By Kathy Amoroso
July 4, 2011

“The country is in the middle of an education ‘crisis’ and the nation’s mayors are on the frontlines,” Sacramento Mayor Kevin Johnson, Chair of the Mayors Task Force on Public Schools, told members of the Jobs, Education and the Workforce Standing Committee on June 17. Chaired by St. Louis Mayor Francis Slay, the committee met to consider a number of education and workforce policy resolutions aimed at tackling education reform and the youth unemployment crisis in cities.

“Failing schools can lead to high unemployment rates and high crime rates in our cities,” Johnson continued. Following Johnson’s remarks, the mayors adopted a resolution aimed at ensuring students have access to great teachers. “This is an essential part of improving our schools, because teacher quality is the most important in'school factor that affects student learning,” Conference of Mayors Vice President Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told committee members.

The resolution starts with the premise that schools have to end the practice of making key personnel decisions based on seniority, or how long someone has been on the job, and start making decisions based on a teacher’s work with students.

Specifically, the mayors called for an end to the practice of conducting teacher layoffs based on last in, first out (LIFO) rules. Noting that teacher effectiveness is critical, the mayors said seniority should only be a determining factor in layoff decisions when two teachers have been evaluated as equally effective. The resolution makes the important point that evaluations have to be linked to critical data reflecting how students are progressing academically.

The timing of the resolution is critical. Many school districts are facing budget shortfalls and are grappling with difficult staffing decisions now.

The committee also heard from Goodwin College of Professional Studies at Drexel University Center for Labor Markets and Policy Director Paul Harrington. Harrington discussed the employment age twist and the collapse of the teen and young adult labor market in America’s big cities.

The Great Recession has created a high (17 percent) youth unemployment rate. But the meltdown destroyed both housing values and retirement plans, forcing aging baby boomers to work longer than they intended. “The nation’s young people who can’t find a job are being replaced by aging boomers who can’t afford to stop working,” said Harrington. Consequently, the nation’s “idleness rate” is rising. This is particularly devastating to America’s urban centers, where large numbers of young people are neither connected to school nor the workplace.

To address the problem, we need to do two things, according to Harrington: “We need to think about how we can link high school to the job market — and we need to resurrect vocational education. “When you look at who graduates from community college, it’s not kids coming out of academic programs, it’s kids coming out of training programs or occupations.”

Part of the reason employers favor older workers over younger ones is that older workers have behavioral traits that are desired by employers — fundamental behavioral traits like getting to work on time and working a full eight-hour day. Young kids are largely disengaged from work activities. “When you look at successful community college programs, it’s those that are tied to the job market,” Harrington told the mayors. “We haven’t done a good job of tying these postsecondary systems to the job market. The way to resolve this is you go ahead and get these kids access to jobs and they learn the behavior through osmosis. You went to work and figured it out. They will too.”