Answer:  Mark Twain, in an essay entitled "As Regards Patriotism." 

Those who answered incorrectly will be expelled from Teachers for America and will have to begin their careers as lawyers or hedge-fund managers two years earlier than expected. 

Why Our Students' Behavior is So Miserable

There are many reasons why the behavior of so many New York City students is miserable, disrespectful, inappropriate, and downright disgusting.  I am too humble to say that I know all the reasons, or even that I know which is the primary reason.  I do know that one of the reasons has been elegantly stated by a blogger named Jersey Jazzman: 

Our kids are inundated by consumerist-driven messages from the minute they open their eyes. They are subjected to loud, bright, crass, violent, inappropriate, inhumane, sexualized, disrespectful, intolerant media in a wide variety of delivery systems. This constant crush of sound and images is capable of dangerously desensitizing them to the real world - a world where they must learn to collaborate, to question, to evaluate, to empathize, and to respect each other.

Click here to read the complete article.  

A House of Mirrors, in Which the Former ATR Finds Herself in a Different Kind of Limbo

NYCATR's star contibutor, Life in Limbo, has done it again: she's managed to get stuck under a low-lying limbo pole, with her poison pencil intact. 

To the regular ATR readers and Friends of ATRs, I hope your summer is going well. 

To the newly-minted ATRs, I hope that your fall down the rabbit hole provides a soft landing and there is a Mad Hatter waiting there with a very strong Margarita just for you (ask for a second, you’re going to need it). 

So, after two years in the ATR pool and a year in a REAL position (at a completely insane and out-of-control school, but let’s not mention that-- oops, too late), why am I here writing for an ATR blog? Good question. I mean, I am a fully appointed teacher who had a satisfactory year by all accounts, right? Life in Limbo should be, for all intents and purposes, out of limbo. Right?? 

RIGHT????? 

Wrong. Apparently, there is more than one type of limbo when you are in DOE Wonderland. 

Let’s turn the clock back all the way to… May. You know, when you get to fill out your preference sheet? Yeah, that time period. I filled out mine requesting a job in my actual license area first, then requesting the job I already had as my second. When tentative assignments came out in June, I was informed that I was (most likely) going to have the same assignment next year. Ok, I thought, this is as good as it’s going to get in this crazy place and I love my colleagues, so yeah, I can handle that. 

Teachers line up for a job fair in September, 2011. 

So I am happily going about my business this summer–schlepping my kids to camp, swim lessons, and basically going with the flow, appreciating that no mandatory, but useless, “Job Fairs” are in my future for the first time in three years. 

Then I get a text message. A colleague tells me that she stopped at school to introduce herself to the new (Leadership Academy) principal and that she got a chance to peek at the new organization sheet for the 12-13 school year. 

My name was not on it. This puzzles me. 

I did not receive an excess letter. 

I did not receive an e-mail, phone call, or smoke signal indicating that I am in excess. 

There was no indication that ANY excessing was necessary under our last principal back at the end of the year. 

HR Connect still lists me as appointed to my school and NOT in excess. 

An e-mail to my AP has not been returned. 

Now, you may be asking, Why not just call and ask? In a universe devoid of absurdity, that would make sense. But this is the DOE, and we all went through the looking glass the day we signed on. So the obvious becomes, clearly, the last reasonable option. 

IF I seek to correct the mistake, then I face being in a situation where I am dealing with a first-time principal with little actual teaching experience (I Googled) in a completely out-of-control school where there have been few, if any, actual consequences for disruptive behavior. I am facing a Leadership Academy principal who has never been a principal before, and who is likely in the building to perform one of two functions: to either drive the school in to the ground so it can be put on the closure list, OR, to get this school “under control” by beating up on teachers so the building can look like a “success” story. Neither scenario puts me or my colleagues in a winning (or even tenable) position. Seems like ten months of torture is on the menu regardless of which is true. 

