Test entry

Last Friday, the California Second District Court of Appeals ruled
in favor of the LA teachers’ union and voided a settlement that buffers
high-poverty schools in LA Unified School District from layoffs. The
settlement remains in effect pending ACLU’s appeal to the state’s
Supreme Court.

Here are some things to keep in mind about this
case, which has big implications for the state’s law mandating
reverse-seniority layoffs (“LIFO”) and for the overall effectiveness of
LAUSD’s teachers:

• What triggered the suit that led to the
  settlement was the devastating impact budget-induced layoffs had on
  three of LAUSD’s poorest schools. In 2009, these schools let go of more
  than half their teachers and had to bring on substitutes to teach
  classes. Schools in more affluent neighborhoods went largely unscathed
  that year.

• The LA teacher contract magnified the impact of
  reverse-seniority layoffs on high-poverty schools. Its provisions
  mandate that the order in which teachers are let go is set district-wide
  and not by school, as state law allows. In 2009, LA’s poorest schools
  tended to have significantly more inexperienced teachers than average,
  which meant that they had to absorb the biggest share of layoffs.

• Ironically
  enough, by 2011 the two rounds of large-scale layoffs had already taken
  such a toll that the quartile of schools with the highest poverty had a relatively low percentage of first- and second-year teachers — slightly lower even than schools in the top quartile of family income.

• The settlement completely exempted 45 of the highest poverty schools from layoffs. But another 153 schools in the lowest quartile of family income were not given blanket immunity.

• The settlement ensured that no school could be hit with more layoffs than average for the district.

• An EdTrust-West analysis of
  LAUSD’s layoffs in 2009 and 2010 showed that there was very little
  overlap between the teachers who actually were laid off and those who
  would have been laid off in reverse order of effectiveness. In 2009, for
  example, the typical teacher who would have been laid off in this
  hypothetical model got the equivalent of five fewer months of instructional gains for her students in math than the average teacher in the district.