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.
What is the real story? I think it is that no one is accurately reporting on why NY State does not get it right on evaluating teachers.
The evaluation process is way out of sync with a teacher's actual performance, with 60% of the end of year rating based on observation reports. That is crazy, since there is no data in observation reports, according to Elentuck v Green, 202 A.D.2d 425; 608 N.Y.S.2d 701; 1994 N.Y. App. Div. LEXIS 1956. Observations are opinions, not facts: "The lesson observation reports consist solely of advice, criticisms, evaluations, and recommendations prepared by the school assistant principal regarding lesson preparation and classroom performance. As such, these reports fall squarely within the protection of Public Officers Law § 87 (2) (g) (see, Matter of Town of Oyster Bay v Williams, 134 A.D.2d 267, 268)." Betsy Combier betsy@advocatz.com
Leading education reform organization StudentsFirstNY issued a new report called Burying the Evidence that analyzes previously unreported findings from the 2015-2016 teacher evaluation ratings. In past years this data was widely released to the public, but this year, the State Education Department (SED) posted the ratings with little to no public engagement.
“No wonder education officials avoided a public discussion on evaluations when they show all teachers are great despite low student performance," said StudentsFirstNY Executive Director Jenny Sedlis. "The State Education Department must follow the law and hold adults accountable for student learning."
StudentsFirstNY analysis shows:
99% of NY teachers outside NYC are rated Effective/Highly Effective and a shocking 71% are rated Highly Effective.
More than half of NY's school districts rated 100% of teachers Effective or above on observations.
NYC has made a mockery out of a system that was previously on track to be a model:
9.5 out of 10 NYC teachers were rated Effective/Highly Effective when only 4 out of 10 students are proficient on grades 3-8 reading and math.
18 out of 19 NYC schools with less than 10% student proficiency on the 2016 NYS ELA exams have ZERO Ineffective teachers.
There's a school with 1% of students passing state math exams but 100% of teachers are rated Effective.
SED is not monitoring districts in the way the law requires.
To read the full report: "BURYING THE EVIDENCE: StudentsFirstNY Analyzes Hidden 2015-16 Teacher Evaluation Ratings," click here (PDF).
The swimming pool at Stuyvesant High School in lower Manhattan:
and the well-funded library of PS 6 on the Upper East Side:
When I asked the School Leadership Team, Parents Association, and Principal Stanley Teitel where the money was being allocated at Stuyvesant High School, the AP for Special Education Jay Biegelson, the AP for Guidance Gene Blaufarb (now at CUNY), and AP Eleanor Archie put Jay Biegelson's name on the parent line of my oldest daughter's Individualized Education Plan which decertified her, all without telling me anything.
These administrators told the NYC DOE Committee on Special Education that I would not respond to their requests to meet with them, even though I was the Editor of the PA Bulletin and on the Executive Board of the school.
The Stuyvesant PA turned on me and attacked me (Paola De Kock led the attacks on the Chinese parents at Stuy and now is, ironically, the Senior Director of NYC DOE Parent Engagement) and the chinese coalition I was helping, who uncovered the missing money.
Stuy parent Paola De Kock who became the ally of Leonie Haimson
When I asked where the money was that Carmen Farina was, as Principal, in control of at PS 6 as the grant from the Annenberg Challenge For The Arts, Carmen called me up on May 23, 2000 and screamed that I was a bitch, a witch, a thief, a liar and much worse. I listened to her screaming for 20 minutes then hung up on her, and a few weeks later reported her for violation of SLT rules (the NYC DOE reprimanded her, then removed her as principal in February, 2001) by having only 4 hand-picked people on the School Leadership Team.
So if anyone finds out about theft in their school I suggest going immediately to the police. Dont stop at the principal's office on the way there, but on the way back after you file a complaint.
When New York City officials revamped the way public schools were funded more than a decade ago, they emphasized one goal above the others: Making school spending more equitable in the nation’s largest system.
