Stories of the Day

Updated 7/4/08

Rubber rooms: UFT makes deal with DOE
Check out the ICE analysis of the deal which comes up smelling of public relations
One would ask why there had to be a deal to hire more arbitrators to speed cases as an alternative to letting people rot in rubber rooms when it seems it would be in the interest of the DOE to get these things done as quickly as possible. So why haven't they? Is it due to the numerous cases of people being railroaded by principals with vendettas? Has the DOE been using the rubber rooms as holding pens to support principals who wanted to keep political opponents or people who were "negative" when they tried to push programs that looked ridiculous to educators? Knowing full-well that many of these cases would not hold up, they chose to pay people. Maybe the political pressure grew too great.

By the way, when I made a suggestion to do this at an Executive Board meeting back in 2005, Randi Weingarten attacked me. And when Jeff Kaufman called on the UFT in June 2006 to hire people to do independent investigations, he was similarly attacked.

It was ICE people that consistently drove the UFT to take action on the rubber rooms, which they did not want to know about until we raised it and began bringing people to Executive Board meetings to speak out. What we ended up with was a useless UFT SWAT rubber room team where the infighting is worthy of Kabuki theater.

Michelle Rhee Targets Seniority, Tenure
Rhee wants to bribe people with high salaries to give up seniority and tenure and be willing to undergo a yearly review, based on the ability to raise test scores. People in it for the short term might take the deal, as might people near retirement (bet these people get reviewed out of the system in a heart beat.) Anyone looking for a teaching career in Washington DC better not be tempted.

And here's a good one because of some old friends:
Miami/Dade County Teachers locked in battle with district
They want to cancel promised raises due to budget cuts. So NYC teachers who expect automatic raises should be aware that this can happen. It did to us back in the 70's and 80's (I think.)

Former NYC Chancellor Rudy Crew (forced out by Giuliani) is the Miami superintendent and former long-time NYCDOE personal director Howie Tames is a labor consultant.

Labor consultant Howard Tames said the district hoped to reach a compromise with the teachers. ''It's the district's position that all employees are important and we want to give money to them,'' Tames said. "But by law, the budget gap has to be filled before we can give out the raises.''

Crew said he will not take his raise either. Crew and Tames still look like gold compared to the crew we got at Tweed.

Howie was a former chapter chairman Unity Caucus member in District 14 who rose quickly though the ranks at the DOE in the mid -70's to head the DOE personnel department, becoming a mainstay and dominant figure through multiple chancellors. Howie knew everyone and knew which buttons to push and he did a lot of favors for a lot of people. He didn't fit the corporate model and was purged under BloomKlein (though he will deny it.)

Howie is also one of my fraternity brothers. We went through some rough times in the 70's when the opposition group "Another View in District 14" (members were amongst the founders of ICE a generation later) battled the local political gang and city-wide Unity Caucus machine. Some of my colleagues still have resentments but Howie and I buried the hatchet a long time ago. Bet he has some fun Tweedle stories. Can't wait for him to write his memoirs.

The attack on teacher unions...

..... is broad-based and international - Lois Weiner put together an excellent presentation at the Teachers Unite forum last week and I hope to have the video up in a few weeks.

Naturally, one aspect is money. Non-union teachers can be paid less - don't be fooled by 125K salaries - the numbers still don't compute in terms of time. The other costs associated with contracts are health care, preps, and class size and other aspects.

But it goes beyond to the ability of organized unions (not the UFT, of course) to drive a progressive education agenda by mobilizing people.

Teachers are the point people all over the world in bringing information to the mass of people and are viewed as potentially dangerous to any agenda unless they can be controlled through fear and intimidation. That's the Taliban assassinate teachers, especially those working with girls. And why teachers in Mexico have been murdered. This is echoed all over the world where teachers are amongst the leaders of progressive movements - except here.*

Thus the real reason for the attack on tenure and senior teachers, people who are the most capable and knowledgeable in terms of resisting the idiot ed ideas being fostered on them.

They want teachers to respond when they are told at 12 midnight that it is really noon to say, "Where are my sunglasses?"

*[Analysing the Kahlenberg "Tough Liberal" book on Al Shanker with supplemental reading goes a way to explaining a lot.]

