No justice, no teachers: Theorizing less-unjust teacher firings in Los Angeles Unified

Abstract

This article combines original interviews, secondary policy analysis, and non-ideal theory to determine the 'least unjust' approach to budget-driven 'Reduction in Force' teacher firings in Los Angeles. Building from the a priori claim that schools should serve children's interests, this article addresses the following questions: To whom is justice owed in this case? What does justice demand for each set of claimants? How should conflicts be resolved? The authors conclude that the least unjust way to fire teachers in response to budgetary constraints is to use a holistic assessment combining student evaluations, administrative evaluations, valueadded measures, and seniority, modified by school stability considerations. Unexpectedly, justice toward students and justice toward teachers turn out to be substantially coextensive when determining budget-driven teacher layoffs. Teachers and students are mutual allies, not antagonistic claimants. Furthermore, to the extent that teachers' and students' justice claims are not aligned, this lack of alignment likely reveals not an intrinsic conflict, but a policy failure that is itself borne of prior injustice.

The significance of A Theory of Justice for philosophy of education

“…When Rawls' Political Liberalism appeared in 1993, political theory and philosophy of education were ready to respond with book-length works on its educational significance, beginning with Eamonn Callan's (1997) Creating Citizens, which made a mark in both fields. 3 The Capability Approach followed (Nussbaum, 2006), as the limitations of a theory of justice focused on the internal affairs of one's own society became painfully obvious, and political philosophers and philosophers of education have grappled more recently with the limitations of ideal theory (Levinson and Theisen-Homer, 2015), the relationships between relational equality and distributive justice (Anderson, 1999(Anderson, , 2007, the competing claims of different distributive principles and metrics (Brighouse and Robeyns, 2010), and other aspects of Rawls' approach. Unlike communitarianism, these subsequent developments have been more than a collection of criticisms that have largely missed the mark.…”

What Is Wrong With Grade Inflation (if Anything)?

“…In this respect, we see the practical ethics of grading and of grade inflation as being two examples of a larger set of dilemmas for educators and educational policymakers about how to enact justice in unjust contexts (see Levinson, 2015;Levinson & Theisen-Homer, 2015). As educators (not to mention as citizens more broadly), we frequently find ourselves trying to do the right thing while, and even by, working within institutional and social structures that contribute to larger injustices.…”

Educational Goods and the Ethical Dimensions of Educational Policy and Practice

“…Levinson and Fay's volumes provide a wealth of such models of case analysis, and there are scattered examples of relevantly similar ethical analyses of issues pertaining to educational policy and practice (e.g. Brighouse, 2003;Levinson and Theisen-Homer, 2015;Curren and Blokhuis, 2018).…”