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Report on ATRs ignores many facts
Sep 25, 2008 10:21 AM
Despite having 1,395 teachers from closed or downsized schools serving in an absent-teacher reserve, the Department of Education hired 5,400 new teachers this September and has yet to find classroom assignments for 229 of them, DOE officials acknowledged on Sept. 21.
That revelation came as the New Teacher Project, the DOE contractor that created the New York City Teaching Fellows program, reissued its controversial report on Absent Teacher Reserves now saying it will cost the city $74 million to pay teachers serving as ATRs this school year. The UFT disputed the organization’s last report, including the cost estimates.
“If the New Teacher Project did not have a financial stake in hiring new teachers, they might have pointed out how irresponsible it was for the DOE to bring thousands of novices into a teacher market where the supply already far outstripped the demand,” said UFT President Randi Weingarten.
Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project and the principal author of the report, said that principals should not be forced to give jobs to ATRs but called the cost of the ATR pool “too big to ignore.”
The New Teacher Project has recommended putting excessed teachers on unpaid leave if they don’t find new classroom jobs after a year, a proposal that the UFT rejected in two successive contract rounds. The UFT negotiated job security for ATRs as a condition of ending bumping and all forced placements.
Weingarten contended that the DOE ignored its own role in exacerbating the ATR situation, including changing the way teachers are budgeted to schools, and rebuffed the union’s many ideas for solving it.
She pointed out that because principals both pay actual teacher salaries yet don’t pay for most ATRs from their own school budget, it has created a perverse financial incentive for principals not to place ATRs in permanent positions, particularly senior ones who command higher salaries.
“The DOE has left in place a funding formula that, coupled with its phasing out of schools and the budget crunch, makes it hard for principals to hire seasoned teachers who had the courage to work in at-risk schools that have since closed,” Weingarten said.
The UFT has repeatedly called on the DOE to impose a moratorium on hiring of all new teachers until all ATRs are placed.
The union has also filed a grievance arguing that principals have an obligation to interview ATRs and tell them if they are not hired why they were rejected.
“The UFT remains committed to working out ways, as we tried to do all of last year, that would place these valuable ATRs who have been displaced through no fault of their own, which would save the city money,” Weingarten said. “To date, the DOE has declined, ignoring its own actions in creating the situation and seeking to unravel the job-security clause. And now the New Teacher Project has joined in the pile-on.
