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Sunday, August 30, 2009

Principals In NYC Leave 1,800 Teaching Jobs Open Rather Than Hire Excessed Teachers



August 29, 2009
Amid Hiring Freeze, Principals Leave Jobs Empty
By JENNIFER MEDINA, NY TIMES

Less than two weeks before the start of school, about 1,800 teaching jobs in New York City remain open as principals appear to be resisting orders to fill vacancies with teachers whose previous positions were eliminated.

Facing steep budget cuts, the Education Department enacted a hiring freeze in the spring, requiring principals with openings to hire teachers who are already on the city’s payroll but who have no permanent position, often because their schools were closed for poor performance.

But many principals prefer new teachers. So in an act of quiet defiance, they are allowing jobs to sit vacant, leading to one of the most difficult hiring seasons in recent history despite the large number of vacancies and the thousands of candidates who could fill them.

Teachers who lost their old posts are frustrated about the scarcity of job offers. New teachers who cannot get hired are furious after upending their lives to begin careers they must now delay. And principals are upset that after years of choosing their work force, their options are being drastically limited.

“The picture out there is not pretty,” said Jemina R. Bernard, who directs the New York office of Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in low-performing schools. Fewer than half of the recruits this year have landed jobs in city schools; by this time last year, 90 percent had.

The openings represent about 2 percent of the city’s teaching payroll, and officials expect that some will be filled before Sept. 9, the first day of school. But a number of schools may end up with larger classes or have to temporarily stop offering a subject.

For years, a teacher whose job was eliminated because of declining enrollment, budget cuts or school closings had the right to “bump” a teacher with less seniority out of a job at another school. But in 2005 the city and the teachers’ union agreed to give principals the right to choose whom to hire.

As Chancellor Joel I. Klein moved aggressively to close poor-performing schools, more teachers found their positions eliminated. And principals tended to hire younger, newer teachers because they were cheaper and did not carry the stigma of having come from a failing school.

So many of the older teachers, who were guaranteed full salaries and benefits, wound up in the so-called absent teacher reserve pool, usually working as substitutes. There are now 1,983 teachers in the pool, earning more than $200 million a year in pay and benefits.

Mr. Klein has suggested that those who do not find jobs quickly are undesirable, or that they have stopped looking. But now the chancellor, who has given more autonomy to school leaders and encouraged the recruitment of new teachers from nontraditional backgrounds, is trying to coax principals to hire from within.

“The economics are that you have to do this,” Mr. Klein said. “But I think everybody, starting with me, knows that this is not the ideal in any way, shape or form.”

With the teachers’ contract up for renewal this fall, Mr. Klein said he would push for a limit on how long teachers could stay in the reserve pool before they could be laid off. But an arbitration board has rejected such a limit.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said that the Education Department had not made a great enough effort to place teachers and that Mr. Klein had unfairly maligned them, making it even harder for them to find jobs. And, Mr. Mulgrew said, principals are reluctant to take on their higher salaries.

About a third of the nearly 2,000 teachers who lost their posts in June have found a job this summer. Some new teachers have landed jobs in specialized areas, like special education and the sciences, in which Mr. Klein has made an exception to the hiring freeze.

But more than 300 teachers have been in the pool for more than a year, and about 150 for more than two years. To entice principals to hire teachers who have been in the pool the longest, Mr. Klein has offered to pay part of their salaries from his central budget for up to eight years.

Several principals — who did not want their names published for fear of angering the administration or the teachers’ union — said they were circumventing the restrictions by offering new teachers jobs as long-term substitutes or hiring them as specialized teachers but placing them in regular classrooms. Some said they planned to eliminate open positions from their budgets rather than take on teachers they considered undesirable, and others said they were holding out in the hope that Mr. Klein would lift the restrictions.

Valerie Hamilton-Roux, 45, who was a reading specialist at Public School 201 in Harlem until it was closed last year, said she had been little more than a “glorified sub” since then. In the last several months, she has attended job fairs and sent out more than a hundred résumés to schools, she said.

“I want to work and be useful, not just a placeholder,” she said. “Whether I don’t say what the principals want to hear or whether they’re skeptical because I haven’t been in the classroom for a year, I don’t know. It’s getting harder to not have sleepless nights.”

Krystel Martinez, 27, also cannot find work. She left a job at Sony Music to enter the Teaching Fellows program, which recruits people without classroom experience to teach while earning a master’s degree in education.

“Why did they go ahead and bring us if there were no jobs for us to have?” Ms. Martinez said. “Some people are losing motivation, but we’re all concerned about having a roof over our heads.”