Misinterpretation (Deliberate?) on Tests and Tenure

Kevin Carey at the Quick and the Ed at the Education Sector, which is part of the Rotherham Empire, misses the point of our post on tenure and testing.

Ed Notes offers a justification for banning the use of student performance data in teacher tenure decisions: Using test scores to estimate teacher effectiveness is methodologically complicated. (This is true). Therefore, it should be outlawed. (This is absurd).

Yes teacher effectiveness is complicated and therefore test results should not be used, or misused. Why outlaw it? Because the practically criminal people running the NYC schools are not to be trusted. But read on, as Carey says:

Most important things, including teaching, are complicated. If we squelch every attempt to understand such things and act on that knowledge, we'll be left knowing very little about very little, which more or less describes the state of knowledge about teacher effectiveness today. Indeed, most teacher policy failures are a function of privileging easily measurable unimportant things, like master's degrees and state certification, over difficult-to-measure important things, like effectiveness in boosting test scores.

Do you understand any of this jargon? Let me translate: I think it means that we know little about teacher effectiveness but let's throw testing for tenure against the wall and see if it sticks. If there's a high body count of teachers who don't get tenure due to something we know very little about, so be it. Us policy wonks need data, data, data.

I do agree with Carey that MA's and state certification mean little in teacher effectiveness. But how come the wonks always use the term "like effectiveness in boosting test scores." I love the word "like." Like what else makes for teacher effectiveness? They always stop at boosting scores - how about, like Johnnie enters a class as a serial killer and leaves tame as a pussy cat but alas, the teacher is a failure and denied tenure because he didn't boost Johnnie's test score. Or the teacher did fabulous science projects with the class which turned many kids onto science but, darn, we just don't know how to measure a rise in enthusiasm.

Carey goes on:

Ed Notes also offers the "it hasn't been tested" argument, i.e. the chicken-and-egg theory of policy obstructionism: it can't be tried because it hasn't been proven; it can't be proven because it hasn't been tried.

I love being called a dreaded "policy obstructionist." The "teacher effectiveness" crowd seem to use the "it hasn't been tested" argument when it comes to class size reduction, i.e. the chicken-and-egg-theory of class size reduction obstructionism, preferring to focus on teacher effectiveness (which is guaranteed to improve with lower class sizes) despite the fact no one has come up with any way to judge other than observation - not a bad way if done objectively. (Here I will be accused of not wanting this method either because I always talk about vindictive principals, but offer the solution of teachers being allowed to call in an independent arbiter. And while I'm on this, I often tell teachers under attack to tape an observation, which seems to make some supervisors incredibly nervous.)

And of course the obligatory attack by Carey on Eduwonkette for calling all the hysteria over the tenure/testing law "union-bashing:"

Meanwhile, some unknown person who claims to be a social scientist but isn't willing to offer any credentials to prove it labels all critiques of the union's role in legally banning evidence of student learning from judgments of teacher effectiveness as "union bashing."
I'd always been under the impression that "science," and thus "social science," involved certain values of empiricism, evidence, and transparency of information..
But maybe "science" means something different wherever they hand out anonymous, theoretical social science degrees, I don't know.

Now, isn't it interesting how Carey on the one hand disparages official teaching credentials
"that most teacher policy failures are a function of privileging easily measurable unimportant things, like master's degrees and state certification, over difficult-to-measure important things, like effectiveness in boosting test scores."

....but attacks Eduwonette for not showing her credentials, without which we obviously can't trust what she says. The quality of what she (or he -wouldn't that be a kick) write is enough for me. Like take this one from Eduwonkette:

Joel Klein, in his op-ed, even blames unions for the existence of achievement gaps:

Protecting grownups rather than making sure students can read and do math is how our country has gotten into the educational mess it's in today. It's the reason we have shameful racial achievement gaps separating our white and Asian students from our African-American and Latino students.

That's why there are no achievement gaps in North Carolina and Texas!

And add Florida and Mississippi and probably a few other non-unionized states around the nation. Gotta love Wonkette, credentials or not.

And what if it turns out that Eduwonkette drives a school bus? Her credentials are what she has to say. Enough for me.

And note the consistent attack on Wonkette by the Rotherham crowd for being anonymous. Boy, will they all be surprised when she turns out to be 13 and in junior high school.

A future post will go into more detail the entire BloomKlein tenure/testing PR sham.

