StudentsFirstNY, a statewide education reform group, and TNTP, a
national education reform group, has released a new report outlining
their recommendations for changes to the Buffalo Teachers Federation
contract. The report is endorsed by the Buffalo Niagara Partnership, but
many of the proposals are unlikely to be readily agreed to by the
teachers union.
Their seven-page report recommends higher starting salaries for
teachers -- an increase from $32,897 to at least $45,000 -- but it also
recommends that many changes that would require givebacks from the BTF,
including teacher contributions to health insurance, a devaluation of
teacher seniority, merit-based pay, longer school days, a more rigorous
tenure process, and fewer sick days.
The report overview states, "In many ways, the current agreement
actually makes it harder for teachers to get the pay and respect they
deserve, and harder for Buffalo’s schools to ensure that students are
afforded effective teachers who can provide a high-quality education."
Do they even read the garbage they write?
They write: "In many ways, the current agreement
actually makes it harder for teachers to get the pay and respect they
deserve."
Their remedy?
"An increase from $32,897 to at least $45,000 -- but it also
recommends that many changes that would require givebacks from the BTF,
including teacher contributions to health insurance, a devaluation of
teacher seniority, merit-based pay, longer school days, a more rigorous
tenure process, and fewer sick days."
Yeah, that'll get quality people to sign on to teach in Buffalo (or anywhere else they push this garbage.)
This is the second "report" out this week from an ed reform hack group calling for higher teacher pay to be offset with other "reforms."
NCTE also touted one.
You can see the framework for teachers contract going forward here - massive givebacks in every area for a little chunk of change in the beginning.
This one goes for the moon - seniority devaluation, merit pay, longer school days, tenure "reform," fewer sick days and cuts to health benefits for a little over $12,000.
No thanks.
Good luck selling that to prospective and current teachers as a sign of "respect."
Seven families will file suit Monday to end teacher tenure in the
fiercest attack yet on job protections enjoyed by New York State
educators.
The families, including five from some of the most impoverished
communities in the city, claim their children were underserved in school
due to incompetent teachers who only kept their jobs because of tenure
rules that violate kids’ constitutional right to a sound, basic
education.
The lawsuit will be filed in Albany and is backed by the politically
connected journalist-turned-education advocate, Campbell Brown.
“There’s no reason why my kids should not be reading on grade level.
The law should be changed,” said Nina Doster, 33, of South Ozone Park,
Queens. The mother of five is a plaintiff in the suit and also a paid
organizer for the StudentsFirstNY advocacy group.
“Every child should be subject to the best education and teaching in every classroom,” she said.
One of the plaintiffs is on the StudentsFirstNY payroll as an organizer?
Doesn't that set up at least the appearance of a conflict of interest in the case?
I mean, this parent is part of a lawsuit that is financially backed by the same financial interests that back StudentsFirstNY.
In any case, Brown's lawsuit here in New York is going to have a rougher road than the Vergara lawsuit in California.
But observers say it will take much more than just education horror stories to win the case.
Brown “has to prove inequity, inadequacy and causation — that the
different legal constellation in New York causes the learning issues
that we see throughout the state,” said David Bloomfield an education
professor at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.
Are teacher tenure and seniority rules the reasons why Ms. Doster's kids are not reading on grade level?
And do teacher tenure and seniority rules lead to systemic problems around the state that cause learning issues like this?
That's what Brown and her cohort have to prove.
To my mind, that they're using a paid organizer for StudentsFirstNY as one of the faces of that lawsuit to prove that says a lot about the legitimacy of the lawsuit.
So now what we have here is a woman who works for an organization that was led by Michah Lasher, a Bloomberg crony, suing over teacher tenure and seniority rules in the NYC school system that supposedly caused her children learning problems while Michael Bloomberg was running the system and Michah Lasher was pushing his agenda in Albany.
The people going after teacher tenure and seniority protections always claim that they want these gone so that when layoffs come, teachers can be retained based upon performance and value, not time with the district.
But according to one former employee, Microsoft - the company founded by one of the major opponents to teacher protections, Bill Gates - just let 18,000 people go randomly:
At the end of last week, Microsoft laid off 18,000 employees — some were laid off in a terribly insensitive memo written by Microsoft executive, Stephen Elop.
One
of those fired employees was Jerry Berg, who worked at the company for
15 years as a software developer. Berg or “Barnacules” is also the
creator of a popular YouTube channel, “Nergasm.” On Sunday, he took to
YouTube to explain the devastating layoff and what losing Microsoft’s
very comprehensive insurance plan means to his autistic son.
...
Berg stated, that the layoffs did not appear to be based on
performance or worth to the company, and he jokingly speculates that an
algorithm may have had a role.
“Somehow, some algorithm put me on a
list, and that was the end of it,” Berg explained. “I’d like to think
that I was probably laid off by a computer. A computer put me on a list
for whatever reason and sent me packing.”
Berg says that some who were laid off were "people I know have personally saved the Windows project countless times" - nonetheless, out they went, with a severance package and key card access revoked as of Sunday.
Berg says his severance package was generous and will give him a few months to transition to new work but
That's very little consolation when you think about how many years you put into that company. And it's one thing if you're a bad performer. If you're a bad performer and you're not doing much for the company, that's one thing. But I had a unique set of skills that I had honed over the years. I know a lot of the systems, a lot of the infrastructure, I've made myself a place, I've made myself a permanent fixture at Microsoft and somehow some algorithm just put me on a list and that was the end of it. Nobody went and looked at my track record, nobody went and looked at my performance, nobody went and figured out, 'Wait a second, this guy could be an asset elsewhere in the company, we should move him!" It was just easier for them to cut everybody that was on the list.
