When choosing which teachers to lay off during economic downturns, Alabama and many other states use systems based on seniority rather than teacher quality. A system based on quality of instruction rather than seniority can prevent students from losing talented teachers.
Links:
- Educators 4 Excellence: Layoff Policy – This link provides multiple studies and briefs concerning seniority versus quality-based layoff policy.
- Teacher-Layoff Policies Examinied in Two CALDER Studies – These studies by the National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research use data from Washington State and New York City to show downfalls in seniority-based layoff policies.
Resources:
- Seniority-Based Layoffs Will Exacerbate Job Loss in Public Education – Marguerite Roza. This report studies in detail how schools with seniority-based layoff policies can decrease their number of layoffs by using a quality-based layoff policy.
- A Smarter Teacher Layoff System – This brief published by The New Teacher Project outlines the quality-based considerations schools should make in determining layoffs in order to best serve students, schools, and teachers.
