This job fair was a mockery!

Barbra Nahoum, an ATR teacher in Brooklyn's District 21, attended the mandatory job fair that was held at the Brooklyn Museum on September 20th.  She enjoyed herself so much that she ran home and dashed off the following letter to Michael Mulgrew, the president of the UFT.

Dear Mr. Mulgrew:

The parking lot of the Brooklyn Museum
features a replica of the Statue of
Liberty.  Whose liberty, we''re not sure.

Today was a humiliating day for teachers who were mandated to attend the Teacher Recruitment Fair. When I arrived with my ATR friends at the Brooklyn Museum, we received a ticket at the gate and then drove around looking for a parking spot. The parking lot was packed with cars and many teachers had to turn around and look for a spot on the street. When I entered the museum there was a check-in counter to sign in. The room was packed wall to wall with people. Most of the people in the room, I have seen at other Job Fairs in previous years. I also met a lot of new ATR's from my district, and I was very sad to see that they are now going to be joining me as a nomad in a school district. It is very apparent to me that this new teaching position "ATR" is here to stay and the club is growing by leaps and bounds.

The room was set up with long tables all around this huge room and half of the tables were empty, due to no-shows of principals, I assume. After I walked the room and it was close to 3:00 p.m., I was given a letter confirming that I attended this job fair. We then left the building and proceeded to walk to my friend's car. We then had to wait on a long line to pass the front gate. As we were waiting, I saw teachers handing the attendant money. I thought to myself, "Why are they paying when the DOE was sponsoring this fair?" When we reached the gate the attendant said, "You pay $7.00 because your ticket is not stamped." We then asked, "where do we get it stamped?" The attendant said, "I don't know." Why wasn't there a sign notifying ATR's that at the end of the fair you must get your ticket stamped? When we received a letter verifying our attendance at the end of the job fair, the Division of Human Resources staff should have asked for our ticket and stamped it. They did not mention anything about getting a ticket stamped. Many teachers were in a rush to leave because they have families and other obligations after school. The majority of teachers paid the $7.00 because none of them were aware that they were supposed to get their ticket stamped at the Teacher Recruitment Fair. There were no signs or any indication that they had to get their ticket stamped in order to be exempt from paying the parking lot fee. It was very obvious that they didn't want teachers to get their ticket stamped.

This event has turned out to be a money making event for people who own this parking lot. It is bad enough that we had to attend this event that was nonproductive. It is so disturbing that middle aged, experienced teachers are subbing and will probably never be regular teachers again in the DOE.  These teachers have many years of public service serving the children in the City of New York and this is the thanks they get. We serve the most important people in the community (our children) and our farewell gift is to be treated with no respect and we are looked upon by our coworkers as if we are rejects in this system.

This job fair was a mockery!

  

Barbra Nahoum

cc: Judy Gerowitz [UFT District 21 Representative]

Howard Schoor [UFT Brooklyn Borough Leader]

Michael Mendel [UFT Secretary]

Photo credit:
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRT9vLM8LmVM6iSxL3gYp5C4CZXSytjXK_uxO-WSHdkVeFAV4uPS4ABzYObUQ

Location Uncertain for Tomorrow's ATR Job Fair

The GEM ATR Committee has informed us that there will be a job fair tomorrow, September 20, for members of the ATR from Queens, Brooklyn and Staten Island.

The location of this fair is presently the subject of confusion. The GEM Committee is under the impression that it will be held at the Armory Foundation at 216 Washington Avenue in Manhattan.  NYCATR, however, called the Armory and was informed that they do not have this event on their calendar.

Does this mean that the job fair will be held, like many others, at the Brooklyn Museum?  NYCATR turns to you, the readers, to reply with any information you might have about the location of tomorrow's job fair.  ASAP.  

New York City Ronin Teacher, by Marc Epstein

The following was sent to NYCATR by Marc Epstein.  Mr. Epstein was a history teacher at Jamaica High School; he is now a member of the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR), stationed at a "re-start" school in Richmond Hill.

Mr. Epstein's articles have been published in a wide variety of first-rate publications.  After reading this article you'll agree that Mr. Epstein has deserved to be published by the New York Sun, the  Washington Post, the Huffington Post, and now, by NYCATR.

http://www.episodeguide.us/episodeimages/ronin-warriors.jpg

About six weeks ago I received a letter informing me that I was now a member of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool of the New York City Department of Education. That meant that because my school was being phased out and wouldn't be accepting new students my services were no longer wanted. Approximately half of the remaining faculty at Jamaica High School received the same notice.

We've now joined the pool of approximately 2,000 "ronin" teachers who were instructed to find jobs by entering an "open market" that lists available teaching positions on the internet, and attend "job fairs."

