Testimony of Randi Weingarten’s before the NYC Council Education Committee on the Proposed DOE Restructuring Plan: January 25, 2007
Jan 25, 2007 7:30 PM
Why would we engage in the most radical restructuring of the best urban school system in America without any real evidence that what is being proposed works any better than what is being replaced? The only other school system in America that dismantled its central structure in this way is New Orleans. I am not arguing that what we have now works for all children; I am simply asking what is the evidence that the new structure or funding formula will be better.
That is the question I want to start with and leave you with.
Thank you, Chairman Jackson, for your quick response to the DOE’s recently announced reorganization. There are dozens of questions about the details of the plan and how it will play out in our schools that parents, principals and educators are asking, so we are grateful you are holding this hearing. It seems the only people who were thoroughly briefed about the plan are reporters.
Let me say at the outset that, unlike CSA members, my members, because of the recent contract and other legal provisions, will be the only stabilizing force in this new reorganization. (Indeed, on issues that are contractual, we will simply grieve, although one wonders if it was so important to the chancellor to use test scores as a part of tenure decisions or to try to stop schools from hiring experienced teachers, why didn’t he raise these issues during the recent contract negotiations?) So my comments are focused on the likely consequences of this program and what it means for students
I’d like to address three basic themes, and they are three things that children absolutely must have in their schools if they are to learn:
1) stability; 2) a focus on instruction; and 3) teacher quality. Unfortunately, this plan fails on all three criteria.
1) Stability
The basic idea of this restructuring is to dismantle the bureaucracy and transfer the responsibility for educating kids from the chancellor to principals. While we have always endorsed the idea that principals, parents and school staffs must play a major role in school decision-making, this devolution cannot be a way for the chancellor and the central administration to divest themselves of responsibility. Wasn’t mayoral control specifically about taking responsibility? The mayor didn’t even want a school board as a check and balance; he wanted direct control.
Dismantling the central structure and creating three separate support structures — private providers, empowerment, and the school system, and overlaying them with an unconnected managerial structure will create confusion and a lack of coherence. It seems the end result would only replicate what happened in New Orleans without even the tragic excuse of a hurricane to justify the district’s simply walking away from dozens of schools and thousands of children. Without any central guidance, each school in New Orleans, whether it’s a charter school or a so-called traditional public school, is pretty much on its own as to the resources it can garner, the students it accepts, the teachers it hires and the services it provides, such as hours of instruction, transportation, food etc. Naturally, standards vary widely, but parents, who supposedly have the freedom of choice, have no way of knowing any of this. They are left to go from school to school hoping one will have space and accept their child. Just yesterday, 300 New Orleans children who were trying to attend school had no place to go and no one to accept responsibility for them.
Now I am sure our city would never allow children to be school-less, but New Orleans should serve as a warning that devolving all responsibility for all services to individual school principals can mean disenfranchising students — particularly children who have traditionally been left behind, like those with special needs. I know of no other school system that so radically decentralized so that every school becomes an island. It is one thing to give successful schools free rein; it is another thing to set floundering schools adrift. There must be a safety net for children, but that is nowhere to be found in this plan.
After meeting with Staten Island teachers yesterday, I am concerned about even the successful schools. The principal of one of the highest performing schools on Staten Island was so perturbed about the prospects that she raised the specter that the school would have to close and everybody would be fired. That’s an early indication of the kind of confusion, fear and disinformation we can expect.
There is so much research that shows children need stability, not turmoil, in schools. That means stable leadership, low teacher turnover and a healthy dose of experienced staff. When the mayor and I announced the last contract, we both noted the stability it would bring. Conversely, what business would so fundamentally restructure three times in five years – and then wipe out all the reforms it championed at the first restructuring? Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t a big fan of the regions and even less of a fan of the micromanagement, but the question is, what is the evidence that this will be better?
2) Instruction
The real business of a school system is educating children. Yet that is notably missing from this plan. It’s all about structure and nothing about instruction. What about the things that have been proven to help children learn and graduate: smaller classes, a safe and orderly environment, allowing teachers the professional latitude to tailor their instruction to the needs of their students; expanded pre-K and career and technical opportunities?
