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Um, how does it go again – oh – right:  l – o – l

I’m asking this because I’m lazy and don’t feel like doing the legwork: does the UFT have its own proposal for getting rid of non-criminal but objectively horrible teachers other than not granting them tenure in the first place? 

Define “objectively horrible.” The DOE defines them as people who stand up to their principals for some basic rights – like a lunch hour. Since you are lazy I urge you to look up the Peter Lamphere case and google Iris Blige. Until the DOE removes objectively bad horrible principals who go after people for political and personal reasons teachers who witness these horror stories will demand the UFT dig its heals in. And you might check out all the complaints from teachers who feel the UFT has the attitude towards its teachers of “guilty until proven innocent.” And Tim. I do hope that if you are ever charged with a crime you accept being sentenced without a trial. Show us what you are made of.

Tim,

“does the UFT have its own proposal for getting rid of non-criminal but
objectively horrible teachers other than not granting them tenure in the
first place?”

The  1000  principals  across  NY  state who  signed  a petition  opposing  the  way  this  evaluation  system  is  being  implemented  are  not  “members  of  the  UFT.”   Last  time  I  checked  principals  were  a  layer  of  management,  and  have  no  interest  in  keeping  “objectively  horrible  teachers”  in  their  schools.

 The  way  the  evaluations  have  been  “piloted”  in  the  33   PLA  schools  in  NYC  is  atrocious.   It  is  obviously  being  used  just  to  lay  the  groundwork  to  fire  teachers,  not  improve  instruction  for  the  students.

Sure, Bronx Teacher. I’d be happy to discuss further, but not until you acknowledge that these teachers exist and that they are at just about every school in the city, from Stuyvesant on down to the elementary schools in the most challenged neighborhoods in the city and everywhere in between.

You’re protesting too much. There are very, very, very few teachers who are objectively horrible and not worthy of rehabilitation, but let’s not pretend that they’re an urban legend. 

If anyone is inclined to answer your question, I expect the answer would be something along the lines of, “there are already ways to get rid of bad teachers,” i.e., notice followed by document discovery and depositions followed by motion practice followed by a hearing followed by an appeal.  Maybe it costs $200,000 but you can’t put a price on due process, can you?  Anyway, to the extent the UFT has any leverage, it should not propose new rules that make it easier to fire its members.  The UFT represents  the interests of its members, not the interests of the DOE, you, me, our children, or anyone else.   

Tim
How can you say that it has nothing to do with your question when even in the Peter Lamphere case where a court killed the U rating Tweed declared they were looking into their legal options? So with vendettas from the very top I am not for the UFT coming up with a plan to make it easier. Want me to tell you the story of the excellent teacher at Seward Park HS
many years ago who got U rated when she filed a grievance because there
was no toilet paper? And the UFT botched that and she had to get her own lawyer.

Yes it does cost to hold hearings – but no one seems to be looking at why those hearing officers get such cushy deals when they often rule for the DOE anyway or split the baby by fining the teacher?  Sure these teachers exist and principals have plenty of weapons to use – I’ve seen it happen. But as long as there are political prisoners and the DOE supports their retention the ability to remove bad teachers is weakened. I claim the quality teacher campaign is bogus. By the way – talk to some elite private school teachers who once taught in a public school and will admit they were not doing well. So context does count. A whole bunch of lousy teachers are lazy and a competent admin can put an end to that easily.

Are you also asking the police union to route out bad cops – who by the way actually can kill. Or harass kids of color just for walking in the streets and then treat them like dirt when finished with them.

And Los Flerpos is right for a change in that the union defends teacher interests but wrong in trying to say that making sure working conditions are decent is somehow not in the interests of children.  Hey, LF, next time you get on a plane check with the pilot’s union to see if they made sure the pilot wasn’t flying 3 shifts and you are on the last one.

It is good for once to see the UFT standing up to the lackey Walcott, the Emperor Michael I who thinks term limit laws are not for him and the State Education Department.  No organization can allow incompetent supervisors, see Ms. Reidy and others, to have free reign to downgrade teacher performance without a meaningful appeals system.  The current appeals system has totally failed to protect teachers from vindictive and other incompetent Principals who don’t have the first clue as to working with teachers to improve their performance in the classroom and given a quick course in the Leadership Academy.  Many if not most of these new instant Principals do not have the slightest ability to properly supervise and work with teachers to improve their performance in the classroom.

