Consider the Source

We all love praise.  There's nothing like praise from kids--from your students, or from your own kids.  You can see when it comes right from the heart.  I've saved some little notes kids have given me, and I look at them from time to time.  One year I got a letter from a principal commending me for my attendance but I have no idea where that is.

While I don't treasure praise from admin quite like I do that from kids, it's fine nonetheless.  It's better, for example, than the counseling memo I got for strolling into a PD session two hours late.  Still, what if you're garnering praise from, say, Jack the Ripper on what fine work you do?  Would you be proud if Charles Manson sent you a Christmas card?  I'm not at all certain I'd put it out for my guests to see.

So when Tim Daly, who took Michelle Rhee's former post as head of The New Teacher Project, starts writing you valentines, it's time to seriously re-examine your priorities.  After all, Daly's name pops up again and again when it's getting rid of working teachers is on the agenda.   He's famously been behind a report called "Mutual Benefits" that suggested firing ATR teachers and offered no benefits to anyone but the Bloomberg administration and its Death Star approach to personnel matters.  It was full of such blatant manipulation of statistics, even I could see them with a cursory examination.

And who is Daly praising?  None other than AFT President Randi Weingarten.  What are her accomplishments?

1.  She's allowed teacher pay in DC to be linked to "performance" in DC, and allows them to be dismissed more easily at the whim of Michelle Rhee, a "common sense" approach, according to Daly.

2.  In New Haven, apparently, test scores also determine who is and is not a good teacher.

3. In Colorado, she was part of a negotiation that allowed 50% of a teacher rating to be judged by test scores and pretty much allowed teachers to be fired on that basis.  Layoffs will no longer be done on basis of seniority but on the basis of test scores.  Raise your hand if you think senior teachers will be getting the best kids.  Anyone?  Anyone?  Incidentally, these changes were vigorously opposed by the NEA.

Daly goes on and complains because Weingarten didn't lead the changes, but acceded to them.  He says it would have been easier for her to fight them.  If there's any truth to that, since no study supports the validity of "value-added," why the hell did she insist on falling down when no one pushed her?  And why was UFT President Michael Mulgrew, here in NYC, so keen on following in her misguided footsteps?

Perhaps the NEA's frank rejection of this nonsense will shock Mulgrew and Weingarten into reality, and coax them into acting in the interests of working teachers.  I'll keep my eye on the convention.  Hopefully, when Bill Gates spouts similar praise, AFT leaders will join rank and file in copious vomiting. 

When parasites write op-eds in the Daily News thanking you for all the lifeblood you've allowed them to drain, it's time to seriously scrutinize how you do your job.

Reverberation

There are always unintended consequences. When the UFT agreed to establish the Absent Teacher Reserve, a writer on Edwize suggested it had been done before and everything was fine. A difference, of course, was that the current chancellor saw fit to keep hiring new teachers even as experienced ones sat in the purgatory he and the union had created. The other difference was that principals no longer had to hire the floating teachers.

Inquisitive souls could go to the New York Times and read the helpful solution proposed by the completely objective New Teacher Project. To help all parties involved, they proposed to fire ATR teachers after one year (They didn't explain precisely how that would benefit the ATR teachers). You knew they were completely objective because their business entailed replacing the ATRs with new teachers they themselves trained and recruited. If that weren't enough evidence, they had millions of dollars in contracts with the city. What possible ulterior motive could they have?

The UFT is often on the cutting edge, so when it enacts a bad idea, "reformers" closely study how they can take it and make it even worse. It appears uber-reformer Michelle Rhee has found a way to do so in DC, where the new contract proposes to take the ATRs, offer them a one-time buyout, and fire them at the end of one year should they fail to take it.

This is precisely what Joel Klein would like to see in New York. Will this becomes a demand in exchange for our receiving the pattern? It may not matter we're entitled to as a matter of course. The UFT has an odd habit of paying for things two or three times.

I stand amazed that after the failures of the Bush administration, the "reformers" have managed to take the same abysmal ideas that tanked the economy and insist on applying them to education. It's all about getting those billions we spend on education into the right hands, the same ones who caused the current crisis.

It's indefensible, and patently incredible that the President who promised us "change" is giving us more of the same, with little or no evidence it will help anyone whatsoever.

Tweedie Birds and Math

According to today's Daily News, budget cuts notwithstanding, the city hired 5400 new teachers this year. They did so even as 1400 veteran teachers sat in the Absent Teacher Reserve. In fact, 229 of the new teachers have not even been placed yet. They were "such good candidates" that the city could not risk losing them.

The 1400 ATR teachers, most there because of school closings, apparently have none of the qualities that make the inexperienced newbies so necessary. The facts that their salaries are higher, and that they make such convenient scapegoats does not even enter into the equation.

