Jo-Ann Demas: The Big U and How I Tried To Delete The Scarlett Letter

Norm Scott has an important post on his blog about U-ratings and the Appeal Process currently available to teachers and staff. Something has to be done about the lack of UFT support for ending the zero tolerance of the DOE for overturning U-ratings. I have re-posted the post in its entirety, with the link:

The Big U and How I Tried to Delete The Scarlett Letter 
By Jo-Ann Demas

LINK

There is an alarming trend of teachers receiving an “Unsatisfactory” on their annual assessment. While a “U” rating is certainly humiliating, it can literally take food off our tables. What’s behind this trend and what can we do about it?

It used to be that a U rating was a rare event. In the last couple of years, U ratings have increased dramatically. Recently at the Queens United Federation of Teachers office, even the lobby security guard observed long lines of teachers waiting to get on the elevators to file for a hearing in regards to their U ratings. What’s going on? I spoke to several principals who were told by NYC Department of Education to start handing out Us. Some have chosen to ignore this verbal edict. Others have obeyed.

Who is being targeted with the Us? It varies: veteran master teachers have received Us. New developing and promising young teachers have received Us. All kinds of teachers are now getting Us. Let’s be frank: not all teachers excel at this job. We all know teachers who are neglectful and who text instead of teach. You can hear some teachers screaming through the walls, using the tactic of humiliation rather motivation. However, it is not our job as union members to inform administrators of other teachers’ activities. That’s called spying. Administrators know who these teachers are: they’re often among the groupies surrounding administrators! These teachers garner favors by spying and tattling. Calling attention to “brown nosers” can be self-defeating. If they also received Us, it would not make the situation better and we would be playing along with the DOE’s blame game. As union members we do not spy on each other. That’s not our job. Our job is to educate children. We made a pledge to protect them. If we have evidence of child abuse, we have a legal obligation to report that abuse whether the perpetrator is a family member or a teacher. This is the only instance where we can “break ranks” without guilt.

Let’s say a teacher needs a lot of improvement. The New York City Department of Education has a hand book which stipulates, in great detail, what the protocol is for boosting teacher effectiveness. The prescribed process involves plenty of professional development with immediate follow-up observation and consultation. This protocol is rarely adhered to. Observations become punitive rituals rather than professional development. Not all teachers who enter the profession are “really in to it.” Yet all teachers should have the right to due process should a U rating befall them. Most teachers truly want to improve and become better educators.

When we get the U, we lift ourselves up and we go down to the UFT office and officially file for a hearing. We are assigned a UFT defender. Several months later, there is a hearing at the DOE headquarters. We are in a small hearing room with our defender and a so-called “impartial” DOE hearing officer. Our administrators are not required to attend the hearing in person. Instead they participate via telephone conference. Each side files documents. Verbal defense of the documents goes back and forth. The tape of the proceeding and the documents are sent to the Chancellor’s office for a ruling. What happens next should not surprise us: 99.9% come back rubber stamped with the same U.

I faced this situation last year. I decided to initiate a lawsuit against the DOE for harassment. I went down to Court Street to buy the audiotape of the hearings. I asked the clerk, in passing, if anyone ever listened to the tape in the Chancellor’s office. He said, “No. Only if it goes to court.” So, after all that hard work with our UFT defender, the DOE is not legally required to listen to the hearing tape in order to make a knowledgeable and judicious decision! What this means is that principals have carte blanche and can give you a U for no justifiable reason at all. The DOE will back them up. The U rating becomes irreversible.

What to do? Take it to court. Get a lawyer. I found a principled labor lawyer who concluded that it is almost impossible to win a lawsuit against the DOE. Besides, a lawyer costs thousands of dollars. The stress of all this registered with my body: I got physically ill. A “souvenir” from childhood aka dormant chicken pox cells in my nerve endings presented themselves as the shingles. I had to assess my situation: I was in continuous pain and had to continue teaching. Could I also conduct a no-win lawsuit at the same time with a lawyer I couldn’t pay for? My situation is not unique. The DOE knows teachers can’t afford a lawyer. I mean, they underpay us. The DOE knows our union does not have the apparatus set up to defend its members at this stage. (More on that later.)