To Mr. Lackey Walcott, to his majesty Emperor Michael Ithey want the ability to get rid of older teachers making the most money under the guise of accountability.  The UFT partially caved two years ago in order to help them win the Race to the Top although little of this money will go to the teachers. 

Let them lose the money.  Who cares.  The UFT’s first responosibility is to protect its members from the arbitrary and capricious type of evaluation system lackey Walcott and Emperor Michael wish to impose.  Of course they should have to prove they have done everything possible to assist a teacher in improving his or her performance in the classroom.  How any well meaning person can be against this is something that boggles the mind.  But in the next day or two, we will see the editorials from the tabloids congratulating lackey Walcott and Emperor Michael I and urging SED to trample on teacher rights.  For once, it seems Mulgrew has stood up for hims members.  Hope he doesn’t cave.

It’s simple really. If SED’s John King imposed a deadline/term limit and it was not met. Bloomberg should just buy another.

Yes, it has a proposal.  Individual teachers should NOT be evaluated, because teaches work in teams.  The entire school has to be evaluated.

However, if the school is found to have done a bad job overall, it should not be closed, because that would be unfair to individual teachers.

And if it is closed despite, and you want to prevent the teachers from teaching, they get stay home and be paid to do nothing, until their retirement.

Meanwhile, qualitative judgements of teachers are unfair, because management is biased.  

But test based evaluation is unfair, because whatever test is used isn’t any good, forces teaching to the test, and wastes time.

That leaves no legitimate basis for evaluation.

Moreover, there is nothing in the contract that spells out that the teachers are required to do anything other than show up, so how can someone who shows be considered inadequate?

Now they want another favor from us?  We closed the Rubber Rooms, saving the city 30 million per year. We agreed to that new pension system that saves the city 100 million per year. We made test scores part of teacher evaluations. We added charter schools allowing the city the chance to gain 700 million dollars. We changed the rating system, allowing us to get an ineffective rating for 2 years, and then be fired within 60 days. Shouldnt all of these negotiations and side agreements been part of our new contract? WE gave into all of this, and got absolutely nothing. No 4%, no 2%. Im a long way to go before retiring and thinking about quitting much sooner. Cant stand the union for letting all this go. None of the above should have been agreed to until a new contarct was agreed to.  Last raise was May 2008.

nope Bigciti.

I’m still very confused about what we were thinking when we agreed to any of this. I’ve personally seen the results of ELA and Math colleagues that showed them in the top 10% some years and the bottom 15% other years. That’s the nature of what we’re measuring. That issue needs to be resolved first YEARS BEFORE we consider using it in a way to decide the careers of teachers. I’ll be the first to admit that as a teacher, I can generally determine whether my colleagues are fantastic or terrible teachers with the vast majority doing a strong job considering what we all have to work with. But that opinion doesn’t correlate with test results consistently enough to even remotely consider them in my reasoning. And I guarantee you that my opinion is going to be far more accurate and I still wouldn’t rely on it to determine teacher careers. We’re going to have to play hard ball because there’s little incentive not to.

Change teachers to bankers and it makes more SENCE

The city has already violated the agreement on the 33 schools when they elected to close Irving and Dodge last month.  The system should not be used at all in those 33 schools.

I am proud of my Union and Michael Mulgrew. There is a bottom, there is a limit, there are boundaries and we haven’t seen that publicly in quite a bit. Now…there is a lot that is not discussed here…the fact that the City was violating every part of the tentative agreement-with a minor challenge from the Union(Michel Mendel letter) and the fact that the City DOES NOT care about SIG schools at all!!!!! Walcott is only using this as an Ace to come back at the Union over and over again with to negotiate the larger agreement that is supposed to be agreed to by June. I hope the Union is planning and being proactive in their planning to go back at the City.

You forgot that we gave up our 8.25% on our TDA too.

Any system  accountability must give teachers the right to bar troublemakers from entering your class. If a teacher is going to be held accountable then those students who constantly disrupt your lesson must be removed immediately. One way of doing this is to have cameras and audio equipment in the classroom. Those students who do not follow the rules not ne allowed back in your class.  

Hey, what happened to Timmy and his answers?

