Marc Epstein, the Ronin Teacher, had this article published by Huffington Post over a year ago. Little has changed since then, except that the Chancellor is now Dennis Walcott rather than Cathie Black--which is also not much of a change.
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| Chancellors Cathie Black and Dennis Walcott stand behind Mayor Bloomberg. Always. Unquestioningly. |
When there is evidence of bad public policy, you can safely assume that it took two parties working collaboratively to create the swamp.
New York's Department of Education and the teachers' union have found themselves mired down in a dispute over the fates of more than a thousand teachers, many of whom have no assigned teaching position, but continue to collect full-time salaries.
This group of teachers is collectively referred to as ATR's, or the Absent Teacher Reserve. Large numbers of ATR's are not instructing students in their licensed areas. Instead they often find themselves working as substitute teachers.
At various times these teachers have been labeled incompetent or too lazy to seek positions by Joel Klein. He wants to fire them.
To judge from his statements and newspaper editorials, we are simply facing a case of old time union featherbedding.
If the problem isn't resolved over the next few weeks, Cathie Black will inherit this mess, and all her public statements to date indicate that she has bought Joel Klein's narrative, hook, line, and sinker.
The primary reason that so many teachers are out of a job stems from Klein's policy of closing comprehensive high schools, declaring them "failed" enterprises, and replacing them with small high schools.
Since the closing is a "hostile" takeover the teachers too are "failed" and sent packing, rather than placed in the new small schools.
If you are in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can lose your position with either a short time served in the system or with 20 plus years on the job.
When you impose this method of staffing on the largest school system in the country, something has got to give. In fact, it's only logical that a number of teachers would find themselves inhabiting the limbo world of the "ATR."
This limbo world can find a music teacher covering classes for absent social studies teachers, while his music program is assigned to a social studies teacher. I know because this precisely what occurred in my school.
The sooner the myths about public school staffing are dispensed with, the better the public interest will be served, because this is Joel Klein's self-created crisis.
Tenure: tenure for public school teachers is not a lifetime sinecure. In most respects it is no different from civil service protections for police, fire, and sanitation workers. You have to have due process in order to fire an employee.
We should recall that the civil service laws first instituted on the Federal level were the direct result of a presidential assassination in 1881, when a disgruntled officer seeker shot President Garfield.
Back in 1883 the cities of New York and Brooklyn served as the model for civil service reform nationwide on the local level.
The New York City schools once had a rigorous accreditation process for teachers. It included a meaningful written examination of the subject area and an oral exam. The Board of Examiners wrote and administered the tests.
As standards ebbed, the once vaunted Board of Examiners was whittled down until it was quietly put out of business in 1990.
The once demanding exam was replaced by a ludicrously easy interview and a more questionable statewide written exam.
It's no accident that the dumbing down of the hiring requirements coincided with the dumbing down of state testing for our children too.
Mayoral control gave Michael Bloomberg the power to re-establish a Board of Examiners with the stroke of a pen, but nothing has been done to return rigorous standards to the hiring process.
Perhaps Bloomberg, who didn't grow up in New York, is unaware that a Board of Examiners ever existed? After all, it's far easier to run a PR campaign than it is to institute real reform.
The union, never one to miss an opportunity, has yet to call for a return to the hiring standards under the Board of Examiners that helped make New York's schools the finest in the country.Why should an experienced teacher have a tough time landing a new position you might ask? Well, along with the downsizing of schools came Klein's decision to budget schools according to the actual salaries of their teachers.
Before mayoral control, a high school teacher counted as a "unit," which meant whether you had a school with lots of experienced teachers or mostly rookies, the cost for staffing the school was the same. The teacher "unit" would represent the average price of compensating one of the 80,000 teachers in the system.
If a school closed, or its population declined, teachers who were no longer needed there were placed in available slots without having them go into the so-called "open" hiring market.
By forcing the principals to figure the real salary of each teacher into their budgets, they have every incentive to hire younger lower salaried teachers and to avoid the more experienced ones, who were too expensive. In Klein's universe inexperience and lower salaries becomes a virtue, while experience be damned!
Would critics of tenure suggest that if a firehouse is closed because of a reorganization move by the department, the firemen are responsible for finding a new job within the system? Would these critics claim that young inexperienced firefighters are preferable to experienced ones?
With the press providing the wind for his sails, and Bill Gates funding the school voyage, Klein's assault on teachers and comprehensive high schools proved irresistible for someone with no real administrative skills. Ask yourself which role is easier, playing Tom Silva on This Old House, or just taking a wrecking ball to the whole place?
Around now, you might be asking yourself why the teachers union acquiesced to the ATR? To say that the union has taken a pounding in the press and from the chancellor over the past seven years is an understatement.
In typical New York fashion, the union stood by when a good policy, the School Based Option Staffing and Transfer Plan was being strangled, and agreed to the ATR pool.
The SBO had a cooperative team of teachers and administrators select new faculty members collegially. If someone with loads of seniority applied for a job and had nothing else going for them except time in the system, they could be rejected.
The SBO was already in place and had been spreading throughout the system when Bloomberg took over the schools. So Klein's claim that he was being strangled by union seniority rules was simply a myth.
If the union was as omnipotent as the editorialists claim, why didn't it block, or wage a PR campaign against this new fatally flawed hiring process and fight for the SBO?
Yet the public discourse is diminished by the union's failure to make its case for the rank and file teacher to the public.
There's no way to divine the answer to that question. In all likelihood the UFT knows that no matter how much ink is spent reviling them, no arbitrator would overturn the civil service laws and allow unassigned teachers who otherwise have satisfactory performance records to be fired.
In the end, the DOE and the union have been clever by half. Hundreds of millions have been wasted. The hiring process hasn't been improved, and teachers who remain the vital component in the education process are further diminished.
If this self-inflicted "crisis" were given to a business management class as a case study, it's likely that they would conclude that the negotiators on both sides of the table were idiots.
