The Absent Teacher Reservist (ATR) Disaster

Aixa Rodriguez, an ESL teacher who has been with the DOE since 2005. After her school closed, she
spent some time in the Absent Teacher Reserve before being hired by a new school for this fall.

The New York City Department of Education and the United Federation of Teachers are, together, accountable for the "Absent Teacher Reserve" or "ATR" disaster.

Excessing teachers is not new. Closing schools is not new. What was new, when Mike Bloomberg came into his position as Mayor of New York City, was the streamlining of the trashing process for tenured teachers. It was the idea that teachers were protected by tenure rights that someone up the line in the food chain disliked.

Bloomberg spoke often about Jack Welsh and the firing of 10% of the workforce to keep employees on the ball, always worried about "being next". The City was, in 2003, under the spell of management/administrators of public agencies to get rid of the riff raff, the employees who sit around and do nothing all day. Bloomberg was led to believe (I honestly do not think he checked this out himself) that tenure gave tenured employees the right to do nothing because they could never be terminated. This is, was, and will be, fake news.

But fake news and false claims work. Especially if someone knows how to use the dark web, how to hack into computers, or who has malicious intent to make up lies about someone. Most people still believe what they read and see on the internet.

So what happened in 2003, and I was fortunate enough to be there to see it, was a full scale attack on tenured teachers and "failing" public schools, so that massive numbers were thrown into big warehouses around NYC (in 2008 there were 8 main warehouses). Some remained for 1 year, others 7-15 years, and a few are still sitting in rooms where they are not given any work, not called a rubber room, but still the same thing. A reassignment room where you are told to sit until further notice is a rubber room.

I started visiting rubber rooms in 2003-2004 when my friends David Pakter and Polo Colon asked me to visit them at 25 Chapel Street, 10th floor. I was there several times a week, and stayed all day, chatting with the teachers there about their stories, their schools, and their administrators. The UFT went to the rubber rooms I think 1 time/year, but everyone at the UFT knew that I was talking with the members, because I also attended 3020-a hearings at the request of members, and then the charged employees started asking for me to help their NYSUT attorney settle their cases. So, I did that. Then I was hired to work as a Special Representative and given an office at 52 Broadway, 16th floor in 2007. I was in all the rubber rooms every week (except Staten Island) until August 2010, when I left to start advocating for teachers' rights at 3020-a on my own.

I still remember when suddenly, in 2012, I heard that every charged UFT member who was not terminated at 3020-a would become an ATR. I asked where this was written down, and heard it was not in writing, it was "just the way it is."

Bad move.

Suddenly, teachers who had been charged with something but who was not terminated, even if completely false, who had  inefficient counsel at the 3020-a and/or a biased arbitrator, became a substitute teacher/nomad, wandering week to week to a new school, replacing full-time teachers/guidance counselors for a day/week/month. How do you establish enough trust with a child to counsel him/her, if you meet them for a day or stay with them a week, then disappear? How can you teach?

Also, ATRs who are assigned somewhere temporarily, mostly a few days or weeks, often do not have access to IEPs, and don't input grades.

Students are smart enough to know that if you are not grading him/her, why bother doing the work?

This is really a black/white picture of ATRs and their bizarre situation in a school, and there are many layers of grey which I am not going into here. But the plan to remove tenure by displacing thousands of people and making it torture to remain in the DOE, certainly worked to create an environment of fear, resentment and even hatred.

It seems to me that we are seeing a return to rational strategic planning, with the new contract implying that ATRs can be placed in their content area in September. But "CAN" does not mean "WILL". Let's see.

Unfortunately, the UFT is still interested in playing-along-to-get-along with the Chancellor, Mayor, and everyone underneath. This is not going to change anytime soon, unless someone wins the $billion lottery and pays everyone to take a looooong holiday.

It is all about money, after all.

Betsy Combier
 betsy.combier@gmail.com
Editor, Advocatz.com
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice

Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Educators Linger in the Misunderstood ‘Teacher Reserve,’ a Byproduct of School Reforms

By Patrick Donachie | October 19, 2018

This past summer, most city teachers were prepping new lessons, revising curriculum and readying for the start of the new school year. However, many teachers on the city’s Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) were polishing their CVs. This included Aixa Rodriguez, an ESL teacher who has been with the DOE since 2005.

She was previously a teacher at the Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies (FLAGS), which closed at the end of the 2015-2016 school year. Like many teachers after a closure, Rodriguez was placed in the ATR, a pool of DOE educators who lack permanent placements in city schools but remain full-time DOE employees. Rodriguez said many teachers in the pool have a similar story to hers, finding themselves relegated to the list in the aftermath of school’s closure or a program cut.

“If those schools close and those programs get shut down, the teachers get labeled along with it,” she says. “Your resume looks like Swiss cheese. I have friends who have been in the ATR for years.”

After FLAGS’ closure, Rodriguez was hired on a provisional basis to fill in for a year for a teacher on sabbatical, but come the end of the school year she was back seeking a full-time role. Rodriguez, like many others, found herself in a proverbial limbo while in the pool; educators in the ATR are still full-time DOE educators (and are paid as such), but often fill in short-term gaps, covering for teachers during parental leave or medical absences, working as substitute teachers or performing administrative work.

However, critics contend that many of these excessed teachers are saddled with disciplinary issues or are not seeking new full-time teaching positions, content to take the short-term work.

How did the ATR start?

