Last week, I documented the dismal statistics regarding Latino student achievement in the San Diego Unified School District: 

   · Nearly one-third of Latino students did not pass the California High School Exit Exam in English last year, and one-fourth did not pass the Exit Exam in math. 

   · Less than one-third of San Diego’s 12th grade Latino graduates successfully completed the required courses to enter the UC or CSU systems. 

   · The number of Latino students who dropped out of San Diego public schools before graduating increased by over 100 percent in the past decade — nearly two-and-a-half times the drop-out rate for white or African-American students.

   I also suggested that School District policies are partly to blame for these statistics:

   · 42 percent of all Latino elementary school students and 53 percent of all Latino secondary school students are clustered in the worst-performing schools.

   In 1977, the court found 23 schools that were racially isolated and ordered the School District to integrate them. But 32 years later, 16 of the original 23 schools are still under-performing – and more than 7,700 Latino students attend these schools.

   The failure that lies at the heart of these statistics is the School District’s policies with regard to teacher placement and seniority. 

   Education experts have long understood the connection between experienced teachers and student performance. But teachers in San Diego’s worst performing schools have significantly fewer years of experience than their counterparts in the School District’s best-performing schools.

   · Last year, San Diego’s worst-performing schools (API 1-3) had 209 first- and second-year teachers, compared to just 96 in the best-performing schools (API 8-10).

   The School Board’s plan to deal with next year’s massive budget shortfall is to layoff the least-experienced teachers first. This last-in-first-out approach, strongly supported by the teacher’s union but opposed by reform advocates, has the effect of disrupting the worst-performing schools the most, since they are most heavily reliant on younger teachers.

   A more rational approach that could go a long way toward improving the quality of education for Latino students (and all other students, as well) would be to tie teacher job security to performance, not seniority. That way, the School District could retain the best teachers and incentivize them to apply their talents to those students most in need.

   “As President Barack Obama has unveiled many planned school reforms, San Diego Unified has steadily steered in the opposite direction…San Diego Unified didn’t join in when California competed against other states for more school stimulus money – partly because the federal contest required reforms. Obama wants to beef up teacher evaluation and include student test scores in how teachers are judged; San Diego has made evaluation less frequent…” 

— Voice of San Diego, March 28, 2010