A close-up look at NYC education policy, politics,and the people who have been, are now, or will be affected by these actions and programs. ATR CONNECT assists individuals who suddenly find themselves in the ATR ("Absent Teacher Reserve") pool and are the "new" rubber roomers, people who have been re-assigned from their life and career. A "Rubber Room" is not a place, but a process.
Lee speaks with Earth School student Jamir Geidi and his mother Fatima Geidi about their positive experiences at her school in contrast to the treatment they received at Success Academy. photo credit: Julia Neusner
Jia Lee voted in as Movement of Rank-and-File Educators
Presidential Challenger to Michael Mulgrew and his Passive Unity Caucus
As
NYC School Crisis Continues, Jia Lee Leads Teachers and Community to Challenge
Unaccountable Union Leadership and Defend Public Education
NEW YORK: Educators, parents, and community members cheered the announcement
of Jia Lee as their choice for UFT presidential nominee at the State of Our
Union, State of Our Schools Conference on Saturday. Fed up with overcrowding, underfunding, and overtesting,
educators are coming together with the community to take back their union, and
bring change to their schools through the 2016 UFT elections.
“Our schools are in crisis, in large part part
because our current union leadership is complicit in bad policy and continues
to tell us that this is the best they can do. It’s not the time for us to
re-negotiate what has already proven to be disastrous. It’s time for teachers
to come together with the community and chart a new course for our union. We
are going to take back our union and lead a fight for the schools our children
deserve,” said Ms. Lee.
Saturday’s conference, organized
by the Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) in coalition with a host of
community organizations, was the first step in defining a platform for the
upcoming UFT election and 2018 contract negotiations to defend and enhance New
York City’s public schools. The conference featured discussions ranging
from “Bringing Democracy to the UFT” to “Making Black Lives Matter in
Education.”
In the upcoming UFT election, Lee will head a
joint slate of teachers representing a united front of MORE and the New Action
caucus. As a parent and a teacher since 2001, Jia Lee is at the forefront of
the growing movement to opt-out of high stakes testing. She has served as a UFT
Chapter Leader for the past 8 years, and is a conscientious objector who has
steadfastly refused to administer tests that reduce her students to test score.
Last year, she brought this testimony to the U.S. senate hearing on ESEA.
Educators and have lost patience with Michael
Mulgrew and the Unity caucus’ leadership of the United Federation of Teachers
and are joining the community to continue building a movement for
change– in their union and in our schools. Mulgrew has been president of
the UFT since 2009 but has been unable and unwilling to effectively challenge
the corporate onslaught against public education. He has agreed to high
stakes-test based teacher evaluations and a contract that delayed earned pay
raises for teachers.
In the last union
election, in which 75% of working educators did not vote and the majority of
ballots came from retirees, the MORE caucus earned 40% of the vote in the high
school division and 23% of the active teacher vote overall. This year, in
partnership with the New Action caucus, MORE seeks to increase voter turnout as
active teachers reclaim their union.
ABOUT MORE: The Movement of Rank-and-File Educators (MORE), is the social
justice caucus of the UFT and largest force for change within the teachers
union. In the upcoming elections, MORE has formed a united front with New
Action Caucus to challenge Unity Caucus, the bureaucratic political
machine that has dominated New York’s teachers’ union for the past 50 years.
Over the past decade, Unity has led the UFT into crisis, signing off on harmful
policies such as overuse of standardized testing and pay increases that fail to
keep pace with inflation, while using union funds to pay UFT President Michael
Mulgrew over $260,000 per year and dole out salaries of over $100,000 per year
to over 100 Unity Caucus political operatives on UFT staff.
###
The Movement of Rank and File Educators is the Social Justice Caucus of the United
Federation of Teachers. To learn MORE, visit www.morecaucusnyc.org
Teacher Wendy Bradshaw PhD from
Florida handed in her resignation letter today. Her letter speaks the unspoken
words of thousands of professional educators across the country. Her letter is
the cry of what is in the hearts of teachers who, also, can no longer harm the
children.
