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| Carmen Fariña, the schools chancellor, and Mayor Bill de Blasio at a hearing in Albany last year. The city is spending $150 million on salaries for employees in the Absent Teacher Reserve. Mike Groll/Associated Press |
How uninformed he is. No one can generalize about all ATRs as he did, because the individuals who are in the ATR pool are as diverse as you could make any large group. Some are not good teachers, it is true. But some are excellent teachers, the best there is, and should have the respect they deserve rather than a label that belittles decades of hard work.
Betsy Combier
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There’s One Thing Worse Than Paying Bad Teachers Not to Work
Bill de Blasio’s New York has started putting them back in the classroom, especially in poor areas.
What should a city do with poor teachers who, thanks to union rules, cannot be fired? For years New York has let them linger on its Absent Teacher Reserve, where they are paid without having a permanent spot in any school. But now the city is taking the opposite approach: putting them back into classrooms.
The ATR is an example of what happens when reform runs up against inflexible labor rules. In 2005 Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended the practice of filling teaching slots in New York’s public schools by seniority. Instead, he gave principals increased power to hire the teachers they thought best. The complication was the union contract. Laid-off teachers could either look for a position elsewhere or join the ATR, where they receive full salary and benefits as they move across schools doing short-term work, often as substitutes.
The ATR differs from the notorious “rubber rooms,” or reassignment centers, where suspended teachers accused of misconduct once awaited adjudication of their cases. Teachers aren’t placed on the ATR because they are facing dismissal. They just can’t (or won’t) persuade a principal to hire them. Some have received ineffective teaching ratings. Others have records of disciplinary problems like absenteeism or sleeping on the job.
As the Bloomberg administration closed the city’s worst schools, the ATR pool grew. On the first day of school in 2013 it included 1,957 teachers. Since Bill de Blasio became mayor in 2014, his administration has offered ATR teachers buyouts and given principals an incentive to hire them by having the city cover part of their salaries for the first two to three years. By the end of the 2016-17 school year there were 822 teachers left in the pool; that year paying ATR teachers cost the city about $150 million.
Then last summer the city announced it would simply place some 400 ATR teachers into classrooms without giving principals any say. As of early December, only 41 placements had been made. Still, the administration has shown its willingness to reduce the ATR with forced teacher placements, meaning more will doubtless come as vacancies arise.
Neither the union-friendly de Blasio administration nor the antagonistic Bloomberg administration has been able to strike a deal imposing limits on how long teachers can remain on the ATR. The United Federation of Teachers opposes any deadline, even on teachers who haven’t found a principal willing to hire them after five years. Today that’s the case for one-quarter of ATR teachers.
Rather than admitting defeat, the de Blasio administration has joined with the union to spin the placements as a better way to allocate resources. The argument is that at hard-to-staff schools with high turnover, permanently hiring a teacher from the ATR is better than relying on substitutes. “What we’re trying to do is give a more stable educational environment to the students,” the union’s president, Michael Mulgrew, said last year.
The most difficult-to-staff schools are often those that serve low-income and heavily minority populations. As expected, a disproportionate number of the ATR placements have been at such schools. The city says it is holding the teachers accountable. ATR teachers have one year to show their effectiveness, after which the city says it will remove the low performers and in some cases follow the required process to fire them. But the fact that it’s nearly impossible to do so is the reason the ATR exists in the first place.
And here is where the political calculus becomes clear: Some struggling schools won’t get any ATR teachers forced on them. In 2014 the city designated 94 of the worst schools as Renewal Schools, singling them out for extra money and attention. The point was to demonstrate that with enough resources, the current system could improve. Now these Renewal Schools have been made exempt from taking ATR teachers. In other words, the de Blasio administration is perfectly willing to put poor teachers in disadvantaged schools, just not the ones in which the mayor has a political interest.
The ATR debacle is the latest illustration of how hard it is to create lasting change in urban public school systems. No wonder, then, that so many parents in struggling districts are trying to get their children admitted to charter schools. Operating outside collective-bargaining agreements, charters don’t have to hire teachers based on seniority or pay bad ones not to teach.
A study last year from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes found that New York City’s charter students made gains equivalent to an additional 23 days of learning in reading and 63 days in math, compared with their peers in traditional public schools. The researchers have found similar results for charters in other cities. As New York puts ATR teachers back to work, it’s clearer than ever that the best hope for change in urban public schools isn’t to reform the current system, but to circumvent it.
Mr. Winters is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and an associate professor at the Boston University School of Education. This essay was adapted from the winter issue of City Journal.
Appeared in the February 10, 2018, print edition.
City Will Move Sidelined Teachers From Limbo to Classrooms
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| Randy Asher, a senior administrator at the department of education, is behind the initiative to put teachers from the Absent Teacher Reserve back into classrooms full time.Caitlin Ochs for The New York Times |
For a dozen years, hundreds of New York City teachers have been paid despite not having permanent jobs, sidelined in most cases because of disciplinary problems or bad teaching records or because they had worked in poorly performing schools that were closed or where enrollment declined.
This limbo was largely the result of a deal that the Bloomberg administration struck with the teachers’ union to give principals more control over who worked in their schools. Under the deal, teachers could not simply be fired, so they were put in a pool known as the Absent Teacher Reserve.
