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NYC Educator is right. This money is being spent for political purposes.

They should be hiring more teachers that way they can be firing them teachers who is lazy and self fish who won’t be taken no 10% salary cut. Look at what Chris Christ be doing in jersey. Fire them greedy teachers who won’t take no pay cut and make there budgets fail. You teachers MUST make SACRIFICE just like all us do.

Why do you teachers got such a hard time making sacrifices like everyone else’s. Just cuz the ecomony is bad don’t mean you can go making you’re fat paychecks and you’re fat pentions, and you’re fat health benefits. Do it for the children. We ALL MUST make SACRIFICES. You aint no different.

Jason, I have a feeling that there will be plenty of newly certified science and special ed teachers coming out of the assorted colleges in the city, on LI, in Westechester, etc. (not to mention the kids who are metro-NY area natives and will be returning home from upstate NY schools, again, with certification and student teaching experience). There are few jobs to be found anywhere so I’d imagine many of them would gladly take NYC jobs. You may counter than those teachers may eventually move on to greener pastures when the economy improves, but maybe not. And how many Fellows/TFA teachers REALLY stay? I see no reason at all to spend $5 million dollars.
And Anathema, I consider reading your post to be enough sacrifice. My head hurts now.

How about people like me who worked their butt off to get teachers certification the long way 3 years of undergrad math ed now working on my masters but do to hiring freeze cant get a job. However teaching fellows still ended up finding jobs this year. Explain that one

I tried to hire two science teachers out of the ATR pool last year. There were a limited number of science teachers generally, in non-shortage areas. I’ll put aside issues I’ve previously raised with the fact that they didn’t respond to job postings, and the few who called me back were unwilling to work in my school due to location. (They literally would not come out for interviews.) Science and Special Education are shortage areas nationally. Nobody is at risk for being laid off in those areas (at least in the specific science subjects that are shortage areas) here and the same thing is true in other districts. Jobs in those fields will be open in Westchester and Long Island and across the country. And if we bar using fellows then schools like mine — the highest-need schools will revert to the good old days where we couldn’t get qualified staff. (Schools in Tribeca and Park Slope will have no problem getting the teachers they need.) I find it particularly ironic that the Bronx Borough President is making this call when the Bronx has the highest percentage of special education students in the city, and is probably the hardest-to-staff borough generally.

I will add to Miss Teacher that the retention rate for Fellows (not TFA, but they’re not at issue here) is higher than traditionally certified teachers. This is true both at the end of their TFA guarantee period (3 years) and after five years. I don’t find this particularly shocking. It seems perfectly logical that older career changers are likely to be pretty sure of what they want and at a point in their lives and careers where they’re seeking stability.

Finally, as noted in the story, this contract works like many other DOE and government contracts. It’s set as a ceiling but it’s paid out based on use. So if fewer teachers are needed and fewer teachers are hired, the contractee gets a lot less money. If 200 teachers are hired because that’s what the need is, then the amount of the contract is paid out proportionally. I used to work for a non-profit group that had a $250,000 contract with the DOE. We worked with individual schools who hired us as needed/wanted, for programs that cost roughly $5000 a piece. We typically earned $50-75K in a year, but if there had been a flood of interested schools wanting to purchase our services, we would’ve been able to meet that need up to the $250K ceiling. Same thing here.

Honestly is there anyone who does not believe there are enough qualified Special Ed and Science folks out there? The TFA at this point is clearly a politicial plum to ensure that Klein brings in more young teachers into the system to push out older higher salaried staff members. At least have the guts to admit this.