Rigid Focus on Seniority Hurts Teachers and Students

There is a huge difference between protecting senior teachers from arbitrary layoffs and guaranteeing their preference in being hired for vacant positions

Imagine you’re a public school principal. You need to hire a teacher and you have two applicants who meet the basic job requirements. The first applicant has 10 years of teaching experience and regularly scores outstanding performance reviews. The second has 15 years of experience but receives only satisfactory performance reviews. Which teacher would you hire? 

If you said the first teacher, you just violated Clause 6.11 of the new collective agreement between the Newfoundland and Labrador Teachers’ Association and the Newfoundland and Labrador School Boards Association. The clause states that “if more than one such teacher makes a request for the same permanent teaching position, all of whom are assessed as competent, suitable and qualified, preference shall be given to the teacher with the greatest seniority.”

In other words, as long as both applicants meet the minimum requirements, principals must hire the teacher with more years of teaching experience. It doesn’t matter if one teacher has better performance reviews, superior university qualifications, stronger rapport with students or a better attitude. According to the new collective agreement, seniority trumps everything else.

While Clause 6.11 states that seniority only comes into effect when teachers “are assessed as competent, suitable and qualified,” the bar is, in fact, much lower than it first appears.

By definition, virtually all permanently employed teachers are competent since school boards can, and do, dismiss teachers who receive repeated unsatisfactory performance reviews. As for being suitable and qualified, any teacher with a teaching certificate and some experience teaching the proper subject meets this requirement. So most currently employed teachers meet the threshold of being competent, suitable and qualified.

A strict seniority clause in a collective agreement makes sense in a factory job where workers are essentially interchangeable. Such a clause protects older workers from unjust age discrimination and ensures that business owners can’t ignore the interests of their long-serving employees.

With people living longer and more productive lives than ever, it’s essential that older workers have fair opportunities to keep their jobs and advance. Age discrimination is wrong and older workers need protection.

However, teachers aren’t factory workers and they’re certainly not interchangeable. Teaching is a highly complex profession and principals are tasked with ensuring that students receive the best quality of instruction possible. In addition, some teachers are better than others, whether that’s a result of attitude, skill, education level or a combination of these three qualities.

In fact, a wealth of research shows that the quality of instruction makes a huge difference to student achievement. As John Hattie, the director of the Melbourne Education Research Institute, has pointed out, some teachers have a much bigger impact on their students’ academic achievement than others. For this reason, Hattie refers to good teachers as “change agents.”

Some teachers are so effective that they can even compensate for the disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds of their students. Considering the importance of educating disadvantaged students, we should make sure these students always have the best teachers possible.

For those who worry that school boards could use declining enrolment as an excuse to replace highly-paid, experienced teachers with cheaper, inexperienced teachers, previous collective agreements already contained a provision stating that layoffs must occur on the basis of seniority. These layoff clauses are standard in collective agreements.

However, there’s a huge difference between protecting senior teachers from arbitrary layoffs and guaranteeing senior teachers preference in being hired for newly vacant positions. Seniority should count when deciding who should lose their job, but it should have less weight in determining who should be hired for a new job. Teachers who wish to move to better positions should do whatever they can to become more effective in the classroom.

It’s disappointing that the collective agreement takes away professional discretion from school principals. The notion that principals can’t be trusted to hire teachers on the basis of merit is an insult to their professionalism.

It’s too bad that Newfoundland and Labrador principals don’t have their own organization to advocate for their best interests, like their counterparts in British Columbia, Ontario and Nova Scotia. Perhaps then their voices would be heard.

When it comes to hiring new teachers, merit should matter more than seniority.

 By Michael Zwaagstra

Michael Zwaagstra is a research fellow with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, a public high school teacher and author of the newly released book A Sage on the Stage: Common Sense Reflections on Teaching and Learning.

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