NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg's Star Chamber is The NYC Department of Education

Below is a post from NYC Educator, one of my favorite bloggers, with just the right amount of sarcasm and humor for the reader to see through whatever Mayor Bloomberg says and does. Now we can add to the laughable ones Sen. Ruben Diaz, who obviously wants some reward for pandering to our soon-to-be-gone-but-not-soon-enough-Mayor. Let's make sure to vote him out of office in the next election, folks.

Of course the Mayor, Dennis Walcott and all the other political tail-riders want to fire teachers who they think are guilty of something. That's why they set up the sham 3020-a process with the UFT and NYSUT.

Only now, people are talking about the violations of law and fact that brought good people to the sudden end of their careers, and the "legacy" of Bloomberg, Dennis Walcott, and the Tweed team will be far different than what they thought it would be, despite the help from so-called "reporter" Ben Chapman of the Daily News. Mr. Chapman has never heard of a "good" teacher who did not have sex with a minor child in the school, steal, or lie and cheat. If you are charged, Ben says, you are guilty. If someone thinks you are guilty of something, then you are guilty. Kids lie. Facts and circumstance dont matter.

Notice what's going on now that summer vacation has begun, and people are leaving town. This is no coincidence, and I think the public and friends of due process should keep their ears to the ground as Bloomberg and his bought allies try to rid NYC of the little bit of rights left (that's my job, digging those up!).

While the cats are away, the rats will play.

Remember the Star Chamber movie?

The NYC Department of Education is Mayor Bloomberg's Star Chamber.

 

Betsy Combier

 

Mayor Bloomberg Lays Out Plan to Eliminate Sex Creeps

LINK

Mike Bloomberg here. I just want to say how pleased I am that the Supreme Court has finally repealed the Defense of Marriage Act. Our LGBT brothers and sisters should certainly be able to marry and live as they wish. Except for teachers.

UFT teachers, as you know if you've been reading the Daily News, tend to be pervs and sickos and sex creeps. After careful consideration, Chancellor Walcott and I have decided that we don't want sex creeps doing anything unconventional, and we've determined we need the right to fire any teachers doing anything we decide to be out of the norm.

This is because our students simply cannot handle role models that vary from those in 1950s TV shows. Clearly in those times, there were no LGBT models on TV, and everyone was white. We think white people have had it all too tough recently, and as you know they are randomly stopped and frisked more far too often. 

That's why, for teachers only, we're going to demand they be straight and white, or at least convincingly pretend to be straight and white. If they can't manage this little request, it's going to be necessary for Chancellor Walcott to be able to fire them. As Ruben Diaz and legal expert Campbell Brown have pointed out, we need the right to fire sicko sex creeps whether or not they've been found guilty. Since we assume all teachers to be sicko sex creeps, we won't be firing them for being LGBT or non-white, but for being sex creeps.

And sure, a lot of you will be saying, "Mike, you're discriminating here." I understand that, and that's why we will make sure to also fire white straight teachers too. Since all teachers are sex creeps because we say so, this will make teachers think twice before they criticize the way we place Children First, Always.

The best way to put Children First, Always is by closing their neighborhood schools, turning them over to Eva Moskowitz, firing unionized teachers based on junk science, and replacing them with at-will employees in charter schools who will never, ever earn a pension. This way, teachers of the Children we place First, Always won't have time to develop into the sex creeps all current teachers are.

So basically, we need the right to immediately fire sex creep teachers who are not straight and white. We also need the right to immediately fire sex creep teachers who are straight and white. Anyone not fitting into those categories will not be affected by this bold but necessary new policy.

However, since all teachers in these categories have been demonstrated by the crack reporters at the Daily News to be sex creeps, we desperately need the right to fire them right away without all that contractual red tape. We can't go through all the rigamarole of negotiating new contracts, because that will cost money we don't have. Once we fire all the sex creeps, the costs of negotiating new contracts will decrease dramatically.