Consider teacher quality: As I talk about later, the unintended consequences of the new formula and the use of test scores in tenure decisions will lead to less experienced teachers in all schools. So the single most important piece of work we have done together – to have the best qualified teaching force ever – will be reversed.
Then there is discipline. Children cannot learn when their classes are constantly disrupted by other children who are misbehaving. Our schools are not as safe and orderly as they should be, and both high level and low level disruptions undermine the education of our children. New and capable teachers leave our system every year out of frustration with discipline problems that are not effectively addressed by the DOE. In this reorganization plan, however, safety is an afterthought, virtually unaddressed. We see a passing reference on page 12, where it is one item on a list under “school environment,” but school environment itself comprises only 15 percent of the accountability pie. The rest – a full 85% -- is devoted to the results of standardized tests.
Class size is another perfect example. Rather than join the parents and teachers in Albany to urge that CFE money be devoted to lowering class size, and therefore give schools more wherewithal to do the one reform guaranteed to raise student achievement that we have never tried in earnest, the city wants to use CFE money to change the funding formula.
Neither does it address the issue that has most aroused the ire of parents, community members and my members as well: the failure to listen! Where is the plan to restore parent voice? And, while teachers are supposed to be able to have a say in the evaluation of principals, (which is good), what weight will that carry? Principals are supposedly being “empowered” with new decision making freedom, but the fact is they will be constrained by ever increasing standardized testing requirements and the inexorable pressure for score gains. Indeed, the whole accountability program seems to be raise test scores or you’re fired. So what then prevents New York from having the same problems that beset Houston, and other cities that saw a one or two year hike in test scores, then big drops and/or disclosures of improprieties in getting them so high?
And what prevents New York from having more and more schools like PS 33 — where the Mayor announced the test score increase in 2005 (an unheard of gain of 50 points). Its principal than retired on a $15,000 bonus, and in 2006, 4th graders who are now 5th graders plunged from 83% proficiency to 41% proficiency.
The more we look at the plan, the more we see that it does not devolve power to the schools but only responsibility; it does not give authority to those who are closest to the students, but only holds them accountable for outcomes with no guarantee they will have the wherewithal or resources or programmatic help they need.
And speaking of funding, wouldn’t you think that in a time when we are anticipating new funds from CFE and from administrative savings, that we wouldn’t have to be talking about school budget cuts, about sacrificing the things that have enabled some schools to succeed, about robbing Peter to pay Paul? Yet that is exactly what the new school funding formula that the chancellor is proposing would do. This is the biggest opportunity we’ve ever had – and maybe ever will have – to pump resources into the schools that serve the neediest children. When we talk about equity for children, we’re not talking about equal resources; we’re talking about every child having adequate resources to fulfill their potential. That means more – a lot more – for those who start off further behind. We strongly favor the underlying concept of fair student funding, to give extra weightings and funding to students according to their needs. But for this to work as envisioned, we have to maintain the way teacher salaries are budgeted, as a unit of appropriation, so that schools receive funding for actual salaries, not average salaries. And every school system in America but one that has adopted this weighted formula does what we propose — weight for poverty and special needs, but holds the schools harmless for teacher salary variations.
We are concerned about funding for special ed and other special needs. It has been extremely difficult to monitor special ed outside of D75 to ensure that children are getting the services they are entitled to. We fear that giving students funding weightings without requiring that appropriate services accompany that funding might further endanger these children. Principals may be enticed by the money and not send severely disabled children to D75, even if they are not equipped to properly accommodate the children in their district school.
The same concern applies to other weighted children who should receive services. Accountability must not be limited to outcomes and test scores. Funding must be accompanied by requirements for services that can be monitored and enforced and schools must be held accountable for providing them.