They also included a provision that critics say is doing just the opposite: an annual bonus of almost $1,000 per student at 13 of the city’s elite high schools, where students are wealthier than the city average and alumni foundations can raise millions of dollars for extras.
That means that students at these schools — where only 15 percent of students are black or Hispanic, compared to almost 70 percent citywide — are getting almost $18 million more this year than they would have without the bonus, according to Department of Education data. Since 2012, when the department began publishing complete information on how schools are funded, the group of 13 schools has received more than $100 million from the bonus.
That group includes the city’s eight exam-based specialized high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, the Bronx High School of Science and Brooklyn Technical High School, where admission is based on a single, three-hour multiple-choice test known as the SHSAT.
It also includes two highly competitive early college high schools, Bard Manhattan and Bard Queens, and two newer schools, Millennium Brooklyn and the NYC iSchool, both of which screen students based on middle school grades and test scores. Townsend Harris in Queens, which has its own competitive screening process, also gets the targeted bonus.
Critics worry that the bonus exacerbates inequality by giving the city’s most exclusive high schools a financial boost unavailable to most schools in the city.
“Students that have made their way into the specialized high schools have largely done so as a result of advantages their families have been able to give to them already,” said Lazar Treschan, director of youth policy at the Community Service Society of New York, a nonprofit advocacy group that joined a legal complaint filed by the NAACP in 2012 challenging the SHSAT as discriminatory (the complaint is still pending with the U.S.Department of Education).
“They don’t need even more additional resources from the DOE at this point,” he said.
But many educators and parents defended the additional money for the schools, saying they are vastly underfunded and have trouble meeting higher academic demands.
“Too often in this country, we’re sticking to the middle and mediocrity,” said Elissa Stein, a former PTA co-president at Brooklyn Tech. “But I also believe there are kids who are high achievers who deserve the opportunity to achieve. And sometimes they need extra funds to go above and beyond.”
The Department of Education defends allocating the funds to the 13 schools, saying that they incur more costs by exceeding the academic requirements of traditional high schools. But department spokesman Will Mantell could not explain specific criteria for which schools receive the bonus.
The bonus, like the bulk of funds for school budgets, is distributed through a formula that former Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein rolled out in 2007, called “Fair Student Funding.” The funding guide stipulates only that the money go to “academically challenging high schools.” But Mantell could not say why, for example, Millennium Brooklyn receives the bonus, but its sister school, Millennium Manhattan, which has a similar curriculum and admissions criteria, does not, or why the iSchool was added to the list.
Before the formula was instituted, the department’s central office gave most schools a fixed number of teachers per student, rather than dollars. But schools with more veteran teachers, who earn more, ended up getting more money to cover those larger salaries.
The net effect, according to Klein, was that schools with similar populations of students ended up with vastly different amounts of city money. The new formula gave all schools a fixed number of dollars per student, allowing principals the freedom to spend the money as they chose.
Currently, city schools are supposed to get about $4,000 of city money for every student on their register. They get additional dollars based on the number of students who need extra academic support. Students who are learning English, for example, bring an extra 12 to 55 cents on the dollar. Special education students and students who are struggling academically bring extra money as well.
Separately, schools get state and federal funds, and money for special city initiatives, such as the drive to offer Advanced Placement classes in all high schools.
But critics of the formula say it has never achieved the equity it promised. And they point to the bonus for specialized academic schools as one reason why.
“The idea behind Fair Student Funding was that the driver for school budgets was student characteristics, rather than the type of school,” said David Bloomfield, a professor of Education Leadership at Brooklyn College. “By creating, or re-creating, a system based on favored school labels, the DOE is somehow saying that all schools are equal but some are more equal than others.”
The specialized schools are part of a larger group of schools that get extra money from the formula because they offer alternative models of education that cost more to operate, according to the Fair Student Funding guide. These include performing arts high schools that require auditions for admission, career and technical schools and transfer schools for students who have dropped out of traditional public schools.
Critics say that extra funding for certain schools, and especially already-thriving ones, undermines the logic of Fair Student Funding.
