Several Los Angeles education jobs could soon be in danger.
The Los Angeles Unified School District recently instituted a policy meant to aggressively weed out poor-performing teachers and administrators.
"This district can rightly be criticized for the promotion of ineffective teachers over the years," Superintendent Ramon C. Cortines said. "That is about to change. We do not owe poor performers a job."
The policy encourages district supervisors to consider firing some of the 404 probationary teachers who were found to need improvement in their last performance evaluation. It also calls for greater scrutiny of the 339 administrators who have not yet become permanent and 175 tenured teachers who received negative evaluations last year.
The policy was implemented only days after the Los Angeles Times presented the district with conclusions of its own investigation. That investigation found the district has often failed to evaluate new teachers before granting them tenure, a status that makes it nearly impossible to fire teachers for performance reasons alone.
District officials have reported that the new policy is in response to 2,000 teachers who were laid off last year and expectations of future layoffs that must target teachers by seniority alone, according to state law.
Officials noted that, because of those measures, "some excellent teachers were let go while some who did not meet district standards were retained."
Teacher eliminations could end up affecting the Los Angeles area's thriving education industry, which has continued to see a monthly and yearly increase in employment, despite the current economic recession.
The Los Angeles-Long Beach-Glendale area's education and health services industry employed 520,000 workers during November, according to the U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is up from 519,300 workers during October and a 1.5 percent increase from last year.