Seniority the Outdated Mode

Well, it was a long shot, but I tried to contact the principal of my former high school, the president of the Clark County Education Association (the union for teachers in Las Vegas), and a trustee from the Clark County School District. I asked them all a very generic question about what their thoughts were on seniority in the school district. I’m still waiting to hear back from all of them. 

I did find a Facebook group that my own mother is a part of (who knew?) which is discussing these very types of issues as they relate to my former elementary school.

I reached out to a member of that group (not my mom) via private messaging and asked her why she was opposed to seniority. She replied that during the past few years, younger members of the staff at the school who were excellent speech therapists, reading and literacy specialists, and P.E. coaches had all received pink slips because of district layoffs. They were replaced by older, more experienced faculty from across the district. However, this mother felt like her children are not receiving the same quality of help now as they were before with the newer teachers. She attributes this to the older teachers operating under older teaching strategies that aren’t as effective.

I don’t know enough about teacher training in the field to substantiate that woman’s claims. I do feel like this conversation helped me see that performance indicators could be better benchmarks than years to determine someone’s productivity in whatever field they are involved in (education, business, government, etc.). I can see that seniority has benefits associated with it because the company can show loyalty to long-serving employees through pay scales or layoffs based on seniority, among other things. However, in the spirit of the enlightenment, would the more pragmatic approach be to make those decisions on a basis of output (the employee’s production) rather than input (the time spent)?