The initial focus of the U stamping is to humiliate and demoralize as in “The Scarlett Letter” a novel by Nathanial Hawthorne set in witch hunt-era New England. Fellow teachers observe the “Scarlett Letter” and feel intimidated to speak up in defense of others. A passive and fearful work force is the result. The union at the shop level, in practice, is rendered ineffective. But did you know that the U can take food off our tables? Yes, there is an economic impact of a U rating. Your salary is not affected. But your ability to earn extra money through per session jobs is. When you receive a U, you are not permitted to work per session. This is harmful in general. For new teachers, it is difficult because of student loans, weddings, new babies, mortgages, etc. For older teachers and those near retirement, a U rating restriction on per session directly affects pension. For the last five years of their careers, teachers can boost their annual average upon which the pension payment is based. This phenomenem probably saves the DOE a bundle: at our expense. U ratings check pension costs.

Upon retirement I learned how the U rating I received two years before still “took food off my table.” Retired teachers may apply as “Occasional Per Diem” teachers. My application as a substitute teacher was denied because I received a U rating in the last five years of my employment. I can show you the form letter.

The experience of receiving a U rating has left many teachers with feelings of abandonment and bitterness towards our union. Under the federal law Taft-Hartley, a union is obligated to fight for its members’ rights. This is called “duty of fair representation.” When we are left “hanging” after a hearing with a rubber-stamped U, the union, in effect, has failed in its legal obligation to defend us. This situation constitutes a violation of the New York State Taylor Law as well. The Chancellor’s Office is guilty of ruling arbitrarily without hearing evidence. The DOE attacks are vicious and our defense woefully inadequate. There has to be a union apparatus in place to defend members beyond the hearing. A union, in its essence, is a defense organization. Full due process must be guaranteed. This is what we pay union dues for. And we need it in writing in our contract. Now with the attacks on teachers taking the form of publishing test scores, etc. it is all the more necessary. We need to be vigilant, militant and organized. When we stand up for ourselves, we are modeling for our students how we don’t accept bullying. We absolutely must change things: the children are watching.

A Lesson For Walcott: Angela Huth in England's Daily Mail on "Great Teachers"

As they threaten (yet again) to strike, a lyrical reminder of how great teachers can REALLY transform lives

By ANGELA HUTH, DailyMail, U.K.

PUBLISHED: 16:08 EST, 10 April 2012

LINK

What do you imagine when you think of a teacher arriving to start a lesson in a classroom of fidgeting, distracted pupils? A general indifference, perhaps, or maybe surly resistance?

In many cases, you would be right. But, very occasionally, the teacher’s entrance will spark a sudden silence among those pupils, a switching on of concentration. 

This signals something that is, I believe, increasingly rare: a teacher to whom inspiration comes naturally and who possesses a talent to spark an eagerness to learn even among pupils who profess to have no interest. 

Those who have been taught by such a remarkable teacher — and I’m one of them — are the luckiest people in the world.

I was at a somewhat eccentric boarding school in the Fifties, a place that might be assumed to employ average teachers, rather than brilliant ones.

What's the secret of a teacher who can inspire: One who can convey the love of learning

But that was not the case. Though there was not a single member of staff who had been through an official training course, the majority were endowed with such a love of their subject and were so skilled at conveying their enthusiasm, that it was contagious.  

Our headmistress, Miss Barrows, known as ‘Brag’, was as eccentric as her school. 

Her father had bought Lawnside, in Great Malvern, Worcestershire, for her when she was 27, so she could ‘exercise her talents’. 

A powerball of energy and high ideals, and the youngest headmistress in England, she was determined to make a go of it. 

Her passions were poetry and music, and she made sure her pupils were marinated in both. She arranged outings to Stratford to see two Shakespeare plays every term. 

Miss Barrows was a friend of Sir Edward Elgar and George Bernard Shaw. After Elgar died, she employed his best friend, Sir Ivor Atkins, to teach us to sing. We became good enough to join the choir in Tewkesbury Abbey and also sang in Worcester Cathedral — all extraordinary experiences for 12-year-olds. 

Miss Barrows was convinced we would all be required to open fetes in our grown-up life, so she employed a woman in a hairnet who came from London every week to teach us the art of public speaking. (After leaving school, I had to wait 11 years to open a fete, but what we learned was extremely useful for the speeches I’ve had to make since becoming a writer.)

