The Core Knowledge Blog

No real surprise, given the parlous state of the economy and employment, but NYC’s Department of Education has ordered principals to fill teaching vacancies with internal candidates only.   The news has left would-be teachers, including those hired by Teach for America and the New York City Teaching Fellows scrambling for jobs, reports the New York Times.   The city will hire about half its usual number of educators from TFA and the Fellows program. 

New York schools–especially struggling schools–looking for new teachers will likely have to fish in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) pool, which consists of educators who are unemployed but still on the City’s payroll.  In most cases, ATR teachers were working at schools that were shuttered or downsized. However, Gotham Schools notes a report by The New Teacher Project, which found that “teachers in the pool were six times as likely to have been rated unsatisfactory by a principal as teachers who hold positions.”

No matter how you slice it, the hiring pool from which principals can hire has just become reed-thin.  “The fact remains that, if the city weren’t forced to pay ATR members indefinitely, perhaps a substantial percentage of teachers could still be new hires (or, maybe, the freeze wouldn’t have happened at all),” writes the New Republic’s Seyward Darby “In good economic times or bad, on financial, pedagogical, and political levels, the ATR is simply unsustainable.”