So please, New York, remember that mayoral control means I do what I want, when I want, and how I want. Support me, Senator Diaz, and legal expert Campbell Brown in our efforts to fire sex creep teachers immediately. It's the only way we can protect our children from these dangerous predators.

We are also very disappointed that no other publications have been running the story about sex creep teachers. In our next step to place Children First, Always, we will look into whether or not it's in the interests of these children to allow these publications to continue doing business in my city.

State senator proposes ban on sex predator teachers from all school property

Sen. Ruben Diaz’s legislation comes after two city instructors were recently nabbed on sex crimes, including a music teacher charged with rape, a criminal sex act and endangering the welfare of a child on Wednesday, and another accused of raping a 10-year-old girl.

Comments (9)

By Corinne Lestch / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

State Sen. Ruben Diaz on Thursday launched a fight to ban sex creeps from school property — not just the classroom.
The Bronx Democrat introduced legislation in the wake of a string of Daily News stories highlighting the difficulty of removing predatory educators.
This “will protect our children from being approached on school grounds by an alarming number of known pedophiles who continue to lurk in our school system,” Diaz said in a statement.
RELATED: SEX PREDATORS REMAIN IN NYC SCHOOLS: GROUP
“I remain disgusted by the Daily News report that cited how city education officials tried to fire 128 school employees since 2007 for sexual misconduct or inappropriate relationships with students — but only 33 were actually axed.”
The proposed bill, which notes there are no state laws prohibiting educators charged with sexual misconduct from staying in the classroom, comes after two city instructors were recently nabbed on sex crimes.
Brian Kearins, a music teacher at Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, was busted Wednesday on charges including rape, a criminal sex act and endangering the welfare of a child.
RELATED: BX. HIGH SCHOOL TEACHER BUSTED IN SEX CASE: COPS
The 33-year-old married father of two, including a newborn, had sex with a 15-year-old student from this past October to April, according to the criminal complaint filed in Bronx Criminal Court.
Last week, Bronx teacher Anthony Criscuolo, 40, was arrested for raping a 10-year-old girl enrolled in his fifth-grade class at Public School 386.
Diaz said his measure — which applies to public and private schools — is one the teachers union should throw its full weight behind.
RELATED: RAPED GIRL'S FAMILY WANTS TEACHERS FIRED
“The teachers union should be supporting this bill, because pedophiles give a bad name to good teachers,” he said.
A spokesman for United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the Education Department already has the power to reassign employees accused of misconduct.
“If Sen. Diaz feels that the Department of Education has failed to enforce this provision, he should take the matter up with the department or Mayor Bloomberg,” the spokesman said.
RELATED: BRONX TEACHER SENT 10-YEAR-OLD APOLOGY AFTER RAPE: PROSECUTORS
But Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the recent spate of sex abuse cases proves that officials should be able to fire teachers found to have committed wrongdoing.
“It should be clear to everyone by now — including the teachers union — that we can’t wait for someone to get convicted before being able to fire them,” said Walcott.
With Ben Chapman
clestch@nydailynews.com

How St. Louis Gets Rid of Bad Teachers

In St. Louis, teachers union plays role in getting rid of bad teachers

Ray Cummings, right, vice president of American Federation of Teachers Local 420, speaks with Richard Simpson, president of the Cleveland High School Alumni Association, and Dorothy Kirner, then 25th Ward alderman, at a St. Louis School Board Meeting in 2006.

LINK

By Elisa Crouch ecrouch@post-dispatch.com 314-340-8119

ST. LOUIS • Critics of tenure say it creates an untouchable class of teachers who can become an impediment to improving public schools.

But in St. Louis, that protection hasn’t been enough to spare several dozen teachers from losing their jobs.

Since 2010, more than 100 teachers have been removed from classrooms — through being fired, pushed to retire or resign — after they were deemed ineffective by their principals. Forty of those teachers had tenure, according to the district, a status designed to protect educators from arbitrary firings.

