Brace for What’s Coming

By Michael Diedrich, Policy Associate, January 30, 2012 at 11:00 am

Acronyms dominate education-speak, as they do most other policy areas. In Minnesota NCLB mandates AYP on the MCAs given by MDE (and so on and so forth). One acronym to watch for this legislative session is LIFO, because I can guarantee you'll be hearing about it.

LIFO stands for Last In, First Out. In the world of education, it means that the last teacher hired is the first one fired during budget-based layoffs. It's a long-standing policy that's been the norm in much of the country, though Minnesota is one of only about a dozen states that requires it based on state law instead of locally-negotiated contracts. It's being targeted for elimination by some state legislators as well as education advocacy groups like StudentsFirst and the Minnesota Campaign for Achievement Now (MinnCAN) [PDF].

LIFO is not a perfect system. It's based on older, industrial models of employment (more akin to factory work than the creative/knowledge work of modern teaching). It means that sometimes newer teachers with great potential are laid off before older teachers without as much fire in the belly. Get ready to hear lots of anecdotes along these lines in the next few months.

Here's the thing: we don't know of anything that works better. The leading alternatives to LIFO tend to take the form of “performance pay,” which is really paying for test scores. As a result of the last legislative session, Minnesota already requires 35% of a teacher's evaluation to be based on test scores. You can expect some advocates to push for that percentage to go higher.

The problem with test-based pay schemes is that they don't work any better. New York City tried one for three years and scrapped it after the RAND Corporation found no effect of the policy. Mathematical analysis of so-called value-added pay models that also rely on test scores found them to be unreliable [PDF], bumping teachers from the top 20% down to the bottom 40% or vice versa from one year to the next.

We don't have a good way of algorithmically determining who the best teachers are. Seniority is one proxy for it – since most teachers get better over time—and test scores are another. I'll have more to say on this over the next few weeks, but for now it's enough to be aware of what's rolling toward us.

Posted in Education | Related Topics: Education Administration  Teachers  Teacher Assessment