The ATR is a result of 2005 negotiations between the United Federation of Teachers and the Bloomberg administration, who wanted to give school principals greater autonomy in hiring decisions. Prior to these negotiations, senior teachers had a greater say in choosing schools in which they were placed, according to Jeff Kaufman, a computer science teacher at Far Rockaway High School and former member of the UFT’s Executive Board. He described this loss of seniority as a “giveback” by the UFT.

“Principals now control, to a large degree, who is in their school,” he says.

Instead of automatically placing excessed teachers in new schools, the ATR carved out a way for principals to make their own hiring decisions, while excessed teachers were ensured they’d remain on the DOE payroll while seeking a position. Many initially applauded the move as an overdue correction to tenured teachers’ control in their own placement (arguing this often led to experienced educators disproportionately getting jobs in certain schools and districts). Now, most agree that the ATR has led to more problematic consequences, and many teachers in the pool assert many of these consequences were in fact the intention all along.

Two years after the establishment of the ATR pool, the city implemented the Fair Student Funding formula, which recalibrated the way in which the DOE determines how much funding schools receive.The city intended to direct more funding towards schools that had been shortchanged over the decades, but teachers’ salaries were to come primarily from this revised funding on the principal’s discretion (as opposed to the DOE directly paying teachers’ salaries).

Critics argue this incentivizes principals to not hire experienced (and higher-salaried) teachers, leading to an ATR pool that is exceedingly older and growing more expensive by the year; ATR payments cost the city $136 million last year. Rodriguez argues this disincentive and a generalized stigma against ATR teachers is depriving the city of a supply of time-tested educators who could be used in the classroom on a more permanent basis; what’s more, the city is already paying for them.

“A lot of the teachers in the ATR are 40 and up, and have a salary level of $80,000. We have both the time and experience,” she says. “(Principals) just don’t want to pay for them. There are plenty of us in the ATR who are ready and willing to work.”

Experience as a downside

Concrete data on the ATR can be difficult to attain, partially because the pool is constantly in flux; often the pool will balloon at the close of a school year as schools are shuttered and programs are cancelled, only to shrink as some ATR teachers fill open positions come the new school year. In 2017, Chalkbeat reported that 38 percent of ATR teachers were in the pool due to school closures, with another 30 percent in the reserve due to budget or program cuts. Additionally, 32 percent were in the pool due to “ramifications from a legal or disciplinary issue.”

The ATR’s cost continues to grow as the pool grows older and more experienced, according to a recent report from the Citizens Budget Commission. Employees in the ATR pool have been teachers for 18 years on average, compared to the average 10.2 years of the total DOE teacher workforce, and the average ATR salary is $98,126, compared to $84,108 for all teachers.

In 2017, a quarter of teachers on the ATR were also on there five years earlier. Some argue that this indicates teachers are not being hired for full-time positions or are not looking for work, though it is also possible a teacher could have been hired off the pool and subsequently excessed again.

There were 788 teachers in the pool in 2006, during the first year of implementation, but after a spate of school closures during the Bloomberg administration that number grew exponentially; at the start of the 2014 school year, there were 1,676 teachers in the pool. That number dropped to 1,202 at the start of 2018, but the Panel of Education Policy closed 10 schools at the end of last year.

Additionally, while as many as a third of educators on the ATR have faced a disciplinary issue, what that designation entails remains opaque. According to the UFT, tenured teachers in the ATR are allowed a hearing before an independent arbitrator when accused by a principal of misbehavior. However, a teacher may end up in the ATR pool regardless of the outcome of any disciplinary process, according to Kaufman.

A tenured teacher may be the recipient of 3020-a charges (which challenge the protections a tenured teacher has and can be a first step towards dismissal). Those charges could be sustained (potentially resulting in termination), but they can also be mediated through arbitration or could even be dismissed altogether. However, even in the cases of dismissal, if a principal opposes reinstating a teacher in the original school that teacher could be excessed and placed in the ATR pool. A teacher would have to ‘grieve’ their status in the ATR to be reinstated over the wishes of the principal in the original school, and Kaufman said he had never seen a successful grievance in such instances.

“Anytime a principal has opposed the return of a teacher, the principal has always won out,” he says. “That stuff starts to get internalized. It clearly impacts on someone’s ability to teach, and if you’ve been on it for a long time there’s a lot of issues. I’ve seen a lot of excellent teachers, lauded in all different ways, and they end up on the ATR and all they can do is end up retiring.”

Ana Champeny, the Director of City Studies for the Citizens Budget Commission and the author of the report on the ATR, noted that the pool’s structure, coupled with New York State’s protracted disciplinary process, could lead principals to see the ATR as an alternative method for dealing with unwanted teachers.

“The process to remove a teacher for cause is incredibly complex, and it’s set in state education law. It’s very time-consuming,” she says. “The ATR can create this unintended incentive—it can mean you can get people into the ATR instead of this long process.”

Still, most ATR teachers are not in the pool because of a disciplinary matter, and some teachers in the pool believe principals shy away from hiring ATR teachers because of the cost involved. Principals may also want to hire inexperienced teachers whom they may feel will be more amenable to that principal’s particular vision, according to James Eterno, a DOE educator who entered the classroom in 1986 and retired last year. After Jamaica High School closed in 2014, he found himself excessed into the ATR pool, and strongly disagrees with how ATR teachers are treated by the DOE and by the principals weighing whether or not they should be hired. Camille Eterno, a high school teacher and James’ wife, is currently in the ATR pool, and said that principals indeed considered ATR teachers differently than other prospective hires.

“The sentiment is that you’re an ATR and they run in the other direction,” she says. “You’re less desirable because you have years of experience. They’re choosing to hire people fresh out of college.”
James Eterno agreed, saying principals often will not even consider ATR educators with years (or decades) of experience because of the higher salaries.