Think about all of this the next time you hear Gates or any of the other prominent corporate reformers talk about how important it is that districts be given the ability to lay off based upon "performance."
By concluding that the due process protections afforded to educators
under tenure denied students "equal opportunity to achieve a quality
education," Judge Treu seems to ignore that correlation does not prove
causation.
If tenure unfairly protects teachers, there should be a
considerably higher number of teachers fired per year at schools where
tenure is not available. The data, however, show
that is not the case. Believing tenure is to blame for low termination
rates and proving that tenure keeps bad teachers in the classroom are
two very different things.
Additionally if Judge Treu believes
that tenure results in the retention of bad teachers which leads to an
unequal opportunity for students to achieve then he must believe that
the counterfactual is true. This means Judge Treu feels that hiring new
teachers will lead to equal opportunity for all students because if it
doesn't then the correlation between tenure and student achievement is
anecdotal.
Unfortunately, data show that new hires are less effective
than their more experienced counterparts. Given that 46 percent of
teachers leave the profession in the first five years, it should come as
no surprise that those individuals that administrators have observed,
mentored and granted tenure are more skilled than those fresh out of
college.
If teacher tenure was the problem in public education, then states and districts without tenure protections should be at the top of list for test score performance, graduation rates, college attainment rates, etc.
But they're not - the states and districts that are at the top of the performance list are the ones with the highest numbers of unionized teachers who enjoy work protections like tenure.
Corporate reformers don't really care about improving education for children - the attacks on tenure and teacher work protections are all about giving states and districts the tools to slimline their work forces and cut labor costs.
An education advocacy group on Thursday threw down the first challenge to New York’s teacher tenure laws in the wake of a landmark court decision in California last month finding such laws there unconstitutional.
A
lawsuit filed in State Supreme Court on Staten Island argues that the
tenure laws violate the State Constitution’s guarantee of a “sound basic
education” by making it difficult to fire bad teachers and by
protecting the most veteran teachers in the event of layoffs, regardless
of their quality. The suit, filed against city and state education
officials, names as plaintiffs 11 public school students whose parents
belong to a group known as the New York City Parents Union.
...
Mona Davids, the president of the New York City Parents Union, said the
suit was modeled on the Vergara case, in which Judge Rolf M. Treu of Los
Angeles Superior Court ruled that the tenure laws deprived students of
their right to an education under the California Constitution and
violated their civil rights. He also ruled that seniority rules
requiring the newest teachers to be laid off first, as in periods of
economic downturn, were harmful.
The Times article raises some reasons why the tenure suit may not work the way it did in California:
Already, the California Federation of Teachers has vowed to appeal the
decision in the case, Vergara v. California. And union leaders, legal
analysts and others said it would be difficult to gain any traction on
the issue in New York’s judiciary.
“It is basically unprecedented for a court to get into the weeds of a controversial education policy matter like this,” said Michael A. Rebell,
an education lawyer and professor at Teachers College at Columbia
University. “Even if a court agrees there is a problem, they are more
likely to defer to the legislative branch, which, in New York, has been
trying to deal with these complex tenure issues and knows more about the
workings of these policies.”
...
In New York, teachers can earn tenure after a three-year
probationary period, which city school officials can extend for another
year, and often do. That represents one big difference with California,
where teachers can win tenure after 18 months, and even before being
certified.
Once granted, tenure in New York does not
afford any advantages in pay or job assignments. Its most important
benefit, in the eyes of teachers’ unions, is protection against
indiscriminate, unjustified or politically tinged hiring and firing.
“Tenure
doesn’t protect bad teachers,” said Carl Korn, a spokesman for New York
State United Teachers, the statewide union, adding that its lawyers are
“already gearing up” to defend tenure in court. “It allows good ones to
fight for what students need.”
State education officials
say that a new teacher evaluation law, which assigns teachers one of
four grades each year, will make it easier to fire teachers who
repeatedly get poor marks, although very few did so in the first year
that the law was in effect.
“With that evaluation system,
the teachers who get promoted, the teachers who stay, would be the
teachers who are high performing,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said when asked
last month about the Vergara case.
Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project,
which has advocated changes in the way teachers are hired and fired,
agreed that the new evaluation system could help remove bad teachers in
New York, in contrast with California, which he said had “a very
outmoded system for evaluating teachers.”
Daly does think challenges to seniority have a better shot here in NY State than a tenure challenge.
New York laws are different - it takes longer to get tenure, in NYC many
teachers never get tenure at all and some have to wait well over the
mandated three years to get it.
In addition, the APPR teacher evaluation system allows districts to fire teachers who come up "ineffective" two years in a row.
The argument that was used in California - "grossly ineffective"
teachers cannot be fired without a long cumbersome process - doesn't
hold water here.
So the deformers are looking to broaden the case, adding seniority rules around layoffs and performance pay to the mix.
They may be able to craft an argument around seniority, but I have a
difficult time seeing them craft one around performance pay.
I'd like to see the judge in New York who agrees that students' civil
rights have been violated because their teachers are ineligible for
merit pay.
Often these deformers exist in a deform echo chamber where they say
stuff that makes sense to everybody in their little circle, but once
they get outside that circle, people look at them like they're crazy.
Arguing that students' civil rights have been violated because their
teachers aren't eligible for merit pay is one of those cases.
I maintain the same thinking on this issue today - I think APPR and the longer probationary period before tenure put a severe crimp in any tenure challenge mounted in the NY courts.
The performance pay challenge is insane - "Judge, children are having their civil rights trampled upon because their teachers are not eligible for performance pay."
Yeah, good luck with that challenge.
Seniority rules will be the challenge that we'll have to watch going forward.
