‘Best and brightest’ need not apply
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The city’s budget woes will force a ban on new teacher hiring, reports the Times (today and last week), the News, and others. The teacher’s union has high praise for the new strategy, which aims to place ‘excessed’ teachers, often languishing in DOE rubber rooms, back into classrooms citywide. Multi-million dollar savings are anticipated, based on projections by the New Teacher Project, which met with significant UFT derision only last year. (The worrisome projected attrition in the profession, highlighted in an April report, seems to have been forgotten.)
Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg have long beseeched the ‘best and brightest’ at American colleges and universities to consider teaching as a profession. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Barack Obama have often said the same, and consistently support efforts to elevate the status of teaching as a competitive, desirable career choice — as it is in many world cultures whose students outshine their U.S. counterparts.
What’s it to be? Can the city be pro-teacher and anti-hiring? Can city leaders credibly encourage talented young professionals and committed career-changers to consider teaching — and then say, ’sorry, not this year’? It appears the answer is, “Yes, they can — and yes, they have,” although the net result, for the city’s students, teachers, and schools, remains uncertain. Not to mention, a very large gamble.
Clarification: Teachers who will be hired for the coming school year are mainly those who were assigned to the reserve pool of teachers whose schools have been closed, reconfigured, or otherwise restructured so that their jobs are no longer open. Educators assigned to the “rubber rooms” face disciplinary evaluations before they may return to the classroom.
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How on earth are teachers assigned to the rubber room supposed to get hired out into schools? If they’re in the rubber room then they were removed from schools under an accusation of wrong-doing. In the rubber room, they languish for months or years waiting for their cases to be heard. The wheels of justice for these teachers grind inexorably slowly, at the cost of $60 million dollars a year to keep paying their salaries until they’re declared innocent and able to be hired again, or guilty and fired for cause.
Comment by fascinated — May 11, 2009 @ 6:12 pm
What is worse about this is that school leaders, such as myself, will now have to hire from within, which limits our ability to select who we want to hire. Sometimes excessed teachers are not assigned for a reason!
Comment by In the System — May 11, 2009 @ 9:45 pm
Clearly this “hiring from the rubber room” is a ploy by the PR machine of the DOE to stir up the pot of angry parents further so that it boils over in fury. They want the parents to get so angry that they pull their kids out of the system and free up more seats for the kids on the waiting lists. These incompetents in the rubber room are not going to be put back to work. They were removed for a reason. Those reasons did not disappear. They are liabilities. Legal Liabilites. They will not be in front of a classroom. This is such B.S. Why not tell us that they are going to hire sex offenders next? How gullible do they think we are?
Comment by district 1 mom — May 11, 2009 @ 11:37 pm
Hmm, could it be that the DOE is trying to use this hiring freeze in order to get parents angered over the current teacher’s union contract? By putting teachers who have been pulled from the classroom, but are still collecting DOE paychecks, back into the classroom, maybe they’re hoping for both principal and parent outrage, thereby proving that the consequence of unsatisfactory teaching should be dismissal.Sadly, the victims in this experiment are our children.
Comment by a parent — May 13, 2009 @ 7:15 am
This policy is horrible for the ASD Nest program! It prohibits them from hiring top notch student teachers whom Nest has groomed and trained through their affiliations with Hunter and NYU and who have graduated and are ready to teach, not to mention the superb para’s who are currently in the Nest classrooms and are now qualified to be promoted to teaching positions. As a parent of an ASD Nest Kindergartener, I know how vital it is for my son to have excellent and well-trained teachers–we need to get the ASD Nest program exempted from this policy, and we need to do it NOW, before it’s too late to train next year’s teaching staff!
Comment by Marni Goltsman — June 1, 2009 @ 10:36 am
I think the public is very misinformed about “teachers in the rubber rooms”. Do you know that most of them were falsely accused by students or sent to rubber rooms by their principals out of spite?
Child molesters don’t go there; they go to jail and get fired
Check out therubberroommovie.com
Comment by anonymous — June 30, 2009 @ 10:51 pm