“I don’t blame you for not wanting to hiring me. I understand; I cost a lot of money. But it shouldn’t be like that,” he says. “Could you imagine if a police captain couldn’t bring in a great detective because they were too high up on the salary scale? That would be outrageous, and I don’t think the public would tolerate it.”

However, some criticize the teachers in the pool, bemoaning the fact that they have full-time salaries without permanent classroom placement. Dan Weisberg, the executive director of The New Teacher Project, said he would question placing ATR educators in classrooms, arguing that too many had significant past disciplinary issues. He also disputed the idea that principals avoid hiring experienced ATR teachers.

“If principals saw a strong candidate to fill a vacancy, they will happily take a senior teacher. For the ATR pool, where you have thousands of vacancies in every conceivable license area, if you’re not getting hired year after year, chances are you’re not applying to vacancies, or you’re not demonstrating you’re a good match,” he says. “Just because you’re experienced doesn’t mean you’re very good at what you do.”

Funding: fair or flawed?

TheFair Student Funding (FSF) formula of 2007 does mean that principals are weighing the value of an educator against the cost that hire entails, rather than making hires on their own with the DOE footing whatever the teacher’s price tag may be.

Prior to the FSF, a given school’s funding largely correlated with teachers’ salaries; this meant there was often disparate per-student funding from school to school. When teachers had more power over where they were placed (prior to the 2005 agreement), educators with seniority often gravitated towards certain schools, and those schools would subsequently get larger budgets to cover their costs.

This shifted with the FSF, which became by a significant margin the largest financial allocation for schools each year. According to an 2013 IBO report, funding from the FSF allocation can comprise as much as 70 percent of a school’s budget and is tabulated based on the characteristics of a school’s student body. For each school, the needs of the students and schools are weighted, including how many students are in each grade and whether some students are English Language Learners or require special-education services. Supporters say the formula aims to instill more equity among schools, cease the funneling of funding towards schools with the greatest number of high-salaried teachers, and direct more towards schools facing the greatest need.

However, only 23 percent of schools received the full amount of funding they were allocated under the FSF in 2017, according to Chalkbeat. In the aftermath of the Great Recession, many FSF funding increases were delayed or cancelled, meaning many of those schools that were inadequately funded prior to the FSF are constantly behind the more affluent schools (additionally, the more affluent schools never had their allocations reduced when the formula was put into place).

This confluence of policies leads principals, particularly in schools receiving lower funding, to have a far greater incentive to hire younger teachers as opposed to taking on the expense of an experienced educator, according to many ATR teachers, because now the expense is being drained from the principal’s FSF allocation (which may be lower than the formula deems it should be). A starting teacher with a Bachelor’s Degree and no prior teaching experience can expect to make, on average, $56,711, an amount more than $40,000 lower than the average salary of teachers in the ATR pool.

“The natural progression of experience is being totally thrown out,” Rodriguez says. “When you have a small salary you’re aiming for, you’re not going to have a diversity of experience.”

New York City has a young teacher workforce compared to the rest of the state; a 2018 Rockefeller Institute report found that 52 percent of city teachers were younger than 40 years old in 2015-2016, and only 27 percent were 49 or older. While this might mean teacher retirementswill pose less danger of school or subject shortages in the city than elsewhere, it leaves NYC’s teacher workforce more susceptible to higher rates of turnover and attrition among younger educators; nationally, less than a third of teachers who leave the profession annually do so because of retirement, according to the Learning Policy Institute. Teachers hired directly out of school are more likely to leave the profession or transfer to a different school, and cash-strapped schools could be placed in a difficult position if principals feel they are only able to afford the expense of inexperienced, younger teachers.

“It’s created a pool with a large number of older teachers,” Kaufman says. “It made principals responsible for the cost of teachers, so there was a stronger incentive to discriminate against teachers.”

De Blasio responds

While it’s likely that the ATR pool continues to grow more senior because of its rising costs (even as the number of teachers in the pool drops), the DOE does not release regular detailed updates on the state of the pool, or on the age and experience level of the educators remaining on it. Champeny lamented the lack of data, saying it was more difficult to propose substantive solutions to the quandaries created by the pool’s existence.

“Is there some group of ‘X’ teachers that have been in the pool since they’ve been created?” she asks. “We just don’t know. That kind of information is really missing. The nuance is really missed.”

The de Blasio administration says it is taking steps to reduce the pool’s size; last year, former Brooklyn Technical High School Principal Randy Asher was tasked with shrinking the ATR. Since 2014, the city has offered separation incentives to encourage ATR teachers to take a lump sum in lieu of staying on the DOE payroll. In 2014, 115 teachers left, and in 2018, the city offered ATR teachers $50,000 to leave the profession; 170 educators took the deal. The CBC report indicated the move cost the city about $8.5 million, but would save the city about $23 million per year in salary expenses.

The DOE also promises to subsidize salaries of ATR teachers for schools who provisionally hire them by 50 percent in the first year and 25 percent in the second year; ATR educators who receive ratings of “highly effective” or “effective” at the end of the first year in the new school will then become permanent hires (though some teachers in the ATR pool say the plan leads some principals to provisionally hire ATR teachers, and then push for a low rating at the end of the first year to get the 50 percent subsidy without having to take on the cost in the following years). The CBC found the subsidy offer led to 372 ATR hires during the 2017 school year.