But now, saying the city cannot afford expenditures like the $150 million it spent on salaries and benefits for those in the reserve in the last school year, the education department plans to place roughly 400 teachers in classrooms full time, possibly permanently. They will be placed in schools that still have jobs unfilled by mid-October. Principals will have little, if any, say in the placements. Neither will the teachers.
The department, which announced the plan in July, has in the past deflected questions about the makeup of the pool. But on Friday, it released some data. Of the 822 teachers in the reserve at the end of the last school year, 25 percent had also been in it five years earlier. Nearly half had been in it at the end of the 2014-15 school year. The average salary was $94,000 a year, $10,000 more than the average salary of teachers across the school system.
Close to a third of the teachers in the pool were there because they had faced legal or disciplinary charges. Others worked in schools that were closed for poor performance or lost their jobs because of declining enrollments. Twelve percent had received the lowest possible ratings of effectiveness in the 2015-16 school year; only 1 percent of all teachers in the system scored so low.
With the beginning of the school year weeks away, principals and others who work in education are wary.
Harry Sherman, the principal of Junior High School 127, Castle Hill Middle School, in the Bronx, said that while some teachers in the pool, often referred to as A.T.R.s, are unfairly stigmatized, “There are also A.T.R.s who are A.T.R.s because we have had the choice of whether or not we want to take them. And sometimes those people are not good fits for schools.”
Daniel Weisberg, the chief executive officer of the New Teacher Project, who worked for the education department under former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, said: “We’ve got this group of teachers who either can’t find a job or won’t find a job. That’s the group we’re dealing with.”
Education experts are worried that a disproportionate number of the teachers will be placed in schools in poorer areas, like the South Bronx, which have difficulty attracting and retaining teachers. Some may be placed in schools in the Renewal Schools program, one of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s signature education initiatives, which is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to turn around low-performing schools.
The principal of a high school in Manhattan, who did not want to be named out of fear of reprisal from supervisors in the department, was blunt about the effect: “You’re going to force the worst teachers in the system into the schools that are struggling the most.”
But the city described the plan as a “common-sense solution” to the problems of both vacancies and the cost of paying unassigned teachers.
“My role is to drive down the A.T.R. and to help take these resources and put them back in schools,” said Randy Asher, the senior adviser to the chancellor for talent management and innovation, and the former principal of Brooklyn Technical High School.
The number of teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve increased dramatically after the deal made in 2005 by the Bloomberg administration, which was seeking to close failing schools, and the United Federation of Teachers. Before then, teachers with seniority could claim whatever job they wanted, displacing novice teachers without so much as having to interview with a principal. And teachers without assignments were involuntarily placed in whatever positions were open.
The deal ended that system and let principals decide whom to hire. Teachers who could not find jobs or were not happy with ones available went into the A.T.R., at full salary.
Reserve teachers do monthlong rotations in schools, frequently serving as substitutes, and some get longer temporary assignments. In last few years, the department has offered principals incentives to hire teachers from the pool by picking up all or part of their salaries for the first two or three years. It has also offered teachers in the pool buyouts. As result, on the first day of school last year — traditionally the point in the year when the pool is largest — there were 1,494 teachers in the pool, down from 1,957 on the first day of school in 2013.
The department says the new policy of placing teachers in vacancies is expected to reduce the size of the pool by half.
In interviews, Mr. Asher and Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, used similar language to defend the plan, saying that it was better for students to have a permanent teacher with the appropriate license than to have a rotation of substitutes.
“We’re talking about being five, six weeks into the semester where they still don’t have a permanent teacher,” Mr. Asher said. “We need to provide stability in these learning environments.”
Mr. Mulgrew said, “What we’re trying to do is give a more stable educational environment for the students.”
A recently retired principal of a school in a hard-to-staff district disputed the idea that putting any teacher into a vacancy was better than other possible solutions. “I have had over the past five years a lot of A.T.R.s come in,” said the principal, who spoke anonymously for fear of repercussions for the school. “And I have to say, less than 10 percent of them — way less, maybe 5 percent of them — would I hire.”
Lynette Guastaferro, the executive director of Teaching Matters, said that in high-poverty schools, it was particularly important that principals be able to choose teachers carefully.
“Kids living in poverty need schools led by strong teams with shared cultures and the best teaching possible,” she wrote in an email.
Principals who are forced to take the teachers will observe them over the course of the year. Teachers who earn an “effective” rating from the principal at the end of the year will then, in most cases, be placed in their positions permanently.
Asked what would happen to teachers who at the end of the year received a less than effective rating, Mr. Asher said the department would, in some cases, start the legal process to remove them.
Nicholas Weber, a special-education teacher who has been in the Absent Teacher Reserve for three years after losing his job at Murry Bergtraum High School for Business Careers because of declining enrollment, said he thought the policy would motivate principals to give bad ratings to teachers so as to not have to hire them permanently.
“It questions the legitimacy of the ratings,” he said.
Mr. Weisberg, who helped negotiate the 2005 deal when he was at the education department, said that one problem with the new policy was that, once principals can no longer choose their teachers, it becomes harder to hold them accountable for their school’s performance.
“The idea that principals get final say over which teachers get selected to work in their buildings should not be thought of as a crazy radical notion,” he said. “This is common sense.”
