A School Too Far: Is School Choice Unraveling Education Reform In New York City?

A Ronin, or masterless samurai, lunges forward.

Marc Epstein, the Ronin Teacher, is once again a wandering warrior. After being plucked off the ATR rolls for a position at Jamaica H.S., Mr. Epstein has recently learned that he will be excessed once again.  The reason?  Because Jamaica H.S., like almost all of the city's once-great large comprehensive high schools, is being broken up into several mini-schools--schools that will be staffed, of course, by young, cheap, inexperienced teachers. No room for expert veterans like Mr. Epstein.

In the meantime, Mr. Epstein scours the Open Market for positions, and contributes insightful articles to publications like the Huffington Post.  Here is his latest:

It would appear that when students don't attend school, they don't get educated in ways that are productive for them in particular, and society at large.

Teachers have long known this to be the case. Now the issue is being joined by politicians, fueled by a Johns Hopkins study that found that 15% of American school children have been labeled chronically absent for missing one school day in ten. In New York City the number is 20%.

With only a few weeks remaining in the current school year, New York City has launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign that asks, "It's 9:00 AM Do You Know Where Your Kids Are?"

Prior attempts at reducing truancy have included celebrity messages and "robo" calls made to the homes of the chronically absent by famous rappers to encourage attendance. Parental responsibility remains a touchy issue. While Bloomberg pointed his finger at parents, he maintained that it's up to the schools to ensure that their students are in attendance.

The problem isn't unique to New York City. Buffalo's teachers refused to have students who were chronically absent factored into their evaluations. The state refused to release Race To The Top monies until an agreement was reached. But there were no solutions that offered any real hope of reversing the staggering number of truants, save the tired nostrums of increased counseling and more parent outreach.

"Alexander the Great Cuts the Gordian Knot," by
Johann Georg Platzer (c. 1730)

At the end of the day, neither public service messages, nor increased cooperation between schools, police, and social welfare services will cut the truancy Gordian Knot.

That's because the truancy statistics are a fairly accurate reflection of the number of students who don't want to be in school. They don't want to be there, especially high school students, who represent the largest percentage of truants, because they arrive in high school incapable of performing on a high school level.

Click here to read the complete article. 

The Waiting Game, in which the Former ATR Wonders About September

After a long absence, our star contributor, Life in Limbo, is back.   She has spent the year out of the ATR frying pan, but into the fire of an out-of-control school.  Her life, we're sorry to say, is still in limbo.

So it’s June. And so far, it appears that I will be spending my first summer in three years NOT wondering where I will end up in September. I should be happy. I should be relieved. I should be relaxed, but this is not the case.


The school to which I am appointed is out of control. There is a complete and total lack of discipline which, of late, has become downright dangerous. Forget the constant cell phone/iPod visibility and usage (one student even brings his laptop to school every day and plays games on it constantly. When told to put it away, he responds, “Touch my f***ing laptop and you won’t have no arm no more, B****.”) When told to put the laptop away by a dean or AP, he does. At least until the dean/AP leaves the room. Then the laptop is back out and he resumes his games. Administration refuses to confiscate any of the electronics. Most of the time they are nowhere to be found.

Fights in the hallways and classrooms happen several times a day. Students smoke pot in the stairwells and often come to school drunk at 8:00 in the morning after drinking in a local park before school. Line-of-duty injuries are common due to unruly students physically assaulting me. I have sustained more than one this year. Both incidents were deemed “accidents” and the consequences to the students were minimal. The teacher next door is out on a line-of-duty injury resulting in a dislocated shoulder as a result of a student slamming a door shut on him (another “accident”). Another teacher has been out for some time with a neck, back, and knee injury when two students running in the halls plowed into her and threw her to the floor. The hallways double as jogging tracks and we teachers are constantly jostled and bumped as we stand in the halls during passing. Hall roamers run into the classroom several times a day to harass other students, randomly shout obscenities at the teacher, perform hip-hop dances, hide from administration, or fight students in the classroom. 