UFT President Randi Weingarten and her crack negotiating team never foresaw this. You may recall that she and her patronage mill signed onto reorganization three, which stipulated that principals had to pay teachers out of their own budgets. They are shocked (shocked!) that principals seem to prefer 40,000 dollar teachers to 100,000 dollar teachers. Fortunately, UFT patronage employees are all still going to conventions and gala lunches, and receiving double pensions, so this only affects working teachers, and who cares about them anyway?

Meanwhile, the New Teacher Project, which receives millions from Tweed, is outraged that 100 of these 1400 teachers have not yet wasted their time applying for new positions. They've been oddly silent about the 229 newbies sitting around doing nothing.

But why bite the hand that feeds them?

Thanks to Pogue

Mutual Benefits

Every day I get email about the ATRs. And every day I have more questions about Tim Daly and his merry New Teacher Project. According to Mr. Daly, the UFT's criticism of his figures is all wrong, primarily because it included guidance counselors. The NTP never said to put guidance counselors on unpaid leave, only teachers. Evidently, paying teachers to be in ATR is a huge financial drain, but paying guidance counselors to do the same is a different animal entirely.

I've written before about Mr. Daly's questionable use of statistics. Actually, though, it's remarkable that none of the tabloids mention word one about his millions of dollars in DoE contracts. Even more remarkably, no one notices that his organization actually trains many of the people who are bouncing veteran teachers out of their jobs.

The biggest irony, though, is that Mr. Daly can write a report, entitle it "Mutual Benefits," offer no benefits whatsoever to working people, and have virtually no one question his integrity.

If that's indeed the case, consider me the first.

Mayor Mike's Kinfolk Issue a Report

After reading widespread claims about Mayor Bloomberg's 81 million dollar bill for ATR teachers, it's nice to see that the UFT is finally speaking up. I only hope someone is listening.

The New Teacher Project, a completely objective organization (which just happens to have a bunch of DoE contracts) released a "fair and balanced" report calling for amendments to the UFT contract. Apparently, those goshdarn lazy ATR teachers don't want to look for jobs at all.

But the UFT says 194 of the 665 ATR teachers are actually working regular schedules full time. Not only that, but with the central system paying their salaries, principals have no incentive whatsoever to put them on payroll. Why not have a free teacher in perpetuity and buy that all-important plasma TV for the principal's office? Why not invest in daily donut deliveries to freshen up the place?

And while you're at it, why not let the mayor and his "fair and balanced" NTP quadruple the supposed cost of this enterprise? The UFT estimates it costs substantially less than the city claims.

The president of the New Teacher Project, Timothy Daly, said he knew of no way to collect data on precisely what ATR members are doing inside schools.

"Why didn't I hear about this before now if this is a widespread problem?" Mr. Daly said.

Interesting that Mr. Daly, despite having no knowledge of what ATR members did within schools, had no problem issuing reports and coming to conclusions about them. And Mr. Daly's conclusions are interesting indeed:

As we have seen in New York already, only a very small percentage of the entire teaching force (235 teachers out of approximately 79,000, or only about 0.3 percent) was unable to find a mutual consent position after a full year in the reserve pool.

Note that the "fair and balanced" approach of Mr. Daly's group is not to actually use the percentage of teachers in the reserve pool, but to compare it to the number of working teachers in New York City, the overwhelming majority of whom have never even been in the reserve pool. You know the old line about "liars, damned liars, and statisticians?"

Another example of Mr. Daly's approach to statistics can be found over at Eduwonkette's comment form.

38 percent of the most senior group of excessed teachers found a new position compared to 35 percent of the most novice.

Note that when Mr. Daly refers to "excessed teachers," he makes no distinction between new teachers excessed for declining enrollment in their subjects, and veteran teachers stuck in schools that got closed. That right there is misleading, as a one-year English teacher might easily go from school A to school B with little problem. It's different for the vet, who's gonna cost principal B over double what one-year teacher gets. And Mr. Daly acknowledges, somewhat, that new teachers are less likely to find themselves in the ATR pool:

...the most novice teachers were more than twice as likely to be reabsorbed by their former schools as the most senior teachers (44 percent compared to 18 percent).

Here, the statistics become even more questionable. There are simply more novice teachers than senior teachers these days. So if 38% of them found jobs, while 35% of novices found jobs, it's entirely possible that many more novices found jobs than senior teachers did. We don't know, of course, because in Mr. Daly's "fair and balanced" report, that info is unavailable to us.

Is there anyone naive enough to believe that if Mr. Daly's group came to different conclusions they'd still be riding the DoE gravy train?