years that you did not spend trying to build a career foundation of practical knowledge because you knew that this was not your real career).
Second, you do not recruit capable teachers by saying, "We would love to hire you. Just be aware that we'll fire you at any time for any reason." Maybe you drew the short straw for test takers in your class. Maybe you just became too expensive. Maybe you made the mistake of vocally advocating for a student's rights.
In fact, we already know that one of the big problems with non-white non-female teachers in the field is not just recruitment but retention. You do not convince people to sign on for a career with you (particularly a low-paying one) if your message is that they can expect that career with you to be short.
Saenz-Armstrong does not make any actual recommendations in the piece beyond this:
Fair enough. But ditching LIFO is unlikely to help with any of that.
No comments:
Post a Comment