The Lottery No One Wins
Yesterday, Matt Yglesias caused a bit of a ruckus when he half-jokingly suggested that laying off teachers at random might be better than using seniority. While making his point, he wrote, “But of course doing layoffs by lottery would be a pretty silly way to run an organization.”
Sara Mead and Chad Aldeman quickly pointed out that laying off teachers by lottery is actually a common practice enshrined in collective bargaining agreements. It is used as a tiebreaker when teachers have equal amounts of seniority. This happens more frequently in larger districts, where hundreds of new teachers begin work on the exact same day. (If you’ll indulge me in a bit of self-reference, I noted the practice back in November 2005.)
If we’re really serious about all this collaboration talk, it seems to me that even the most reactionary school board and hidebound union can agree on a method to break seniority ties that is superior to a random lottery. You wouldn’t hire teachers by lottery. Laying them off by lottery is a dereliction of duty.
February 25th, 2011 at 10:26
Mike,
Let’s not forget that the dereliction of duty arguably started when the rate of hiring of new teachers began to exceed the rate of student growth in numerous school districts in the last decade. Everybody’s grumbling about seniority based layoffs when, in many places, the hiring of less senior teachers should not have even happened in the first place.
March 1st, 2011 at 14:51
[...] 3. More on teacher unions. Sara Mead and Chad Aldeman quickly pointed out that laying off teachers by lottery is actually a common practice enshrined in collective bargaining agreements. [...]