Suggestions on using teacher quality to determine layoffs are sensible, but not new or easy to implement

Contact: Richard Ingersoll, (215) 573-5674 or (215) 573-0700 (x226); rmi@gse.upenn.edu

BOULDER, Colo. and TEMPE, Ariz. (May 12, 2010) - In a recent report, the National Council for Teacher Quality urges making teacher-layoff decisions on the basis of teacher quality and performance. A review of that report released today by the Think Tank Review Project praises the report but notes that the implementation devil lies in the details.

Teacher Layoffs: Rethinking "Last Hired, First Fired" Policies was reviewed for the TTRP by Professor Richard Ingersoll of the University of Pennsylvania, assisted by graduate student Lisa Merrill. Ingersoll is an expert on teacher supply and quality.

The issue of how to prioritize which teachers to lay off is of growing interest in light of teacher downsizing spikes in the troubled economy. Some 60,000 teachers were laid off in 2009, about 2 percent of the nation's teacher workforce, which is four to five times the annual average number during the 1990s.

Teacher Layoffs considers layoff procedures at 100 of the largest U.S. school districts and finds that in 75 of them, seniority is the primary criterion for choosing who will be dismissed. The report argues that while "teacher quality" is not frequently used to make those decisions, it can and should be.

Ingersoll and Merrill observe, however, that while the paper's ideas are "straightforward and common sense," they are not new, and they are not easy to implement: "For a century we have seen numerous attempts to measure, recognize and reward differences in teacher quality," they write. "Often, unfortunately, these reform attempts have met little or no success."

Among the challenges confronting teacher quality reforms are deciding among the multiple and competing definitions of the "good" teacher, and deciding who decides which teachers are better and worse.

The reviewers credit the brief with recognizing some of the obstacles to changing teacher-layoff policies - such as its acknowledgement that when principals make evaluations, their systems need to be transparent and systematic. Moreover, principals themselves should be held accountable for their evaluations.

But while the brief makes "a useful contribution" in documenting variations in school-district layoff policies and summarizing options, the reviewers note in conclusion that it omits discussion of a potentially broad-based strategy in addressing layoff policies: involving teachers themselves in design and implementation.

"Layoff policies do not have to be conceived as something done by others to teachers," they write. Indeed, they add, "a long tradition of research on implementation has shown that one way to aid the successful implementation of difficult employee reform initiatives is to enlist those being reformed."

The Think Tank Review Project (http://thinktankreview.org), a collaborative project of University of Colorado at Boulder's Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) and the ASU Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU), provides the public, policy makers, and the press with timely, academically sound reviews of selected think tank publications. The project is made possible by funding from the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice.

Find the review by Richard Ingersoll and Lisa Merrill on the web at:
http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-teacher-layoffs

Find the National Council on Teacher Quality's report, Teacher Layoffs: Rethinking "Last Hired, First Fired" Policies on the web at:
http://www.nctq.org/p/docs/nctq_dc_layoffs.pdf

The Education and the Public Interest Center (EPIC) at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit (EPRU) at Arizona State University collaborate to produce policy briefs and think tank reviews. Our goal is to promote well-informed democratic deliberation about education policy by providing academic as well as non-academic audiences with useful information and high quality analyses.

Visit EPIC and EPRU at http://www.educationanalysis.org/

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