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.”
Robert,
I read your reference to Gotham School’s note on the New Teacher Project’s review of the ATRs in New York.
While I’m no blind supporter of Randi (and why has it become necessary to declaim that these days?) I thought you should call to your reader’s attention Eduwonkette’s assertion – I guess you can post, just not blog? – that the “6 times more likely to have a unsatisfactory rating” is a bit of a statistical slight of hand. Her contention seems to be that the absolute number of teachers in this “repeatedly unsatisfactory category” is so small that its misleading to cite them as a representative of the larger pool.
That said, I agree with the many who have observed that Chambers Street’s apparent volte face regarding the value of excessed teachers seems to be the triumph of expediency over principal(s). Sadly, as with the shifting of the G&T cut off from the 95th to the 90th percentile when not enough children qualified under the former “nationally proven and rigorous” standard, it appears this is a situation with which the denizens of Tweed are familiar. (And in their defense, I guess they would say this is evidence of their flexibility, and willingness to listen to other opinions)
OTOH, getting rid of ATR, or significantly weakening it, makes a job at a low-performing school much less desirable than at a safely high performing school. This cuts against the desire to put better performing and/or more qualified teachers in high needs schools.
But if you just want to close public schools as quickly as possible, letting people know that the most likely way they’ll get booted from the ranks of NYC teachers, loose their pension, etc., in a terrible job market is to work at a low-performing, or even moderately-performing, school is a good way to accelerate that process.
This is not a hypothetical — this is exactly the discussion I’m having over the dinner table with my wife the experienced master urban teacher, and I’m saying “time to retreat to Classical and leave the kids at greater risk to someone else.” We’ve got a family to worry about.
T
Excellent point. The redoubtable Jennifer “Eduwonkette” Jennings notes “81 percent of teachers in the ATR have never received an Unsatisfactory rating. Only 6 percent of all teachers in the ATR – about 14 teachers – have received an unsatisfactory rating more than once in their careers.”
That said, by even the most charitable analysis, it takes extraordinary incompetence — or extraordinary vindictiveness on the part of a principal — to get slapped with a “U” rating in NYC. I’m guessing that getting an unsatisfactory places second on the list of rarest events in New York, just behind getting struck by lightning, and just ahead of winning the lotto and quality starts by Oliver Perez.
Thus I have a hunch that there are far more unsatisfactory teachers in the ATR than the simple, blunt instrument of a U rating would indicate. It’s common to hear of agreements where a teacher agrees to leave, and a principal agrees to give a satisfactory review.
Robert,
And I agree with you as to the likely under reporting of unsatisfactory teachers.
Alas Jennifer, who is far smarter than I, will likely tell us that you can’t really rate teachers effectively as the value added metrics are all subject to inflation, and principals can be extraordinarily vindictive.
More study needed?
Or more common sense.
Alak, I was just reading the tenure provisions of New York State’s Education law. (ed law sections 3012, 3014, 3020)
Clearly anyone with common sense was required to depart Albany prior to the drafting of that bill.
I struggled to understand the State’s interest in regulating to such a fne degree how individual school districts evaluate teachers. Unless that is that you equate the interests of the State with the interests of the leadership of the teachers’ union.