“What needs to be ‘specialized’ about academics?” said Jill Bloomberg, principal of Park Slope Collegiate High School in Brooklyn, which shares a building with Millennium, but does not get the bonus. “What does an English class at Millennium need that one at Park Slope Collegiate doesn’t?”
Even with the bonus, the specialized high schools often get far less money per pupil than most schools. That’s because they serve few students learning English, special education students or low achievers. And like almost all city schools, they don’t receive 100 percent of the funding the formula calls for. That is a legacy of years of state budget shortfalls that routinely leave the city with less from the state than promised.
For example, Brooklyn Tech gets about 88 percent of the amount it is supposed to based on the Fair Student Funding formula (or $5,328 per pupil this year). Adam Stevens, a history teacher there, has seen both sides, having taught in schools that receive the academic bonus as well as those that do not. When Stevens compares Brooklyn Tech with Paul Robeson High School, the almost entirely black and Hispanic high school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where he taught before it was closed in 2014 for poor performance, he comes to this conclusion: “The kids at the regular, segregated schools need [the additional money] more.”
At Brooklyn Tech, there’s both a genetics lab and a robotics program that are rewarding for students and teachers; Robeson High had neither. “The entire city should have these courses,” Stevens said.
Principals whose schools don’t get the bonus money say they have less ability to provide the kind of intellectual enrichment offered at the specialized academic schools – and that makes it harder to attract students at the annual open houses and high school fairs.
Each fall, some 80,000 New York City eighth-graders select from a dizzying array of more than 400 high schools, and rank their top choices. Choices can include schools required to accept anyone in their geographic zone and those that screen applicants based on grades, attendance and standardized test scores.
In such a competitive high school choice system, less established and less selective schools face constant pressure to attract more students, and say that even a little bit of extra money could help.
Harvest Collegiate, a small high school near Union Square that doesn’t screen applicants, gets $7,644 per student from the formula. Kate Burch, the principal and founder of Harvest Collegiate, points out that almost a third of the school’s students are in special education, and another third have serious academic needs. The money, she said, pays for bilingual teachers for English-language learners, case managers for special education students and extra tutoring for struggling students.
That leaves little for after-school clubs, additional teacher training, advanced electives or the full-time guidance counselor Burch would love to hire. “To do all those things just takes extra money, period,” she said.
The differential funding has perhaps the biggest effect on schools that aren’t considered elite enough to qualify for the bonus, but don’t have the deficits that bring in extra money.
They are places like Forest Hills High School in Queens which does not get federal Title I funding, provided to schools with concentrated amounts of poverty. The Title I cutoff is around 60 percent; at Forest Hills, 53 percent are eligible, according to the principal, Ben Sherman.
“We are in deep financial pain right now,” said Sherman. The school received $5,446 per student through the formula this year.
Townsend Harris High School, gets the specialized academic bonus – and gets almost $600 more per student from the formula than Forest Hills does, even though it had only four students below grade level and two students learning English this school year, according to the department’s data.
Critics say the specialized academic schools have a financial advantage even without the city bonus: well-resourced and well-connected parents and alumni. In addition, Brooklyn Tech, Bronx Science and Stuyvesant maintain endowments of $13 million, $6 million and $2.4 million, respectively, to help fund extracurricular activities.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education.
The inspector general for Chicago Public Schools found that dozens of employees who were barred from the district found working in new jobs at city charter and contract schools last year. (Jose M. Osorio / Chicago Tribune)
New York City is not the only place that teachers are thrown out of their jobs, tarred and feathered, and placed on the "Do Not Hire" ("problem code") list.
Anyone charged with 3020-a, and anyone discontinued or terminated, whether tenured or not, is immediately placed onto a "problem code" - unless you are a VIP like Santiago Taveras, Carmen Farina or other people at their 'untouchable' level.
The UFT is not willing to end this blacklist. Some representatives say it does not exist. But it does, and it is, in my non-lawyer opinion, a libelous label used to back up false or unproven charges.