One of things we're starting to see, however, is that deformers are looking like they're going to throw as many challenges against the courthouse wall to see if any stick.
I'm not a lawyer, but my sense is, the wider you make the cases, the more likely they are to get tossed.
So it will be interesting to see how this all ends up.
One thing I do know - none of this has anything to do with the quality of education children get.
If they wanted to fix that, they'd lower class sizes, stop the Endless Testing regime, and cease handing out Common Core homework that makes both children and parents cry.
A new advocacy group is helping parents
prepare a challenge to New York's teacher tenure and seniority laws,
contending that they violate children's constitutional right to a sound
basic education by keeping ineffective teachers in classrooms.
Campbell
Brown, a former CNN anchor who has been a critic of job protections for
teachers, launched the group, Partnership for Educational Justice, in
December. She said six students have agreed to serve as plaintiffs,
arguing they suffered from laws making it too expensive, time-consuming
and burdensome to fire bad teachers.
The
preparations to challenge the state's tenure laws this summer follow a
landmark ruling in California earlier this month. Los Angeles Superior
Court Judge Rolf M. Treu struck down the state's laws on tenure,
dismissal and seniority, saying they disproportionately saddled poor and
minority students with incompetent teachers. Evidence that ineffective
teachers hurt learning, he wrote, "shocks the conscience."
California
unions that intervened in the case, Vergara v. California, said they
would appeal, and legal analysts predicted the ruling would inspire
similar suits around the country.
Carl
Korn, spokesman for New York State United Teachers, said his union
believes the Vergara decision will be overturned, and the facts are
different in New York than in California. While he said that New York's
new evaluation system has flaws, it aims to bolster teacher quality.
"The
system is designed to help all teachers improve, and for those who
struggle or don't belong in the system, to remove them in an expedited
hearing," he said.
Michael Mulgrew,
president of the United Federation of Teachers in New York City,
said by email: "It is a shame so many so-called 'reformers' can't find a
way to do something that would actually help students, teachers and
schools."
Ms. Brown wants a verdict in
her group's case to spur legislators to come up with better education
policies. "My hope is this would be a wake-up call to politicians who
failed to solve these problems for years," she said.
Her
team has been meeting with parents to find plaintiffs. One is Jada
Williams in Rochester, who wrote a seventh-grade essay complaining about
teachers who she said gave no real instruction and failed to manage
unruly students. Her mother, Carla, said in an interview: "When a child
in class is educationally neglected, that's a criminal act."
David Welch,
the Silicon Valley entrepreneur who financed Students Matter, the
advocacy group that filed the Vergara suit, has given Ms. Brown
guidance, and came to a meeting of about 30 people at her apartment in
April to discuss it, she said. A mother of two children in private
school, Ms. Campbell said she gave seed money to the Partnership for
Educational Justice. She declined to disclose other donors. She has
applied for nonprofit status.
Jay Lefkowitz,
a senior partner at Kirkland & Ellis, is leading the New York
case pro bono. Mr. Lefkowitz, a former deputy assistant to President
George W. Bush,
fought for Wisconsin's school vouchers and prevailed through the U.S. Supreme Court.
Mr.
Lefkowitz said "it boggles the mind" that in the New York education
system the vast majority of teachers were rated effective or better last
year even though 69% of students in grades three through eight didn't
pass state proficiency tests.
"The
system lacks integrity and students are being forced to pay the price,"
he said. Unions often note that many factors affect learning, such as
poverty and parent involvement.
Mr.
Lefkowitz said he plans to challenge statutes mandating that during
budget cuts, districts must dismiss the newest teachers first, with no
consideration of their performance. Unions have long argued that without
seniority rules, districts would lay off more highly paid veterans to
save money.
He said he will also
challenge what he said are overly complicated disciplinary procedures
that dissuade administrators from trying to revoke tenure; some of these
cases have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees.
Union
officials emphasize that tenure doesn't guarantee a job for life, but
enforces due process to shield teachers from arbitrary firings, nepotism
and vindictive bosses. A district may seek to revoke tenure if a
teacher gets two bad annual ratings in a row.
Mr.
Lefkowitz plans to argue teachers are granted tenure before it is clear
they deserve it. In New York, teachers generally get tenure at the end
of three years of acceptable service, but principals can add another
probationary year.
In the California
case, the plaintiffs brought an equal-protection claim, arguing that a
disproportionate share of bad teachers end up in schools serving
disadvantaged students.
The New York
constitution says children have a right to a "sound basic education."
Mr. Lefkowitz plans to argue that laws leading to the retention of
ineffective teachers hurt students no matter what their background. He
said he plans to file the suit in New York Supreme Court in Albany.
I think the plaintiffs in this case will have a more difficult time getting the verdict they want because
a) tenure takes longer to get in NY - many teachers are taking 4 or 5 years before they are getting it in NYC - and many teachers never get tenure at all and just leave the system and
b) APPR effectively ended tenure protections - teachers can be fired two years running if they're rated "ineffective"
The plaintiffs can argue that it costs millions to fire so-called "bad teachers" all they want.
Under APPR, it takes two years of "ineffective" ratings to fire teachers - something that is easily engineered the way the system was devised by the state.
Reformers can also claim that 69% of students were less than proficient on the state exams, so 69% of teachers must be less than effective all they want as well.
That argument is easily countered by the moves the governor and the Legislature made to acknowledge how awful the CCSS implementation was, something that directly affected the state test scores, as well as all the publicity surrounding the SED artificially setting the new CCSS test bar a lot higher than the one for the old tests.
I don't think Campbell Brown and her merry men and women in reform are going to have as easy a time in this kind of suit as the reformers had in the initial Vergara case hearing.