The Sham of Tenure and Test Scores

Updated 2 pm

With the NY State legislature rejecting BloomKlein's attempt to tie tenure to test scores on the heels of turning down the congestion pricing plan, the attacks from Bloomberg and Klein are coming fast and furious. This is not really about tenure. Principals have the right to delay tenure for teachers and many are so vulnerable, they can pretty much be let go quite easily.

First of all, an enormous number of teachers are not even in the mix. Gym teachers? No tenure if the kid can't pole vault? Music? Kids can't play Bach or sing like Callas? OUT! Computer teachers? Typing teachers? 20 words a minute? or 30? or 5? OUT! So where's the equity?

But let's look at the kinds of classes that would be affected. High school regents would be the only ones at that level. Now we need a system to compare apples to apples. What rules are in effect to adjust for the differences in schools and between different classes in schools? What impact does attendance have? Should teachers of a first period class, where many more kids don't show up, be held to a different standard than other periods? What about teachers of non-regent classes? What tests are they to be judged on?

In elementary and middle school, the tests they are talking about are math and reading. So are only these teachers in the line of fire? Do social studies, science, gym, computer, etc. get off? What about reading with push-in programs? What if the teacher who comes in daily is tenured and incompetent while the classroom teacher is untenured? What about the literacy or math coach? In sports the coaches are the ones to get fired, not the players.

Of course, the pro BloomKlein press will express outrage while ignoring all these angles.

With all these questions left on the table - and I blame the UFT for not raising them publicly to point to the folly of the plan. Unity Caucus slugs will jump on this statement: "See you chronic complainer, give the union credit for using its political muscle to win this." Without battling it out over the ideology and relying solely on the political sphere, they will win some battles but will lose the war.

It is clear there is another purpose on the part of BloomKlein. They know full well the linking of test scores to tenure will have no impact on the kids. It is a political and ideological ploy so they can say they beat the union and were successful in modifying tenure. Kudos from the anti-union right will follow. It's about PR.

This is also about putting pressure on just those untenured teachers who can influence the only results BloomKlein care about - the ones that they can use to bolster their political case that they really, really did close the achievement gap. The message: DO WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO TO MAKE US LOOK GOOD OR YOU WILL NOT GET TENURE!

The next step is to hand out erasers that do not leave a trace.


Update from Leonie Haimson on NYC Education listserve:

I was just interviewed by Marcia Kramer on the teacher tenure/test score controversy – I said basically what I wrote in today’s news wrap-up:

1- standardized test scores alone are not sufficient to judge teachers’ competence, since they have to be examined in relation to a lot of other important factors, including class size and the type of students they have, as well as other evidence of the teacher’s skill and what else is going on in the classroom -- and that this administration cannot be trusted to use this data carefully, given their record on merit pay and school grades.

2- tying teacher tenure to test scores could have very destructive effects, discouraging teachers from taking on struggling or special ed students, and lead to a further loss of morale, with even more test prep replacing real learning.

3- Off camera, I said that a hiatus of two years was good since whatever is decided will be implemented by a new administration that will hopefully be more trustworthy with the use of such data.

Marcia Kramer’s Channel 2 story came out pretty good; except for last line, which is blatantly untrue. Video available here:

For more on this issue, see the blog here. Use test scores for tenure? Not a good idea, with these bumblers.

Who is Killing Tenure, Klein or Weingarten?

While Joel Klein has used sturm und drang in his attack on tenure, Randi Weingaten has actually gone out and done something about it by bargaining away tenure rights guaranteed by state law. Contracts supersede the law.

Here is how tenure has been weakened

1. 3020A hearings are now heard before a single arbitrator as opposed to a three person panel that is in state law. It is more difficult to get a three person panel and there is more hope of convincing two out of three arbitrators that a teacher is right as opposed to a single arbitrator.

2. We can be suspended for up to three months and even longer without pay before a 3020A hearing based on an allegation. This provision began in the 2002 contract and was expanded in 2005.

3. For time and attendance problems, there is an expedited process where they can give us any penalty short of termination without having to go through the 3020A process. Whatever is decided can be used against us in future 3020A cases. Teachers are being pressured to sign away their tenure rights in these time and attendance hearings. This was a 2005 provision.

Once upon a time in the West ---
Until UFT crack negotiators manage to overrule courts