Tim Daly is the President of The New Teacher Project and the lead author of "Mutual Benefits."Over the past several days, representatives of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) and others have sought to challenge specific findings of “Mutual Benefits,” our recently released study on New York City’s school staffing policies. We appreciate the UFT’s engagement in this dialogue and welcome their participation.
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) researched and released “Mutual Benefits” with the goal of sparking a substantive, data-driven policy debate from which better policies would emerge. We are glad to see this debate taking shape and remain optimistic that it will lead to reforms that better serve New York City students.
As our paper indicates, the current policy on teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATRs) is flawed in four fundamental ways:
1. Teachers in the ATR have no incentive to search for positions aggressively and no requirement to apply for positions
2. Teachers have earned and will continue to earn tenure while serving in the ATR
3. There is no limit to the amount of time teachers may serve in the ATR, earning full salary and benefits regardless of their placement status
4. The ATR includes a higher concentration of teachers with documented performance problems than the overall teacher population, and that concentration is growing over time
It is important to note that our assessment of these flaws in the current policy has not, to our knowledge, been rebutted or addressed by any criticism of the paper to date. We stand by these findings and continue to believe that, if unaddressed, the stresses that these flaws put on the school system will inevitably undermine the fair, open and efficient staffing process now in place in New York City.
Though the arguments by the UFT and others against our findings and recommendations have not centered on these core issues to date, many of them mischaracterize our research and threaten to distract everyone involved from the real issues at hand. Below we respond to each of the primary arguments leveled against our report, as discussed primarily in posts on the UFT’s official blog, EdWize.org, and on Eduwonkette.com. We have asked both sites to post this response as part of the larger discussion.
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One-third of ATRs are teaching “regular programs” on a full-time basis.This assertion is inaccurate and misleading for several reasons, including:
1) It wrongly includes guidance counselorsThe UFT estimates that 200 or more individuals in the ATR are, “teaching full programs, with regularly scheduled classes, just as they had done when they were regular assigned to schools.” However, the UFT includes not only teachers but also guidance counselors in this figure. Our report does not include data on guidance counselors or address their hiring patterns at any point. Guidance counselors should therefore be excluded from this calculation. Data from New York City’s payroll system appear to indicate that approximately 85 guidance counselors remained in excess as of April 2007.
2) It includes District 79 teachers, whose excessing and hiring processes were anomalousIn his posting on EdWize.org, Leo Casey of the UFT claims that 270 of the 665 teachers in the ATR are from District 79 alternative schools. Neither figure is correct. According to the NYCDOE’s payroll system, 123 teachers from District 79 schools were in the ATR as of December 2007. These teachers were not included in the 665 figure or our study in general because District 79 underwent a substantial and atypical restructuring in 2007 that led to many teachers changing schools. The rules governing the hiring process for these teachers differed from those for other excessed teachers.
For this reason, TNTP did not include 2007 excessed teachers from District 79 schools in its analysis; it would have been misleading to consider them along with other teachers whose excess process was quite different and far more typical of the city’s normal hiring process. If the UFT believes that the restructuring process for alternative schools should have happened differently, that is a worthy debate – but it is quite separate from this one.
Even so, District 79 teachers fared very well in obtaining new placements. Overall, only 24 percent of teachers excessed from District 79 in 2007 still had not found a new position by December—lower than the unselected rate for teachers who were not from District 79 schools.
3) It is based on an unreliable data sourceLast, the UFT’s data is of questionable quality and requires more scrutiny and explanation. It is not enough to conclude that because a teacher reports working a full class schedule that the teacher is actually filling a full-time, permanent vacancy. Self-reported data is vulnerable to a host of inaccuracies. For example, the teacher could be substituting for a teacher who is on long-term leave but who will return again. Verification of the UFT’s claim would require communication with the building principal and an examination of the course allocation for each school. It would require knowing whether the only factor preventing principals from placing ATRs into permanent positions is the budget issue raised by the UFT, or whether they are assigning them to classes merely because they have been instructed to do this as the best way to accommodate ATRs who are housed in their buildings.
It is entirely possible that some teachers in the ATR are effectively teaching on a full-time basis. Indeed, as we have noted before, it is difficult to know exactly how principals are putting these teachers to use. In instances where a reserve pool teacher truly is filling a permanent position, we believe that teacher should be formally appointed to the position. That is a reasonable and fair outcome. Limiting the amount of time a teacher may serve in the reserve pool, as we recommend, may in fact provide an incentive for principals to appoint these teachers to positions formally (or risk losing them).
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