Administration’s response to this has been anemic at best– student removal forms are never acted upon, incident reports are filled out and submitted, but fail to elicit even an “in-house” suspension. Students who fight are removed from the room, but are returned to class ten minutes later after being told that they “are making poor choices.” Students who curse at and threaten teachers are taken out of class for a few minutes and returned to class because “there is nowhere to put them and they need to be educated”.


I am fully appointed to this school, which means unless I am excessed, I will return here in September. Rumor has it that the administration is to be replaced, and while I have no concrete news on this, I think something is up, as we have a Quality Review coming up and the administration is noticeably quiet. A week before a QR would have them poking into classroom libraries, data binders, file cabinets, and scouring Post-it notes on bulletin boards for “actionable feedback.”  But nothing. It is as if they have thrown up their hands and left it all to fate.


I wonder about this. For all their faults, the administration in this building is not a “Gotcha Squad.” I don’t tremble with fear when they walk into the classroom and I have had extremely positive observations and interactions with them. However, the fact that I did press for suspensions for the students involved in my line-of-duty injuries may have caused them to lose face in the safety arena and I know they try hard to keep everything quiet. Since I am currently teaching out of license (sort of), I can easily be excessed if I become a “problem” and replaced with a newbie teacher in the appropriate license for the position. So I may very well be back in the ATR pool in September.

So as the end of the year approaches, I find that the ATR pool may not be as bad as returning to this dangerous school, especially if the administration IS replaced and we end up with reptiles from the Leadersh** Academy.

Either way, I lose.

Unassigned Teachers of the World, Unite!

The geniuses at E4E recently reported on the Chancellor's latest attempt to "solve" the ATR problem:

How to solve the problem of unassigned teachers has long been a battleground issue for city education officials and the union, the United Federation of Teachers.

If you're unassigned, try twiddling your thumbs. Or
try out some of the tips at www.wikihow.com/Waste-Time

Tell me, brothers and sisters of the Absent Teacher Reserve, how often have you been "unassigned"?

Weren't you assigned to a different school every week this year?  And didn't you always go where you were told to go?  And didn't you always teach the classes you were assigned to teach (except of course when the students wouldn't let you teach them)?

And if, on occasion, you were not given anything to do, was that because there's no work to be done in our overcrowded schools?  And was it because you--with your degrees, certificates, and years of satisfactory service--weren't able to do the work?  Or was it because some knucklebrained administrator couldn't take five minutes to identify some struggling students who could benefit from your expertise?

10 Necessary Questions for Michael Mulgrew

"Moses showing the Ten Commandments,"
by Gustave Dore' (1865)

Moses brought down the tablets with the 10 commandments. Philip Nobile, admittedly a lesser luminary, merely has 10 questions to ask our UFT President, Michael Mulgrew.  

If the worst one could say about Michael Mulgrew is that once upon a time at Grady High School he fulfilled the adulterous fantasy of many teachers, then I’m not throwing the first stone. The boys of the Unity Caucus are famous for having a good time. Whether Mulgrew and Emma Camacho-Mendez did the lust and thrust in his shop several years ago is relatively small potatoes, even if there were evidence. But I would have preferred faster and more furious denial.

If the sex never happened at Grady, then Hochstadt’s grand conspiracy-blackmail-extortion theory wrapped in a suicidal lawsuit collapses. So why didn’t Mulgrew come out swinging in Sunday’s Post, at least to defend the honor of his good friend Ms. Camacho-Mendez? Instead, he told paid spokesman Dick Riley to say that Hochstadt’s “lawsuit was a catalog of absurd, false charges which we expect the court to dismiss."    

Bill Clinton proclaims, "I did not have sexual relations
with that woman."

Mulgrew’s Monday email to members was similarly bloodless in reference to “false and absurd claims of a wide-ranging conspiracy and personal misconduct, without stating any actual proof of either.” But why not a simple, case-closing statement: “I did not have sex with that Guidance Counselor at Grady.” Wouldn’t you rush to say that or its equivalent, if you were Mulgrew and you and your good friend were maliciously accused in the Post? Wouldn’t you have announced a libel suit against your greatest enemy in the press?