So I am now tempted to keep this under wraps. At this point, traveling from school to school weekly seems like a better deal than ten months of torture under a Learning Academy principal and the Common Core. In an odd way, given the options, the ATR is the better deal. Now I agree, they both completely suck, but at least the ATR option doesn’t require all the extra hours, paperwork, and “accountability”. 

If my job is going to suck either way, I’ll take the suckage that requires less work.

GEM/ATR Committee: Protect pre-Turnaround ATR teachers

The GEM/ATR Committee has issued a statement in response to the recent arbitrator's decision that saved hundreds of teachers from being assigned to the ATR pool. The Committee's statement is presented here verbatim; only the occasional bold typeface is the addition of NYCATR.

August 11, 2012

1) The UFT is to be applauded for its efforts to defeat the DOE's efforts to vilify veteran teachers and send teachers in the 24 turnaround schools into the ATR pool. The arbitrator said that the DOE was wrong in making teachers reapply for their positions.

However, we call upon the president to extend the same commitment of protection to teachers that have been excessed prior to this June.

This tactic of closing down schools is an old one under Bloomberg, Klein, Black and Walcott. The only thing that is different with the present instance is that the DOE was trying to close schools and circumvent the messy PEP process that resulted in organized community opposition and lawsuits.

There is now court precedent on our side. In New York State on July 24, Judge Joan Lobis sustained the arbitrator’s position by saying that teachers’ contracts must be respected. (290 82nd 338) In Louisiana on June 20, Judge Ethel Simms Julien used the same reasoning to say that 7,000 post-Katrina school employees were wrongly fired in New Orleans. (As this last example is in another state, this can be deemed “persuasive” in a legal argument application for our state.)

While the teachers in the 24 turnaround schools have been saved, it is important to not forget the teachers new to the ATR pool from schools that the DOE has successfully shut down and the prior generation of ATRs. The UFT must insist on a hiring freeze until ATRs have been placed, as it did on September 12, 2007.* 

The excessed teachers are not the causes for "failing schools." The schools the DOE targets for closure disproportionately have low income students, high percentages of special education and ELL students.

1-a) Stop the Lockout

It's time that Mulgrew and the UFT defend all of the ATRs and fight for their placement, just as hard as they fought for the preservation of the positions of the teachers in the 24 schools slated for "closing." 

ATRs are being locked out of positions.

i) ATRs go unhired while novice teachers, many fresh out of college or education school, are placed in positions. We call for the termination of the new replacement workers and for their replacement by ATRs.

ii) Adding insult to injury, workers with the title of teacher are the one class of UFT professional that is forced on a weekly sojourn. The DOE is placing guidance counselors, social workers, librarians and paraprofessionals in full-school year assignments. 

iii) ATRs are asked during job interviews to demonstrate their competency in new teaching protocols: Common Core, workshop model, Danielson Method. Novice teachers are given preferential treatment with summer training in these areas. We call for the termination of novice training and for the offering of training to ATRs.

1-b) No to ending careers with buy-outs

The UFT leadership’s talk of a buy-out is a caving in to the DOE's harassment of ATRs. Mulgrew did not defend the ATRs' teaching integrity when the DOE spoke of the ATRs as dead-weight during the May news reports of buy-out talks.

1-c) No to observations of ATRs

Observations of ATRs beginning in the 2011-2012 are another product of a side agreement to contracts. It is inappropriate for teachers to be observed with students that they have just met, with students that know that the lesson is just a sample lesson.

2) No more side-agreements to contracts

The UFT must stop making agreements to the status of ATRs outside of the contract process. In these side agreements the city is biting off, in piecemeal fashion, contract protections of senior teachers. As an example, on April 15, 2010, and in the summer of 2011 the DOE and the UFT made an ATR agreement without any input from ATRs or other rank and file members of the UFT. These side agreements are made without the sort of membership vote to which contracts are subjected. Yet, the agreements carry the same powerful weight that contracts carry.