Her friend, Miss Parke, was the senior music teacher. Learning with her was a mixed blessing: she was brilliant and terrifying. A mistimed crotchet would inspire a purple rage, but then she would ask what would I like to learn next.

Those who have been taught by such a remarkable teacher - and I'm one of them - are the luckiest people in the world

She played snatches of Chopin, Schubert and Liszt in a way that brought tears to the eyes and, in my case, inspired a desire to be a concert pianist — one of several ambitions that did not materialise.

The third member of the old guard  was Mademoiselle, who lived in an attic  in one of the boarding houses and  whose entire life was spent correcting our work meticulously. 

In class, she insisted on the boring bit first — reciting verbs in unison, so they were bashed into our heads for ever. But then she would switch to poetry and literature. At 12, we were reading Les Miserables and loving it because ‘Mammy’, as we called Mademoiselle, had the talent to reveal to us its greatness.

Today, if teachers of French dared to abandon phrase-book stuff and graduated to literature, more children might enjoy the language. 

Having a teacher from France, of course, is a great help, and in those circumstances you learn the right accent, though there is not much of that around these days.

All these teachers stayed at  the school for 20 to 40 years. Sparsely dotted among the talented at Lawnside were a few less compelling characters. 

There was the geography teacher who knew only about dairy farming in Denmark, the history teacher who dictated reams of dates and the maths teacher who could not explain algebra. The prevailing belief at the school was that if a pupil was bad at something, she should be allowed to concentrate on what she was good at.

Today, if teachers of French dared to abandon phrase-book stuff and graduated to literature, more children might enjoy the language

So, during maths lessons, I was sent to the library to read. Such an approach would be derided today, but I thought it eminently sensible.

Two years before I left school, an English teacher arrived who changed the lives of every pupil she taught. Rosemarie Dillon-Weston read English at Oxford and was intending to become a don. She had to give up this idea to look after a sick sister and teach near where they lived in the Malvern Hills. She came to Lawnside in the mid-Fifties and stayed 40 years.

D.W., as we called her, was as singular in appearance as she was in mind. With fine brows arched above brown eyes of scintillating depths, there was a handsomeness about her that would have appealed to the pre-Raphaelite painters.

Summer and winter, she wore a suit of scratchy brown tweed, and yellow ankle socks. A long plait of hair was wound round her head and she never wore a speck of make-up. (I doubt there was a single powder puff among the entire staff). Oh, how we longed for her lessons. 

As she entered the classroom, there was an anticipatory hush. Each one of us hoped for a tick  or two in the margins of our  essay: these were rarely given and much prized. 

She had no time for those who did not try, and could be withering. But I can’t remember one of us who did not want to do our best for her. 

We were thrilled by her vision. She taught us to think for ourselves: to discover, to observe, to feel. 

She gave life to Shakespeare, furnishing us with complete understanding of a play before we went to Stratford. 

As for writing (never in those days called creative writing), it was D.W. who encouraged vocabulary, finding the right word and an original way of describing something. For those, like me, who had always intended to write, it was a gift beyond compare. 

D.W. also started a weekly poetry reading for hardcore enthusiasts and Shakespeare readings. So we went through many plays, taking parts, and dozens of poems.

Increasingly rare: a teacher to whom inspiration comes naturally and who possesses a talent to spark an eagerness to learn even among pupils who profess to have no interest

These gatherings went on late. Once they were over, D.W. would hoik her books into a bag, catch a bus to the other side of the hills and walk the last half-mile home in the dark.

A dozen years after I had left school and published my second novel, I was asked to hand out prizes at Lawnside. 

As I did so, I saw D.W., a touch frailer but still in her yellow socks, at the back of the hall. I spontaneously paid tribute to her, and 500 pupils and parents stood and cheered. She was cross, but I was glad to have done it.

After that, we kept in touch until long after she retired. When my books were published, it was her judgment that meant most to me. 

When my elder daughter was studying King Lear, D.W. wrote  five pages of inspired notes to  help her. I would visit D.W. in her hillside cottage every few years: she longed to hear about all the plays I had seen. 

She died horribly, alone in her cottage, after a fall. But she has become a legend among pupils, and having been taught by her is one of the greatest fortunes of my life.

My younger daughter, Eugenie, having read classics at Oxford, went to teach in a large comprehensive school, St Olave’s and St Saviour’s, at the Elephant and Castle in London. 