Last autumn, the city also began to place ATR educators in schools without the approval of those school’s principals. Many principals vociferously opposed the practice, calling it “forced placement” and decrying the loss of control in hiring decisions. The city originally wanted to place 400 ATR teachers in school though this approach, though only 72 were eventually placed.

Earlier this year, The Education Trust uncovered information on those teachers who were placed in schools through this practice; none of the 41 teachers placed in schools without the approval of principals through Oct. 15, 2017 had an “Unsatisfactory” or “Ineffective” rating, according to the Education Trust. Of the 205 provisional hires in the past year, only five had an “Unsatisfactory” rating. This indicated the city placed high-quality teachers in schools, but the Trust’s report expressed worry that the remaining pool of ATR educators could be disproportionately packed with teachers with “Unsatisfactory” ratings (though The Trust acknowledged that the pool was constantly in flux).

In last week’s announcement of a new contract between the city and the UFT, de Blasio acknowledged the new agreement did not do anything in particular for teachers in the pool, but stressed that the administration was tackling the problem through other means.

“The pool’s been shrinking consistently, it will be shrinking more in the coming year. A lot of things that could have been done a long time ago weren’t being done, like ensuring that a capable teacher whose school changed was not left out in the cold but was helped immediately to find a new assignment between June and September of the same year,” de Blasio said during a Thursday press conference announcing the new contract. “There’s a host of other initiatives, but it’s absolutely shrinking and it will keep shrinking.”

The DOE contends its policy reforms are starting to have an impact, noting that there were 765 teachers in the ATR at the conclusion of the 2017-18 school year, compared to 1,131 at the end of the last school year, along with efforts to emphasize longer-term placements to offer schools and educators more stability.

For Rodriguez, an uncertain summer was punctuated with the call she was hoping for; she was off the ATR pool, working as an ESL teacher as a provisional hire at a school in Manhattan. The position has the potential to extend beyond the year. But her thoughts remained with other teachers still in the ATR pool, lacking a permanent placement. Some may enjoy the substitute work, but Rodriguez was adamant that the current design of the system was wasting the talent and experience of teachers already on the payroll.

“Wherever I go, I need to stay. I need to put roots down, and the problem is the constant closures are having people run around. You don’t form relationships, you don’t develop curriculum over time,” she says. “I’m just going to try to enjoy the year, do my best teaching and we’ll see what comes next.”

Assessing the ATR’s progress over the past decade, Eterno contended that the pool’s existence amounted to an towering array of missed opportunities.

“The vast majority of teachers, if given the opportunity, could have helped out,” he says. “We could have been assets, for sure.”

The NYC Department of Education Failed To Place ATRs as Planned

Aixa Rodriguez

The New York City Department of Education is an institution trying to move forward without a strategy or the necessary information to reach set goals successfully. And, no one wants to admit this fact.

As the City School Board - the Panel For Educational Policy - remains under Mayoral control (in my opinion a total mistake), the buck stops at Mayor de Blasio.

The political environment of NYC is structured in such a way as to assure incumbents their jobs until they die, or reach term limits, at which point their best friend is "voted" in. We continue to have a pay-to-play state. De Blasio's extensive payola machine in this state guaranteed him a second term as Mayor, despite a first term that looked like he was bought by rich "I-want-somethings" who were willing to pay to get what they wanted.

One of the biggest problems that I see in the Department of Education is that huge amounts of public dollars are placed on well-funded but unworkable, bad ideas of someone who has caught the mayor's ear for some unknown reason. But no one has to care if the idea works or not, because there is employment immunity (I do not mean tenure, I mean political protection) and the dollars don't come from any individual pocket. Many people are very careless with money that comes from the public tub... see below.

The UFT doesn't seem to be interested in changing the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) situation, an embarrassment for sure. How unfair to displace professional people and make them roam from school to school to teach subjects they were not trained to teach? How disrespectful is that?

No one who can do something about this situation actually cares enough to make changes. Sad.

Betsy Combier

betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter

Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Karen Sklaire

ATR Teachers: Pool’s Stigma Shaped Meager Results: 41 Back in Class

• By CRYSTAL LEWIS, The Chief,
 
• Dec 29, 2017 Updated Jan 3, 2018

After much controversy, the Department of Education’s plan to place 400 Teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve into schools was a bust, with just 41 Teachers placed in schools that had vacancies.

But that was no surprise to Aixa Rodriguez, Gina Trent and Karen Sklaire, three of the Teachers in the pool.

                                                   Blaming the Blameless?

In October, this newspaper reported that some Teachers in the ATR feared the stigma of being in the pool would make Principals reluctant to hire them. In that article, Ms. Rodriguez said she’d heard that some Principals were hiding vacancies; she said recently she believes that was one reason why the number of Teachers matched to schools was so low.

“They blame us for being in this position. There’s no way to absorb us,” Ms. Rod­ri­guez said in a phone interview.

Ms. Trent said that because ATR Teachers have been vilified for years, “I knew they would have trouble placing us.”

There were 1,202 teachers in the ATR pool on the first day of school this year. As part of a goal to reduce the cadre, the DOE said it would begin matching ATR Teachers to vacancies that were still open by Oct. 15.

The plan immediately met pushback by pro-charter-school groups, including StudentsFirstNY, which rallied worried parents at City Hall. Even though the majority of Teachers ended up in the pool because their schools closed or had drops in enrollment, some parents and education advocates were concerned about the quality of candidates. About a third of the pool’s Teachers have gone through a disciplinary case; 12 percent received unsatisfactory ratings.

Barred From ‘Renewals’

Days before the agency began looking at the vacancies, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that Teach­ers from the reserve pool would not be placed in the city’s Renewal program for struggling schools.

