Jersey's LIFO lesson

NY Post ^ | February 20, 2011 | Editorial

[Scanian]

Turns out not everyone’s afraid of the big bad wolves in the teachers union.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and his education chief last week launched a tag-team assault on seniority-based teacher layoffs, a holy heifer for organized labor.

The “last in, first out” rules are “bad for kids, bad for parents, and bad for the teaching profession,” said Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf.

Too bad New York is being left in the LIFO lurch.

While Cerf and Christie spoke, New York Education Commissioner David Steiner and Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch were still neck-deep in a kowtow they made to the unions last Tuesday — refusing to join Mayor Bloomberg’s attack on the layoff law that’s threatening to devastate city schools.

Steiner offered a vague alternative that, as described, had nothing to do with structuring workforce reduction — and at best would go into effect in two years.

But budget cuts will force layoffs as soon as the summer.

Which means there’s no alternative to thousands of high-performing teachers being shown the door while the deadwood continues to prosper.

Christie explained the stakes in Jersey: When the ax falls, “we send another generation of . . . good, enthusiastic teachers away because we have built a system that cares more about the feelings of adults than the futures of our children.”

Cerf outlined the solution: rating teachers by their effectiveness and using data like student achievement — rather than counting gray hairs on teachers’ heads.

[kearnyirish2]

LIFO is just an expensive way to keep washed-up teachers on the dole while shutting out any new talent (naturally at a lower rate).

NJ is so bad that in my town passing the school budget would have resulted in a few teachers being eliminated anyway, while if it failed even more teachers would be let go.

[rawhide]

I like this idea!