NJ Education Report

Social science writer Eric Horowitz has been reading Richard Kahlenberg’s biography of Albert Shanker (“Tough Liberal“) and comments on Shanker’s view of the primary benefit of  last in, first out, or LIFO: it’s arbitrary.  Thirty years ago, there was so much discrimination towards Blacks and Jews that LIFO imposed a system of job security that left no room for racism or anti-Semitism.  It’s virtue was its arbitrariness. Horowitz:

What better way to protect against racial discrimination than to mandate that everybody be discriminated against based on experience? The problem is that even if it was a smart thing to do at the time, the policy seems to have outlived its use. Nowadays the threat of a teacher being dismissed strictly because they are Black or Jewish is much less severe, and even if somebody were to attempt to pull it off, it’s unlikely they would get past the existing union protections. Meanwhile, Shanker’s final justification of maintaining unity plays right into the hands of critics who claim the unions put their own interests ahead of those of students. Shanker is effectively saying that allowing a superior teacher to be fired is a price worth paying for union solidarity. 

One interesting takeaway from all this is that if attempts to do away with LIFO had begun earlier, so that there was less overlap with the push to utilize value-added measures, reformers may have been more successful in their efforts to eliminate it. But once teacher concerns about value-added measures began to grow, the fear of unknown arbitrariness rekindled the desire for an arbitrariness that was well-known. Just as Shanker felt LIFO was necessary to prevent dismissals due to racial discrimination, many teachers now feel LIFO is necessary to prevent dismissals due to what they perceive to be unfair VAM scores.