But the DOE found a lower number of vacancies than anticipated, partly because a few of the vacancies were temporary and enrollment decreased at some schools, which meant they didn’t need more Teachers.

“I think a lot of schools hired as quickly as they could so they wouldn’t have to take in an ATR Teacher,” said Ms. Sklaire. The Drama Teacher was excessed in June after her school’s enrollment declined.

One hundred and thirteen Teachers from the pool were hired prior to Oct. 15. An additional 205 Teachers were provisionally placed on a quarterly basis, and can be hired permanently if they receive an Effective rating or higher during evaluations.

“We’ll continue working with our school leaders and ATR Teachers to supervise and support ATR Teachers, and we’ll address any matches that aren’t working for schools,” said Randy Asher, who was hired to shrink the reserve.

Thrown in Cold

Ms. Rodriguez, an ESL Teacher, was placed at a Bronx high school until the semester’s end in January. She said that another Teach­er had been teaching her class for the first weeks of school.

“I was given no curriculum or guide and had no idea what the class had been doing,” she said. Because she missed out on developing relationships with students and staff at the beginning of the school year, she said, she felt “a mixture of guilt and frustration” that the semester was ending.

Ms. Trent, an English Teacher who has been in the pool for 10 years, said she was also provisionally placed until January but wasn’t given a class. “We are supposed to be used to assist other Teachers but that’s not happening here,” she said, adding that she and another ATR Teacher often work in the library.

Because the DOE announced that the placements would be until June, Ms. Trent was surprised to find out hers would end so soon. That experience isn’t new: she said that many ATR Teachers, who earn an average salary of $94,000, had been told they’d be hired permanently but weren’t because the DOE wouldn’t subsidize their salaries after the first year.

“So many of us have been lied to,” she said.

In addition to frustrations over the DOE’s failure to place as many ATR Teachers as anticipated, there are also concerns about how the closing of 14 schools, including nine Renewal schools, would expand the pool. More than 400 Teachers will be affected.

“It’s going to increase the pool. We’re just creating more ATRs,” Ms. Sklaire said.

About 70 percent of Teachers ended up in the pool because of a budget reduction or declining student enrollment, or because of a school closing or phase-out, like Ms. Rodriguez.

Her former school, Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies, faced a sharp drop in enrollment and joined the Renewal program for the 2015-2016 school year. She became an ATR when her school closed in 2016.

New schools will open in place of some of those set to close, and at least half of the positions in them are supposed to go to Teachers from the closed schools, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

But at a Dec. 18 press conference, Ms. Fariña had said that there have been cases where that hasn’t been true: at I.S. 584, which replaced a shuttered middle school this fall, “nowhere near” half of the Teachers came from the previous school. The majority of Teachers who were put in the reserve after their schools closed in the 2016-2017 school year have been placed, according to the DOE.

Do Better Next Year?

“We’re confident that we’ll be able help Teachers at closing schools secure new positions for next year,” said agency spokesperson Mi­chael Aciman.

But to Ms. Rodriguez, that means Teachers already in the pool will have more competition to be hired at a school. “It’s not good for me, it’s not good for Teachers coming from the closing schools, and it’s not good for schools that could have good Teachers,” she said.

The New York Times Publishes Fake News About Employees in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) Pool

I keep hoping that some major media will report on the ATR situation correctly. Unfortunately this hasn't happened.

The title of the article in the New York Times on Friday October 13, 2017, "Caught Sleeping or Worse, Troubled Teachers Will Return to New York Classrooms" has, imbedded in it, the bias of the Times and the reporter in the words "Troubled Teachers".

You know the article is about how ALL teachers in the ATR pool are tarnished in some way. ALL teachers in the ATR pool are damaged goods.

Randy Asher, new Department of Education ATR Administrator

The truth of the matter is, in my opinion, that New York City is dealing with a "troubled" system that labels ALL teachers who are misplaced from their classrooms for any number of reasons, as "bad", "ineffective", "mentally deranged", "criminals", etc. in order to remove ALL of these newly minted alleged "misfits" from the payroll of a school where the administration doesn't like, or cannot afford, the teacher/Guidance Counselor/secretary or staff member.

Reporters for most newspapers like catchy headlines and stories that anger, frustrate, or get under the skin of the reader. We get that. But fake news brings alarm on the part of readers, and that's where the NY Times has gone wrong in the article posted below.

We, the readers, are supposed to believe that ALL ATRs are "bad" teachers in some way. There is no truth to this. I personally know excellent educators and DOE employees who have become ATRs for no reason relating to their pedagogical skills or to any misconduct. Jealousy, exposure of wrong-doing and abuse of students by administrators, high salaries, all play into the formula for preferring charges pursuant to Education Law 3020-a. The process is seriously out of whack and should - no must - be changed so that the excellent, senior, expensive but effective teacher/employee can  continue to give their expertise to students, and not fear sudden re-assignment, 3020-a charges, as well as ridicule by parents, students and administrators who read a newspaper or watch the evening news.

Betsy Combier
betsy@advocatz.com

Editor, Advocatz

Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, New York Court Corruption
Editor, National Public Voice
Editor, NYC Public Voice
Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Caught Sleeping or Worse, Troubled Teachers Will Return to New York Classrooms

By KATE TAYLOROCT. 13, 2017

One of the teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve held his last permanent job at P.S. 157 in the Bronx. Among
other things, he was caught sleeping when he was supposed to be helping with dismissal.