Several times I was invited there to give lessons in writing. I set challenging exercises I had learned from D.W. — and on one occasion I taught a lesson with my daughter.

I noticed that when Eugenie  came into the classroom, all fidgeting stopped. Watching her at work — she was often funny and wore clothes the girls thought ‘cool’ — I liked to think she, too, was  an inspiring teacher, just like  those I was so lucky to have known as a child. 

The enlightened headmistress, Dr Bishop, suggested Eugenie should start Latin lessons. She was sceptical, but 30 pupils volunteered for her class, and loved it. 

She took them all to Oxford for a day: they were enchanted by the colleges and mesmerised by a lecture on Greek women.  

I asked Dr Bishop what’s the secret of a teacher who can inspire. She said: ‘One who can convey the love of learning, who is rooted in a passion for her subject so that the pupils really enjoy the lessons and are excited about learning. 

‘I admit this is a talent not given to all, but teachers can develop into good teachers through sharing ideas, and taking an interest in a child as a whole. 

‘Energy, enthusiasm are imperative. Inspired teaching can make a whole difference to a child’s life.’

It can make a difference to grown-up lives, too. Choirmaster Gareth Malone is a good example of a well-known teacher who can inspire. 

Look how he transformed the lives of Army wives. His passion, determination, talent and lightness of touch mean he can take an unpromising bunch of pupils and inspire them to succeed.

I’ve met many who have been lucky enough to have fallen under the spell of an inspired teacher. They all agree that if you discover the love of learning through one subject, the desire to learn further in other subjects magically spreads. This, surely, is the best reward a teacher of inspiration can provide.

That desire for wider learning has certainly been my experience in life since I left school. It is a gift for which I will always give thanks to D.W. and the other wonderful teachers whose classrooms I was lucky enough to sit in.


Role model: Maggie Smith as inspirational teacher Jean Brodie

Mayor Bloomberg's Information Double Standard

April 10, 2012

For City Hall, 2 Standards on the Public’s Right to Know

By JIM DWYER, NY TIMES

LINK

As a champion of open government, leader in reform through transparency and all-around tribune of the people, the administration of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has given full support to a campaign to make public the evaluations of about 18,000 teachers.

The public’s right to know, the Bloombergians say, outweighs the flaws in the evaluation system, which had wide margins of error and is being replaced.

Simultaneously, acting in what he calls the “public interest,” Mr. Bloomberg has fought hard to keep secret a continuing evaluation of the 911 system, which is rumored to be critical of the operation after the city spent $2.1 billion to overhaul it.

In this case, Mr. Bloomberg maintained that the public was better off not seeing a draft of a report that he commissioned after the December 2010 snowstorm, when the city couldn’t keep streets cleared and ambulances got stuck in the snow while critically ill people waited for help.

The draft report is said to be nearly 300 pages, and two Fire Department unions have been trying to get it as part of a grievance they have brought against the city. Mr. Bloomberg said it wouldn’t be right to release it without additional fact-checking.

“You can’t take a working paper where no one’s really checked the facts and just put it out,” the mayor said on his radio show on Friday morning. “Because all of a sudden, everybody believes that’s the truth. When we have a final report, we’ll get it out there.”

That the report existed in any form was a point of contention in hearings on the labor grievance, Joshua Zuckerberg, a lawyer representing the Uniformed Fire Officers Association, told a state judge on Monday.

The unions, Mr. Zuckerberg said, “have been requesting this report for months; first we were told that the city had no idea what we were talking about.”

Later, as witnesses referred to the report during testimony, the unions again asked for it. Finally, a judge issued a subpoena, and the matter ended up in court when the city refused to turn it over on the grounds that, as Caswell F. Holloway, a deputy mayor, said in an affidavit, “candor in self-examination will be chilled and the ability of policy makers to carry out effective reform will be curtailed.”

In front of the judge, Mr. Zuckerberg charged that the city lawyers were having a hard time keeping the story straight, and took note of the mayor’s comments on the radio.

“So this has gone from a report that didn’t exist to a report that they didn’t have to a report that is in draft form to, now, a report that is wrong,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “It’s a cover-up.”

Not so, a lawyer from the city’s law department, Eric Eichenholtz, told the judge. Yes, he conceded there had been some “confusion” over the existence, or nonexistence, of a 300-page document.

