Note To Mulgrew: You Are Responsible For The Excessive Paperwork Problem Too

A teacher called into a WNYC interview with UFT President Michael Mulgrew yesterday to complain about all the excessive paperwork teachers are dealing with.

James Eterno posted about these excessive mandates last week:

The list below was sent to me from a NYC public school teacher.

Do you want to be a teacher today? Then understand that in many schools you will spend most of the day meeting multiple mandates like those enumerated here.

Dear Staff,

Please note that I will be looking at the following in a walk through tomorrow.

Please have these items labeled in a central location where I do not have to interrupt instruction.

Student folder
Display of work inside and outside of room
Comments on work
Date on work

Conference notes
Lesson plans
Student desks
General environment
Outside bulletin board
Leadership binders
Scaffolding of learning - charts
Rubrics
All assessments posted on line and analyzed
Inquiry binder for each grade - grade leaders
Inquiry notes for your struggling students
Discipline chart
Writing process chart

James goes on to note how Bloomberg won in the battle between the city and the union because all of these mandates have been pushed through without any changes to the contract (or, I would note, any extra compensation.)

Yesterday on WNYC Mulgrew blamed Bloomberg for the excessive paperwork too:

 Mulgrew also criticized the Bloomberg administration for creating unnecessary paperwork for teachers through what he called a burdensome "obsession" with accountability. Fariña has pledged changes to that effect, although she has yet to introduced change to the current paperwork system, and Mulgrew didn't specify what changes he'd like to see.

But what Mulgrew fails to say is that he agreed to much of this when he abdicated the evaluation system negotiation fight and hailed Governor Cuomo's proposal to have NYSED Commissioner John King impose an evaluation system on NYC teachers if Mulgrew and Bloomberg couldn't come to an agreement.

Much of the excessive paperwork has been instituted as part of the evaluation system, particularly the Danielson evaluation framework.

The union wanted to make sure that all 22 competencies of the Danielson framework were part of the evaluation system, allegedly to give teachers a better chance to receive positive evaluations, but with this came a ton of extra paperwork and compliance work like the mandates James Eterno listed in his post.

Gotham Schools covered that last year when SED Commissioner King announced the new evaluation system he was imposing on NYC teachers:

One of the only issues, it seemed, that the city and the union could agree on when it came to observations was which rubric to base them on. It turns out they lacked consensus even there.

The union proposed using the version of Charlotte Danielson’s rubric, called the Framework for Teaching, that teachers have used since the city’s Teacher Effectiveness Pilot started three years ago. The city advocated for the updated version, which came out this year and accounts for instructional practices required of teachers as the state transitions to the Common Core learning standards.

King, who has driven the state’s adoption and rollout of the Common Core, imposed the updated version.

Danielson components

The Danielson Framework contains 22 “components” broken down into four “domains.” Arguing that the framework’s elements are interrelated, the UFT wanted principals to have to consider all 22 components when rating teachers. But the city asked for only a subset of seven components to count. Both the city and UFT agreed that the domains that have to do with in-class instruction should get more weight than the domains that deal with teacher’s planning and after-class reflection.

In his ruling, King sided with the UFT. Since all of the components work together, he said, they should all factor into teachers’ ratings. He awarded 75 percent weight to the domains that the UFT and city agreed were more important.

So Mulgrew can blame Bloomberg all he wants for all the excessive paperwork and mandates teachers are drowning in these days.

The truth is, he is as much to blame as Bloomberg is - he pushed for the use of the Danielson framework to be used on teachers, he hailed the King evaluation system which imposes so much of this extra paperwork, he was defending this system as late as last September from detractors and critics (i.e., teachers who had to live under it), and he was the one who pushed the 22 competencies in the Damielson in the first place - according to reports, the DOE thought it was too much to do, but the UFT pushed it and King agreed.

In short, Mulgrew is as responsible for the excessive paperwork these days as Bloomberg is.