Don't Target Our Mentors, Say Young Teachers
What damage is done to schools if teaching becomes a revolving door job?
Already struggling with a low retention rate in a difficult profession, young teachers say they’d prefer not to find out.
A group of young teachers in New York schools called on state leaders this week to preserve “last in, first out” seniority rules.
New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed 4,666 teacher layoffs this year and
has called to end seniority as the basis for determining the order of firings. Bloomberg says the layoffs are needed in light of reduced state funding. Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office has said the layoffs are unnecessary—though he still wants to change how they would occur, if they do.
State legislators are divided, too: the Senate passed a bill this week that would end “last in, first out” layoffs, but the Assembly is not expected to act on the legislation.
The state’s budget is due April 1.
If the layoffs happen, the younger teachers would be first to go under current rules, because they have least seniority—the long-established way unions have fought to rein in managerial favoritism, impulsiveness, and retaliation.
Young teachers say there are good reasons to have seniority: Veteran teachers save new ones in their first years, and experienced workers provide grounding and perspective. And if seniority disappeared, they fear senior teachers would be unduly targeted for layoffs because they earn more.
“As newer teachers, we rely on our more senior colleagues for guidance and support,” reads an open letter the young teachers released. “Without more senior teachers, we would lose our bridge to lessons learned through years of dedicated work in the school system.”
The letter has been signed by 121 teachers with less than five years’ experience. (A copy of the letter is below).
Cuomo put forward a bill Tuesday that would replace seniority-based layoffs with new teacher evaluations that look at student test scores among other measures to determine layoffs.
Liza Campbell, a third-year math teacher at a Brooklyn high school, said relying on test scores narrows the curriculum and deadens learning. Other proposals to measure teacher effectiveness, like principal observations, are wide open to bias, she added.
The city’s teacher union, the United Federation of Teachers, is sidestepping the seniority issue in the legislative fight this year. Its position is that the city doesn’t need layoffs, so there’s no need for the conversation about which teacher is fired first.
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Campbell said UFT President Michael Mulgrew expressed support privately for the open letter, which the New York Collective of Radical Educators coordinated.
While the young teachers agree that no layoffs of public workers are necessary in a city where Wall Street firms booked $19 billion in profits last year, they say teachers need to address seniority head on.
Campbell remembers breaking down crying her first year of teaching, feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. Senior teachers counseled her, giving her the motivation to continue.
“Having dealt with all types of issues that occur in a classroom strengthens your ability to teach well,” Campbell said. “If I were laid off, I would be really angry at Bloomberg. But I certainly wouldn’t be angry at teachers in my school who committed 30 years of their lives to children. That’s not who I’m going to blame.”
An Open Letter from Newer Teachers of New York State
Dear parents, students, colleagues, school administrators, elected officials, and members of the public,
Currently, New York State's seniority rule protects experienced teachers from layoffs, a policy sometimes known as "last in, first out." In recent budget negotiations, Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Black have pressured Governor Cuomo to overturn this rule. We, the undersigned teachers who have been teaching in New York State for five years or less, stand in solidarity with our more experienced colleagues and strongly support maintaining the seniority rule.
As newer teachers, we rely on our more senior colleagues for guidance and support. Senior teachers offer us their advice, their formal mentorship, and their connections with communities. Without more senior teachers, we would lose our bridge to lessons learned through years of dedicated work in the school system.
In addition, the rates of black and Latino new teacher hires in New York City have steadily declined since 2002, while the vast majority of New York City public school students are black and Latino. Opening up more senior teachers to layoffs would risk further decreasing the already sparse ranks of teachers of color. These teachers provide guidance for younger teachers of all backgrounds, and play an important role in the lives of our students.
We also believe that Bloomberg and Black’s so-called “merit-based” system for retaining teachers will foster competitive, fearful school cultures that are detrimental both to teachers' professional development and to student learning. In addition, Bloomberg and Black seek to measure teacher performance by student test scores, an imperfect measure at best, and one that encourages narrowly test-focused curricula.
Finally, Bloomberg and Black's arguments against the seniority rule are based on the fact that newer teachers work for lower salaries than our more experienced peers; allowing experienced teachers to be laid off would therefore reduce the total number of necessary layoffs. This argument, however, fails to account for the true cost of professional development and adequate support for newer teachers. It also ignores the fact that teacher experience is one of the most reliable predictors of student learning. If student achievement is the priority, then experienced teachers are more than worth their cost.
Ultimately, the debate over who to lay off is a distraction from the root causes of inequity that continue to affect our profession and the lives of our students; budget cuts should not include any teacher layoffs. Education is an investment in our future, and cuts to education are ultimately short-sighted. We reject political tactics that raise the specter of massive teacher layoffs in efforts to divide the workforce and pit parents against teachers. In the interest of our students, we stand with senior teachers in supporting the seniority rule.