The term "ronin" (literally, "floating men") originally described samurai in medieval Japan who for one reason or another no longer had a lord to serve, and, hence, lost their employment. It's estimated that around 1600, the number swelled to over 400,000. (Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, p. 1275 vol. 2, ISBN 4-06-931098-3)

For those unfamiliar with Japanese history, the ronin genre of movies became famous worldwide in the 1950s and 60s. Arguably the most famous of which were The Seven Samurai and Yojimbo, directed by Akira Kurosawa.

I dutifully followed the instructions on the Department Of Education website and applied for jobs in my field. So did my colleagues. We didn't receive a single call for an interview.

I received an email informing me that a "job fair" was taking place at the Brooklyn Museum last week. Four Jamaica High School ronin piled into my car with our bar-coded invitations and traveled to the museum.

Faceless bureaucrats with name tags and Blackberries greeted us at the door. We were told to take the elevator up to a magnificent rotunda with desks arranged in a circle. School representatives were seated at the tables with signs indicating their school and positions available.

We ran into other ronin who had been dropped from our school the year before. They told us that all of the job fairs that they had attended had been a waste of time.

Our group consisted of two English and two Social Studies teachers. Although many positions were listed on the Internet during the "open market," there wasn't a single job interview in our field at the museum.

If you don't live in New York, you can read tales of Ronin-Teachers at a website devoted to chronicling their travails.  [NYCATR: I guess that's us.] Aside from acting as a samizdat for people in our predicament, it reveals the dirty little secret that New York City really has no public left in the political sense anymore. That's because in another era an earsplitting roar would have erupted over the deliberate misuse and abuse of qualified public servants.

I felt like I was an extra in Chushingura, a Japanese play about the forty-seven samurai who took revenge after the forced suicide of their lord Asano Nagamori. Asano had drawn his sword in the Shogun's castle after being humiliated by the chief of protocol. Forty-seven of his samurai who had become ronin after Asano's death, waited two years to exact vengeance. (Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia. Kodansha, p. 404 vol. 1, ISBN 4-06-931098-3)

They found employment by taking on all sorts of demeaning occupations until they were sure that the secret police were no longer watching them, then they carried out their vendetta.

When I was doing my graduate work in Japan, I observed that the story would be performed annually. 

Every Japanese person knows the story. It's been presented in Bunraku puppet theatre, Kabuki plays, movies, and television series, in countless revivals for the past three hundred years. Nevertheless, everyone remains riveted by the story and enjoys the play for the staging and the performance.

In the end the ronin get their revenge and assassinate the chief of protocol, but the Shogun, not knowing what to do with these loyal samurai, at last offers them the only honorable Japanese solution. They are allowed to commit seppuku (ritual suicide) en masse.

Feudal arrangements have displaced rational bureaucratic function. Increasingly, the twenty-first century business model for running the country's largest public school system resembles something out of a Japanese medieval play. 

Rather than the high-tech model that was supposed to usher in the new age of education innovation, we have an authoritarian regime bent on holding the teaching profession responsible for ten years of meaningless doctored test results. In addition to the human cost of a decade of poorly educated kids, the budget has doubled to $22 billion a year!

A kind of kabuki-charade plays out with a script that talks about "business models," "open markets," and "job fairs," while no honest method of staffing schools with qualified teachers who have become ronin is put in place.

With the start of the new school year the editorialists will once again rail about unemployable teachers who are living on the taxpayer's largesse, while the mayor revives his campaign to terminate us.

Our union leaders celebrate when Mayor Bloomberg's phony threat to lay off thousands of teachers isn't realized. But when the Department of Education lifted the hiring freeze this summer so that schools can hire cheaper inexperienced teachers at precisely the same time that the ronin teacher pool is being stocked with older experienced bodies, nobody says a word. That includes the union and New York's vaunted press. 

At the end of the day the teacher-ronin are expendable. After all, when you go to the movies and buy popcorn, does it matter who puts the popcorn in the box, or if there is a new person behind the counter every three weeks?

The MBA types who now run our schools will tell you that if you can manage a muffler shop you can manage a McDonald's, a bowling alley, or a movie theatre, so why not a school? In this corporate universe teacher experience is as irrelevant as is the size of the classes.

But in our society ritual suicide is not an honorable solution. So I don't expect a mass suicide of ronin-teachers even if the mayor offers it as an option.

All of the teacher-ronin have received email notification to report to various schools the day after Labor Day. We can be utilized in any capacity, and have no idea if we will be teaching in our subject area.

The Department of Education reminds me of the "man on the street" who was asked by a reporter whether he thought it was worse to be ignorant or indifferent? He replied, "I don't know and I don't care."

The pity is Kurosawa is no longer around to make a movie about the New York City ronin-teachers that would give Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman a run for its money.