Francis Blake has not held a permanent position in a New York City public school in at least five years. At his last job, in a Bronx elementary school, records show he was disciplined for incompetence, insubordination and neglect of duties — he had been caught sleeping in a classroom when he was supposed to be helping with dismissal.

Felicia Alterescu, a special-education teacher, has been without a permanent post since 2010, despite high demand for special education teachers. According to records, in addition to getting a string of unsatisfactory ratings, she was disciplined for calling in sick when she actually went to a family reunion. She also did not tell the Education Department that she had been arrested on harassment charges.

This month, Mr. Blake, Ms. Alterescu and hundreds of other teachers who are part of a pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve could be permanently back in classrooms, as the city’s Education Department places them in jobs at city schools.

The reserve is essentially a parking lot for staff members who have lost their positions, some because of school closings and budget cuts, others because of disciplinary problems, but cannot be fired. It grew significantly as a result of a 2005 deal between the Bloomberg administration, which wanted to give principals control over hiring, and the teachers’ union. Since then, the union has fiercely protected the jobs of teachers in the reserve, resisting attempts to put a time limit on how long a teacher can remain there.

Until now, the teachers in the reserve have rotated through schools for a month at a time, serving as substitutes or, in some cases, sitting in the teachers’ lounge.

The salaries for those in the reserve cost the Education Department more than $150 million this past school year — enough to put an extra social worker or guidance counselor in nearly every school. The city says it cannot keep spending that much for teachers without permanent jobs. As of Oct. 15, if a school has an opening, a reserve teacher may be placed in it. Up to 400 teachers, roughly half the number in the pool at the end of the last school year, are expected to be put into vacancies. They will have a year to prove their abilities, after which the city will consider taking measures to dismiss them if they don’t measure up.

“The A.T.R. has been wasteful for 12 years,” said Olivia Lapeyrolerie, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio. “For the first time, there’s a common-sense strategy to get A.T.R. teachers who make the grade into permanent positions, and to hold them accountable if they don’t.” She added that the de Blasio administration had cut the size of the reserve by 27 percent through buyouts and other measures.

‘A Vicious Cycle’

Critics of the plan say that it is likely to put incompetent teachers in struggling, high-poverty schools, which have the most difficulty filling jobs.

“It’s a vicious cycle,” said Dr. Bernard Gassaway, a former New York City principal and superintendent. “If you have students who are challenged, and you have teachers who are challenged, you can’t have positive results come out of that.” He said the department would send the worst teachers to schools that would offer “the least amount of resistance,” because they had inexperienced principals and little parental involvement.

The Education Department originally said that teachers from the reserve might be placed in schools that are part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Renewal program, in which the city is spending more than $500 million to turn around failing schools, but this week said that would not happen.

As of Oct. 4, schools listed approximately 800 teacher vacancies, according to an Education Department spokesman, though that might not reflect the exact number of jobs available; he said he could not give a breakdown of where the vacancies were.

In a system in which only 1 percent of teachers earn the lowest possible ratings, of ineffective or unsatisfactory, 12 percent of the teachers who were in the Absent Teacher Reserve at the end of the last school year had received one of those ratings in 2015-16.

Nearly 40 percent worked in schools that were closed for poor performance. Another 30 percent were “excessed” from their positions because of budget cuts or because the number of students enrolled at their schools fell. Principals are sometimes forced to let go of teachers they would like to keep for those reasons, but they can also use them as a way to get rid of low performers. The rest landed in the pool because of legal or disciplinary charges.

Randy Asher

Troubling Histories

As of last spring, roughly a quarter of the teachers in the reserve were in it five years earlier. These teachers are the most likely to be problematic, since their history suggests that no principal has been willing to hire them, or that they have actively avoided getting a permanent assignment. Among this group, principals say, are teachers who are incompetent or mentally unstable.

“So many of them, in my opinion, weren’t capable of leading a classroom again, or ever were,” said Matt Williams, the founding principal of a small high school, Bronx Design and Construction Academy, who left the department in 2014.

To identify teachers from the reserve with troubling histories, The New York Times cross-referenced two sets of records: the Education Department’s Excessed Staff Selection System, which lists available staff and openings in the system, and arbitrators’ decisions in disciplinary cases, which are available from the New York State Education Department.

Among the teachers available is a science teacher who, in her last permanent job, did not bother to regularly enter students’ grades, according to the arbitrator’s decision. She gave one student in her earth science class a grade of 83 percent, despite the fact that the girl had never come to school. Administrators who observed her classes often found students talking, listening to music on their headphones, or even asleep.

Also in the pool: a special-education teacher said to have disciplined autistic students by making them stand for 45 minutes to an hour; leaning on them to prevent them from getting out of their seats, and making them hold their breakfast trays for 10 minutes before allowing them to eat. An arbitrator wrote that she was “unquestionably guilty of corporal punishment,” yet let her go with a fine and training.

Randy Asher, who is heading the effort for the Education Department, declined to discuss specific cases. He said that all teachers in the reserve would be considered in filling vacancies, though he said it was “less likely” that those with multiple poor ratings or histories of corporal punishment would be placed.

“We’ll look at it case-by-case,” he said. He added that, in any event, the teachers were already in schools, just for shorter, temporary assignments. (A handful of teachers charged with inappropriate relationships with students or actions of a sexual nature, whom arbitrators declined to terminate, remain assigned away from classrooms and are not in the reserve.)

Some observers say that, while the cost of the reserve is untenable, the city should find a better solution.

“As far as what would have been the best thing for the kids in New York City schools, it would have been to find a way to end the A.T.R. without placing those teachers in schools,” said Marcus A. Winters, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Chicago and Washington, for instance, have put limits of roughly a year on how long a teacher without a permanent assignment can collect a paycheck.