Last August Frank Bruni was won over by the anti-teachers union/pro-parent trigger propaganda film "Won't Back Down."
Frank loved the film and it's anti-teachers union message so much that he managed to miss how bad the film itself was - something the rest of the country did notice. The movie was one of the lowest grossing films ever.
“Won’t Back Down” tells the David-versus-Goliath story of a single
mother, played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who leads a rebellion to wrest
control of her daughter’s persistently abysmal public elementary school
from local officials. It’s scheduled for release next month, although it
was shown to Weingarten a few weeks ago. I saw it on Wednesday.
And it actually takes pains to portray many teachers as impassioned
do-gooders who are as exasperated as parents are by the education
system’s failures — and by uncaring colleagues in their midst. But I
understand Weingarten’s upset. The union that represents one of those
do-gooders (Viola Davis) has lost its way, resisting change, resorting
to smear tactics and alienating the idealists in its ranks. What’s more,
some of the people who are assertively promoting “Won’t Back Down” are
those who cast teachers’ unions as a titanic impediment to the
improvement of public education. So “Won’t Back Down” is emerging as the
latest front in the continuing war between those unions and their
legions of critics, and it has become yet another example of how
negatively those unions are viewed.
“When did Norma Rae get to be the bad guy?” asks a union leader (Holly
Hunter) in the movie. I don’t know, but that’s indeed the state of play
when it comes to teachers’ unions, and it’s a dangerous one.
...
Over the years, the teachers’ unions have indeed guarded tenure
protections and last-in-first-out layoff practices to a zealous degree
that could at times seem indifferent to the welfare of schoolchildren.
“We bear a lot of responsibility for this,” Weingarten told me in a
phone interview on Friday. “We were focused — as unions are — on
fairness and not as much on quality.” And they’ve sometimes shown a
spectacular blindness to public sensitivities in their apparent
protection of certain embattled teachers in given instances.
Frank goes on to write that teachers need to be more flexible and give up their work protections like seniority and tenure in order to make the public education system better.
Because it's work protections like seniority and tenure that cause all the problems in schools, don'tcha know!
COLUMBUS, Ohio — No one at the Catholic high school that fired Carla
Hale in March claimed that she was anything less than a terrific
physical education teacher and coach, devoted to the kids and adored by
many of them.
No one accused her of bringing her personal life into the gym or onto
the fields. By nature she’s private. And she loved her job too much to
risk it that way.
But she lost it nonetheless, and the how is as flabbergasting as the why is infuriating.
Rather suddenly, her mother died, and an hour afterward, she and her
brother numbly went through the paces of a standard obituary, listing
survivors. Her brother included his wife. So Carla included
her partner, Julie, whom her mother had known well and loved. Leaving
Julie out would have been unthinkable, though Carla didn’t really think
it through at the time. Her grief was still raw.
A parent of one of the school’s students spotted the obituary, and wrote
an anonymous letter to the school and to the Diocese of Columbus,
saying that they couldn’t allow a woman like Carla to educate Catholic
children.
So they don’t, not anymore. In a termination notice, the principal
explained that Carla’s “spousal relationship violates the moral laws of
the Catholic Church.” That was the sum of the stated grievance against
her, and after more than 18 years at Bishop Watterson High School,
Carla, 57, was done.
Frank's upset, and rightfully so, that a "terrific physical education teacher and coach," one who was "devoted to the kids and adored many of them" was fired for being a lesbian and living with her partner.
Frank notes the hypocrisy of the church over this and reports that "Neither the federal government nor Ohio outlaws employment discrimination based on sexual orientation," though the city of Columbus does.
Still, Frank writes, Hale's lawyer is not sure whether the Columbus statute can be applied to religious groups.
I wonder, did Frank consider how a union with its work protections - including outlawing employment discrimination based upon sexual orientation - could have saved Hale her job?
Because they could have.
Frank doesn't like teachers unions in general and doesn't like work protections like seniority or tenure for teachers in particular, so it probably didn't occur to him that what happened to Hale is Exhibit A for why teachers need work protections like seniority and tenure.
But the truth is, the fewer work protections teachers have across the country, the more these kinds of firings will take place.
Frank is rightly outraged Hale was fired from a Catholic school for being a lesbian.
But if Frank Bruni gets his way on work protections for teachers in public schools, you can bet some teachers will be fired from the public schools for the same reason in the near future.
If you're paying attention to the LIFO issue, the last few hours have been pretty wild.
As of 8:40 PM, here is where we stand with the LIFO changes.
The State Senate Education Committee passed Mayor Bloomberg's LIFO proposal, but with "lukewarm" Republican support - 10 members of the committee voted to advance the bill out of committee, but 6 did so "without recommendation."
The Senate as a whole voted on the bill in the evening and passed it 33-27 with two Dems not voting.
Assembly Speaker Silver said the Assembly would NOT take up the bill and referred the issue to the Board of Regents. The Regents are working on new teacher evaluation systems as part of the Race to the Top legislation passed last year that NYSED Commissioner David Steiner says would supersede any changes to LIFO.
Then, moments after the State Senate passed the LIFO bill, Governor Cuomo issued his own LIFO proposal that closely tailors the RttT guidelines but moves the timeline up by a year. Teachers would be evaluated under the new ratings starting in 2011-2012 under Cuomo's proposal rather than starting in 2012-2013 as decreed by the RttT legislation.
Cuomo's legislation essentially undermines tenure and seniority protections for teachers, but unlike Bloomberg's LIFO bill, does so ALL across the state rather than just in NYC.
Bloomberg's aides trashed the Cuomo proposal tonight because the governor issued it without consulting with Bloomberg first and did not give Bloomberg the power to lay off teachers indiscriminately right NOW.