Though the removals constitute a small percentage of the 1,934 teachers districtwide, they mark a monumental shift in the St. Louis Public Schools, where decades of bad record keeping made firing tenured teachers nearly impossible. They also reflect a broader effort by school district officials to elevate the level of teaching in the city’s 72 public schools and five alternative education sites.

An unlikely partner in the process is the teachers union.

“Remember, this isn’t the union of our mothers,” said Ray Cummings, vice president of the American Federation of Teachers Local 420.

Several times a week, Cummings accompanies Jeff Spiegel, a human resources director for the St. Louis district, to schools where they help principals document teacher performance. They meet with teachers who struggle with such skills as classroom management and connecting with students. Some are on the verge of burnout.

They put them on an improvement plan.

Spiegel, the former superintendent of Ferguson-Florissant schools, came to St. Louis in 2011 to work solely on improving teaching in the district. Since his arrival, 340 teachers have received ratings on their evaluations poor enough to put them on professional improvement plans, according to the district. After 18 weeks, 181 of those teachers showed significant improvement. The rest, for the most part, were let go.

“You know what? Mediocre is not good enough,” Spiegel said. “We have to have high performing teachers in every classroom.”

Cummings agrees.

Rather than fighting the school district on this, he and other union leaders are in full support. In fact, union representatives make up five of the nine members of the administrative panel that has recommended the dismissal of tenured teachers to human resources.

“At one point, the union was just there to take care of salaries, benefits and to monitor the contract,” Cummings said. “Most members feel we should be raising the profession, making sure the working environment is such we can improve our craft.”

THE ST. LOUIS PLAN

Steps to remove ineffective teachers in St. Louis were unheard of five years ago, when Superintendent Kelvin Adams arrived at a school system recently stripped of accreditation. The task of removing an underperforming teacher was a time-consuming one filled with bureaucracy, so principals didn’t bother.

“The district was unaccredited, but a large number of teachers were rated satisfactory,” Adams said. “The two don’t align themselves well.”

Together, the Special Administrative Board, union leaders and district staff began crafting a teacher evaluation system similar to one they’d observed in Toledo, Ohio. It provides peer counseling for deficient teachers who are flagged by their principals and express the will to improve. It pairs newly hired teachers with mentors who help them navigate the urban classroom.

The intent, union and district leaders say, is to improve teaching — not to get rid of teachers. In fact, they say, it’s to reduce the number of teachers who leave the district after the first year out of frustration. And it’s also to throw a lifeline to struggling teachers who want to be better.

“We do better if we can salvage teachers than construct a plan to get rid of them,” said Richard Gaines, vice president of the Special Administrative Board that took over the district in 2008. “If they could not be salvaged, then help them transfer to other areas.”

The system they developed is the St. Louis Plan, now administered jointly by the school district and the union. Teachers flagged as deficient have 18 weeks to improve or face being issued a statement of charges and a hearing in front of a hearing officer, which can lead to termination. (A bill passed by the Legislature this year would reduce that time period to 30 days if signed by Gov. Jay Nixon.)

Teachers who waive tenure rights enter the St. Louis Plan. They receive coaching for up to one year. But if they don’t show improvement, a nine-member review panel may recommend termination.

The collaborative approach between union leaders and district administrators provides a glimpse into the role teachers unions may eventually play on a national level, after years of attacks from reformers determined to eliminate tenure and open more union-free charter schools.

In 2008, the American Federation of Teachers surveyed a sample of its members and found that a majority preferred their union to tackle teacher quality. Sixty-six percent wanted their union to prioritize good teaching over job rights, and 22 percent felt the opposite. The rest were either unsure or wanted both priorities to be equal.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has highlighted the St. Louis Plan at conferences on labor-management collaboration.

Partnerships similar to the one in St. Louis are beginning to appear in a few places, such as Hillsboro County, Fla., and New Haven, Conn. In Missouri, the teachers union in North Kansas City has contacted St. Louis officials about the collaboration.

But by and large, the partnership is unique.

“If this is happening in St. Louis, that’s unusual,” said Terry Moe, professor of political science at Stanford University, and an expert on teacher unions.