“It’s one of those things that you would hope that even the union would understand — that if you’ve been in the A.T.R. for five years or so, it’s probably time to move on,” Mr. Winters said. As for the de Blasio administration, which is generally seen as close to the teachers’ union, he said, “I don’t know if they were aggressive enough to do it or not.”

Adam Ross, the general counsel for the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said, “If an arbitrator finds, upon examining all the facts, that termination is not warranted, it is management’s responsibility to use the employee in question.”

A Question of Energy

Sara Dingledy, the former principal of Westchester Square Academy, a small high school in the Bronx, said that while about half of the reserve teachers who rotated through her school were capable and eager to be hired, “I had a whole bunch of people in who obviously had no interest in getting a job, who wanted to know where the staff room was so they could sit down, who just wanted to surf the computer all day.”

Mr. Blake said that he had applied for a number of jobs, and blamed his trouble in finding a permanent position on his salary. Both he and Ms. Alterescu were at the top teacher pay scale of $113,762 last year.

“It’s a matter of economics,” he said.

Mr. Blake said that he went on roughly two interviews a year, mostly for positions as a cluster teacher — an elementary-level teacher who teaches a subject like science or art to groups of students throughout the day. He said that at his age — about 60 — he didn’t think he would succeed as a regular classroom teacher, who is with the same group of students all day long and is responsible for keeping records on their academic progress and other matters.

“You basically have to be like Bartleby the Scrivener there to keep up with all the logs you have to do for 30 students,” he said of the paperwork.

The department moved to fire Mr. Blake in 2009. His supervisors at Public School 157, the Grove Hill School, in the Bronx, described his lessons as ineffective and his classroom management as poor.

The case was heard before an arbitrator, a process dictated by state law and the teachers’ union contract. The arbitrator, Alan Berg, wrote in his decision that Mr. Blake “appears to lack the energy and enthusiasm necessary to be a truly good teacher,” but imposed a fine rather than firing him. “Being boring alone does not warrant termination,” Mr. Berg said.

Ms. Alterescu worked at Junior High School 189, the Daniel Carter Beard School, in Queens, until 2010. She was twice disciplined for excessive absenteeism or lateness. While she was assigned to a reassignment center, or “rubber room,” in June 2010, she sought and received a doctor’s note saying that she was unable to work, then flew to Chicago for a family reunion, claiming sick time for the two days of work she missed.

The next year, after she had been assigned to the reserve, she was arrested and received desk appearance tickets on two occasions, for altercations with her mother and sister. She did not immediately report the arrests to the department. The department sought to remove her, but an arbitrator, citing her long tenure, imposed a fine instead. Ms. Alterescu said in an interview that she believed the principal of J.H.S. 189 disliked her and that she did not immediately report the desk appearance tickets because she did not think they were arrests. She said the charges in both cases were ultimately dismissed.

Mr. Williams, the former Bronx principal, who is now the vice president of education at Goodwill Central Texas, said that, while principals would no doubt be frustrated to have ineffective teachers forced on them, they weren’t the only ones who would be unhappy.

“No one dislikes a lazy or not-good teacher more than a good teacher,” he said.

Good Public Policy Means Getting All ATRs Permanent Positions

I think one of the most surprising public policy events of the past 14 years or so in New York City is that there is a total lack of an effective, well-planned strategy for educating children and young adults in the nation's largest public school system. The changing curriculums every other year, the Renewal School Movement, the discipline code which targeted minority special education children, the suspension hearings' scam, even the "no cell phones allowed" racist policy, none of these worked yet all were supported as the next golden rule that would change everything for the better.

How is it possible that a group of highly educated, very intelligent people - the Mike Bloombergs and Joel Kleins of the world - could create such a complete mess as the ATR pool? And, on top of this grave error, take a stand that this was good for anyone, whether it be the kids, their parents, or staff in the schools?

Making kids suffer for teachers no one wants

The ATR boondoggle stinks and everyone who hears about it agrees with that assessment. I urge all readers of this blog to see that the media is full of Fake News on the subject of ATRs, yet no one, not Mike Bloomberg, not Joel Klein, Bill De Blasio, nor Carmen Farina, has apologized or been held accountable for the massive misuse of taxpayer money.

Give every person with the title "ATR" a permanent position and revise the evaluation and rating processes to make them more realistic and fair, then let all employees sink or swim. The "good" (effective) educators and Guidance Counselors will naturally rise to the top. Reward these people for hard work, respect everyone, and lead those who can't handle teaching into another profession. Its called retraining, not draining the swamp.

My bet is that intelligence is not as useful as common sense.

Betsy Combier
betsy.combier@gmail.com
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Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
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Editor, Inside 3020-a Teacher Trials

Ridding Schools of the Bloomberg/Klein Toxicity: Ending the Absent Teacher Reserve Pool in New York City is Long Overdue

Ed In The Apple

Posted on July 16, 2017 | 1 Comment

The 74 is a national online education website co-founded by Campbell Brown, a former news anchor and virulent enemy of teacher unions, supporter of charter schools and Betsy; it is an advocacy website masquerading as a an informational site.

