Expert Witnesses Testify on Significant Harm and Disparate Adverse Impact Caused By Seniority-Based Layoff Statute

Testimony resumed today in the groundbreaking education equality trial, Vergara v. California, with a line-up of expert witnesses who presented compelling evidence regarding the real and appreciable harm that five provisions of the California Education Code impose on all California students, especially low-income and minority students.  These expert witnesses include Dr. Dan Goldhaber, the Director of the Center for Education Data and Research and a Professor in Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at the University of Washington—Bothell, and Dr. Arun Ramanathan, the Executive Director of Education Trust—West (EdTrust-West).

Dr. Goldhaber, who began his testimony on Wednesday, focuses his work on issues of educational productivity and reform at the K-12 level, distribution and quality of teachers in the workforce, and connections between students’ K-12 experiences and postsecondary outcomes.  His testimony focused on the impact of the “Last-in, First out” (LIFO) layoff statute.   The presentation Dr. Goldhaber referenced during his testimony can be found on the Students Matter website.

Dr. Ramanathan testified about the student achievement gaps between different ethnic and socioeconomic groups in California, the effects of seniority-based layoffs on these student achievement gaps, the efforts of school districts to deviate from seniority-based layoffs, and the significant likelihood that school districts will announce reductions in force in future school years.

The evidence submitted in Court today came on the heels of the powerful testimony of another expert witness, Dr. Thomas J. Kane, who testified last week that African-American and Latino students in Los Angeles Unified School District are 43 percent and 68 percent more likely, respectively, to be taught by the district’s least effective teachers.

Testimony by Dr. Dan Goldhaber

During his first day of testimony, Dr. Goldhaber testified about the effects of seniority-based reductions in force on student achievement and the disparate impact of such layoffs on minority and low-income students.  He testified that seniority-based layoffs and effectiveness-based layoffs target very different groups, with only a 16 percent overlap between the teachers who would be dismissed under both layoff policies.  He also stated that the teachers who would be laid off under an effectiveness-based layoff policy would be considerably less effective on average than the teachers who would be laid off under a seniority-based layoff policy.

Dr. Goldhaber began his testimony by discussing a study he conducted in Washington state, which has 270 districts with collective bargaining agreements that require teacher layoffs to be conducted, at least in part, on the basis of teacher seniority.  As a result of his study, Dr. Goldhaber concluded:

• “Teachers that are laid off under an effectiveness based criteria are considerably less effective than the teachers that are laid off under a seniority based criterion, which of course means that teachers that remain in the classroom under the effectiveness based criterion are a lot more effective than those teachers that would remain in the classroom.”

Dr. Goldhaber also found that 80 percent of teachers that receive reduction in force notices in Washington have two years or less of teaching experience, and that these teachers are more likely to teach minority and low-income students. Dr. Goldhaber concluded that:

• “The difference between the average teacher laid off in an effectiveness distribution versus the average teacher laid off under a seniority based criterion is equivalent to two-and-a-half to three-and-a-half months of student learning…which means that under the seniority based criterion we are not laying off the least effective teachers, so we are losing from those classrooms, the teachers that tend to be more effective… I also concluded that there is a disparate impact specifically in African American students. The teachers that would be laid off under a seniority system, many of them are junior but very effective.  Those are teachers that are good but not in the classroom because they get laid off.”

Dr. Goldhaber also testified that his findings in Washington are applicable in California because “the individual collective bargaining agreements [in Washington] look consistent with the California Education Code.”

When asked whether teachers make a significant contribution to student learning, Dr. Goldhaber stated the following: “[T]eachers actually explain a great deal, a very high percentage of student achievement…[T]eachers are actually quite important.”

The presentation Dr. Goldhaber referenced during his testimony can be found on the Students Matter website.

Testimony by Dr. Arun Ramanathan

In his role as Executive Director of EdTrust-West, Dr. Ramanathan works on numerous studies and projects related to the effectiveness of teachers, the distribution of effective teachers, adequate and equitable funding, access to high standards of education, and accountability for student performance.

During his testimony, Dr. Ramanathan testified about the following findings from research conducted by EdTrust-West:

• “African-American students have significant achievement gaps starting from the earliest grades all the way through high school and you find the result of these even in college access and college graduation rates, college completion rates, and the other big finding was in the K-12 system African-American students get less of everything they need to succeed.”
• “[T]here [are] wide and persistent achievement gaps between Latino students and white students, those gaps have remained consistent, those gaps have a tremendously negative impact on outcomes, long term outcomes, for Latino students and it should serve as a wake-up call for our State that we should fix that.”

Dr. Ramanathan discussed the achievement gaps in the Los Angeles Unified School District in great detail, testifying that “low-income students and African American and Latino students in Los Angeles Unified School District [do] not have equitable access to the district’s most effective teachers… In English Language Arts, non-low-income students, 43 percent have access to highly effective teaching in comparison to 26 percent of low-income students.”

Dr. Ramanathan further testified that these achievement gaps are “stunningly large. And … they’ve remained stunningly large over the course of the past decade…”

Additionally, Dr. Ramanathan testified about his findings that schools serving the most at-risk students also experience the most destabilization during the seniority-based teacher layoffs: “Seniority layoffs result in the loss of highly effective teachers from schools that can sorely need these teachers, and students that sorely need these teachers in order to close achievement gaps…”

While discussing elementary schools that were negatively affected by LIFO layoffs, Dr. Ramanathan stated that they “were thoroughly destabilized[.]  [T]heir students lost access to educational opportunities, as a result of that, these students were largely low socioeconomic, African-American, Latino, because of destabilization in their schools because of layoffs in many cases received no education in core subjects.”

Dr. Ramanathan also spoke of his personal experience as Chief Student Services Officer for the San Diego Unified School District. He described the story of a high-poverty, “turnaround” elementary school in which the teachers did such an amazing job that the school became a Distinguished California school. Dr. Ramanathan went on to testify, however, that seniority-based layoffs required the district to send “layoff notices to 24 of the 26 teachers in that school,” an action that Dr. Ramanathan described as “absolutely unconscionable.”

Finally, Dr. Ramanathan testified that the recurring nature of reductions in force indicates that there likely will be teacher layoffs in some California school districts during the upcoming year.