That’s what bothers me. Mulgrew is not acting like an innocent man. If he was spied in flagrante at Grady, it follows that there was a cover-up of some kind. So far, evidence goes in the other direction. The Daily News reported on Tuesday that “the city has confirmed Mulgrew was never removed from the classroom for any investigations during his teaching career, contrary to the lawsuit’s allegations. He also was never found to have committed wrongdoing by any investigators.”  Even Donald Herb, the retired custodian who supposedly saw the grappling lovers told the News that Mulgrew was a “good guy…We could tell he was a fighter back then. Now he's got some power and they're trying to take him down. That's all this is about." And Ivor Neuschotz, the former Grady Principal allegedly in the know, has kept silent.

Emma Camacho-Mendez's comment about
her alleged affair with Mulgrew was "clueless," says
Philip Nobile. 

Despite this cold trail, I’m leaning in the direction of the original sin---until Mulgrew and/or Camacho-Mendez convince me otherwise. The rumor is too widespread and robust to discount on Mulgrew’s tepid denial and Camacho-Mendez’s clueless comment in Sunday’s Post: “I have no comment on that. It’s the first I’ve heard of such an allegation. I have nothing to say to you.”   

The court of public opinion is not the same as the court of UFT opinion. Randi was compromised when she was in the closet and covered up Klein’s secret swiftboat campaign against her, only to be protected by Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon who also covered up Klein smear operation at Tweed. That’s what Randi told me,  Michael Mendel, Jim Callaghan, and NYSUT lawyer Chris Callagy in 2008.  Mulgrew needs to come clean with members, to assure us that he is not compromised. 

Herewith are ten questions to set the record straight:

1. Did you have a romantic relationship with Camacho-Mendez when you were both at Grady? Have you had a romantic relationship with her at any time? 

2. Did you have sex with her within Grady? 

3. Comacho-Mendez told the Post that she had never heard the Grady rumor before; what about you? 

4. The rumor has surprisingly long legs despite lack of confirmation; did anything happen at Grady that might have started it? 

5. Granted the circumstances, the appearances, and your and Camacho-Mendez’s less-than-indignant denials, you can understand why some members like me are skeptical and want a detailed response to the Hochstadt suit, even though it lacks proof. Will you hold a press conference and answer questions? 

6. Will you sue Hochstadt, Betsy Combier, and the Post for reckless disregard of the truth? If not, why not? 

7. Norm Scott mocked Hochstadt’s grandiose claims while expressing contempt for Unity’s entrenched leadership: “The idea that the UFT had to be blackmailed to sell out the teaching corps is ludicrous when we know it is in their DNA to give away decades of hard won rights and pieces of the contract, whole chunks at a time. The interesting part of the charge was that Mulgrew took his supposed lady up the ladder with him to a juicy full-time patronage job at UFT headquarters. But really, does anyone expect people in power to function differently?”  Your response? 

8.  Randi came to your swift defense against Hochstadt, but you were silent last month when the Daily News, with the connivance of Walcott, smeared Eric Chasanoff  as a pervert teacher. Why did you let Eric twist in the wind? 

9. The 10-minute “open mike” at the start of Executive Committee meetings is the only chance that rank-and- file members have to confront you and your cabinet. But you allowed Secretary Michael Mendel to censor that small window of opportunity, forbidding dissenting members to speak more than once a term. Is this your idea of democratic process? 

10. One more thing: Are you sorry that you cynically killed the DA resolution to endorse Bill Thompson against Bloomberg, thus assuring four more years of teacher bashing?  

Does the UFT leadership betray its members?

Sheikh Abdulaziz al-sheikh, the
 Grand Mufti of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

It's really none of our business what UFT President Michael Mulgrew may have done with a female guidance counselor on a drafting table at Grady H.S. (click here to see the allegation).  What does concern us is the possibility that Mulgrew promoted his paramour to an important union job for which she was not qualified, and that he may have been compromised by his scandal when he negotiated with the DOE.