Please share her words so just
maybe, we can once again have schools that love and tenderly care for the
well-being of our most precious gifts – our children and grandchildren.
#DoNoHarm
“Today I resigned from the school
board. I would like to share with you what I gave them. Feel free to share it
if it strikes you as important.
To: The School
Board of Polk County, Florida
I love
teaching. I love seeing my students’ eyes light up when they grasp a new
concept and their bodies straighten with pride and satisfaction when they
persevere and accomplish a personal goal. I love watching them practice being
good citizens by working with their peers to puzzle out problems, negotiate
roles, and share their experiences and understandings of the world. I wanted
nothing more than to serve the students of this county, my home, by teaching
students and preparing new teachers to teach students well. To this end, I
obtained my undergraduate, masters, and doctoral degrees in the field of
education. I spent countless hours after school and on weekends poring over
research so that I would know and be able to implement the most appropriate and
effective methods with my students and encourage their learning and positive
attitudes towards learning. I spent countless hours in my classroom
conferencing with families and other teachers, reviewing data I collected, and
reflecting on my practice so that I could design and differentiate instruction
that would best meet the needs of my students each year. I not only love
teaching, I am excellent at it, even by the flawed metrics used up until this
point. Every evaluation I received rated me as highly effective.
Like many other
teachers across the nation, I have become more and more disturbed by the
misguided reforms taking place which are robbing my students of a
developmentally appropriate education. Developmentally appropriate practice is
the bedrock upon which early childhood education best practices are based, and
has decades of empirical support behind it. However, the new reforms not only
disregard this research, they are actively forcing teachers to engage in
practices which are not only ineffective but actively harmful to child
development and the learning process. I am absolutely willing to back up these
statements with literature from the research base, but I doubt it will be asked
for. However, I must be honest. This letter is also deeply personal. I just
cannot justify making students cry anymore. They cry with frustration as they
are asked to attempt tasks well out of their zone of proximal development. They
cry as their hands shake trying to use an antiquated computer mouse on a ten
year old desktop computer which they have little experience with, as the
computer lab is always closed for testing. Their shoulders slump with defeat as
they are put in front of poorly written tests that they cannot read, but must
attempt. Their eyes fill with tears as they hunt for letters they have only
recently learned so that they can type in responses with little hands which are
too small to span the keyboard.
The children
don’t only cry. Some misbehave so that they will be the ‘bad kid’ not the
‘stupid kid’, or because their little bodies just can’t sit quietly anymore, or
because they don’t know the social rules of school and there is no time to
teach them. My master’s degree work focused on behavior disorders, so I can say
with confidence that it is not the children who are disordered. The disorder is
in the system which requires them to attempt curriculum and demonstrate
behaviors far beyond what is appropriate for their age. The disorder is in the
system which bars teachers from differentiating instruction meaningfully, which
threatens disciplinary action if they decide their students need a five minute
break from a difficult concept, or to extend a lesson which is exceptionally
engaging. The disorder is in a system which has decided that students and
teachers must be regimented to the minute and punished if they deviate. The
disorder is in the system which values the scores on wildly inappropriate
assessments more than teaching students in a meaningful and research based
manner.
On June 8, 2015
my life changed when I gave birth to my daughter. I remember cradling her in
the hospital bed on our first night together and thinking, “In five years you
will be in kindergarten and will go to school with me.” That thought should
have brought me joy, but instead it brought dread. I will not subject my child
to this disordered system, and I can no longer in good conscience be a part of
it myself. Please accept my resignation from Polk County Public Schools.
Teachers expect to work hard but should not be expected to devote every minute of their lives to their job, writes one union leader
I was speaking recently at a joint ATL/NUT meeting on childhood and adolescent mental ill healthwhen I was silenced by a young man who told me that while he was very concerned about adolescent stress, he was even more worried about his partner, a primary school teacher. Increasingly, when he came home from work, he found her crying on the kitchen floor.
