WHEN BILLS FILED on Beacon Hill get sent to a committee for further study, the move is often likened to consigning them to the legislative graveyard. Directing bills to a study is seen as a gentle way of disposing of proposals for which there is little appetite among lawmakers. 

But far from sounding a funeral dirge, backers of a proposal to upend the seniority rules that control teacher layoffs are declaring victory after a study was ordered on the issue. The key difference: The issue wasn’t shunted off for “study” to a legislative committee but was adopted as part of the 2025 budget signed on Monday by Gov. Maura Healey. 

The budget amendment approved by both legislative chambers directs the state education department to carry out a study of looking at the extent to which teachers of color are disproportionately laid off relative to their representation in the state’s teacher workforce overall. The amendment also directs the study to include data on teachers laid off who received an exemplary performance evaluation in the prior school year and also analyze the impact of layoffs on teachers who worked at schools with large numbers of high-needs students or low teacher retention rates. 

“I think this is a great step forward,” said Sen. Pavel Payano, a Lawrence Democrat who pushed for the amendment with Rep. Priscila Sousa of Framingham. “Having data to show us what we’re hearing is happening in the Commonwealth will help us to continue to lobby to ensure that our Commonwealth is doing everything it can to make sure our teaching workforce is diverse.” 

Payano immigrated to the US with his family at age 6 from the Dominican Republic, while Sousa arrived here from Brazil when she was 12. 

Payano and Sousa, both first-term lawmakers, co-sponsored legislation in the just-completed session that would have made major changes to the state law governing teacher layoffs by giving district administrators facing layoff decisions more leeway to retain teachers from “underrepresented” groups or those with dual language backgrounds over those with more seniority, the factor that currently rules most such decisions. 

Supporters of such changes say current layoff rules undermine efforts to diversify the state’s teacher workforce because teachers of color tend to be newer entrants to the field and therefore disproportionately among the first to be let go when districts face a budget crunch. They point to Brockton, where teachers of color accounted for a third of layoffs in the face of a yawning budget deficit last year, while they account for 27 percent of the district teacher workforce. 

A strong body of research shows that minority students benefit from having classroom teachers of their background, something Payano and Sousa say makes backsliding on teacher diversity efforts all the more troubling in places like Brockton, where students of color account for more than 85 percent of the district’s student population. 

When it was clear that their bill to change layoff rules was not going to advance in the legislative session that just ended, Payano and Sousa pivoted to call for a study looking at layoff data from the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years. 

Payano said major changes like those their bill called for almost never get adopted the first time they are filed, and he said lawmakers’ willingness to direct the education department to carry out a study shows there is interest in better understanding the issue. “What we’re hearing from our colleagues is that they care about this issue, they want to learn more, and I’m deeply appreciative that our leadership in both chambers supported this and our colleagues in both chambers voted for this,” he said. 

The issue exposes a sharp point of tension between two constituency groups, with some minority lawmakers and advocates backing the layoff rule changes, while teachers unions strongly oppose the weakening of seniority rights. 

“We anticipate that the results [of the study] are going to be really invaluable in illuminating the need to change the status quo policy to help our most diverse students,” said Lisa Lazare, executive director of the advocacy group Educators for Excellence. 

Max Page, president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the state’s largest teachers union, called the effort misguided. “This notion that we should figure out how to upend collective bargaining agreements and that this is going to improve the diversity of our workforce, I think, is silly, and more than silly, I think it is part of an anti-union effort,” he said. Page said the focus should be on increasing funding for schools to avoid layoffs and on programs that provide tuition support to recruit more people of color into the teacher pipeline. 

While the education department will now produce a study looking at the issue, Page said the MTA worked hard to ensure that original legislation to make changes to layoff rules did not advance. “This was a bill that we don’t think was going anywhere, and we made sure of that,” he said. 

For his part, Payano said he’s keeping an open mind on the kinds of changes the state education department study report may point to as ways to further the overall goal of increasing teacher diversity. “It could be that what they recommend differs from what Rep. Sousa and I put forward,” he said.