Leave it to NYCATR's ace commentator Philip Nobile to formulate the issue with just the right mix of clear reasoning and biting cynicism.  Here's what Nobile wrote as a comment to a Gotham Schools report about the scandal:

Would our UFT leaders betray members to protect their own interests? Is the Grand Mufti Moslem?

Click here to see Nobile's full comment.  

Mulgrew to ATRs: You are second-class UFT members

Marjorie Stamberg reports:

At the Wednesday, May 16 meeting of the UFT's Delegate Assembly , I raised the issue of the union's cynical "solution" to the UFT's disenfranchisment of ATRs in the union elections. Many ATRs had no place to vote in the union elections as they trudge from school to school on a weekly basis, where they are treated as non-people until they move on the next week. This week-to-week trek was agreed upon by the union and the DOE last spring, as part of the deal that there be no teacher layoffs. Last fall, I and others put forward motions that the ATRs be accorded their full voting rights with their own chapter. We have been fighting for this for several years, and it has always been brushed off with the excuse that their situation is only "temporary."  

Last week, the UFT leadership announced a "solution"--with chapter elections upon us, they decided that ATRs would vote at the school where they are for the week the elections are held. This is outrageous--how can ATR teachers effectively advocate for their needs when they are "here today, gone tomorrow," and the chapter representatives are not accountable to them? 

UFT President, Michael Mulgrew

Yesterday, when I raised this issue in the question period at the delegate assembly, Mulgrew refused to let me get a sentence out, interrupting me, harassing and yelling, "What's your question," "Make it a question," "That's not a question!" Following his lead, a passel of Unity delegates obediently picked up the jeer. Over the din, I was finally able to get out, "My question is, how do you justify this outrageous cynical disenfranchisement of the ATRs' right to vote?" and saying "the ATRs need their own chapter."

The Artful Dodger

Mulgrew answered with a time-honored evasion: The union is in arbitration, he said, because the DOE has not kept to its commitment to place ATRs in open positions and long-term vacancies. Until this arbitration is settled, the union is doing the "best it can" to give ATRs voting rights. He was silent on the fact that the weekly trek of ATRs is happening with the consent of the UFT leadership, which agreed to it as part of the deal on layoffs last spring.

Don't worry, I will keep on raising this issue. With more schools closing than ever, there will be a huge swelling of the ATR pool next fall. As we all know, "If you're not ATR, you could be soon." The fight for rights of ATR teachers is everyone's fight.

Really Big News: DOE may offer buyouts to ATR Teachers!

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the NYC DOE is interested in offering retirement buyouts to teachers who have been in the Absent Teacher Reserve for more than a year.

According to the report, the UFT has tried in the past to negotiate buyouts for ATR teachers, without success.  Regarding this recent offer by the DOE, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, "We are prepared to listen."

Click here to read the full story.

Who runs NYSED?

Marc Epstein, better known here as the Ronin Teacher, has discovered who really runs the New York State Education Department:

It’s apparent to anyone...that the State Department of Education is run by the Wizard of Oz.   Just pull the curtain away and all you have is a little old man who is only capable or accepting packages of tests from the Pearson Company.

Click here to read the full article. 








Picture credit:  http://www.themoneymasters.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/toto-exposes-oz1.jpg

Curiouser and Curiouser

James Eterno, the leader of the ICE-UFT party, has uncovered a curious little tidbit from a UFT publication about elections for chapter representatives:

Member ATRs on weekly assignment to the school should be allowed to vote for chapter leader, not for delegate.

 Click here for the full article. 

Picture credit: http://www.alice-in-wonderland-book.com/images/alice_tenniel_curiouser.jpg

Did HE say that?

A perfectly sensible sentiment appeared in a Gotham Schools article today:

“In the end it’s the parents job to raise the children. And the school systems can only do so much.”

Click here to find out which leading member of the Blame-the-Teacher Party uttered this eternal truth.