Indeed, when I worked for the UFT from 2007-2010, and my office was right next to Amy Arundel's office, I used to get calls all the time from members who wanted to know whether or not they were on this list, and I would walk next door and ask Amy, who would look up their file, and then she would tell me yes or no.
The problem code is a red flag put onto your file number to alert anyone that your fingerprints have been tagged as not cleared to work for the DOE or any vendors.
When a potential employer calls up the Department, and they ask about you and say that they are thinking of hiring you, all the DOE is permitted to say is how many years you worked for them. But seldom do they stop there. They go on to say that your file has a "Problem code".
Try it. Have a friend call DOE Human Resources and ask if you can be hired.
Anyway, if you are on the problem code, you must try to get off of it. What you need to do is, contact the Office of Personnel Investigations (OPI) at 65 Court Street, and ask for an appointment to discuss clearing your fingerprints. Bring someone with you who can support what you are saying - a teacher or educator who knows your skills and character is best.
At this meeting make an argument as to why you must have this red flag removed from your employee profile. Get the person's name and email address with whom you spoke, and email them what your argument was, after the meeting. Then wait for the decision. When you get the OPI decision, than you may file an Article 78 to overturn it, and then you can also sue the DOE if you have filed a Notice of Claim.
More than 160 Chicago Public Schools employees who were barred from the district because of alleged abuse, misconduct or poor performance were found working in new jobs at city charter and contract schools last year, according to a report from the district’s inspector general.
The list included three workers who were fired or resigned and blocked from being re-hired at CPS because of sexual abuse accusations, according to the report, which was released Tuesday. Twenty-two were put on a “Do Not Hire” list “due to improper corporal punishment or physical abuse of students,” according to the report.
Nearly 80 others were blocked from returning to the district due to incompetence or violating school rules. That included a list of probationary teachers who were blocked from future employment at CPS because of poor performance.
The 163 unidentified employees — 98 of them teachers — represented a small fraction of the workforce at the city’s publicly funded but independently operated charter and contract schools, the reported noted.
But Inspector General Nicholas Schuler’s office also found that CPS had no system for those schools to determine if their potential employees had been blacklisted by CPS with the “Do Not Hire” designation. Despite preliminary steps taken to fix the problem, the IG’s office said CPS has not finalized a policy on how to handle such situations.
The report did not name schools that hired the former district employees. Officials from three of the city’s largest charter school operators either declined to comment on Schuler’s report or said their schools conduct criminal background checks but don’t have access to CPS’ list of prohibited employees.
Kelley Quinn, spokeswoman for the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, said in a statement that “charter schools have not had access to the Do Not Hire list, but are required to run independent background checks for all staff, which they have done.”
“We also look forward to working with the district to ensure charter public schools have timely access to the Do Not Hire list in the future.” Quinn said.
A district spokesman said CPS conducts background checks for more than half of all charter and contract operators. In those cases, job candidates agree to share whether they’re blocked from working at CPS.
Schuler’s office said CPS is “developing a protocol” for alerting independently run schools of job candidates who are prohibited from working in the district. The IG said CPS also hopes to cover current charter and contract school employees as well.
It’s not clear how many employees on the Do Not Hire list are still on the job at charters or contract schools. The IG’s office reached its conclusions after reviewing a list of charter and contract school employees from last winter.
The three school workers accused of sex abuse are no longer working at the charters that hired them, the IG said.
“The charter data that we asked for was effective in December of last year,” Schuler said in an interview. “It’s a snapshot date in December of last year. Therefore, we’re unable to say exactly how many of these people in the (group of) 163 are still at the charters today.”
One challenge, Schuler noted, is that the law allows charter schools “considerable latitude” on their hiring decisions.
State law prohibits schools from hiring candidates who have been convicted of certain criminal offenses. CPS also elects to bar a range of other offenders from being hired, though charter schools are not required to follow suit.