3) Dues equity for ATRs: Elected reps of ATRs’ choosing

Furthermore, the UFT must stop its opposition to the ATRs' practice of their electoral rights. ATRs have no venue by which to vote for representatives that come from their ranks to express their interests. Other distinctive groups, such as paraprofessionals and career and technical school teachers have their special divisions. ATRs, with ranks at an estimated 830, equal the size of teaching staffs at about ten large schools put together. For the reasons of parity, ATRs must have elected representatives at the boro level. 

The UFT held during the 2011 to 2012 year that ATRs could vote in whatever school that they were serving for a given week. This is disingenuous. How can an ATR within a few days size up the main issues at a given school and properly weigh the strengths and weaknesses of two or three candidates at the school? It is further unfair to the staff in the school in question. ATRs, as outsiders, in close races could tip elections, affecting the outcome for the staff to be represented at that school. 

The UFT needs to recognize that we are not in a temporary status. It knows, full well, that principals are not inclined to hire them, due to their senior salary level. There is no valid rationale in opposing chapters and representatives with the argument that giving ATRs representation will institutionalize their status. Given that many ATRs have been in this status for more than two years, they already have an institutionalized status by default.

*"Dispelling rumors that their jobs might be in jeopardy, Weingarten made clear that teachers who find themselves working as ATRs maintain their salary benefits and cannot be fired or laid off thanks to a job-security guarantee that the UFT secured in the 2005 contract.

"At a Sept. 12 [2007] labor-management meeting that Weingarten requested on the treatment of excessed teachers, UFT officials called for a moratorium on new hiring until vacancies are filled by current ATRs in the district or high school superintendency provided they have the appropriate license.

"'Filling vacancies with ATRs meets both federal and state requirements related to having a 'highly qualified teacher' in every classroom,' said Weingarten.'"

"DOE officials agreed at the Sept. 12 meeting to modify the new school financing system to encourage principals to hire ATRs. The school will get filled for the first year as if the teacher were a new hire and for the second year at 50 percent of the teacher's actual salary before assuming the cost of the actual salary before assuming the cost of the teacher's actual salary in the teacher's third year at the school.

"UFT officials also urged the DOE, in the next open market transfer period, to require that principals grant interviews, in seniority order, to ATRs with the appropriate license to fill vacancies before new recruits are interviewed or hired. Principals should also be required to put in writing why the ATR was nor hired for the position, the union said.

"The UFT also demanded that all ATRs be allowed access to all DOE job fairs. The union made the demand after receiving word that the DOE barred ATRs from attending job fairs for prospective new teachers last spring." New York Teacher, Sept. 20, 2007. 

No Interviews for ATR Teachers at Fort Hamilton H.S.

Alexander Hamilton was one of this country's earliest financial geniuses.  Jo Ann Chester, the Principal of Fort Hamilton High School, which is named after old Alex, also seems to have a way with dollars and cents.  She has been accused of a complex scheme of underpaying more than a dozen teachers at her school. 

Jo Ann Chester (second from left)  accepts a check

 for $250,000 from State Senator Marty Golden (L).  

If that's not dastardly enough, Ms. Chester also figured out a way to circumvent the DOE's requirement that teachers from the ATR should be interviewed for any open positions. Gotham Schools reports: 

A union source said Chester had not interviewed a single member of the Absent Teacher Reserve for vacant positions, even after the city began requiring schools to interview any teacher in the pool who put in an application for an open position. 

By making it appear that full-time teachers were assigned to every class, the school avoided being assigned members of the ATR pool in the last year, after the city began cycling them weekly into schools with vacancies. 

The city wants principals to hire ATRs whenever possible, because their salaries are already on the city payroll. But schools that hire the teachers, who lost their positions when their schools shrunk or closed, must foot the bill for their salaries. It is less expensive for principals to pick up brand-new teachers whenever possible.

Click here for the full story. 

Acting As If: The 13 Week Trial

Here's a new piece by our contributor Dumped ATR.  Her name fits her experiences, but she is trying to be positive.

It wasn't a bad spring, though my UFT Rep said I had a rough year. He and others have been trying to help me find a position after doing a good job at my spring "leave replacement" position. Here's how it went.