“There still isn’t a final report or recommendation, and that is probably why they were hearing that for a long time,” Mr. Eichenholtz said. “There was definitely some confusion.”

Well, yes. The same might have been said for the teacher evaluation reports, which are as important to running a school system as they are in any line of work. For years, the evaluation system for teachers was openly dysfunctional, but reforms have been slow to come, even though the Bloomberg administration was negotiating new contracts over the last decade that included increases in the pay scale.

The personnel evaluations of some public workers, like police and fire employees, are protected by law from disclosure. Teachers are in a different category, and the mayor and others contend that parents are entitled to information about the performance of people to whom they entrust their children. Certainly, that ought to apply to the 911 system, too.

One of the most necessary projects undertaken by Mr. Bloomberg was its overhaul. From the outside, 911 looked like an emergency dispatch system, but that function was secondary to the protection of agency turf. Warlord bureaucrats fought with wires and buttons over who got the most exciting jobs.

Mr. Bloomberg set out to change that. Maybe if the mayors before him had published reports that told the truth about the system, it would not have become as ossified as it did.

Whatever its current state, it could not be as dilapidated as what he inherited. He should not worry about airing its current problems, even if the report hasn’t been polished to a high gleam. It means only that there are still things that need to be fixed.

E-mail: dwyer@nytimes.com
Twitter: @jimdwyernyt

 

Mayor Warns of the Pitfalls in Social Media

By MICHAEL M. GRYNBAUM, 

LINK

On Twitter, he is @MikeBloomberg, a popular online avatar with more than 230,000 followers. His official Foursquare account leaves tips about Shake Shack and Kennedy International Airport. And his Facebook page energetically promotes the programs and values of New York City Hall. 

But the actual Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg? When it comes to social media, he has a few concerns.

In a speech on Wednesday in Singapore, where he received a prize for urban sustainability, Mr. Bloomberg spoke about the difficulties of leading a city into the future amid a political culture that is often focused on the short term.

The mayor noted that technology, despite its benefits, can add new pitfalls to an already grueling process. “Social media is going to make it even more difficult to make long-term investments” in cities, Mr. Bloomberg said.

“We are basically having a referendum on every single thing that we do every day,” he said. “And it’s very hard for people to stand up to that and say, ‘No, no, this is what we’re going to do,’ when there’s constant criticism, and an election process that you have to look forward to and face periodically.”

Later, Mr. Bloomberg noted that long-term urban planning “requires leadership, and standing up, and saying, ‘You know, you elected me, this is what we’re going to do,’ and not take a referendum on every single thing.”

At that, the mayor’s interlocutor, the Singaporean professor Kishore Mahbubani, took back the microphone.

“I think the Singapore government sympathizes with your point about social media,” Professor Mahbubani said, prompting loud laughter from the audience. “We are having the same daily referendums in Singapore.”

Mr. Bloomberg was still traveling in Southeast Asia on Wednesday and unavailable to elaborate on his comments. But his aides at City Hall said the mayor had been speaking narrowly about how social media can shift the public discourse away from long-term thinking.

“The immediacy of social media, he has found, creates both opportunities — for information-sharing and for citizen empowerment — and challenges, for governments, for businesses, for media, to see beyond the next tweet, or the next blog post,” Howard Wolfson, a deputy mayor, said in an interview.

“It’s more about planning for the next 20 years as opposed to the next 20 minutes,” Mr. Wolfson added. He declined to name specific policies of the Bloomberg administration that had been affected by a rough online reception.

At City Hall, Mr. Bloomberg, who made his fortune in information technology, has avidly embraced social media. He hired the city’s first full-time chief digital officer and persuaded Cornell to open an engineering campus on Roosevelt Island. He also frequently promotes the city as a prime destination for talent in the growing field of tech start-ups.

His administration has not been hesitant to use Facebook and Twitter as potent political tools: Last month, amid a controversy over financing for Planned Parenthood, the mayor announced a donation to the group in a Twitter message, generating thousands of replies on various social media outlets.

Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Media, a group that studies how technology is changing politics, said he admired the mayor’s engagement with social media. But he said he could also empathize with Mr. Bloomberg’s concerns.