During a job fair on Wednesday in a clubhouse bar at the Mets’ stadium, Citi Field, principals sat behind small cocktail tables, with lines of job seekers snaking through the hall. Hundreds of candidates stood in line for a chance at one of two jobs at East Bronx Academy for the Future. The principal, Sarah Scrogin, said she had received very few applications from teachers who had been in the reserve pool for an extended time. And like others, she found several candidates whom she would be happy to hire but cannot because of the freeze.

“This should be a time when we are really picky,” Ms. Scrogin said. “The last thing you want to do is bring somebody on who you will regret later.”

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks to the slander of Mr Klein, the ATRs are an unattractive pool and principals are reluctant to hire them. I wonder if this is actionable.

Anonymous said...

We ATRs are told by the DoE and the UFT to look for jobs. But how can we do so when the official transfer login site
https://www.nycenet.edu/offices/dhr/transferplane/apps/login.apspx

has the following "need not apply" message?:
"Important Note to All Users--Read Before Attempting to Register or Lon In:
This system will not recognize user accounts from the Excess Staff Selection System or user accounts from prior Open Market periods. If this is your first login attempt for this Open Market period, please register as a new user."
A cookie must indicate that my PC belongs to an ATR, because this subtitle appears early in the webpage:
"Excessed Staff Selection System--Sign In"

Teachers, activists and reporters need to know: we cannot apply to schools even if we want to. This flies in the face of official policy saying that ATRs have priority.

Anonymous said...

The ATRs may not be as attractive for their relative higher salaries. It is a problem engineeredd by
BloomKlein as a lever for their larger and hidden agenda to turn many tenured teachers into the status similar to contractors.

Anonymous said...

The comment that I just read about excessed teachers and ATRs is way off base and obviously written by someone with no knowledge of DOE procedures or DOE budgeting. First, it doesn't matter what the salary of a teacher is because the principal only pays the AVERAGE teacher salary from his/her budget for their entire staff. This is a checks and balances system/method automatically built in to the computerized budget program called GALAXY. Unless they are at the absolute top of the pay scale, the salary of one teacher means nothing to the principal. Allow my to explain…Let us say John Doe, 22 years old, and fresh out of college making around $48K applies for a job at PS XYZ and a veteran teacher that makes $75K applies for the same job. Principal X hires the veteran teacher. The school budget will not be charged 75K per year but rather the average teacher salary in the school. Your comments are not valid.
Also, as an administrator that interviewed over 17 ATR's this summer I will tell you that making blanket statements about the quality of ATRs or people in excess is dangerous! Many of these people are NOT qualified teachers that had their schools closed as you stated. Several potential ATRs had "U" ratings, many with unauthorized leaves, 5-7 questionable “restoration of health” leaves within two years, fresh out of the rubber room, or funny enough one excessed teacher that openly said that they were happy to be in excess because now they can "do bulletin boards and answer phones in the school and get my same paycheck—a blessing because I just had a baby." Let me ask you a serious question--forget for one minute that you are a disgruntled teacher---If you were the principal of PS XYZ, would you willingly let this CRAP into your school knowing that behavior will be out of control, parents will be in complaining daily and students will not be sitting in front of a top notch teacher? Would you want YOUR child sitting in front of Mrs. XYZ, fresh out of the rubber room, that has to leave the building at noon each Tuesday to go to her court ordered AA meeting while your son misses reading? I think not ... There are two sides to every story and you are, understandably, reporting one side.

Chaz said...

I wrote about this in May and it has proven to be true. Too bad.

NY_I said...

We've got some opportunities to put a dent in the mayoral dictatorship over the schools.

Check out my blog, http://nycityeye.blogspot.com
for my candidate recommendations for mayor, public advocate and comptroller in the September 15 Democratic Party primary.

We, the voters, need to remember that we do have opportunities to support candidates that are pledged to curb mayoral control, audit the DoE, and to replace the parent-exclusion policy with more chances for parent input.

NY_I said...

We've got some opportunities to put a dent in the mayoral dictatorship over the schools.

Check out my blog, http://nycityeye.blogspot.com
for my candidate recommendations for public advocate and comptroller in the September 15 Democratic Party primary.

We, the voters, need to remember that we do have opportunities to support candidates that are pledged to curb mayoral control, audit the DoE, and to replace the parent-exclusion policy with more chances for parent input.

Anonymous said...

Teaching Fellows is a an elitist joke