The 50-State Comparison on teacher employment contract policies provides a national comparison of teacher employment contract policies in all states. All of the information was gathered from and focused on state statutes and regulations. State case law was also utilized for metrics related to collective bargaining. Data collection focused…

Guided by Honig and Hatch's (2004) conceptualization of bridging and buffering, we undertook an analysis of reduction in force (RIF) provisions from 546 Ohio teacher collective bargaining agreements. We asked the following question: Are the most disadvantaged school districts providing greater protections to tenured teachers when making RIF…

This paper studies the effect of parental job loss on children's school performance during the Great Recession in Spain, using an original panel dataset for students observed since the beginning of the crisis in a school in the province of Barcelona. By using fixed effects, this paper is more likely to deal with the problem of selection into…

An increasing number of states are requiring teacher performance, as measured by evaluations, be considered when districts are conducting layoffs or reductions in force, according to a 50-state policy review by the Education Commission of the States (ECS). ECS reviewed reduction-in-force policies in 2012 and recently created an online database,…

An increasing number of states are mandating teacher performance be considered in educator employment decisions, including awarding tenure and layoffs, according to a 50-state policy review of teacher tenure laws. Tenure laws have historically granted job protections based on years of employment. The Education Commission of the States (ECS)…

Research has shown that "last hired, first fired" policies maximize the number of teachers subject to reductions in force by eliminating those teachers that are lowest on the pay scale first. Until now, advocates of effectiveness-based reduction-in-force (RIF) policies could only point to simulated policy exercises as evidence of the…

This article combines original interviews, secondary policy analysis, and non-ideal theory to determine the "least unjust" approach to budget-driven "Reduction in Force" teacher firings in Los Angeles. Building from the a priori claim that schools should serve children's interests, this article addresses the following…

Since 2008, Italian universities have seen their budgets slashed by 14 percent. And in late 2010 the Italian government passed a law that drastically reduced the number of contract university workers, effectively laying off thousands of postdocs, assistants, researchers, and lecturers. The law also included a planned decrease in the number of…

Fueled in part by the U.S. Department of Education's Race to the Top program, a massive effort to overhaul teacher evaluation is underway in states and districts across the country. The aim is to ensure that evaluations provide a better indication of "teaching effectiveness," or the extent to which teachers can and do contribute to…

The great majority of institutions, public and private, are looking toward 2009-10 and beyond, in anticipation of the deepest budget cuts in more than a generation--and certainly deeper than at any time in the memory of most current campus leaders. In the current recession, even financially well-positioned independents with substantial numbers of…

Greensboro College has many of the intimate hallmarks of a small, private, liberal-arts college. Professors give their cellphone numbers to students and routinely provide extra help to those who need it. Classes at the North Carolina institution average 14 people. One of the students featured on the college Web site is a biology major who plays on…

The research is clear: teachers are the most important factor in raising student achievement in schools. If Connecticut is serious about closing our worst-in-the-nation achievement gap and raising academic performance for all students, there must be an excellent teacher in every classroom. Connecticut's budget crisis will likely lead to widespread…

When the Cleveland, Ohio, school board had to make radical cuts in its budget last spring, it was forced to eliminate 540 teaching jobs. There wasn't a whole lot of mystery about "which" teachers among Cleveland's 3,500-member teaching force would be the ones to lose their jobs. The state's hard-and-fast seniority rule--last hired, first…

For students, quality teaching means the difference between a bright or potentially dim future. School principals face several challenges that work against recommending contract non-renewal for incompetent teachers. This study investigates the reasons that school principals recommend contract non-renewal of probationary teachers. Targeted…

Over 2000 teachers in the state of Washington received reduction-in-force (RIF) notices in the past two years. The authors link data on these RIF notices to a unique dataset that includes student, teacher, school, and district variables to determine the factors that predict the likelihood of a teacher receiving a RIF notice. They find a teacher's…