New York Times Trash Job on ATR Teachers
NEW YORK -- So the “bad teacher” industry is alive and well, and once again it is targeting our colleagues in the Absent Teacher Reserve.
A totally biased article slamming educators in the ATR is splashed on the front page of the New York Times (October 14) under the headline “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Idled Teachers Head Back to Class.” The online version refers to “Troubled Teachers.”
The whole thrust is, as always, to blame teachers for any and all problems in the public school system. The fact that almost 10 percent of our students are homeless (more than 100,000 kids) is, of course, not mentioned.
The Times did a whole statistical study, it says. But for all the claims about “troubled,” “incompetent” or even “mentally unstable” teachers, further down in the article you read that nearly 40 percent of the ATRs are there because their schools were closed, and another 30 percent were excessed for budgetary reasons or because of low enrollment.
Only 12 percent had “ineffective” or “unsatisfactory” ratings, less than one in eight of those thrown into this limbo.
And why are teachers “U rated”? Times writer Kate Taylor blew off suggestions that such ratings often spring from arbitrary and even vengeful principals against whistle blowers, union activists, or others who don't get on board with the latest PD fad.
The “experts” quoted in the article are a long list of ex-principals, supervisors and other leftovers from the Bloomberg-Klein era. In fact, some of the very best teachers in the system have been ATRed at various points.
And among the 12 percent, the “worst” case they could cite was an ATR teacher who took a day off to go to a family reunion in Chicago and called in sick. Horrors!
Also, they found she didn't report that she had been arrested, although at the very end of the article we learn that these were bench warrants stemming from a family dispute and the charges were later dropped.
The article is aimed at the union, of course, for insisting the DOE give excessed teachers a chance to teach, instead of rotating them from school to school on a monthly basis as subs or leaving them sitting in the neo-rubber rooms (which supposedly don’t exist anymore).
The ATR crisis grew out of the orgy of closing public schools, part of the whole privatizing “education reform” craze, which brought us Success Academy maven Eva Moskowitz and Teach for America.
In this era of Trump, it is worth remembering that many of the big pushers of this union-bashing effort were Democrats for Education Reform (a bunch of Wall Street moguls) and the Obama administration in Washington headed by his basketball buddy Ed Sec Arne Duncan.
Follow the money – along with the school closures they gave principals dictatorial control over teacher selection and introduced a funding scheme giving each principal a set amount of dollars, instead of paying salary through the central office. This created a whole set of incentives.
(A careful reader will note that both of the supposed “bad teachers” singled out in the Times hit piece are in the top salary grade.)
So it was “two for the price of one”: instead of hiring an experienced teacher who had accrued raises, the principal could hire two new teachers fresh out of ed school or Teach for America.
And the system is hostile to new teachers as well as to veteran educators: many new teachers leave because they are stuck in the “delay of tenure” trap, as the DOE keeps them as probationary employees to be fired at will and under the thumb of the principal.
As for the veteran teachers pushed out in the ATR frenzy, I personally know a black Ph.D. science teacher who helped countless students to get a GED; a Vietnamese-American teacher who was visiting her homeland the summer they interviewed for jobs after the schools in D79 were closed and hundreds of teachers excessed when Cami Anderson “reorganized” the district.
Both those teachers are retired now – our loss, and that of the students. Anderson went on to become chief of the Newark School system where she could play with a $100 million grant from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg.
She used it to carry out mass firings of teachers, introduce school lotteries and expand the number of charters. She was eventually driven out over her arrogant disregard of parents’ protest and student sit-ins.
The UFT leadership clique “Unity Caucus” bears a big part of the responsibility for the whole ATR mess. Especially Randi Weingarten, who later admitted that they didn’t realize what the results would be. In the 2006-7 contract, the UFT bureaucracy agreed to abolish union seniority transfers.
Under that system, if your school closed, or your principal was impossible, you could transfer to another school with an opening, based on seniority, license and an S rating showing you were qualified.
No more. In exchange we got the “open market.” It’s about as “open” as the affordable housing market in Manhattan. The “open market” is a vehicle for manipulation, favoritism, nepotism and possibly worse.
Principals often go through the motions of “listing” jobs, and even sometimes “interviewing” candidates, when they have already decided who they are going to appoint.
One of the consequences of this system is that teachers got less experienced, whiter and much more distant from the communities they serve. It has become harder to get in if you are a graduate of CUNY, while TfA recruits Ivy Leaguers and college grads from outlying states with zero experience with urban schools.
This was borne out by the comprehensive study initiated by a union activist on “the disappearance of black and Latino teachers.”
And now, some charter school teachers won’t have to go to ed school at all. They can just be thrown into the classroom in a charter teaching mill. If Eva likes them, they’re certified. And the effect on the students…?
But of course the purpose is to bust the union.
A piece of good news on that. Among the huge numbers of new teachers who flee the charter schools after a couple of years, we’re hearing that a number are getting jobs as union teachers in the DOE. They are more than welcome, but what we really need is for the union to step up its drive to unionize the charters, and not under sub-par Green Dot contracts.
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