In Romeo Public Schools, the teachers’ contract stipulates the last names on the seniority list are the first to get laid off.

In Ann Arbor Public Schools, if teachers scheduled to be laid off have the same level of seniority, the tie is broken by their Social Security numbers.

Public school unions have long bargained for the performance of the employee not to be a factor in who stays and who goes when layoffs come down.

But that will change with the new teacher tenure law that Gov. Rick Snyder recently signed into law.

Michael Van Beek, education policy director at the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, said now layoffs will have to be determined by “how well those teachers are performing based on their evaluations.”

Teacher effectiveness will have more of an impact than how long they’ve worked in the school.

The old system was based on seniority, which was promoted by the unions.

“The union tells teachers, ‘Stick with us. Keep paying your dues. In the end, you will have the best job security,’” Van Beek said. “The whole system is based upon rewarding teachers who stay with the system, not necessarily improving student learning.”

Jim Ballard, executive director of the Michigan Association of Secondary School Principals, said he supports the new performance-based evaluation when determining who gets laid off.

“Something new in the process — performance,” Ballard wrote in an email.

“How it is going to work is going to take a couple years for people to figure out,” Ballard said.

Ballard said he thinks that in four years, the evaluation process will factor in things as a combination of test scores, how students are doing, employee skills and professionalism.

“In four years, we’ll have a pretty solid system in place,” he said.

The political theater known as the federal debt limit negotiation is unlikely to cure Washington’s overspending habit, but it is shining a brighter spotlight on one of the clearest, least-ambiguous political/policy choices presented to the American public in living memory: The Obama budget vs. House Republican “Ryan budget.”

Thinking that his side has an effective political club to use on Republicans, a Democratic state Senator recently offered an amendment inviting colleagues to publically take a swing at the Ryan budget. Here’s how it was described on MichiganVotes.org:

Amendment offered by Sen. Bert Johnson (D), to automatically repeal the provision of Gov. Rick Snyder's tax reform and business tax cut that partially eliminated some of the income tax exemption for pension income, if the U.S. Congress passes the Ryan budget cut and associated Medicare changes affecting those age 55 and under.

Five Michigan Republican state senators appeared to accept this apparent invitation to “diss” the Ryan budget. They were:

Dave Hildenbrand from Lowell, Rick Jones from Grand Ledge, Dave Robertson from Grand Blanc, Tory Rocca from Sterling Heights and Tonya Schuitmaker from Lawton.

However, Sen. Rick Jones told CapCon his voting intention wasn't related to the federal issue raised by the amendment: “I wasn’t dissing the Ryan budget. I was showing my opposition to the state pension tax.”

Sen. Dave Robertson went further, telling CapCon, "I wholeheartedly agree with the goals of the Ryan budget."

A spokesperson for Sen. Tonya Schuitmaker said her intention was to express disapproval for the pension tax provisions of the MBT repeal and business tax cut, but she did not know the senator's views on the Ryan budget. An answer to CapCon's request for those views had not been received by this article's publication deadline.

CapCon also did not receive a response from Sen. Dave Hildenbrand to the same follow-up question; Hildebrand did respond to an email asking about his vote, but the response did not include his position on the Ryan budget.

Sen. Tory Rocca did not respond to an email from CapCon asking about his vote.

According to a Reason analysis, the Obama budget proposes spending levels of “almost $6 trillion by 2021, while Ryan's plan comes in at more than a trillion dollars less, around $4.7 trillion,” and does so with lower taxes, deficits and borrowing. In April, just four Republicans jumped ship on a U.S. House vote to adopt the Ryan plan. Five Republicans joined all U.S. Senate Democrats to defeat the measure in May.* A Senate vote on the Obama budget went down 97-0.

Back in Michigan, one Democrat, Sen. Glenn Anderson of Westland, joined the other 21 GOP Senators in opposing the Johnson amendment.

* The Republicans were Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine and Rand Paul of Kentucky, who doesn’t think Ryan's budget cuts enough.