Contracting an Illness
The final AFT criticism of the “Unintended Consequences” report (see item below) is that it failed to provide specific examples. I don’t think AFT really wants to open that box.
While the The New Teacher Project report is pointedly critical of union contracts, it spends little time on seniority and layoff provisions. One of these is common to many teacher contracts, and it illustrates just how ridiculous these things can get.
EIA’s Contract Hits page contains several instances (including a new one today) of contracts that spell out the rules of seniority, with an elaborate series of tiebreakers that would do justice to the National Football League playoffs. The worst of these is what happens when two or more teachers are hired on the same day, have the same amount of time in service, and therefore have equal amounts of seniority.
It is a rare occasion to find “all other things being equal” in a layoff or reduction-in-force in a public school district. So it’s distressing to discover that contracts won’t allow the exercise of judgment and discretion even in such rare circumstances. Indeed, the union would prefer that those decisions are made through a random drawing — by lot — rather than have an administrator, committee, or even a joint labor-management team decide which teachers are to keep their jobs on the basis of their performance, however defined.
Any system that enshrines random chance as a method of choosing one teacher over another cannot be rationally defended.