Job Fair Tale #3: Fine Art and False Hopes

                                                                                                        

artquotes.net

  By Life in Limbo

                                                                                                             

I wasn’t going to go. 

I’ve become tired of dancing to the same old song and, sorry, I was just going to sit this one out. And I’ve already seen all of the paintings in the European Masters room. While I love Rembrandt, THSC, could you please move the fairs to a different gallery? I think the Surrealists make a better backdrop for this, anyway. 

But my inner masochist had been looking forward to this all week, and she’s such a whiner when she doesn’t get her way, so off I went. 

The “job fair” was supposed to start at 2. I arrived at about 1:45 and the line to get into the museum was already snaking through the Brooklyn Museum patio. I ran into a friend from my original school and I mentioned that I had been unable to print my ticket. He told me he had the same problem (printer trashed due to hurricane flooding) and said to speak to the lady at the head of the line so I could go in to get a ticket. 

I walked up to the woman at the door and she was engaged in a friendly conversation with a colleague. I waited. She made it a point to ignore me, so I finally just went in and got on the line for my ticket. A few seconds later, she was behind me, shouting. “Move over here! Yes, YOU! I’ll speak slowly. MOVE…OVER…HERE."

I had no idea she was speaking to me until she got up in my face. I looked at her and she said, "Did you not SEE that there happens to be 100 people outside? Or do you think that you don’t have to wait like the rest of the world does?” I explained that I just needed to get a ticket and wasn’t cutting to get in. “You didn’t cut the line? Oh, you certainly did! I saw you – you walked right past all those people like they wasn’t even there and just come on right through that door like you don’t got to wait for nothing.” When I asked if I was on the right line to get a ticket and then RETURN to the BACK of the line, she said, “Wait on this line here,” indicating the line she had pulled me off of.

After getting my ticket, I returned to the BACK of the line, which was now to the edge of the museum property. It was snaking onto the sidewalk shortly thereafter. I looked at the people with me and was, as usual, amazed at how many teachers here were over 35. If seniority decides excessing, then there must be an administrative game afoot because in every school I have seen it’s the 25 year olds who are in classrooms while the rest of us go to endless “job fairs”. 

I soon made another startling realization. There was a conversation next to me between a THSC person and a teacher whose entry was questioned. The teacher was asking the THSC person for her name. She refused to tell the teacher her name. “Say you spoke to the Hiring Center” is what she said, but she would not give out even her first name. So I started looking at these THSC people and saw than NONE OF THEM have names. Their badges said, “THSC Support” or “THSC Placement Adviser”, etc, but no one had an actual name. As a matter of fact, NO ONE in the place had names except for the teachers – even the principals/representatives wore badges that said simply, “Interviewer”. It was like being interviewed by a big, nameless machine - you don’t know who anyone is; you are at a disadvantage because your name is in bold type for all to see.

I also noticed that the gallery was half empty. The entire back of the room was filled with empty tables, set up for schools that never showed. Plenty of teachers were walking around looking frustrated and sad. The newly excessed teachers look confused. I spoke to several Reading teachers, all of whom had between 10 and 17 years of experience, one with 22. So many others told me of being in a building 7, 12, 15 years and being excessed while brand new teachers have classrooms. 

The saddest thing I saw was a male teacher about my age, who had two kids with him, about the ages of my older two. His name tag said, “Technology and Computer Science” and his kids kept pointing to tables saying, “What about this one, Dad?” or “This is a high school, Dad, how about here?” and he kept answering, “No, they don’t want me, they don’t want me.” My heart broke for this man, and my anger flared at a system that throws people on the trash heap like day-old bread. 

There were others – the teacher who taught business electives at a closing high school, a drama teacher excessed because the dance room was being converted to a classroom in her overcrowded school, music teachers who were told there would be no band program for them next year, math teachers, science teachers, even more than a few experienced Special Ed and ESL teachers, who are supposedly in shortage areas.

But do you know who there was an abundance of? TEACHING FELLOWS! Brand new, shiny, sparkling Teaching Fellows! Everywhere! Even though the invitation e-mail specifically stated that this “job fair” was for ATRs exclusively. One of them was at the water station, complaining about the lack of positions in ELA and how this was a waste of her five weeks. I said to her, “There are about 2000 of us ALREADY in the system without positions. Until EVERY one of us is placed in a position, there shouldn’t be a SINGLE new teacher in this room, period. You think you wasted five weeks? Some of these people have put in 10, 15, 20 YEARS and this is what happens to them.” She said she had no idea that there were teachers already in the system without positions. Apparently, the DOE lies to the Fellows, too.