 

“He is expressing the difficulties and the challenges of using social media in an effective way in governing,” Mr. Rasiej said in an interview. “But I also want to encourage him to say the technology also offers an opportunity to build a better and more robust democracy.” 

Arbitrators balk at slow pay from state

Former NYC Arbitrator Paul Zonderman

LINK

ALBANY — An increasing number of impartial arbitrators who hear disciplinary cases for tenured teachers and administrators are refusing to serve because it can take roughly 18 months to get paid, according to state education officials.

The agency’s deficit in the account for arbitrators has grown in recent years and is as high as $9.5 million. There’s no relief in sight because the 2012-13 state budget only includes $3.8 million.

The $3.8 million will first go to hearings heard under a revamped system included in the budget to control costs. Stenographers — who charge about $1,000 per hearing day — have to get paid because they are hired under a competitive contract. Whatever is left will pay hearing officers with past-due bills, state officials said.

“For the past two years, the Board of Regents sought a number of reforms to the tenured teacher hearing process to address spiraling costs and the extraordinary length of time to resolve cases,” Valerie Grey, the Education Department’s deputy executive commissioner, said in a statement to Gannett’s Albany Bureau.

“We are pleased that the recently adopted state budget includes a number of important programmatic and fiscal reforms, and the department has already begun implementing these changes.”

Last May, when Grey testified before a Senate committee, the lag time in pay was about 15 months.

The Education Department’s account for what’s known as 3020-a hearings has had a deficit for the past five or six years, education officials said. It wasn’t until the 2008-09 fiscal year that it surpassed $1 million, they said.

The deficit can be attributed to continued under-funding of the account, combined with the high cost of arbitrators and disciplinary charges that take years to resolve.

Jay M. Siegel, an independent arbitrator from Cold Spring, Putnam County, said he has a few outstanding disciplinary cases and will not be accepting any new ones.

“The payments are extraordinarily delayed, often two years,” he said.

Another reason is the new procedures that were put in place with the budget, “which appear to have unrealistic timelines attached to them,” Siegel said.

The 2012-13 state budget, which took effect April 1, authorizes the education commissioner to set maximum daily rates for arbitrators. Currently they range from $900 to $1,800 for a five-hour day. The commissioner can limit the number of case “study” hours arbitrators can bill for and remove them from the list if they take too long to complete hearings.

Other time limits under the new system include 15 days for both parties in non-New York City districts to choose an arbitrator. Otherwise, the commissioner will name someone. Before April 1, the parties had 45 days to agree on someone.

Another new requirement is all evidence must be submitted within 125 days of when the district files charges, except in extraordinary situations.

State education law requires arbitrators to make decisions within 155 days, but few cases are decided in that time period, a recent review by Gannett’s Albany Bureau found.

Martin Ellenberg, a hearing officer from White Plains, Westchester County, said he takes one or two 3020-a cases each year. “I won’t tell you that we’re being paid promptly,” but the lag time is not too bad, he said.

“The system works. Sometimes it works slowly, but it works,” he said.

The average time to settle non-New York City cases in 2011 was 287 days, down from 338 in 2010, state education statistics show. The average for not-guilty decisions was 1,070 days, more than double the previous year’s average. Guilty decisions took an average of 632 days, down from 742.

The time it took for New York City case decisions in all three areas dropped dramatically. The average time period for guilty verdicts was 299 days in 2011, half of the 598 days in 2010. Not-guilty decisions took an average of 323 days, 37 percent less than the average of 516 days in 2010. Cases were settled in an average of 241 days in 2011, 33 percent less than the 362 days for 2010 cases.

Much of the decline can be attributed to the agreement New York City reached with the United Federation of Teachers to streamline the disciplinary process and eliminate “rubber rooms,” where teachers spent their days while waiting for cases to be resolved, a city Department of Education spokeswoman said Monday. The new system took effect in September 2010.

Most teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence in New York City are now assigned to administrative or non-classroom tasks. The Department of Education can use an expedited, three-day disciplinary process in some non-termination cases.

New York City increased the number of hearing officers from 23 to 39 two years ago and increased from five to seven the number of days they hear cases each month. Additional arbitrators are hired for non-termination cases subject to the expedited disciplinary process.

Non-New York City districts draw from a pool of about 190 hearing officers registered with the American Arbitration Association, agency spokesman Tom Dunn said.