Editorial: Let teacher performance determine who’s laid off

With Washington state’s budget crisis, it is almost certain that many teachers will be laid off across the state. So a broad coalition of education groups, parents, business leaders, former and current teachers and even some students is urgently pushing for legislation that would allow districts to consider performance-based evaluations before deciding who will lose their jobs.

As is, the process is elementary, and we don’t mean that in a good way. “Last hired, first fired” is the sole consideration in most school districts. It’s that way in many other states as well, and it results in such absurdities as “teachers of the year” being shown the door. A bright young Ohio teacher who was present when President Barack Obama signed an education reform bill last year was laid off shortly thereafter.

Companion bills in the Legislature – HB 1609 and SB 5399 – would compel districts to review the past two evaluations of teachers before making layoff decisions. Predictably, the leadership of the Washington Education Association is battling to preserve the sanctity of seniority, but the union ought to take note that 81 percent of people who responded to a poll question about this issue took the opposing viewpoint.

And why not? Parents want their children to get the best education experience possible, so if a newer teacher is getting better results, it makes no sense to dump her. The allegiance to seniority also cripples education in those schools trying to close the achievement gap. Reformers note that newer teachers tend to be overrepresented at schools surrounded by low-income households, so the layoffs disrupt these children disproportionately.

In addition, efforts to hire better math and science teachers are imperiled because they would be among the first teachers laid off. This would be a significant setback for reforms aimed at improving STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education, which is critical to the state’s economy.

What’s more, a University of Washington study indicates that seniority-based layoffs damage overall student achievement. The Center for Education Data and Research’s model suggests that a performance-based system would add the equivalent of two to four months of learning for students versus the current system.

The critical component of these bills is teacher evaluations, which are superficial at best in many school districts. A change in the law would compel districts to produce meaningful performance reviews because of the raised stakes. Thanks to previous reform legislation, some pilot projects are under way to beef up evaluations, and they include ways of factoring student improvement into the equation.

But even now, many districts have a good idea which teachers are not making the grade. They just need the go-ahead to do adequate documentation and act on this knowledge.

The fate of the House bill, which has the best chance at this point, could be decided today in committee. Fence-sitting legislators ought to help pass it so that this important debate can continue.