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By Kate Shaw and Adam Schott
Earlier this summer, a major California Superior Court decision, Vergara v. California, took aim at that state's longstanding teacher tenure law and attendant job protections, including seniority-based layoffs more commonly known as "last in, first out."
While it may not have garnered national attention, a proposed policy here in Pennsylvania holds similar potential to reshape teacher staffing policies on a broad scale.
Harrisburg lawmakers ought to look before they leap.
Legislation sponsored by Rep. Tim Krieger, R-Westmoreland, recently approved by the chamber's Education Committee, would amend the state's School Code by removing Pennsylvania's own seniority-based furlough process, and instead require school districts to base these decisions on teachers' most recent performance evaluations.
Reasonable people can disagree about whether seniority alone should determine furlough decisions. Yet as furloughs become more frequent as a result of Pennsylvania's school funding crisis, it's a different matter entirely to presume that Act 82, the state's new teacher evaluation system, is ready to inform high-stakes decisions.
Analysis conducted by Research for Action identified three elements of the House proposal that are especially likely to expose the Commonwealth and school districts to costly lawsuits, and unfairly jeopardize the employment of public school teachers.
The most obvious shortcoming of the Krieger bill is that it ignores the entirety of a teacher's career, and instead bases determinations of a teacher's effectiveness only on his or her most recent evaluation.
In this way, the proposed policy violates a cardinal rule of the American Educational Research Association, which warns about the distorting influence of high stakes testing generally, and the specific danger of what is essentially a single elimination proposition.
A second concern relates to the new teacher evaluation system's heavy reliance on student test data.
While there are important practical and technical considerations whenever high-stakes decisions are based primarily on student test data, Rep. Krieger's bill takes these concerns one step further because it depends on student assessment data that is not yet available and a new School Performance Profile rating system that appears to place high-poverty schools at a particular disadvantage.
A third problem bridges the technical and the commonsensical. Under the state's new evaluation system, teachers are sorted into four categories (Distinguished, Proficient, Needs Improvement, and Failing) in an attempt to provide some important distinctions in performance that were not possible with the binary, satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating that predated a state law known as Act 82.
This approach is common among states, and establishes clear, but arbitrary, cutoff scores for sorting teachers into each category.
However, it defies both logic and research evidence to say that there is a meaningful difference between the "1.49 Needs Improvement" teacher and the "1.50 Proficient" teacher. A very small difference on any one element of the evaluation could have made the difference.
H.B. 1722 is blind to this fact, and requires that a district implementing furloughs lay off the 1.49 teacher before the 1.50 teacher—even if the principal has reason to believe that the score is invalid, or not a true reflection of differences in skill or effectiveness.
It's possible that as Pennsylvania continues to roll out its new teacher evaluation system, it will identify and address all of the challenges noted above.
However, absent these assurances, the Krieger bill places too great a weight on this still-evolving policy, deviates from established practices in educational measurement, and ignores the more pressing challenge confronting significant numbers of Pennsylvania school districts: inadequate resources to retain the teaching force that our students deserve.
Kate Shaw and Adam Schott are, respectively, the executive director, and director of policy research for Research for Action, a Philadelphia-based research group.