“Although the Board decides not to hire those individuals, it does not have a statutory basis to require charter schools to defer to the Board’s conclusions about the risks presented by those individuals,” Schuler’s office said.
Finally, an article pops up that does not generalize about how awful all ATRs are. This is good.
The NYC Education Department employees currently in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool or "ATR" list are, truth be told, a mixture of the good, the bad, and the ugly. The major media such as the New York Times, NY POST, and NY Daily News have published stories recently which are misleading and factually wrong. Not all ATRs are the scum of the education system's rejects, far from it. Reporters writing only about the "bad" ATRs who have won their right to continue teaching due to strange circumstances are missing the most important point. The point omitted is that the NYC Department of Education indicts anyone who someone important doesn't like, without consequences. There is no accountability for the wrongful, bad faith actions of a few mean-spirited educators/administrators who use their positions of power to destroy the lives of people who they don't like or dont want to pay for. As one DOE Attorney told me, "Give me some money and I can indict anyone".
In the article I am re-posting from The Chief dated October23, 2017, Karen Sklaire, Aixa Rodriguez, and Gina Trent are not in the ATR pool for misconduct, but for other reasons. They deserve to be given permanent positions in their content areas of expertise. But not all ATRs are as good as these three women. I will point out some examples of the "bad" ATRs in a future post.
It’s the Scarlet Letter of teaching,” Karen Sklaire, a theater Teacher, said of being placed in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool.
In November, the Department of Education will move 400 Teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve into schools. The one-year provisional placements will be based on vacancies that existed on Oct. 16, and will be made permanent if the Teachers earn an Effective rating or higher from their supervisors.
Won’t Go To ‘Renewals’
The plan has been panned by pro-charter-school groups, including StudentsFirstNY, which rallied worried parents at City Hall Oct. 12. That same day, Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña announced that Teachers from the reserve pool would not be placed in struggling schools that were part of the city’s Renewal program.
A handful of Principals spoke out about their concerns with the Teachers in a recent New York Times article, which was headlined “Caught Sleeping or Worse, Troubled Teachers Will Return to New York Classrooms.”
“I cried when I saw the article,” Ms. Sklaire said.
During her time at a Manhattan elementary school, she set up a program for students to see Broadway shows, and in 2015, won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Honor for her work in theater and human-rights education. But Ms. Sklaire was excessed in June because there weren’t enough students enrolled in the drama program. The school’s population was shrinking as well.
Aixa Rodriguez
Looking for work as an ATR is “demoralizing,” said Aixa Rodriguez, who was placed in the pool after her school, Foreign Language Academy of Global Studies, closed in 2016.
Over the years, funding for the school decreased along with its enrollment, which dropped from 388 students in 2009 to 99 students in its last year.
Ms. Rodriguez said that she’s learned to carry a printout of the Highly Effective rating she earned from her supervisors when she goes to hiring fairs. “The first thing you’re asked is, ‘you’re an ATR?’ You can hear them dismiss you,” she said. Ms. Rodriguez was placed provisionally at a high school last year.
‘What Did You Do?’
While the majority in the pool—74 percent—earned a Highly Effective, Effective, or Satisfactory rating in their most-recent year in the classroom, the stigma of being an ATR hurts even Teachers who perform well on the job.
“I don’t identify myself as an ATR immediately,” said Ms. Sklaire, who has earned Highly Effective and Effective ratings throughout her 15 years teaching. “Because you can see it in people’s faces: they’re thinking ‘Oh God, what did you do?’”
Like Ms. Rodriguez, most Teachers entered the pool because of a school closing or phase-out (38 percent), or a budget reduction or declining student enrollment (30 percent). The other 32 percent ended up in the pool following a legal or disciplinary case, including cases in which the charges against them were determined to be unfounded.
The pool has shrunk from 1,131 Teachers in 2014 to 822 thanks to buyouts, including one in June granting Teachers who left the system $50,000. Randy Asher, who was hired to shrink the reserve back in January, said that all Teachers in the pool would be considered in filling vacancies.
