Fullerton Assistant Superintendent Testifies to Disparate Impact of Dismissal and Layoff Statutes

Fullerton Asst. Superintendent Douglas Explains How “Dance of the Lemons” Leads to Ineffective Teachers in the Neediest of Classrooms

Eight days into the groundbreaking education equality trial, Vergara v. California, Plaintiffs called to the stand Mark Douglas, the Assistant Superintendent of Personnel Services for the Fullerton School District (FSD), and Dr. Thomas Kane, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

In his role at FSD, Mr. Douglas oversees the certificated and classified personnel functions within the school district. During today’s testimony, Mr. Douglas testified about the impact of ineffective teachers on his district’s schools, specifically about how the state’s burdensome dismissal laws lead to the reassignment and transfer of ineffective teachers to other posts instead of the removal of such teachers from the classroom. Mr. Douglas also addressed how the challenged statutes disproportionately impact low-income and minority students. Mr. Douglas was called to the stand and questioned by Plaintiffs’ counsel, Kyle A. Withers.

Dr. Kane is faculty director of the Project for Policy Innovation in Education at Harvard University, a program that partners with states and school districts to evaluate innovative policies. His work has influenced how we think about a range of education policies, including test score volatility, the design of school accountability systems, and teacher recruitment and retention.

During today’s proceedings, Dr. Kane testified on his background and qualifications. Dr. Kane is an expert on measurements of teacher effectiveness and previously served as director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Measures of Effective Teaching (MET) project, which analyzed the efficacy of various teacher measurement approaches. Dr. Kane was called to the stand by Plaintiffs’ counsel, Joshua S. Lipshutz.

Testimony by Mark Douglas, Asst. Superintendent of Personnel Services, Fullerton School District

Mr. Douglas, the administrator responsible for personnel recruitment and staff employment at FSD, testified that FSD has engaged in the “Dance of the Lemons,” a practice whereby ineffective teachers are reassigned to new schools rather than being fired, due to the onerous process involved with the dismissal of a certificated teacher. Mr. Douglas described the “Dance of the Lemons” at FSD as “moving people of less skill, poor performance, not a match to other schools.” He added: “[I]t can be to another like school or…to the South of town,” referring to a more economically disadvantaged area of Fullerton.

Mr. Douglas further testified that the “Dance of the Lemons” results in the transfer of less effective teachers to economically disadvantaged schools because “a[n ineffective] teacher can exist without parent pressure at a lower end school.”

Additionally, while discussing seniority-based layoffs at FSD in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010, Mr. Douglas confirmed that schools with high numbers of low-income and minority students were disproportionately impacted, stating that in the lower-income parts of the district, “several of the schools had as many as a third of…their faculty go through the layoff process… where in middle Fullerton and upper Fullerton, only one school experienced an impact that was probably about fifteen percent.”

“Dance of the Lemons”

The “Dance of the Lemons” occurs when ineffective teachers are cycled from school to school—instead of getting firing—because the Dismissal Statutes in California’s Education Code make dismissal too lengthy and too costly for school districts to initiate.

As a result of the “Dance of the Lemons,” the most ineffective teachers are concentrated in schools serving low-income, Latino, and African-American communities. For example, in the Los Angeles Unified School District, Latino and African-American students are two to three times more likely to have bottom-quartile teachers than their white and Asian peers, in part, due to the “Dance of the Lemons.”

Students Matter has created an infographic illustrating the “Dance of the Lemons.”