I haven't seen any comments from either the UFT or Assembly Speaker Silver.
ALBANY, NEW YORK (WXXI) - The push to change teacher hiring rules to end the policy of last hired first fired got a boost when Governor Andrew Cuomo introduced a bill to extend the proposal to all schools in the state.
The Senate passed a one house bill that would end what's known as LIFO, the last in first out policy for unionized teachers in New York City, something Mayor Mike Bloomberg has requested as a tool to better manage expected teacher lay offs. Moments later, Governor Andrew Cuomo released his own bill, that would end LIFO in all schools in the state and institute a new teacher rating system for the 2011, 2012 school year.
"It is time to move beyond the so-called 'last in, first out' system of relying exclusively on seniority," Governor Cuomo said. "However, we need a legitimate evaluation system to rely upon. This will help make a statewide evaluation system ready and allow us to replace 'last in, first out.'"
Senate Education Committee Chair John Flanagan says he knows the bill will create "consternation and angst", but he is open to it.
Flanagan says the bill will cause "consternation and angst" because he knows that most Republicans do NOT want these changes in their districts.
The debate was relatively speedy, with Flanagan casting the bill as a common-sense measure with numerous provisions designed to bring stakeholders to the negotiating table to work out an agreement that would supersede the legislation. As in this morning’s Education Committee hearing, Sen. Suzi Oppenheimer said the chamber shouldn’t be legislating a matter more appropriately handled in negotiation.
Sen. Kevin Parker earned murmurs for pointing out that if Flanagan’s bill was so effective at improving teacher performance, why didn’t it apply in Flanagan’s own Long Island district, or elsewhere in the state?
So will Senate Republicans be ready to make changes in their own districts for the 2011-2012 school year?
And just how fair can this system be if it's being rammed through so fast.
Bad news if you're a teacher.
Lots of unknowns here and let's face it, when it comes to unknowns, that usually means teachers are scapegoated, blamed and ultimately fired.
Just ask the teachers in Central Falls or Providence.
UPDATE: At 6:56 PM, NY 1 reports that Bloomberg says he has not seen Cuomo's proposal but STILL wants his proposal to abolish seniority-based layoffs passed as soon as possible:
Like I noted earlier today, the news accounts of the Mayor4Life's threatened layoffs have so far been almost entirely FROM THE MAYOR'S PERSPECTIVE.
There have been few questions about whether these layoffs are necessary given the mayor's bragging that he has a budget surplus, two billion in extra tax revenue and the governor says they don't have to happen.
Instead the issue has been framed from the perspective that layoffs HAVE to happen, that they are a force of nature that CANNOT be stopped (kinda like a tsunami or really bad diarrhea) but they CAN be mitigated by changes to seniority rules which would allow the mayor to lay off "bad" teachers instead of "good" young ones. But the EVIL teachers union has refused to budge on these archaic (and perhaps communistic) seniority rules and so some schools (particularly ones in Harlem) are going to lose as many as 70% of their teachers and the children will be taught by the custodians and bedbugs.
Or something like that.
There is just NO WAY for the union to win a political fight about layoffs and seniority when that's the way the issue is framed.
So it's imperative that Mulgrew and company stop dining on quail and get out the message that these layoffs DO NOT HAVE TO HAPPEN, that the mayor is CHOOSING to lay people off because he WANTS to, not because he HAS to.
It is also important that the UFT point out all the things Bloomberg and the DOE WASTE money on - like CityTime, tax breaks for rich condo owners, no bid contracts that go millions over budget, etc.
Finally it is important for Mulgrew and company to DEFEND seniority anyway, to note that seniority protects older teachers and veterans who WILL ALWAYS be the ones laid off if seniority protections are weakened or destroyed. In addition, if seniority protections are ended, layoffs will happen EVERY year instead of once every two generations because the mayor and the DOE will be able to FIRE ANYBODY THEY WANT FOR ANY REASON THEY WANT WHENEVER THEY WANT.
These are the important frames for this issue to me, and so far, I haven't seen Mulgrew address the issues very well in the corporate media.
Or if he is framing the issues that way, the corporate media certainly isn't going with that particular frame.
This NY 1 article, for example, STILL frames the issue from the mayor's perspective. The article even uses parents upset about LIFO, saying they don't understand why the union won't budge on seniority instead of FORCING the city to lay off all these great teachers.
Arghh!!!!
I wish I could say to these folks, "Listen, I understand your feelings, but this is an issue that the mayor HIMSELF is forcing. Your kids DON'T have to lose their teachers AT ALL. There is plenty of money in the budget to KEEP ALL of these teachers, but the mayor refuses to do so.
Instead he is FORCING this issue because he is playing politics with the seniority rules.
Why is it so DIFFICULT to get this essential TRUTH about the layoff issue out?
If the union is unable to get this message out SOON, they will lose on this issue and we will see layoffs EVERY year, no matter how the budget looks or the economy is doing because the mayor and the DOE are ALWAYS going to look to save money by laying off veteran teachers.
Just the way they love to lay off older people in private enterprise and private corporations.
They used to call it downsizing.
Then it got renamed outsourcing.
Whatever you want to call it, it basically means that if you hit a certain age or make a certain level of income, when a company decides to let people go, your ass is first on the list.
If the mayor and his ed deform shills are allowed to win this seniority issue, the school system will quickly become a 5 YEAR AND UNDER racket.
I know that's exactly what Bloomberg, Obama, Christie, Rhee, Klein, Black, Cuomo, et al. want.
But the public doesn't know that's what they want.
The public needs to be informed about this.