3) Teacher Quality
The part of the funding formula that we have the most serious reservations about is how teacher salaries are funded. The union, the chancellor and the mayor have worked very hard over the past few years to address the issue of teacher quality. Teacher Quality is the one thing that every parent, every administrator, every researcher can agree on – that it’s the single most critical factor in children’s learning. And we’ve made great strides – attracting more highly qualified applicants with more competitive salaries and ensuring that teachers are fully certified.
This proposal will totally reverse everything we’ve accomplished. It will deprive more and more of our kids of an experienced, highly-skilled teacher. In the short run it will do that only at schools that now have a relatively senior staff, but in a few years it will hit all schools, whether they serve middle class or poor children. Because of the incentives and disincentives built into the formula, schools with many senior teachers will have to reduce the actual number of teachers other or sacrifice programs that made them successful. But our concern is equally for schools that now have few experienced teachers. At first, they will have extra money to hire teachers and provide other services. But if they want to keep those teachers as they gain experience, they will have to reduce those other services. Alternatively, they could encourage high turnover and attrition among their teaching staff so they can keep their salary costs low. Is that what we are looking to encourage?
In other words, forcing schools to pay for the cost of their actual teacher salaries out of a budget that isn’t adjusted for schools with relatively more senior staffs would punish those schools (whether they serve poor or middle-class children) that have built a stable (and therefore more senior) teaching corps, and it would reward those with high attrition and a revolving-door staff.
How did those successful schools build such a stable staff? They provided an environment for teaching and learning, with special help for kids who need it, and supports for teachers. They could afford to do that because the DOE holds their budgets harmless for the cost of teachers. The new funding method would force them to sacrifice exactly what made them successful. It would budget them for teachers only at the citywide average salary level. To keep that experienced, stable staff and pay those higher than city-wide average salaries, principals would have to reduce expenditures in other areas like enlarging class sizes or eliminating remedial programs, for example. Or to save those services, schools could “churn” their staffs, destabilizing the school and losing the experience of he teachers in whom they’ve invested.
Let’s be clear about this. Under the current system, the DOE funds the required number of teachers, regardless of their salary level. Schools with less experienced staff are not forced into that situation because of lack of funds. Schools with less experienced staff have not provided the conditions that retain a stable teaching force. They are seen as unsafe, disorderly, unprofessional places to work. Teachers in NYC are not averse to teaching poor children; plenty of high-poverty schools manage to attract and retain the most highly qualified teachers: PS 15 in Red Hook, the Patrick Daly School, has 88% of its students eligible for free lunch, significantly higher than the city-wide average. Yet 63% of its staff has more than 5 years experience. East New York Transit Tech, with 75% students receiving free lunch, has 62% of its teachers with more than 5 years experience. What teachers seek is schools that offer a collaborative respectful environment, and schools that provide that should not be punished for it.
Noreen Connell points out the long-term implications of such a policy. “The funding proposals have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come,” and noted “they won’t be around to suffer the consequences.” She says that because as underfunded schools use their additional funding to retain teachers and build that experience base, they will find themselves less and less able to provide the extras that their students need. Or they will have to encourage high teacher turnover. How does that help kids? It doesn’t. It hurts the very kids it was supposed to help.
The DOE has said it intends to deal with this by holding harmless the high-cost schools for a year, yet in communications to principals just yesterday they appear to be backing off this pledge. Moreover, unless they immunize schools forever against the variations of teacher salaries, this will inevitably become a robbing Peter to pay Paul situation.
Adding to this diminution of teacher quality is the tough on tenure talk. Ironically, this talk is simply masking the fact that the system has always had the power to grant tenure. What’s really happening is that principals are in fact being disempowered in this area, as evidently that decision is shifting to the chancellor. Even though the principal has observed the teacher in the classroom at least 18 times and evaluated her work for three years, we’ve been told the chancellor wants to make every tenure decision himself. That’s why I assume he wants to use standardized test scores; something all of us used to believe should never be used for evaluation purposes. Indeed, the chancellor and I had that conversation back in 2003.
But before I talk about how tenure is granted, let me tell you one story that illustrates why it is an important means of promoting good teaching.
