Editor’s note: We’re publishing a series of op-ed articles from students in The Writing Program at USC. Every student in the class taught by Dr. John Murray and Stephanie Bower was required to make a short documentary about education by profiling a local school and/or program. Following the film project, the students wrote op-ed articles in response to their experiences and tackled some of the issues they discovered while making the shorts. We will be posting a new op-ed daily for the next two weeks.

by Brian Campos

In my senior year of high school, I was fortunate enough to sit on the school board as the non-voting student representative. As the board was working on which policies they would adopt for the whole district, it fell to me to voice the student impact of a particular policy.  During that year I learned so many things from sitting on the board, especially the difficulties policy makers have to face even at this small level. From the many things that I had witnessed that year in the board room, one thing that would leave quite an impression on me were the meetings in which the district had to cope with the anticipated school funding cuts from Sacramento.

In every meeting during those last couple of months, the proposed district budget would feature more and more cuts as Sacramento allocated less and less funding. All in all, when the final budget was finally approved for the upcoming school year, the district had cut about thirty teachers and consequently eliminated a number of classes and programs.

But while seeing the changes that would result from the budget cuts was disheartening enough already, what was most disheartening to me was the relatively easy decision as to which teachers would be given pink slips. The process seemed so easy that it was almost automatic. There were no discussions regarding teachers’ performances in the classrooms. No discussion about their successes or failures in engaging their students. There was no discussion at all whether a teacher was good or bad. The only thing that was discussed was how long a particular teacher has been employed by the district. So the process was in fact automatic, devoid of any common sense so administrators could seem fair and impartial, because like most of their counterparts around the country, this school district used seniority as the sole basis in deciding which teachers would be saved and which would be fired.

During that final meeting, when I looked at the list of teachers that were being laid off, I was sad to see that a number of them were my own teachers, some of whom were my favorite and my most effective teachers during my high school years. I saw the name of my English teacher that year, who even though she lacked experience, was so enthusiastic about teaching English that her enthusiasm infected the whole class. She lost her job while the other English teacher was saved, a teacher who would show up late to his own class and who would notoriously put his students to sleep. This is the kind of scenario that this system achieves. It punishes new teachers who are more often than not are the most enthusiastic people in their field and who are more likely to relate to the students and engage them in a more effective way. As a result, talented teachers are robbed of the opportunity to practice a craft that they perform well and students are robbed of a better quality education.

I am not attacking the value that experienced teachers bring to the academic well being of a school. Many of the best teachers out there are the most experienced ones and I certainly believe that these individuals have become better teachers by virtue of that experience, but I do not think that they should be judged solely on that criteria. It is a flawed assumption that experience is the only thing that makes a teacher a good one. Experience can and should be one of the criteria for judging on who is to be laid off or not, but it should not be the only one.

So how do we begin to correct this great disservice in our education system? We can begin by eliminating policies that reward teachers on seniority alone, like tenured pay. A comprehensive system of merit pay should be put in its place, where teachers are rewarded solely on their job performance and not on the fact that they have been there the longest. In addition, when districts have a budget shortfall and need to lay off a number of its teachers, they should be forced to follow the examples of almost all other business organizations that face the same scenario, and evaluate their workforce on their performance and base their decision on who to fire and not fire based on that evaluation.

We cannot waste time and must establish these reforms now. With our economy being in the state that it is as state governments, especially California, are facing record breaking budget shortfalls, we must anticipate that funding for education in this state will be cut even lower, forcing district administrators to lay off many more of their teachers. We must therefore try to preserve the quality of our education system as best we can with the resources that we are given, beginning with keeping our good teachers.

photo credit: Rob Shenk’s Flickr photostream (creative commons)