Perhaps they think it's a good idea to have a constantly rotating teacher corps of 22-27-year old Barbie and Ken Educators4Excellence dolls in the classroom.
But I doubt it.
They, like most humans, know that the schools need both younger and older teachers, that experience in both the classroom and life informs a teacher's work as much as the energy and verve that the ed deformers say the younger teachers bring.
That has been my experience, at any rate.
I suspect it has been the experience of many of you out there in the DOE too.
Now let's get this TRUTH across to the city.
And UFTer's, for god sakes, can you frame an issue correctly for once?
They are about a mayor and a power elite that would rather cut income taxes on millionaires and let millionaire condo owners pay pennies to the dollar on their real estate taxes while slashing school budgets to the bone and laying teachers off than do what's right for the school system.
And of course all the papers frame the story the way he wants it framed and will no doubt frame the Albany story the way the mayor wants it framed too unless some Assemblyman gets up in his face and says he's full of shit pushing this LIFO issue when layoffs do NOT have to happen because the city has a surplus and $2 billion extra in tax revenue.
I guess media coordination is what you get when you have a billionaire media mogul with close allies at all the other corporate-owned media outlets who wants to get out his anti-union anti-teacher propaganda aimed at creating fear among teachers, students and parents so that he can demagogue the LIFO issue.
Bloomberg says he is laying teachers off despite a budget surplus, $2 billion in extra tax revenue this year and the declaration by Governor Cuomo that no school layoffs have to happen in NYC. Tonight he released the school layoff list as a scare tactic to get the State Senate and Assembly to change seniority rules for him so that he can lay off whomever he wants whenever he wants:
The New York City Department of Education made public on Sunday a list that estimates the number of teachers each school will lose to layoffs if the state does not allocate more money for schools and seniority rules are not changed.
The layoffs, totaling 4,675 teachers, 6 percent of the active teachers in the system, would spare virtually no academic subject or neighborhood, and they would affect 80 percent of the approximately 1,600 public schools in the city. Most would lose one to five teachers; nine would lose half of the teachers they have.
The list details the worst case, and its projections may never materialize. City Hall chose to release it as the State Senate prepared to vote on a bill that would allow the city to lay off teachers based on factors like performance and disciplinary records, rather than seniority. By releasing the list, the department hopes to draw more parents to its corner by reminding them that virtually no school would be untouched.
The mayor DOESN'T need to lay off any teachers.
He's doing this to get his way on seniority.
Will it work?
Dunno.
I do know that if I were a parent in a school that was going to see a ton of layoffs, I wouldn't be mad at HOW the layoffs were done, I would be mad AT the guy who did the layoffs, especially since the governor says they don't have to happen.
That would be Bloomberg.
Given all the money he spends on no bid contracts and outside consultants, all the money he refuses to collect from rich condo owners for taxes, all the money he spends on testing contracts and the like, the money is ABSOLUTELY in the budget to stave off layoffs.
That is the bottom line here
As Mulgrew said:
"I think it's clearly a strategy of the mayor to try to create fear and panic amongst people when he has a three billion dollar surplus and doesn't need to do layoffs.
I posted yesterday that if the Assembly and State Senate bills are passed that allow the mayor to lay off teachers using measures other than seniority - like ever being "u" rated or convicted of any crime or fined by the DOE - the first thing I would do after receiving such a notice is seek legal counsel to protect myself and my job.
A bill introduced in the Senate and soon to be introduced in the Assembly seeks to change the law that requires teachers to be laid off solely on the basis of seniority. It aims at the 529 New York City teachers who have been convicted of crimes.
The bill also aims to put at the top of the layoff list those teachers who have been rated "unsatisfactory" by principals; who have been absent or late too often; or who have faced misconduct allegations that have been substantiated.
The assistant general counsel for New York State United Teachers, Claude Hersh, said he doubts there are 529 teachers who have been convicted of crimes, as most in that position tend to seek out the union for help. He said there are fewer than 50 such cases coming through his office each year, and added that the Department of Education has the option of seeking to dismiss any teacher convicted of a crime, but doesn't always do so.
Mr. Hersh also said that in many cases the crimes are related to teachers who did not properly disclose their incomes as they sought to continue to qualify for subsidized public housing.
The DOE did not provide figures for how often it seeks to dismiss teachers who have been convicted of crimes.
"The vast majority of our teachers are law-abiding citizens who are doing a great job—but, if we have to lay off 4,600 teachers, we certainly think those who have been convicted of crimes should be laid off before a good teacher who has done nothing wrong," said a DOE spokeswoman, Natalie Ravitz.
Legal experts said picking off teachers merely because of their convictions is problematic. State law bars discriminating against people with criminal convictions unless the crime was directly related to the job at hand.
"It's unfair and discriminatory for all employers in New York, not just school teachers, to hold against someone a conviction based on conduct that had nothing to do with the fitness of their job," said Samuel Estreicher, who teaches labor and employment law at the New York University School of Law.
Okay - couple of things here:
First, note that the DOE can ALREADY fire teachers convicted of a crime, but the NYSUT says they don't always seek to do so.
Next, note that the NYSUT doubts the figure of teachers convicted of crimes publicly disclosed by the mayor and the DOE.
Gee - Mayor Moneybags and the DOE lying about data? What a surprise!
Then note that they're going to seek to fire ANYBODY ever convicted of ANY crime - including someone who has been arrested and convicted of trespassing or making a public nuisance during a public protest or someone who got arrested for some public vandalism as a teenager.
In other words, misdemeanors AND felonies will be treated the same under these layoff provisions.
Look, I'm not out to defend teachers convicted of crimes, but I do want to make the point that this is Bloomberg, the DFER's and all the other anti-union forces looking to manipulate public opinion by tarring any teacher ever "u" rated, arrested for something or fined as some scumbag criminal malcontent who belongs in jail, not a NYC classroom.