I was not surprised when a post by Dan Weisberg, former Joel Klein soldier popped up on the 74 site.  Weisberg currently leads TNTP, a not-for-profit that has consistently attacked teacher tenure and teacher assessment. The post, “Paying Teachers Not to Teach is Absurd – but Reviving NYC’s Dance of the Lemons Hurts Kids,” sounds like one of the endless press releases from the Bloomberg-Klein machine. Klein, an attorney, surrounded himself with attorneys, and we know what Shakespeare said about lawyers . Klein and Weisberg and company portrayed themselves as “disrupters,” changing the system by breaking down and rebuilding  from scratch, by creating chaos and building a new system from the ground up. After a dozen years of disruptive change the administration succeeded in disruption and failed to ensure positive change. The whirlwind of policy change after policy change alienated principals and teachers and confused the public.

On the eve of the 2013 mayoral election Sol Stern, in a City Journal essay offering advice to the new mayor wrote,

The public, for its part, remains dissatisfied with Gotham’s schools, according to a poll of city voters commissioned by the Manhattan Institute and conducted earlier this year by Zogby Analytics ….  New Yorkers now trust the oft-maligned teachers more than they trust the mayor’s office: almost half of all respondents said that teachers should “play the largest role in determining New York City’s education policy,” compared with 28 percent who thought that the mayor-appointed schools chancellor should.

A little background: for decades a few hundred teachers were excessed at the end of a school year, some schools had reduced registers, other schools had increasing registers. The excess teachers were placed in schools with vacancies, The contract Excessing Rules provided an orderly transition since the first contracts in the early sixties.

Another section of the contract provided for Seniority Transfers, half of all vacancies, vacancies were defined as open positions due to retirement or resignation, not leaves of absence, and posted in the Spring, In the early nineties a school approached the union with a plan, exempt the school from seniority transfers and a school committee made up of a majority of teachers would select new hires. The union agreed and after a few years the process was embedded in the contract. By the Bloomberg ascension 60% of schools had opted for what became known as the School-Based Option Staffing and Transfer Plan.

In the article referenced above Weisberg, with obvious pride, reports that he led the part of the negotiations that eliminated seniority transfers and established the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool.

The union was pushing for the SBO Staffing/Transfer Plan to replace the seniority transfer plan – it was easy to agree to the Open Market employment system – any teacher could move to any school with the approval of the receiving school; basically all teachers became “free agents” at the end of every school year. Thousands upon thousands of teachers change school every year, and, the movement is commonly from high poverty, lower achieving schools to higher achieving schools.

The evidence is clear, teacher mobility damages high poverty, low-achieving schools, In “Teacher Quality and Teacher Mobility, Li Feng and Tim Sass (February, 2011) conclude,

The most effective teachers who transfer tend to go to schools whose faculties are in the top quartile of teacher quality. Teacher mobility exacerbates differences in teacher quality across schools.

Numerous studies come to the same conclusion,

Hamilton Langford and others, “Explaining the Short Career of High-Achieving Teachers in Schools with Low-Performing Students,” (January, 2004),

Low achieving students often are taught by the least qualified teachers, these disparities begin when teachers take their first jobs and in urban areas they are worsened by teacher subsequent decisions to transfer and quit. Such quits and transfers increase disparities …  more qualified teachers are substantially more likely to leave schools having the lowest achieving students 

The long established seniority transfer plan required five years of service before a transfer – now annual “free agency,” the “disrupters” harmed the most vulnerable schools.

Weisberg, et. al., also are proud of the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, actually an attempt to rid the system is “bad teachers,” or maybe senior teachers, or maybe union activists or maybe simply to show the union and teachers who really was in charge.

The number of U-ratings under Klein/Weisberg escalated dramatically, close to 3% of teacher received unsatisfactory ratings. The appeals were a sham, the Department was judge and jury. Accusations of misconduct, defined as any conduct the principal thought was inappropriate, conduct that in prior years might result in a letter of reprimand now resulted in a trip to the infamous “rubber room.”. Eventually the teacher was dumped into the ATR pool; of the small number of teachers who were brought up on charges the vast percentage were exonerated or paid a fine and were returned to the ATR pool. The aim was to convince the legislature to change the law and require the teachers in the ATR pool for more than six months would be laid off. The union successfully defended seniority layoff rules.

Under the new teacher assessment law, based on principal observation and student growth scores, the number of ineffective ratings shrunk to pre-Bloomberg numbers.

The deBlasio-Farina Department has announced that ATRs would fill vacancies occurring after October 15th, and, if they received effective or highly effective ratings under the matrix teacher evaluation law, would be fully absorbed into schools, ending a toxic policy and saving the school system perhaps $100 million a year.

The “March of the Lemons” referenced by Weisberg should not refer to the teachers, it should refer to the “disrupters.” would soured the school system.

Additionally, the Department should consider:

* Creating an inspectorate, a group of principals who can observe ATRs who principals think are moving towards an ineffective rating. In the pre-Bloomberg days it was commonplace for the superintendent to observe teachers in their last year of probation.

* Open Market transfers require five years of service in a school to be eligible for transfer, not the current annual “free agency.”

* Renewal and Focus/Priority schools should be given a window prior to all other schools to hire staff – perhaps six or eight weeks before all other schools could commence hiring.

Each and every year the New York City school system has to hire 3-4,000 new teachers due to teacher attrition – about 40% of teachers leave within five years, and, in the neediest schools the percentage is far higher.

Susan Moore Johnson, at the Next Generation of Teachers project at Harvard published research findings, “Finders and Keepers: Helping New Teachers Survive and Thrive in Our Schools, (March , 2004), as well as continuing their research into the issue.

Unfortunately little of the research has translated into policies within school districts and schools.

Good riddance to the ATR pool, and, lets help teachers who need assistance and support our new teachers.

Healing and supporting makes a lot more sense than disrupting and angering.