Even more recently I heard of one young teacher who had, as a performance objective, the instruction that she must not cry in the staffroom. She did not know what to be more mortified about – that she had cried in the staffroom, or that her line manager could propose such an objective without any thought about what might cause her to cry in the first place.
Tales like these are told to me just too often. It seems that teacher stress is increasingly being regarded as par for the course and part of the job. A newly qualified teacher, asking for help to deal with an impossible workload which took up every evening until 11pm and all of the weekend, was told by her line manager –"that’s the way it is in teaching".
Well, it should not be that way. Teachers, as professionals, expect to work hard but should not be expected to devote every minute of their lives to their work. Teachers need time to relax, to pursue hobbies, to talk to their families and friends. They need time to be human.
In no other profession would this entirely reasonable view be contested. Teachers, however, too often are expected to sacrifice their health, their relationships and their happiness to the job. I speak to too many teachers who are exhausted from the constant stress of never feeling they are on top of their workload; who know that there is always something else to do. They never really relax, apart from a week or two in the summer holidays. Constantly on the alert for the next thing, struggling under the weight of impossible demands, they are leaving the profession in increasing numbers, often with no other job to go to, worn down and worn out by the voracious demands of their work.
The education system cannot afford to be so profligate with its teachers. At the moment England is in a perfect storm of rising pupil numbers, falling teacher recruitment and poor teacher retention. Official figures show that the country will need nearly 160,000 additional teachers over the next three years, to cope with a projected 582,000 rise in primary and secondary age pupils by 2020. If our education system is to meet this immense challenge, it needs to value its teachers as its most precious resource, and treat them accordingly.
School leaders could start by collecting data on what is happening in their school. How many hours are their staff working, and on what? ATL members complain about the hours spent on pointless bureaucracy which adds not one jot to the quality of their teaching or their pupils’ learning. Over-elaborate lesson plans; triple marking (have you got your green pen to hand?); taking photographs of their pupils’ practical maths work (to prove they have done some practical maths); stamping pupils’ books with "verbal feedback given" (to prove that they have given verbal feedback). These activities are pointless and unprofessional.
They betray a worrying lack of trust between school leaders and their staff, and this underpins activities which are, frankly, a waste of time. In the end, school leaders who make these demands are acting unprofessionally – because their key role should be to lead effective teaching and learning in their schools. The activities I have listed above do not, in any way, characterise effective teaching and learning. They are a waste of teachers’ valuable time.
Mary Bousted is general secretary of the ATL education union
Liza Campbell, Seattle teacher with an participant's report on recent strike
Jia Lee, Chapter Leader of the Earth School, high stakes testing conscientious objector
Lauren Cohen, Chapter Leader at PS321K
Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters
Ismael Jimenez, WE Caucus, Philadelphia Teachers Union
Joe Burns, Author of Strike Back: Using the Militant Tactics of Labor's Past to Reignite Public Sector Unionism Today
Alan Singer, Hofstra University, Social Studies Educator
Charmaine Dixon, Parent, Change the Stakes
Benita Rivera, The Many
Akinlabi McCall, Coalition for Public Education
Endorsing Organizations:
NYCORE, Change the Stakes, NYCOPTOUT, The Teacher Diversity Committee of New York, NYS Stronger Together Caucus, Bad Ass Teachers Association, Coalition for Public Education.
Our schools are under assault by corporate reform efforts, standardized testing, and a governor who is eager to fire teachers and close schools. As working and learning conditions deteriorate, our union leadership has neither put up an effective resistance nor been a force for change for better schools.
The Movement of Rank and File Educators (MORE) invites all UFT members, parents, students, and friends to help develop a strategy to create a more democratic and more proactive UFT that can be a force for change in education in New York City.
