The Pink Slip Factor: Budget Cuts Threaten California’s Teaching Workforce

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

Policymakers should safeguard gains to ensure every student has a fully prepared and effective teacher

By Margaret Gaston

Once again, California schools are scrambling. Faced with a budget crisis, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has proposed cutting $4.8 billion from the state’s education budget. To make ends meet, local school districts are considering program cuts, and contemplating laying off employees, including teachers. State law requires that school districts must send preliminary “pink slip” notices of potential layoff by March 15. These threats of teacher layoffs are harmful to the morale of local school personnel and greatly complicate the challenge school districts face in retaining and hiring staff to meet student needs.

But the threat of layoffs has implications that reach beyond the local classroom. The “pink slip” factor threatens the progress the state has made in strengthening its teaching workforce. Consider what occurred during the last budget crisis. In 2003, the education community was facing expected budget cuts of $5.4 billion and by the March 15 deadline more than 20,000 teachers statewide had received layoff notices. By June, all but 3,000 of the layoff notices had been rescinded, but the damage may have already been done to the state’s capacity to recruit and prepare teachers. The number of enrollees in teacher preparation programs during the 2002-03 school year was 74,203. The next year, that number dropped to 67,595 and the following year (2004-05) it was 64,753, a loss of about 10,000 teacher candidates in two years. Similarly, the numbers of teaching credentials awarded dropped from 27,000 in 2004 to 22,400 in 2006.

This is not a small issue. California needs to replace about one-third of its teaching workforce, about 100,000 teachers, over the next ten years due to retirement alone. We are going to need every teacher we can get. And if a weaker teacher pipeline is the result of this year’s budget problems, low achieving schools in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods are likely to find it even harder to hire fully prepared teachers from a shrinking pool of available candidates, making an already inequitable situation even worse.