“We have full discretion on which Teachers we match to vacancies, and we have discretion not to match ATR Teachers to vacancies based on their work history and performance,” he said. “We’ll look at it case-by-case.”
Hiding Openings?
But some of the Teachers in the pool are skeptical of that plan.
Ms. Sklaire said she’d heard from a higher-up that Principals were hiding vacancies. She said she would hear about a position, then check the open-market and it wasn’t there.
For Ms. Rodriguez, who taught ESL for the city for 12 years, “there were no vacancies for ESL Teachers in The Bronx,” she said.
ESL Teachers are in high demand because English-language learners are underserved: only a third graduate on time. About a quarter of the city’s English-language students are in The Bronx. “Either that shortage area dried up really quickly, or positions are being hidden,” she said.
Uncertain Future
Then there are worries about what will happen to permanently hired ATR Teachers once the DOE subsidy for their salaries is gone. During the past school year, the DOE either subsidized half of the costs for such Teachers the first year and 25 percent the next, or the full cost of the Teacher’s salary for the school year.
But the schools must pay the Teachers’ full salaries after that.
Gina Trent
Gina Trent, an English Teacher who has been in the ATR pool for 10 years after being excessed from a transfer school, said that when she and other ATR Teachers found out they’ll be permanently placed if they receive Effective ratings or higher, “we all knew the Principals would find a way to give us less than an Effective rating.”
Part of the problem is that the average Teacher in the ATR has taught for 18 years, earning $94,000, according to the DOE—far from a starting salary. Since 2007, the city has used “Fair Student Funding” to determine how much money schools get (including for hiring new Teachers) based on how many students they have, and granted Principals control over hiring.
Earning Top Pay
“I’ve never met a young ATR,” Ms. Trent said. “Almost all of them are extremely competent and all of them are at the top of the salary scale.”
Principals have historically exaggerated the impact on their school budget of hiring someone from the ATR pool, a spokesperson for the United Federation of Teachers explained. The UFT has advocated for the DOE to charge schools a citywide average salary for each Teacher, which so far it has not agreed to do, she said.
Ms. Rodriguez said that in addition to being over 40, most people in the pool are “brown.”
“There are a lot of whistleblowers in the pool, too,” she said, citing Peter Maliarakis, who settled with the city in 2015 after he complained about grades being changed and was charged with insubordination.
Another Teacher she named, Kathy Perez, was placed into the pool after being assaulted twice at M.S. 72 in Queens. She was trampled by disorderly students in 2012, then shoved to the floor in 2013, and underwent back and knee surgeries. She won a $125,000 lawsuit against the DOE for her on-duty injuries last year.
The tenured Literary Specialist, who has taught for 21 years and entered the pool in 2014, said that she’s been floating from school to school in her district.
‘We Can’t Afford You’
“Assistant Principals have told me they’d love to keep me but they can’t afford my salary,” Ms. Perez said.
“Fair Student Funding needs to go,” she said. “That whole concept is absurd. I get paid whether I’m in a classroom or I’m floating around. So for a Principal to say ‘I can’t afford you’ is ridiculous. It forces Principals to hire cheap Teachers.”
Ms. Trent added that the reasoning behind the backlash against ATR Teachers is flawed. “Most of the backlash is parents saying they don’t want their kids to get stuck with a bad Teacher, but ATRs are more-experienced Teachers. Studies have shown more-experienced Teachers are generally more effective,” she said.
Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke in 2015 with Automotive High School Principal Caterina Lafergola, who later left the school. Automotive is one of eight schools where teachers have had to reapply for their jobs in recent years.Now, teachers at two more schools will have to do the same. (Ed Reed/Mayoral Photography Office)
In a bid to jumpstart stalled turnaround efforts, the entire staffs at two troubled high schools will have to reapply for their jobs — an aggressive intervention that in the past has resulted in major staff shake-ups.