Let’s use this year's upcoming union elections to transform the UFT by bringing together our voices, finding common ground, and increasing our participation from the chapter level up.
Unlike the UFT leadership, MORE is asking your input for shaping our union's program! The workshops at this conference will help define the language of our election platform.
What Has Happened to Teacher Evaluations? We Need Your Help
By Anthony Cody.
Under
President Obama, the federal Department of Education offered several billion
dollars in Race to the Top money and waivers from NCLB to states and school
districts across the country in exchange for redesigning teacher evaluation
processes. The feds required that a significant portion of teacher evaluations
be based on student test scores, which was interpreted to mean anything from a
low of 20% to a high of 50% of the weight of an evaluation. Some states used
complex formulas to calculate “value added,” while others adopted frameworks
from Charlotte Danielson or Robert Marzano.
These
evaluations were designed to strengthen teaching – to provide teachers with
feedback, to identify those in need of support, or those who should be
dismissed. But it is unclear what the real impact has been. It is unclear what
theimpact of these policies(link) has been. Furthermore, there
seems to be very little data being collected regarding the impact of these
processes on working teachers – and the administrators who must evaluate them.
We hear that more teachers are leaving the profession, and that morale has
dropped. Are the new evaluations part of the reason?
The
Network for Public Education has launched a research project to investigate. We
want to hear from educators – teachers and administrators who have been
involved directly in the evaluation process over the past decade. How have
evaluations changed? What are the impacts that are being felt in your
classrooms and schools? How are students being affected?
As part
of our investigation we have developed a survey. It asks detailed questions
that will help us understand and communicate to others how changes in
evaluation processes are affecting our colleagues and students. We would like
to collect as many responses from around the country as possible. Please take
the survey. Your answers will help us create understanding and critical
awareness.
Here is
the link to the survey. Please feel free to share it with colleagues — teachers
and/or administrators. The more responses we get, the better picture we will
have of what is happening in our schools.
Anthony
Cody worked in the high poverty schools of Oakland, California, for 24 years,
18 of them as a middle school science teacher. He was one of the organizers of
the Save Our Schools March in Washington, DC in 2011 and he is a founding
member of The Network for Public Education. A graduate of UC Berkeley and San
Jose State University, he now lives in Mendocino County, California.
Awesome Survey!!! Where are you taking this survey?? What are you
doing with it? Is Randy Weingarten from AFT seeing this survey? I hope some of
these politicos seeand hear our voices!!! Great job.
I received an accomplished grade at my Ohio high school (best
rating,)Through no fault of my own,a year later, the State informed me that I
had been downgraded to skilled.I have taught for 38 -years in the inner
city.These teacher ratings are arbitrary and based on invalid and unreliable
test data.
Anthony, Teacher evaluations according to VAM has been in the
process for some time. I have prepared a 2 part article to show teachers that Lamar
Alexander has had his fingerprints on this system a long time. Hope this
helps teachers understand the real data collection issues.
Anita
URGENT: WHAT EVERY TEACHER NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT VAM http://tinyurl.com/nrdkbbw http://tinyurl.com/osy5ay4
@HogeAnita
Teacher Rafe Esquith's misconduct investigation is a high-profile test for LAUSD's 'tiger team' LINK
When a
colleague complained that Rafe Esquith, the most celebrated teacher in Los
Angeles, had made a joke about nudity to his fifth-grade students, the district
called into action a newly formed squad of investigators to get to the bottom
of it.
Internally dubbed the
"tiger team," the unit was created last year in the wake of repeated
sex abuse scandals that had long plagued the nation's second-largest school
district. These investigators were supposed to cut through the bureaucracy's red
tape and investigative backlog and quickly ferret out wrongdoing.
In Esquith, they had
their highest-profile subject and their biggest test.
This week, based on the
unit's investigative efforts, the school board behind closed doors voted
unanimously to fire Esquith.
