Designing Education & Other Miscellany: The New Teacher Project’s Case Against Quality-Blind Layoffs

Monday, March 28, 2011

The New Teacher Project’s Case Against Quality-Blind Layoffs

The New Teacher project, a national nonprofit with aims to close the achievement gap by finding ways to ensure high-need students get top-notch teachers, makes a case against quality-blind layoffs. While the case isn't surprising, the following excerpt, from a February 2011 report, is:

Fully 40 percent of the nation’s teachers (1.25 million) work in one of 14 states—Alaska, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, West Virginia and Wisconsin—where it’s currently illegal for schools to consider job performance in making layoff decisions. Ten of these states are facing budget deficits greater than 10 percent, meaning that layoffs are a real possibility.

Image source: The New Teacher project (click to enlarge image)

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I've worked in publishing for more than 15 years. I spent twelve years at Wired, where I was a senior editor at the magazine and as an executive producer for Wired News and HotWired. I had David Byrne yell at me and Edward Tufte tell me that what Wired did to information was pornographic. More recently, I've worked as a contract editor at PBS Frontline/World. I loved learning about midnight soil and health education through music and still shudder at the story of "Extraordinary Rendition." Prior to that, I worked at McGraw-Hill, Henry Holt, and The Saturday Evening Post. Over the years, I've developed an interest in education reform, and this is the place where I save my thoughts.

Currently, I'm contemplating what Roy Rosenzweig called "the novice in the archive" of the Internet and the question, How do such novices evaluate and distill research material in a way that creates value to them?

Another personal passion of mine is the consideration of moments of historical and social crisis in which the media had role. I've presented academic papers on the topic, including one about the impact of the press on San Francisco's bubonic plague (to the Society for the Social History of Medicine at Glasgow University) and another on the scientific writing of journalist Robert Chambers (for the Darwin Day Symposium at Stanford University). Upcoming, I'll be presenting a paper about diplomat turned journalist then OSS and CIA spy, Norwood Allman, at the University of Nottingham's "Landscapes of Secrecy: The CIA in History, Fiction and Memory."

I'm also the blog and yearbook adviser to the upper-grade students at Hillwood Academic Day School in San Francisco. I've been an instructor with San Francisco State University's Multimedia Program.

Far from the realm of education, I co-authored Cocktail: The Drinks Bible for the 21st Century, a James Beard Awards finalist and have contributed to the Food & Wine Magazine Annual Cookbook, as well as Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age. I've written for a variety of publications, including Yoga Journal, Time Out!, Food and Wine, and Wired. Most recently, I helped edit Bill Moggridge's latest book, Designing Media. (My favorite video clip from Bill's interviews: Ira Glass on storytelling.)

— Laura Moorhead
laura_moorhead [at] mindspring.com