For Immediate Release
UFT faults Klein for creating job barriers for ATRs
Apr 29, 2008 10:36 AM
UFT President Randi Weingarten denounced a report issued on April 28 by the New Teacher Project, a DOE contractor, which blames educators filling day-to-day vacancies for being unable to find new permanent teaching positions and recommends firing them after one year.
Statement by UFT President Randi Weingarten:
Today one of the Department of Education’s wholly-owned subsidiaries issued a report blaming experienced teachers who, through no fault of their own, were excessed from their teaching jobs and also proposed that rather than asking the DOE to help place the excessed teachers that they be fired.
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) issued this report three weeks after the UFT filed an age discrimination complaint against the DOE for discriminating against older teachers by the introduction of a funding formula that creates a disincentive for schools to hire them.
This report also comes five weeks after I gave City Council testimony blowing the whistle on the DOE’s waste of tens of millions of dollars in the failure to help the teachers get full time assignments in schools where their talents would be better utilized than in their day-to-day substitute posts.
The report comes eight months after the UFT attempted in a series of negotiations to both assist teachers to get placements and to reduce the amount of money the DOE was spending on the ATR pool. Each time the union attended a negotiation session coming up with creative ideas to place ATRs, the DOE said all it wants is to have them fired.
This is not new. This proposal made today is virtually identical to the proposal this same group made as part of DOE negotiations in the spring of 2005 asking that excess teachers be laid off.
Once the fact-finding panel rejected the DOE proposal, the union and the city agreed in 2005 to a choice placement system provided there was job security for everyone who through no fault of their own was not selected by principals. The union advised the DOE at that time in negotiations that if this structure were adopted there would be hundreds of people in an ATR pool, the very same problem the report complains about today.
TNTP met with us and the DOE earlier this year and we shared all of this info, none of which appears in their report. Instead, in a slanted and ill-considered and factually inaccurate way, they attempt three years later to get what they tried to get in 2005. That is why the UFT is denouncing the report.
The DOE is abrogating its responsibility to help these dedicated teachers find permanent jobs when they have lost positions through no fault of their own.
This is a disservice not only to these teachers who have devoted themselves to the profession but also to the children who would benefit from their talents. It’s a waste of skill and money. The city could save millions of dollars by employing the teachers in the ATR pool who are already being paid. Why recruit more teachers at additional costs when you have experienced teachers on salary who are ready and eager to work?
This is utter nonsense. These teachers have dedicated their lives to teaching because they love children and they want to continue teaching in schools they can consider their own. But no matter how hard they try to find permanent positions, the DOE does everything it can to make sure principals give preference to younger teachers.
Sadly, not only is this an out-and-out attempt at contract abrogation and a quintessential blame-the-victim strategy, but what TNTP proposes is terrible education policy. Everyone in education these days talks about how we get and keep experienced teachers in struggling schools. If this policy were ever implemented and a struggling school closed down, it would stop any effort to recruit and retain teachers at these high-needs schools because it says “Don’t come to schools that have challenging students because if the school closes you’ll be fired.”