Maria Colon, a bilingual Social Studies teacher, which is a shortage area, at John F. Kennedy HS in the Bronx, is a perfect example. Maria sat in a “rubber room” for a year and a half awaiting the outcome of her tenure hearing on charges of neglect of duty, insubordination and conduct unbecoming. Two weeks ago a state hearing officer exonerated her of all the charges against her for lack of evidence.
And what was her quote “crime”? She blew the whistle on her principal, Anthony Rotunno, after some 20 student test scores on the English Regents were mysteriously adjusted upward by as much as 25 percentage points. Her principal not only ignored her complaint but he retaliated by falsely claiming she had student transcripts in her office. Investigators found no such transcripts the next day. A short time later she was excessed. Because she was a senior teacher, the principal excessed every single bilingual social studies teacher in the school in order to get at her.
Maria testified before this committee on March 2, 2006 on proposed whistle-blower legislation. We are proud to have Maria as one of the NYC teaching corps and we shudder to think what would have happened to her without due process protection.
Tenure is not automatic; it’s earned. Only about 2/3 of all new teachers eventually get tenure. One-third leave teaching before ever coming up for tenure. Among those thousands we lose, there are a lot more people who could have been great teachers had we given them a little more encouragement and support. Instead, the chancellor is focusing on what he concedes is a small number who might mistakenly get tenure. And that’s the tragedy here. Rather than focus on how to keep good teachers, the school system is scaring them away!
If the DOE pursues this, we will be back to teacher shortages. What great new applicants will come to New York City when they know their futures are in jeopardy? That would be pretty ironic, after we’ve worked so hard to improve teacher quality.
And the test scores angle. The worst part of that idea is not that it’s unfair to teachers but how it would hurt kids. What teacher would want to teach the most challenging students in New York City if their future is dependent on the students’ standardized test scores? How will tough schools recruit new teachers or probationary teachers? That’s like telling oncologists they will be judged by their patient survival rates, or lawyers they will be judged by the number of trials they win. How many would take on the sickest patients, or the most complicated cases? This proposal simply discourages risk and innovation.
And to expect a new teacher, in her first two years (because the third-year results would not be available yet), to produce those measurable effects is simply not understanding the nature of teaching. Everyone knows the first year or two are learning years, and, according to research, most teachers don’t hit their stride until the 5th year.
And how can you hold them responsible for test scores when you have no idea whether they were given the conditions and resources necessary to do the job? Remember, they don’t choose the classes they teach or even what and how they are allowed to teach.
And what do you say to parents who will now be afraid to that new teachers will feel forced to narrow the curriculum even more to only math and English, because their tenure will be dependent on student test scores.? Not to mention the fact that teacher evaluation is a mandatory subject of bargaining, and the chancellor has not even raised this topic with us, even though we just completed a contract agreement two months ago.
Once again, the chancellor is projecting a really negative portrayal about teachers. If I sound angry — I am — because after the mayor and I tried to get back to the business of teaching and learning by avoiding another protracted labor dispute, and, after the mayor boasted that we have the best qualified teaching force, I deeply resent it.
All in all, we have some serious doubts about this reorganization. We are concerned about losing a year of instruction, while the top brass settles into the new hierarchy and schools get used to new service providers. We are concerned that another reorganization is simply an abdication of responsibility — and done because no one was happy about the flatness of test scores this year, especially in the middle and high schools.
Most of all, we think it is simply wrong to set schools adrift, privatize many essential services, destabilize successful schools, limit parent voice even more, and strike fear in the hearts of new educators. Its wrong for the DOE to divest itself of the obligation to provide the resources and conditions and supports that enable all schools to succeed. And it’s wrong to let the DOE off the hook for its failure to address class size, special needs children, and improving teacher retention. We urge you to encourage the DOE to focus on the things that matter, to use the CFE funds wisely: to reduce class sizes in all grades, to improve safety and discipline, to expand pre-K, to restore the arts, to offer more career and technical opportunities and to listen to the voices of educators and parents.