Interesting that you keep bringing up bankers.  I’ve made the case that the top 1 percent and those members of public employee unions benefitting from the screw the newbie, flee to Florida schemes have much in common, and have benefitted at other people’s expense.

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/new_york_explained_in_one_chart.html_0

Make sure you actually download the chart; unfortunately Room Eight bugs prevent me from downloading the spreadsheet.  You might also want to read this.

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/a_halloween_tale_how_occupy_wall_street_could_really_terrify_the_top_one_percent.html

And this.

http://www.r8ny.com/blog/larry_littlefield/point_of_intersection_between_the_years_in_retirement_rich_and_the_bonus_rich.html

The meta issue, in the public and private sectors, is our institutions being pillaged by those who control them in the era of Generation Greed, leaving younger generations worse off.

The RttT funds relating to teacher evaluations are not and have never been about benefitting students, but reconfiguring labor relations in the schools. Along with school closings and reorganizations, they are part of the assault against laws and contract provisions that govern tenure and seniority, are intended to give supervisors more levers for purging seasoned teachers and denying tenure to new teachers, and ultimately lead to the ed deformer’s wet dream of a constantly churned, at-will and compliant labor force that will meekly implement the power and profit-driven mandates of the 1%.

As Diane Ravitch, NYC Educator, Reality-Based Educator and others have pointed out, few of these funds are intended for the classroom, but are instead intended as lures for ever more local expenditures on testing. They will inevitably lead to even more wasted and diverted resources, further destruction of the neighborhood public school, and accelerated expansion of charters schools (such as SED head King’s Uncommon Schools chain). 

The UFT made a terrible error in initially agreeing to link student test scores to teacher evaluations, but Michael Mulgrew is to be commended for not giving in to King’s dishonest pressure tactics in this round. The money is chump change to begin with, will lead to further wasting of money, and has sinister purposes.

Sports analogies are way overused, but I’ll attempt one here. When Mohammed Ali fought George Foreman for the heavyweight championship in 1974, his strategy – later to become famous as the “rope-a-dope” – was based on the assumption that he couldn’t win by directly challenging Foreman punch-for-punch. Instead, he bided his time, taking punishment, but let Foreman exhaust himself over the course of the fight, at which point  Ali, having conserved his strength, was able to win in the later rounds. 

Hopefully, despite the lateness of the hour, the UFT leadership finally recognizes what the  1% intends the endgame to be in education, and has a strategy to check and reverse it. Right now, teachers are dispirited and demoralized; the union needs to take the risk of transforming that into justifiable anger and mobilization on many fronts. That, along with an alliance with parents and students, is the only thing that has the potential to stop and eventually drive off the privateers.

Larry Larry
It’s always the teachers it’s all our fault. It’s never anyone else, can you understand that your approach just gets under our skin. You are so OCD that it’s almost sad. In fact you deserve all that you get. Have a great New Year if you can.

You work at Newtown HS? I go to school there and I’m a bit alarmed at this.

 As always, well put,  Michael.  Thanks. 

God what a windbag. And thanks for the tired rope-a-rope analogy. I assume the UFT ends up with pugilistic dementia?.

Lies, lies, lies. First of all, that money is not lost and gone forever. It’s been suspended. King has no right to withold the money permanently. It sounds like tough talk but if and when they can reach an agreement, the funding will be restored. But even more importantly, don’t think for one second that the money was going to be used for things such as hiring more teachers to reduce class size or more modern technology or things like that. Do you know what the money is being used for? Well part of this teacher evaluation malarkey is to use student test data to evaluate teachers. But of course the vast majority of secondary school teachers especially don’t teach courses where exams exist. So what are they going to do? Rather than recognize how ludicrous this is, they will be using the money to develop exams not to evaluate studeents but to evaluate teachers. Also, there has to be professional development of intermediate supervisors to carry out these new evaluations. So they have invented a new position called talent coach using many of the disgraced Principals such as the lady from Lehman High School who was caught tampering with studeng grades. No they wouldn’t fire her. Instead they made her a talent coach. And guess how that new position is being funded? Why of course with this funding. So don’t believe the lies being thwon out by the politicians, by the lackey Walcott and Emperor Michael I. Nothing the UFT has done will hurt the kids in the slightest. Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/gov-slams-schools-making-deal-article-1.999348#ixzz1iDAwAsbp