I took what turned out to be a leave replacement position this spring at a large, but pleasant high school on the other side of the NY Planet from where I live. It was the first time I had taught five, maximum-sized classes (my entire career has been spent in small schools, up till now.) All of these classes were well-attended, with students doing homework, extra credit--practically anything I assigned. Nobody thought I had a great shot of getting hired, though the coordinator of my department really wanted to bring me on board. However, in my mind, I believed I would be hired, and I tried my best to allow that belief to guide my work--to "act as if." Well, I wasn't hired permanently, though I was told I could apply for the job on the open market. As I don't want to feel doubly beaten, I chose not to do so. 

There are pros and cons to having been provisionally hired. If I hadn't done well in the position, I would be glad to leave it. However, I invested my abilities "as if" I were a permanent member of the staff. I'm not sure if my principal took the time to imagine me with quite the same interest. Of course, he doesn't have to do that. In fact, once he was asked by the DOE to make a decision about me (at 13 weeks in to a position I took over in the middle of the year) he made his decision, and that was it. (The DOE did this everywhere, don't ask me why.) To be safe, as he told the UFT Rep at the school, he "kept his options open." I had thirteen weeks in which there was one key observation by the principal, plus several "snapshots." The two department chairs who hired me, observed me and fought to keep me, to no avail, though I was honored by their efforts.

To be fair, I choked during that one observation, causing my class to basically ask me the next day, in polite terms, "WT--." They were stumped by what was, arguably, the most pretentious "Do Now" I had ever asked them and they had a hard time making connections to the follow-up questions. I panicked and thought, "Maybe they haven't understood anything I've said." The truth was, I had created a lesson designed to impress the principal and not really in the style in which I teach, or speak. The coordinator figured this out. So did my students (who also confessed they froze because the principal was there. No, I did not tell them in advance that I was being observed.) The next day, we completed the task that I had wanted them to do the day before in our usual rhythm with time to spare for good discussions. But, the principal would never return, despite attempts of administrators and senior faculty to get him to do so. Colleagues said that they had never seen so many people rally for one person. I'm very grateful. My supervisors were very complimentary and pleased with my work. They also knew, as one said, that I felt like "my entire career rested on the principal's observations"--and that it was difficult for me to keep my nerves from jumping out of my skin in his presence. For that reason, they sometimes popped in on me, to get me used to people walking in, and to emphasize to me what I did well, so that I might be less nervous should the principal come again. 


He didn't, unfortunately. I tried to act "as if" everything was okay, regardless, but the more time passed that he didn't return, the more, inside anyway, I felt like the chances of staying in the school were over. My colleagues were extremely understanding and supportive and I made many friends among them. They continually reminded me that they saw how hard I worked and that they knew I was a good teacher. But, the days passed. Oh sure, he came by for "snapshots." Walked in for less than five minutes during a discussion here and there. Asked my students what they were writing about. I was told that, unless he saw something he didn't like, he usually didn't stay long on these little surprise visits. He must've liked some of what he saw as he didn't stay. The one discussion I had with him directly after a snapshot (I got feedback from my coordinator) involved him saying I was "brilliant," but should try to let the students who are late pick up their handouts instead of passing them down to them. I took too much stock in the compliment, as it became clear to me later, that he didn't really have much of a handle on who I was or what I did. Certainly not enough to want to give me a second chance. I did get an "S" rating at the end of the year, and since everyone continued to rally for my employment until the end, I am secure in the idea that I did not do a terrible job. 

Nevertheless, the teaching experience was exhilarating. It was incredible to find myself "just teaching." My students were welcoming, sensitive and enjoyed challenges. I know the principal has no obligation to work with me or get to know me. I guess I simply wish he did. I would have committed to working with him. That wouldn't have been acting.

Buyouts for ATR teachers? Anyone Home?