On Thursday, Esquith
attorney Mark Geragos criticized the inquiry into his client and slammed the
unit as "an investigative hit squad" that was determined to find
wrongdoing by probing, if necessary, into every aspect of an employee's life.
Mark Geragos
District officials
defended the work of its investigators, saying they've brought professionalism
and a faster resolution to complex cases, which is better for teachers and for
students. They said that nearly half of the employees investigated by the unit
returned to their jobs.
The team includes seven
full-time investigators, a supervisor and two forensic specialists. Among them
are former L.A. Police Department detectives and a former investigator with the
L.A. County Sheriff's Department. Three former administrators review their
work, and the unit is headed by Jose Cantu, who's been with the district for
more than 30 years, including 14 as a principal.
Also participating in the
Esquith investigation is an outside law firm, a practice the district has
reserved for especially sensitive cases.
Esquith qualified for
special handling because he is one of the most famous and honored teachers in
America, the subject of articles, a documentary and White House accolades. He's
renowned for coaxing stirring performances of Shakespeare from Latino and Asian
students who live in the working-class neighborhood around Hobart Avenue Elementary
School.
In denouncing the unit,
Esquith's attorneys pointed to how the investigation started: with a review of
a joke about nudity that Esquith made to his fifth-graders in March. Several
weeks later, officials pulled Esquith from his classroom, and he never
returned.
The evidence gathered in
the case is confidential, but district officials outlined allegations in an
August letter to Esquith's attorneys. According to the letter, investigators
were looking into accusations that Esquith improperly touched minors before and
during his decades- long teaching career, that his school computer contained
images and video "of a sexual nature," that he exchanged
inappropriate emails with students, that he threatened a parent and two
students, and that he mishandled a nonprofit through which he funded field
trips and other benefits for students.
Esquith's attorneys said
they were astounded at how a routine review of a harmless joke ballooned into a
sweeping inquiry.
The district has
acknowledged that the unit, formally called the Student Safety Investigation
Team, decided to examine the nonprofit without specific complaints against it.
Officials also insisted that serious allegations emerged that could not be
ignored, and that Esquith was not removed from class because of the joke.
Esquith's attorneys
already are pursuing litigation to reinstate the acclaimed teacher, but on
Thursday they upped the ante. They filed a class-action lawsuit in Los Angeles
Superior Court on behalf of Esquith and other teachers, alleging violation of
due process, age discrimination, whistleblower retaliation and wrongful
discharge.
Esquith's experience,
they contend, is indicative of a larger problem: District officials target
higher-paid, older teachers to strip them of retirement benefits.
"The vast majority
of investigations are based not on student or parent complaints, but rather
upon vague allegations by LAUSD administrators which eventually widen to
encompass a complete audit of a teacher's life and every association,
affiliation, and relationship the teacher has ever had his or her entire
life," according to the complaint. "Teachers with unblemished and
impeccable records … fear for their lives and reputations."
In the process, students
are being mistreated as well, Geragos said at a Thursday news conference. The
unit "basically intimidates and tries to extract statements from students
that they then use for kangaroo-court-style proceedings in order to get people
to resign," he said.
District officials
rejected that characterization, saying in a statement that "investigations
are conducted in a sensitive manner."
The investigative unit
grew out of the 2012 arrest of Miramonte Elementary teacher Mark Berndt, which
led to a flurry of allegations and several prosecutions. At one point, more
than 320 instructors were in limbo after they'd been pulled from classrooms.
The district has since
paid about $200 million in settlements, judgments and legal fees related to
Miramonte and other cases — and took a public-relations beating.
Attorney Brian Claypool,
who represented 18 families in the Miramonte case, said the investigative
team's work is proof that the district learned from the sexual abuse scandal.
"Our goal from Day
One was to make fundamental change to eliminate this systemic failure that
they've had for decades, and we're now seeing a real heartfelt attempt to cure
this problem and to finally put the kids first," Claypool said.