THE PLAN AT WORK

Terrance Howell, a first-year teacher at Hamilton Elementary, said the mentoring he received through the St. Louis Plan gave him feedback he needed to improve his reading instruction, classroom management and navigation of the school district’s bureaucracy.

Without a mentor, “It would have been chaotic,” Howell said. “I really wasn’t prepared for my first year here.”

But the partnership isn’t without detractors. Some teachers complain that they now pay dues to a union that has failed to stand up for them. They say union leaders are enabling school administrators to use performance as an excuse to get rid of teachers for arbitrary reasons.

“They’ve created the stigma that the older teachers need to be fired,” said Velma Bailey, a special education teacher who lost her job last year at Yeatman Middle School.

Cummings says this isn’t true.

“Older members might expect an adversarial relationship with management,” he said.

Some teachers flagged as deficient say they ultimately benefited from the St. Louis Plan, but that they were treated unfairly by principals with whom they didn’t get along.

MaryBeth Chavez was considering a career change in 2011 while teaching high school math at Clyde C. Miller Career Academy.

“I had been beat down so bad thinking I was not worth anything as a teacher anymore,” Chavez said. But spending a year with the consultant teacher revived her.

“She made me see that I had it in me to give and see where my weak points were and help me through those weak points.” Chavez now teaches math at a different school. “I’ve never been happier teaching.”

But Chavez and others are nevertheless uncomfortable with union leaders working closely with principals and district administrators on teacher performance issues. The union has a fiduciary responsibility to have their backs, they say.

And sometimes personality conflicts between principals and teachers can get in the way of a fair evaluation.

“I do think it’s a good thing, but how teachers are forced into it can be very problematic,” said LaTosha Hayes, hired in 2006 as a fourth-grade teacher at Mallinckrodt Academy of Gifted Instruction.

In 2011, her principal gave her a bad review — the first in her career, Hayes said. The principal had previously led her son’s school, where she and Hayes had their first disagreements.

“It became I could do no right and everything wrong,” Hayes said. “I knew it was personal.”

The amount she learned working with the consultant teacher was invaluable, Hayes said. Having successfully completed the St. Louis Plan, she now works at Gateway Elementary.

The St. Louis Plan does have a cost. To provide first-year and struggling teachers with mentors and consultants, 15 teachers leave their classrooms for three years to work in this role. This will cost $1.65 million for the 2013-14 school year.

Funding comes from a 2012 agreement that gave the district a windfall in desegregation funds. One of the players who forged the agreement was Adolphus Pruitt, president of the St. Louis chapter of the NAACP.

“It was a very reasonable investment for a very critical need,” he said of the St. Louis Plan. “Whenever we can take teachers within the district and improve their ability to teach our kids, it is smart and humane to give them the help they need.”

Petition To Fire Principal Minerva Zanca of Pan American International High School in Elmhurst Queens

NYC Chancellor Dennis Walcott & City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras: Help Us Terminate Principal Minerva Zanca of Pan American International High School

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   2. LINK 
      Petition by
      BK Nation
      
      
      
      

      Two teachers that were preparing for tenure this year were denied and subsequently fired by a principal that referred to them as “having big lips” and “nappy hair.” John Flanagan, a Spanish Language teacher, and Heather Hightower, an ESL-Science teacher, were the targets of these remarks by Minerva Zanca, principal of Pan American International High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York.

      YouTube Video

      These two teachers, as well as tenured Theatre teacher Lisa-Erika James, have filed a discrimination claim against Principal Minerva Zanca within the Department of Education—Office of Equal Opportunity—for poor performance ratings and undue budget cuts that they feel were racially motivated.

      Assistant Principal Anthony Riccardo, who is also filing a harassment claim against Ms. Zanca, uncovered these comments in a written statement that discloses, in vivid detail, the targeting of these three teachers over the course of the 2012-2013 school year. In Post-Observation Conferences with Mr. Riccardo, Zanca states that Ms. Hightower “looked like a gorilla in a sweater with nappy hair” and asked, “Did you see his big lips quivering?” in reference to Mr. Flanagan.

