Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) has won a small victory in its fight to preserve
seniority rights at Los Angeles Unified (LAUSD), according to the 4LAKids Blog.
2010, in Reed vs. California, lawyers argued that low performing,
low income schools were unfairly impacted by layoffs since they tend to have
higher percentages of younger teachers who lack seniority and that this
violated students’ constitutional right to educational equity. Judges ruled in
the plaintiffs’ favor, paving the way for LAUSD to exempt 45 schools from
seniority rules, even though this violated state law and teachers’ contracts.
UTLA sued to
overturn the ruling and the California 2nd District Court of Appeal has now
invalidated LAUSD's exemption. In the 2 to 1 decision, the justices said that
UTLA has the right to a trial where they can argue the merits of their case.
The ACLU, which supported the Reed lawsuit, is planning on appealing the case
to the state supreme court. Until the Supreme Court takes action on the case,
the 2nd District Court’s ruling will stand.
ruling did not address the ACLU’s or Reed’s argument that seniority violated
students’ constitutional rights, focusing instead on the fact that the Reed ruling
violated existing state law on seniority rights during layoffs.
that students’ constitutional rights are violated by seniority is absurd on
several levels. First, the reason those schools are low performing is because
they have high percentages of lower income students. Their teachers are not the
cause of their poverty or their low test scores and even the best teachers
cannot make every poor student successful in school. Educational equity is impossible
without economic equity and if the ACLU and parent backers of the Reed lawsuit
really care about educational equity for poor children, they should be looking
for strategies that reduce economic inequity, not attacking teachers’ unions
and labor protections for working people.
it is reasonable to assume that the best teachers should be able to help some
lower income students succeed academically and that they would be more
effective than the worst teachers. However, there is no reason to assume that
younger, less experienced teachers are necessarily more effective than their
more senior colleagues. On the contrary, experienced teachers ought to be more
effective, on average. Thus, protecting their jobs during layoffs is in
While it is
true that lower income schools have larger numbers of inexperienced teachers,
it is not necessarily true that protecting their jobs is the best way to
maintain continuity for their students. Obviously, high teacher turnover is
disruptive to academic programs and can be stressful for children. However, younger
teachers have a much higher attrition rate than experienced teachers, even when
layoffs aren’t occurring. Thus, lower income schools suffer higher turnover
rates and personnel disruptions than affluent schools, regardless of seniority
rules. The solution to this problem is not to undermine teachers’ binding
contracts or to do away with seniority protections, but to provide more support
for beginning teachers, so they are better able to cope with the challenges and
frustrations of the teaching profession.
or curtailing seniority does nothing to change the teacher demographics at low
performing schools, especially if the protected novice teachers still leave the
profession within 3-5 years. Rather, reformers ought to look at why these
schools tend to have such high levels of novice teachers and seek remedies to
these problems. Many experienced teachers, for example, have worked in such schools, but got burned out from all the extra
demands placed on them by administrators and politicians to fix problems that
were out of their control. Others saw the writing on the wall and decided to
transfer to more affluent schools before their evaluations, tenure or pay
started to be negatively affected by low student test scores. Some simply got
emotionally drained from years of working with so many students who were
hungry, sick, depressed or lacking in the prerequisite skills necessary for the
classes they were in.
Apartheid-like nature of most urban school districts ensures that there will be
affluent schools with a majority of students who do well on standardized exams
and who are socially and academically ready for the classes in which they are
placed and others within the same district with a majority of lower income
students, with lower graduation rates and test scores. This, along with
inadequate funding and the persistence of the wealth gap are the real educational