If that is so, then the DOE ALREADY has the means to seek their dismissal - as they have with the two teachers allegedly found to be having sex in a classroom or the former sex worker who openly bragged about her prostitution past on her blog.
So for the mayor and the DOE and the DFERer's and the Journal to make believe like there is a whole bunch of scumbag criminal malcontents in NYC schools who ought to be fired is just jive.
This is about PUBLIC MANIPULATION to get their way on a larger issue that will allow them to lay off senior teachers at will and save the system millions of dollars.
Finally, let me state again that if the state senate and assembly bills go through with the convoluted provisions for how to lay off teachers using "U" ratings, two years of "bad" student test scores as measured by a value-added assessment with 12%-35% margins of error, a criminal conviction, or a DOE fine, there are SO MANY grounds to sue on, both individually as a teacher and collectively as a union, that the first thing everybody who gets notice should do is LAWYER UP.
Here is the portal to find contact info for your assemblyperson, your state senator and the governor.
Call them, email them, leave a message - let them KNOW that while ending LIFO seems like a common sensical thing to do, the rationale that will be used to lay off or fire teachers will be very simple - how much money do they make?
The vets will go, the cheaper rookies will stay.
That's the issue in a nutshell.
So start calling and let's let them KNOW what teachers - actual working teachers, not two year Asshats4edcuators who know work as DFER lobbyists - think about this legislation.
Both the Post and NY1 are hailing a Q poll out showing that 85% of New Yorkers are opposed to using seniority over "merit" as the basis for teacher layoffs.
And of course the corporate whores at Gotham Schools roll with that story at the top of their education listings this morning.
The pushback on this "poll" is very simple - if seniority rules are displaced by "merit" rules for layoffs, school districts are ALWAYS going to lay off expensive, veteran teachers and keep cheaper newbies regardless of merit, talent, skill, or expertise.
Because the "merit" can always be ginned up just the way the principal in the Bronx tried to gin up "U" ratings against teachers she didn't like so that they could be rubber roomed or fired.
That's it - that's the deal.
So until some "objective" form of "merit" can be found to evaluate teachers - and value-added evaluation systems using student test scores that have 12%-35% margins of error are NOT that form - seniority MUST be kept in place or you will see a mass firing of good veteran teachers and a hiring of cheap 22 year old rookies.
That of course was not how the LIFO question was framed by the polling firm.
And that is why the results came back with 85% approving of ending LIFO.
You can be sure the corporate whores at the Post, the News, the Times, NY 1 and Gotham Schools will use this in the coming weeks to push their corporate-driven agenda to end seniority and tenure.
The framing of the pushback is simple - end seniority and there will be no more senior teachers because Bloomberg and his principals will fire them all and hire much cheaper, less knowledgeable and less experienced newbies - not to make the system better, but simply to save money.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s “Last In, First Out” proposal, to nullify a law which forces layoffs of teachers to be based on seniority, may officially be on the table for discussion, but many legislators, especially Democrats, say it will not get very far.
“I’ve spoke to several of my Assembly colleagues, even my Senate colleagues, and this is nothing that we would do. Mainly the city ones, we would never do that,” said Democratic Queens Senator Shirley Huntley.
With more than 6,000 jobs on the chopping block, the mayor says school principals should be able to fire the worst teachers, regardless of how long they have been on the job.
Many lawmakers say despite the mayors claim that the provision hurts poorer districts, they argue that a provision like the mayor's should be negotiated through collective bargaining.
“It’s just giving too much leverage to the City of New York,” said Huntley.
Some say it has nothing to do with bad teachers but comes down to cash.
“Economic realities -- I think that’s the real reason we’re being faced by this particular push at this period of time,” said Queens Assemblyman Jeffrion Aubry.
...
Senate Republicans said they were considering Bloomberg's "Last In, First Out" proposal, but were holding their cards close to the vest.
“I don’t think we’re even close to something coming across the finish line, so to speak,” said Republican Senate Education Committee Chair John Flanagan.
Republican Brooklyn Senator Martin Golden was also vague, but made it clear eliminating seniority protections is a tricky move.
“I’m not one way or the other on the issues. I want to make sure that the teacher who works hard in the public school system, that he or she is protected,” said Golden.
When Senate Republicans aren't jumping at the bit to change seniority rules for layoffs, you'd have to say that the chances that Bloomberg, Zuckerman and Murdoch (the Roman Ruling Triumvirate of NYC) are successful at getting the changes through are pretty slim - especially with Silver and the Dems in the Assembly so opposed to the changes.
We'll see - things could switch, Bloomberg could buy people off, etc.
But so far, Bloomberg has not convinced the people that matter that these changes should happen.
Black is but one part of the sophisticated campaign to rewrite the teacher-layoff rules. The Post’s news pages have been trumpeting a group of younger teachers who are supposedly rebelling against the inflexibility of the UFT’s leadership; the group is fueled in part by $160,000 that a private group co-chaired by Klein passed along from the Gates Foundation, one of the most powerful backers of Bloomberg’s education reform. Closing the circle, Klein now works for Post owner Rupert Murdoch. The ultimate target of all this lobbying is Governor Andrew Cuomo, whose backing is key to any significant overhaul of teacher-layoff policies. “A lot hinges on where Andrew comes down,” one Bloomberg adviser says. The mayor’s campaign contributions to State Senate Republicans could pay off as well. “If we have [Republican majority leader Dean] Skelos onboard and pass a good bill out of the State Senate, and raise enough public attention on the issue, through editorials and ads and everything else, and the governor is pounding away, it gets harder for Shelly [Silver, the Assembly majority leader] to ignore it,” another Bloomberg strategist says. He also highlights a further bit of leverage. “Quite frankly, this is Rupert’s top issue,” he says. “Does Andrew really want to lose the Post over this? And also make enemies of Mort Zuckerman and Bloomberg in his first few months?” If Cuomo pushes for the union and the city to negotiate a relaxation of the seniority rules, it would be an enormous victory for Bloomberg, with a minor assist from Black. But her real campaign is only beginning.