      

      Minerva Zanca, Principal at Pan American High School, Sylvia Mata, President of LULAC Queens

       

      "It is not only important to have high standards for our public school teachers,” says Kevin Powell, President of BK Nation. “But we must also support the good ones, like these teachers, who are completely dedicated to their young people. I find it unacceptable that a principal can engage in this kind of conduct without any repercussions. We are not going to stop until due justice and process is served here. We are calling on the school district and the DOE to review this matter thoroughly, to deal with the facts fairly, and to make it clear that racial bias and mistreatment of teachers in any form is not tolerated in New York City. We are also specifically asking for the support of City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, who has a working relationship with Principal Zanca since the school is in her district, and for her to condemn this racist and abusive behavior and to stand with us in pushing for an investigation and justice.”

      The New York City Department of Education’s Chancellor's Regulation A830 is a strict antidiscrimination policy that protects its employees from discrimination based on race/color/ethnicity/gender and sexual orientation. The three teachers feel their Civil Rights have been violated and in return are pursuing their complaint in the hopes of getting their jobs back. Ms. James is asking that Ms. Zanca be held fully accountable in compliance with the Chancellor’s Regulations. Ms. James states “It is deeply disappointing that Ms. Zanca has made such hurtful racial epithets and is allowed to run a school where many of the children are of Afro-Latino descent.” There are currently no African American teachers left at the school.

       
 
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Thursday, June 27, 2013

Contact:

Kevin Powell

 kevin@kevinpowell.net

Queens, NY Principal Minerva Zanca calls African American teachers "big lipped," "nappy haired," and "gorillas"

Two teachers that were preparing for tenure this year were denied and subsequently fired by a principal that referred to them as "having big lips" and "nappy hair." John Flanagan, a Spanish Language teacher, and Heather Hightower, an ESL-Science teacher, were the targets of these remarks by Minerva Zanca, principal of Pan American International High School in Elmhurst, Queens, New York.

These two teachers, as well as tenured Theatre teacher Lisa-Erika James, have filed a discrimination claim against Principal Minerva Zanca within the Department of Education-Office of Equal Opportunity-for poor performance ratings and undue budget cuts that they feel were racially motivated.

Assistant Principal Anthony Riccardo, who is also filing a harassment claim against Ms. Zanca, uncovered these comments in a written statement that discloses, in vivid detail, the targeting of these three teachers over the course of the 2012-2013 school year. In Post-Observation Conferences with Mr. Riccardo, Zanca states that Ms. Hightower "looked like a gorilla in a sweater with nappy hair" and asked, "Did you see his big lips quivering?" in reference to Mr. Flanagan.

"It is not only important to have high standards for our public school teachers," says Kevin Powell, President of BK Nation. "But we must also support the good ones, like these teachers, who are completely dedicated to their young people. I find it unacceptable that a principal can engage in this kind of conduct without any repercussions. We are not going to stop until due justice and process is served here. We are calling on the school district and the DOE to review this matter thoroughly, to deal with the facts fairly, and to make it clear that racial bias and mistreatment of teachers in any form is not tolerated in New York City. We are also specifically asking for the support of City Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, who has a working relationship with Principal Zanca since the school is in her district, and for her to condemn this racist and abusive behavior and to stand with us in pushing for an investigation and justice."

The New York City Department of Education's Chancellor's Regulation A830 is a strict anti-discrimination policy that protects its employees from discrimination based on race/color/ethnicity/gender and sexual orientation. The three teachers feel their Civil Rights have been violated and in return are pursuing their complaint in the hopes of getting their jobs back. Ms. James is asking that Ms. Zanca be held fully accountable in compliance with the Chancellor's Regulations. Ms. James states "It is deeply disappointing that Ms. Zanca has made such hurtful racial epithets and is allowed to run a school where many of the children are of Afro-Latino descent." There are currently no African American teachers left at the school.