Chancellor Dennis Walcott

Just about two months ago, 974 readers saw an article in this blog  about Chancellor Walcott's plan to offer retirement buyouts to ATR teachers.  The UFT, though, doesn't seem to know anything about it.  Here is a message from an anonymous ATR teacher:

No offer.  I called the UFT and spoke to a nasty woman who said, "We don't have a buyout."  I asked about the negotiations and where they stand and she repeated, "We don't have a buyout." Does anyone know what's happening? 

Former Bloomberg Henchman Turns on the Boss

Eric Nadelstern

Eric Nadelstern used to be the second-in-command at the NYC DOE, until he retired in January, 2011.  Now, however, Nadelstern has issued a paper in which he attacks the Bloomberg education administration: 

[they see] their primary role as creating opportunities for Bloomberg to step onto a national political stage after he [leaves] city government. Education reforms [are] now...evaluated on the basis of whether they contribute capital to the mayor’s political aspirations.

Click here to read Nadelstern's full report, and a summary thereof by Gotham Schools. 




Photo Credit: http://www.nypost.com/rw/nypost/2011/01/21/news/photos_stories/032309Education17WCL160149--300x300.jpg

What is an ATR?

Diane Ravitch

If you're looking for one great blog to follow (other than this one) I recommend Diane Ravitch's Blog.  The Divine Diane has her gentle finger on the pulse of education issues from New York City, the U.S.A. and the world over.

In a recent post, Dr. Ravitch responded to some readers from outside of NYC who wondered what an ATR is. Here is her response, together with a long quotation from one our colleagues:

I have explained that {an ATR} is a teacher who used to work in a school that was “phased out” and replaced by new schools. This is the Bloomberg administration’s central strategy of school reform: close and replace, close and replace, repeat and repeat. 

The teachers who lose their jobs have not been evaluated. They may be great teachers. They just happened to have the bad luck to teach in a closing school. If they are experienced teachers, other principals may reject them because their salaries are too high. So they become wanderers in the school system. They become members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, floating from school to school, a week at a time in each. They are lost souls in a soul-less system run by the greatest minds of our generation. 

I heard from an ATR today. He or she can tell you what life is like for an ATR:

Dear Diane, 

I am a 21 year veteran atr teacher. I truly appreciate your blogging. I have been subjected to the most ridiculous and hostile work environment this past year. As it stands, any teacher can become an ATR at anytime. 

The troubling thing is that my “colleagues” shun us as though we are lepers. I guess its just not cricket to be seen talking to us. The prevailing meme is that we must be “bad” teachers. 

The administration treats us like subs and even calls me a sub to my face. Imagine being informed in your email each week where you will be working the following week. At each school there is a different schedule, so forget dealing with your own children, holding a second job, going to school or even per session. The algorithm that the NYCDOE claims to use in the placement of the ATR underclass, includes distance from home as a major factor. For thirty of the thirty four schools I was sent to, the travel time each way was two hours minimum. 

As an ATR I have no democratic rights. We have no chapter. The only proper description of the treatment we have recieved at the hands of the DOE and its HR enforcement arm, the UFT has been constructive discharge.

Click here to read the full article. 

Big News: Thousands of Teachers Saved by Arbitrator From Falling into ATR Cesspool

The prospect of thousands of teachers falling into the ATR cesspool has been averted, at least temporarily, by an independent arbitrator.  The arbitrator ruled that the Mayor's plan to "turnaround" 24 schools is a violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

Gotham Schools reports:

An arbitrator has ruled that the city’s plans to reform 24 struggling schools by overhauling their staffs violated its collective bargaining agreements with the teachers and principals unions.

The arbitrator’s decision adds a new and abrupt twist to the six-month-long shakeup at the schools. It also virtually guarantees that the city cannot claim more than $40 million in federal funds for the schools that the overhaul process, known as “turnaround,” was aimed at securing.

The turnaround rules require the schools to replace half of their teachers, and the city was trying to use a clause in its contract with the teachers union, known as 18-D, to make that happen. In recent weeks, “18-D committees” told hundreds and probably thousands of teachers and staff members at the schools they could not return next year. 

Under the arbitrator’s ruling, all of those staff members are now free to take their jobs back.

Click here for the complete article.