GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Re “Last year, the state and city teachers unions threw their political weight behind the ban on linking teacher tenure to student achievement, successfully lobbying Albany to insert the provision into the state’s budget.” :

Last year, the unions also lobbied to freeze charter school funding. In effect, NYSUT and the UFT rewrote legislation, reducing legally entitled payments to schools that included some of their members among them.

Would spending time with someone who understands education help me learn why the unions would do this? Is there an educationally driven reason for this lobbying?

KS, what you conveniently forget to mention is that while charter school funding froze, public school funding was cut. I mean, be fair…

QP, The city is already gaming the system to make it seem as though test scores are going up. It would be easy for them to play the same game with job security for teachers. IOW, come up with a fair system for teacher evaluation and we’ll support it. So far the DOE has not shown itself to deserve our trust.

Why am I not surprised?

“Teacher’s Union Blocks Any Attempts To Improve Our Children’s Future. Steady paycheck for minimal work & accountability is far more important”

Sounds about right

Please stop lumping teachers in the category of mediocre. There are a large proportion of great teachers in nyc. There a few, few teachers who don’t belong in this profession and the union and other teachers always advise them to leave the profession and seek another career. Good teachers want to work next to good teachers. By the way, no one is great. Why? Because everyone has good and bad days. I feel that the public need to focus on how parents play a tremendous part in their child’s life and because of parents’ involvement, teachers can do they job of teaching. Stop blaming the ills of society on teachers! You have mediocre politicians in office too, too long. You have mediocre principals that are protected by the DoE. You have mediocre administrators, who have never taught a day in their life, creating policies that are absurd, but Klein will protect them. I spend the entire day disciplining high schoolers who come unprepared to school (no notebook, pens, pencils, paper), on their cell phones, will teachers are trying to teach, come to school 50% of the time, but teachers are forced to give them extra credit so they can pass, curse at teachers in way that would make a drunkard sailor blush. So pardon me if there are a few mediocre teachers. What about the 90-95% of the teachers who work extremely hard under those conditions to teach student who unwilling want to learn. If you going to blame teachers, then blame everyone, too.

And by the way, INT, you need to find a better administrator because all those issues you cited with your students are not things you can deal with by yourself. There needs to be a schoolwide effort to counter the anti-intellectual, anti-school ethos your kids are bringing into the building. Take advantage of the free market, do your research, and find a school leader who is working with “difficult” kids but putting supports in place for teachers. They’re out there.