I'll say this for the anti-tenure/anti-seniority ed deformers - they're well-coordinated, well-heeled, well-oiled and well-funded.
Ever since the ACLU successfully sued to change some seniority-based layoffs in California schools, I have been waiting to hear the DFER's and the educorporatists and the politicians push a similar strategy here.
New York's "last in, first out" law, which requires that teachers be fired based on seniority rather than merit during a budget crisis, could be struck down as illegal, legal experts told The Post.
"You don't have to be a great constitutional scholar to figure this out," said Mark Rosenbaum, chief counsel of the American Civil Liberties Union's Southern California branch.
The reason is simple, Rosenbaum said. LIFO layoffs disproportionately hit the neediest students, most of whom attend struggling, difficult-to-staff schools with the highest percentage of junior teachers. These schools suffer the greatest loss of instructors under a strict seniority-based layoff policy because they have the most new hires and fewest veteran teachers.
"You can't learn if you have a revolving door of teachers. It's a disgrace," Rosenbaum said.
But the ACLU did something about it -- at least in California. The group sued the state when LIFO-based layoffs decimated dozens of struggling schools in the LA school district -- arguing it violated students' "equal opportunity" to be educated.
And last month, plaintiffs won a court settlement that exempts 45 of LA's most troubled schools from the LIFO law. The California teachers union is appealing the ruling.
Do you know what disproportionately hits the neediest students?
When Bloomberg and the NYCDOE purposely starve schools that serve students who need extra resources because they want to close them and open charter schools in their places.
State lawmakers are secretly eyeing a compromise that would allow Mayor Bloomberg to fire thousands of "nonteaching teachers" without consideration of the "last in, first out" law, The Post has learned.
The plan, being discussed at the highest levels of the Legislature and with aides to Bloomberg, would grant the mayor the right to fire between 2,000 to 4,000 nonclassroom teachers -- including all those who formerly languished in the notorious "rubber room" under disciplinary charges.
The plan would also target members of the "absent teacher reserve pool" -- which includes nonworking but on-the-payroll teachers from schools that have been shut down because of poor performance -- and teachers assigned only to "administrative functions," sources said.
Bloomberg warned Friday that the city might be forced to lay off as many as 20,000 teachers because of a combination of a city revenue shortfall and the severe state budget cuts to be unveiled tomorrow by Gov. Cuomo. If the plan becomes reality, about 10 to 20 percent of teachers slated for layoffs simply because they were hired last would be spared.
Bloomberg, conceding that significant teacher cuts are inevitable, has launched an aggressive campaign to overturn the state law that requires the city to fire teachers on the basis of seniority and not competence.
State lawmakers privately say Bloomberg can't win full repeal of the law because of intense union opposition and concerns over the criteria the mayor would use to justify teacher dismissals.
But the dismissal of poorly performing "nonteaching teachers" was described by a top state official as "potentially doable."
Cuomo and Senate Republicans have signaled they're open to such a measure, but Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) and his union-funded Democratic Conference have yet to weigh in.
As always, take ANYTHING written in the Murdoch Post (or any Murdoch "news" outlet, for that matter) with a grain of salt.
But it isn't too hard to believe that Cuomo and the Senate are working behind the scenes to give Bloomberg the power to fire at will.
Silver and the Assembly are all that stands in the way of this.
And once the mayor is given the ability to fire teachers at will, you can bet the "bad teachers" in the system will ALWAYS be the most expensive and senior teachers who will be scrubbed from the system every few years like clockwork.
Lake Parsippany Elementary School’s newest Teacher of the Year is facing unemployment.
Jill Mills, a librarian whom the district honored last night as the school’s top educator, has been laid off because of budget cuts.
“It’s a shame,” Parsippany schools Superintendent LeRoy Seitz said. “It would be great to find a way to get her back.”
Mills, a 43-year-old Florham Park resident, is one of five media specialists who were cut in the 2010-2011 budget.
That spending plan called for the layoffs of more than 30 faculty members, including the media specialists. The district employs about 750 teachers, with roughly 15 of them being librarians, Seitz said.
Mills’s layoff announcement came just before she was honored not only by her school, but also the Lakeland Hills Family YMCA, which serves 10 towns in northeast Morris County.
The YMCA on May 26 named her the top K-8 educator in a region that stretches from Denville to Lincoln Park.
“If nothing else, it’s great for my self esteem,” Mills said of the awards. “It’s also heartbreaking.”
Mills had been with the district for three years -- not long enough to become tenured.
That meant she was one of the faculty members who were most vulnerable to layoffs, Seitz said.
The hedge fund managers will argue that this is the problem with tenure and seniority, that it requires the last in folks get laid off first.
I say baloney.
The problem is the hedge fund managers and the rest of their crooked ilk.
So this issue isn't about tenure or seniority - it's about the greedy top 5% (and especially the top 1%) increasing their wealth astronomically over the last two decades while barely paying anything in taxes.
It is - as my friend NYC Educator always says - about making sure Steve Forbes tax bill remains low.
In New Jersey, it is about Governor Christie refusing to raise taxes on people making over $1 million a year even as he forces massive layoffs and budget cuts to schools, fire personnel, police, etc.