All in all, this “job fair” was just like all the others. I hope they consider changing the gallery for the next one. I have viewed all the paintings in this one. Do they have any by Dali or Miro?

Job Fair Tales, by Life in Limbo

Our ace contributor, Life in Limbo, reports about the DOE's job fairs, where thousands of ATR teachers have wasted millions of hours. 

One of the singular privileges of being an ATR teacher is the opportunity to attend “job fairs” hosted by the Teacher Hiring Support Center (THSC). Usually held at the Brookyn Museum, they are a type of speed-dating where ATRs walk around, resumes in hand, and stand on line for interviews with schools with vacancies in their license area, while admiring fine art.

The first of today’s job fair stories begins in late May. I had realized that I hadn’t gotten any emails from the THSC recently and decided to check the their website myself. After a considerable amount of digging, I found a calendar of four job fairs, none of which had been brought to my attention! Two of the dates had already passed without my knowledge that these events were happening! I read further and saw that these events were by “invitation only."  

No problem, I thought, I’ll just request an invitation. I emailed the THSC of my intention to attend the next job fair and requested my invitation. I checked my contact information in the website (all correct) and waited. The following day, I was sent an email by THSC stating that my qualifications were being reviewed and that the event was by invitation only; should THSC feel that I am a good match for this event, I would certainly receive an invitation. The invitation never came. When I asked the THSC why I never received it, I was told to “Watch your email for invitations to future events!” 

Apparently, I was not the only ATR who was not notified of this event, as fellow blogger Chaz has noted.  I also heard from a UFT representative that this fair was for Teaching Fellows only, and that there would be separate events for ATRs over the summer. This made me wonder why the new hires were getting first crack at vacancies while ATRs (who are ALREADY DOE EMPLOYEES) were being forced to pick over the crumbs after the newbies got first crack at the jobs. My borough UFT office said they’d look into this and get back to me. I am still waiting. 

The second of today’s job fair stories begins a few weeks ago, in early July. I was up at my UFT borough office on a simple, unrelated errand. My eye wandered to a stack of handouts on a table bearing the THSC logo. I picked one up and saw that it was a flyer announcing five summer job fairs for ATRs, some by borough, others for schools throughout the City. Since the flyer stated that ALL ATRs would be invited to attend, I took a copy of the flyer and began checking my email for the invitations. No invitations ever came. 

I was able to attend the job fair last Tuesday, however, and did gain entry by having the representative at the check-in desk look me up on the computer. (What happened at the job fair is another post for another day.)  But the question kept nagging me: Why is it so difficult to get invited to job fairs that are allegedly being held FOR YOU?? And how many other ATRs who, like me, WANT to find permanent placement, are not being told of these events? Why would the THSC, and by extension, the DOE , NOT want us to attend these events they go to the trouble and expense of organizing? Is it possible that they do not WANT us placed? I think so.

If we are not aware of these fairs and do not attend them, the Post, then News, and every op-ed piece will focus on the lazy ATRs who didn’t bother to show up for the six job fairs the DOE so painstakingly organized JUST FOR THEM. This, in turn, strengthens their position that the ATRs should be the first to go during layoffs and that seniority rights must be eliminated to make this happen. After all, they must be lazy and unmotivated if they can’t be bothered to attend six job fairs held in their honor. 

Are we being used as pawns in Bloomberg’s “End LIFO” battle and set up to look lazy and unmotivated?  It certainly looks that way from here.  

By the way, I requested an invitation to the next job fair. Anyone want to guess how it turns out?

Something beautiful happened yesterday at the Brooklyn Museum

The grand architecture and refined portraits of the Brooklyn Museum's third floor hall served as the setting yesterday for hundreds of job-seeking teachers--and one truth-seeking reporter for wnyc.org, Beth Fertig.  

Ms. Fertig correctly took note that most of the teachers at the DOE-sponsored fair were members (or soon-to-be members) of the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR).  And unlike many of her colleagues in the media, Ms. Fertig understands what this group is about.

Among Ms. Fertig's well-made points were the following:

1. Teachers do not arrive in the ATR due to poor teaching. Rather, "some were cut by their principals for budget reasons; others taught at schools that were closed."

2. Members of the ATR "remain on the payroll and WORK as substitutes."  Yes, I added the italics and the screaming caps--because so many reporters fail to report this little fact that ATRs WORK.

3. Some ATRs have been "subbing for several years" but have found that "schools didn't want to hire them permanently because of their expensive salaries, or that there weren't enough positions available in their license areas."  

4. The mayor has suggested "putting a time limit on the ATR pool, suggesting teachers who aren't snapped up right away must not be very good."  


5. Ms. Fertig's piece de resistance is a quote from a high-school business teacher who's been an ATR for three years:

"We're treated like we're worthless," she said. "I love teaching."