RIF: The hidden cost of teacher reductions in students

“Gutted.” “Devastated.” “Abandoned.” These words, written in emails from my former students, express their feelings toward the news that my contract would not be renewed after ten years of service to the students and families in my community. I found myself “riffed,” a colloquial term for a reduction in force, or RIF–a storm that we can see from miles away, but one that we never expect to actually hit home. 

Due to extensive budget cuts and rising inflation forcing schools to drain their reserves, school districts in my state of Washington, as well as nationally, are scrambling to operate while receiving less funding than in years past, and passionate educators and Specialized Instructional Support Personnel (SISPs) are being ousted in droves. 

When we think of the negative impacts of RIFs, we imagine the blow to teachers. But the multitudes of great–and often hidden–losses that our students experience as their favorite teachers, paraeducators, counselors, or librarians suddenly disappear from their daily lives, are systemically widening gaps, reducing support systems, and increasing school pressures on students across the country. 

Loss of Highly Qualified Educators

The RIF came for me without warning. During a doctor-prescribed extension to my maternity leave, while my clocked hours in the classroom had paused, other teachers continued to accrue, and I was surpassed in seniority. So, when the district determined the need to dissolve a full-time position in my content area, I was, to the shock of my students and colleagues, replaced by a multilingual learner specialist who hadn’t taught in my content area for as long as we had been colleagues.

And, let me be clear: I am not a new teacher. I have been a National Board Certified Teacher since 2020–a year in which I was also promoted to department lead during a global pandemic. According to the article “Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy” published by The Brookings Institution, “If the teachers to be laid off were chosen in a way largely unrelated to their effectiveness, such as seniority-based layoffs, then the associated increase in class size might [have] a negative effect on student achievement.”  

These teacher losses create problems for students, who lose accomplished teachers and subject-matter experts in favor of those with more years under their belt. This is not to say that my colleague is not an outstanding educator. But the implication is that, while I had been becoming an expert on my school’s curriculum and national best-practice instruction in my content area, this teacher was focused on other curricula and specialties. Now, they will be racing to catch up with a decade of innovation in my department, all while managing colossal class sizes. 

Larger Class Sizes, Less Individualized Instruction

As class sizes gradually increase, the ability for a teacher to provide deep and meaningful individualized instruction to students decreases. And as full-time positions are dissolved, administrators are forced to redistribute students into preexisting classes, squeezing more chairs and desks into a crowded classroom, and more names onto an already loaded roster.

In my own career, I have watched my class sizes creep from 20 to 27 to 31 students per class, which is the maximum limit enforced by my state. However, not all states have a cap for class sizes, despite recommendations from teachers and experts alike. In a study cited by the Brookings Institute, students placed in a 15-student class showed “increas[ed] student achievement by an amount equivalent to about three months of schooling” compared to the class with 22 students in the same study. This is because a more manageable caseload of students encourages more meaningful instruction, allowing teachers to appropriately study student data, make adjustments to modify and accelerate lessons to meet students’ needs, and provide detailed feedback to support student growth. 

In these overcrowded classes, without the time and capacity to differentiate instruction, teachers are forced back into a “one size fits all” curriculum, and students can easily fall through the cracks. Students who need additional academic support, like multilingual learners or students with learning exceptionalities, are suddenly reliant on paraeducators to help them with their learning–another branch of the educational system which is being slashed by budget cuts, according to the American Federation of Teachers. And students with social-emotional challenges like anxiety, ADHD, oppositional defiance disorder, or increased absences often struggle the most to be heard and thrive in overcrowded classrooms.

Social-Emotional Support Deficits 

As positions within school districts disappear, so too do the familiar and trusted adults and programs that many students depend on, sometimes serving as literal lifelines for students who are most at-risk. The frustrated and sad student voices in my inbox are a great example of this: for them, I provided not only academic support, but also encouragement, consistency, and safety, and it is possible that I may have been one of the only people in their lives meeting those criteria. 

In their article outlining factors that contribute to student dropout rates, the Dropout Prevention Center identifies low social-emotional support at home, dysfunctional family life, minimal parent involvement, abuse, high mobility, and poverty as leading causes for student dropout, amongst a myriad of others. These are the sole focus of many positions supported by federal grants to increase student support, “including counselors and social workers,” according to NPR. As these grants are cut, the positions are too.

 Known as Specialized Instructional Support Personnel (SISPs), these school psychologists, paraeducators, counselors, therapists, and even librarians and nurses are involved in providing “other necessary services” outside of academic instruction to students, according to the “Every Student Succeeds Act” (ESSA) passed in 2015. Without them, students lose their access to additional levels of support, such as the obvious mental health services, but also other programs that foster positive mental health in students, such as clubs like Queer Students Association, which often meet after school to support LGBTQIA+ students.

For the last decade, I have partnered annually with the local public library to provide students with books. After our library was shuttered last year due to budget cuts, removing or repurposing all librarians on campus, this partnership with the local public library was, for some students, their only access to books. Without me, this program and partnership have dried up, and with it the tributaries of positive benefits that young people experience when given access to reading for pleasure. When teachers are moved around or let go altogether, there are new faces where there once was a trusted adult, new routines that once created stability, and a new world of unknowns.

As the Department of Education is effectively dismantled by the current Trump administration, and billions of educational dollars are halted or rerouted into charter schools (NPR), the future of education is also entering into a world of the unknown. Educators do not stumble into the profession, but enter into it because of their passion–for people, for equity, for learning. But mounting burnout, lack of support, and increasingly excessive workloads to the already “low pay, poor working conditions, and long hours” (k12dive) continue to energize a teacher exodus. The fallout of this endemic teacher shortage, like the aftermath of the pandemic, will have lasting impacts on our students for generations to come.

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