The teachers, guidance counselors, social workers and paraprofessionals at Flushing High School in Queens and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx will have to re-interview for their positions beginning next spring, education department officials said Thursday, the same day that staffers learned of the plan. Meanwhile, Flushing Principal Tyee Chin, who has clashed bitterly with teachers there, has been ousted; his replacement will take over Friday, officials said. (DeWitt Clinton’s principal will stay on.)
Both schools are part of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature “Renewal” program for low-performing schools, but have struggled to hit their improvement targets. They are also under state pressure to make significant gains or face consequences, leading to speculation that the rehiring is meant partly to buy the city more time before the state intervenes. (Last year, Flushing was the only school out of two-dozen on a state list of low-achieving city schools not to meet its turnaround goals.)
“Having a strong leader and the right team of teachers is essential to a successful school,” Chancellor Carmen Fariña said in a statement, “and this re-staffing process is the necessary next step in the work to turnaround these schools.”
The staffing change stems from an agreement between the de Blasio administration and the city teachers union, who have agreed to the same process for eight other schools since 2014. Among the six schools that went through the process last year, nearly half of the staff members left — either because they were not rehired or they chose not to reapply.
As part of the deal, hiring decisions will be made by committees at each school comprised of the principals and an equal number of union and city appointees. Unlike when former Mayor Michael Bloomberg attempted to overhaul bottom-ranked schools by replacing their principals and at least half of their teachers, these committees can choose to hire as many or as few of the current teachers as they choose.
In the past, the city has placed teachers who were not retained through the rehiring process in other schools — a move that drew criticism for overriding principals’ authority to choose their own staffs. City officials would not provide details about the arrangement for Flushing or Clinton other than to say that the education department would help teachers who left the schools find new placements.
The education department “will work with each teacher to ensure they have a year-long position at a school next year,” spokesman Michael Aciman said in an email.
Both high schools have already endured a destabilizing amount of turnover: Since 2013, more than half the teachers at both schools have left, according to the teachers union. And Flushing’s incoming principal, Ignazio Accardi, an official in the department’s Renewal office, is the sixth in six years.
The school’s outgoing principal, Tyee Chin, had a brief and troubled tenure.
Tyree Chin
Last year — his first on the job —he wrote a letter to his staff describing a toxic environment that he called “the Hunger Games for principals,” where he said some teachers keep up a “war cry” for a new leader. Meanwhile, the teachers union lodged a discrimination complaint against Chin with a state board, alleging that he threatened to press “racism and harassment” charges against the school’s union representative simply for carrying out her duties, said United Federation of Teachers Vice President of High Schools Janella Hinds.
Janella Hinds
“Principal Chin came in with an attitude that wasn’t collaborative or supportive,” Hinds said. “We’re dealing with a school community that has had a long list of principals who were not collaborative.”
In an email, Chin disputed the union representative’s allegations and said many staffers did not want him to leave.
“Only a small number of teachers were unhappy with my leadership because they were held to a higher expectations [sic] and or were investigated for inappropriate actions,” he said. “I have received many emails from staff telling me they are very sorry and that it was a pleasure having me as their principal.”
Chin’s departure comes after DeWitt Clinton’s previous principal, Santiago Taveras, who also sparred with teachers, was removed last year after city investigators found he had changed student grades. He was replaced by Pierre Orbe, who will remain in his position.
Santiago Taveras
The education department will host recruitment events during the spring and summer to bring in teacher applicants, who will be screened by the schools’ staffing committees, officials said.
However, it may be difficult to find seasoned teachers willing to take on such tough assignments.
When the teachers at Brooklyn’s long-struggling Automotive High School were forced to reapply for their jobs in 2015, the majority left. Many of their replacements were rookies, said then-principal Caterina Lafergola.
“Many of the schools that are going through the rehiring have a stigma attached to them,” she said last year. “It’s very hard to recruit strong candidates.”
Not long after, Lafergola left the school, too.
Caterina LaFergola
Update: This story has been updated to include a response from the outgoing principal of Flushing High School, Tyee Chin.