Then-Supt. John Deasy
adopted a zero-tolerance approach that won praise for putting student safety
above all other considerations. But critics said some teachers were fired or
over-punished for relatively minor or unproven infractions.
Esquith is just the
latest victim, said Washington Post columnist Jay Mathews, who has chronicled
Esquith's classroom success.
The district "has
let itself be swallowed up in a witch hunt, with a school board too frightened
by the very mention of molestation to stand up for a great teacher,"
Mathews said. "L.A. schools were making steady improvement, but what energetic
and imaginative teachers are going to want to work in a system that has decided
to sic attack-dog lawyers on anyone who says something that might seem even
mildly offensive?"
The
head of the teachers union, however, said the handling of cases has improved
under the current superintendent. "In Ramon Cortines we have found a
willing partner to address that overreach on the part of Deasy," said Alex
Caputo-Pearl, president of United Teachers Los Angeles.
He put the current number
of suspended teachers at around 100.
He added that provisions
in the new teachers contract provide additional safeguards, but that the union
remains concerned about whether the district is abiding by these commitments in
all situations.
He declined to comment on
Esquith's case.
"We've reached out
and been in contact with Mr. Esquith," Caputo-Pearl said. "He opted
to hire his own private attorney, which is his right. We support his ongoing
efforts to have his due process respected."
Times
staff writer Sonali Kohli contributed to this report.
ESQUITH'S ATTORNEY TURNS DOWN LAUSD 'KANGAROO COURT' HEARING LINK byMike Szymanski
Esquith Attorney Ben Meiselas
In another testy exchange with LA Unified, a lawyer for teacherRafe Esquith said district investigators are asking “loaded questions” of past and present students about theconduct of the teacher.
The district called for a hearing this month with Esquith, who is still on payroll while in “teacher jail,” but the attorney turned down the request, calling such a hearing a “kangaroo court.”
In a letter of response sent yesterday, Esquith’s lawyer,Ben Meiselas, said he was declining the request because it said district investigators would be discussing “your inappropriate conduct.”
“The hearing will be biased, unjust, and will seek only to effectuate the purpose of the witch hunt from the very beginning, which was admitted by LAUSD investigators, which was to destroy Mr. Esquith’s career, as it has done with thousands of other teachers,” Meiselas said.
He said Esquith would not participate in “LAUSD’s kangaroo court system.”
Meiselas said school investigators have “engaged in threatening and harassing conduct toward students and parents in low-income and minority neighborhoods” in asking questions about Esquith, a celebrated teacher who started theHobarth Shakespeareans. He was removed from the classroom after what an assistant teacher thought was an inappropriate reading fromMark Twain.
Meiselas’s letter says that school investigators asked students such questions as have they ever “sat in Mr. Esquith’s lap.”
The district disputed Meiselas’s characterization of the communications with district officials.
In a statement today, the district said it has “endeavored to expedite the investigation of teacher Rafe Esquith to a swift, yet thorough and fair conclusion. Mr. Esquith was not requested to attend a ‘hearing,’ as asserted by his attorney. Rather, he was directed to attend an informal meeting so that he could respond to the allegations made against him.”
The district said those kinds of meetings are conducted before any disciplinary action in the spirit of due process.
“Through his attorney’s letter, Mr. Esquith has flatly refused to comply with this reasonable directive,” the district said. “The District, of course, must investigate serious allegations of misconduct and protect students. It would prefer to accomplish this task with the full cooperation and participation of Mr. Esquith but will take appropriate and responsible next steps regardless.”
Esquith’s legal team has filed a class action lawsuit that lawyers say involves hundreds of teachers who have fallen into what the district calls a “teacher housing” situation while investigations are being done. A Los Angeles Police investigationis also being conducted on the Esquith accusations involving children.
Meiselas said Esquith will no longer do the daily “check-in” as required by teachers in the housed situation.
