Tuesday, October 12, 2010

The (Non-Existent) Equity Effects of Mutual Consent Hiring

It is worth repeating this quote from a Center on Reinventing Public Education reoport, Seniority Rules: Do Staffing Reforms Help Redistribute Teacher Quality and Reduce Teacher Turnover?, cited by Bruce Baker:

We conduct an interrupted time-series analysis of data from 1998-2005 and find that the shift from a seniority-based hiring system to a “mutual consent” hiring system leads to an initial increase in both teacher turnover and share of inexperienced teachers, especially in the district’s most disadvantaged schools. For the most part, however, these initial shocks are corrected within four years leaving little change in the distribution of inexperienced teachers or levels of turnover across schools of different advantage.

This has always seemed pretty obvious to me.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm surprised. I would have thought the exact opposite of what is promised, that is, that turnover would increase in both the short and long term.

But, wait. I don't really get what you mean by "seniority-based hiring system" -- even in NYC we do not have seniority-based hiring. We would lay off, if that were to happen, and so far in this economic crisis it hasn't, but we would lay off in reverse seniority order. But that's not "seniority-based hiring."

Jonathan

Tom Hoffman said...

Until a couple years ago, once you were a full time teacher in the system, with the exception of a few site-based schools and other special cases, assignment was done strictly by seniority. You literally went to a big meeting where you got a number based on your seniority compared to everyone else, they went through the jobs, and whomever raised their little card with the lowest number (most seniority) got the job.

Not that that's an ideal system either.

Tom Hoffman said...

I'm referring to Providence above, of course.