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June 19, 2012

Road to “turnaround” rehiring has been bumpy, teachers say

by Rachel Cromidas, at 2:19 pm

The hiring process has hit snags at several “turnaround” schools where teachers have been told to reapply for their jobs this year.

Staff from many of the 24 schools that the city will close and reopen this year under a reform model called turnaround are complaining they are facing confusion and misinformation over who qualifies to be rehired and what will happen to teachers who are not rehired. At a handful of the schools, interviews were delayed by days because of last-minute administrative changes and unexpected time pressures. And some of the school-based hiring committees are working long hours but still falling behind.

Department of Education officials say the rehiring process is underway at all schools and is moving smoothly considering the sheer number of interviews that must be conducted. Any teacher from the schools who applies to stay on is guaranteed an interview, and about 2,600 of them have. They represent 85 percent of the 2,995 teachers currently working in the schools.

“All of the committees are up and running,” said Marc Sternberg, the deputy chancellor overseeing the turnaround initiative. “Some are ahead of others, and some are getting momentum now. Offers are starting to be made.”

But teachers at the schools say the interviews and offers are coming only after logistical hangups that complicated an already stressful process in the waning weeks of the school year.

At John Dewey High School, the first day of scheduled interviews was cancelled after not all members of the hiring committee showed up. Later, the school extended interviews well into Friday evening to make up for lost time.

“The person who was scheduled for 1 p.m. [Thursday] is still waiting for her 6 p.m. interview,” said one teacher last week. “At 4:30 p.m. they held the 11 a.m. interview. And they scheduled people for Friday at 6 and 7 p.m. It is really unbelievable.”

At Richmond Hill High School, teachers were gearing up for interviews when they learned the process would be postponed because the principal the city had installed earlier this year was being replaced. Michael Weinstein, formerly an assistant principal at Leon M. Goldstein High School of Science, is no longer slated to oversee Richmond Hill’s replacement school. Instead, Wayne Anderson, most recently a math teacher at Pathways College Preparatory School, will handle that job.T

Teachers at Richmond Hill and other turnaround schools are now weighing outside job offers with the knowledge that they may not know whether they can stay at their current schools for several more weeks.

“Many of our teachers have applied to other schools, and I’ve heard some of them already have positions in other schools,” said one Richmond Hill staff member last week. “People are waiting, and basically what they were told is that if they go on an interview at another school and they’re called, then they have to make the best decision for them, professionally. And obviously the interviews have not started here. We were told today is that they hope to start them next week.”

Sternberg said some hiccups should be expected considering the magnitude of the project in front of the turnaround schools’ hiring committees.

“This will take time, and this is not a principal making a decision — it’s a committee making a decision,” he said. “Our concern here is that we do it right and that we get the best faculty that we possibly can. It will require patience by everyone. It may take longer than they think.”

The process has moved more quickly at other schools undergoing turnaround. The hiring committee at Automotive High School in Brooklyn started meeting with applicants from outside the school this week after interviewing more than 50 staff members from within the school in past weeks and informing each of them of the committee’s hiring decision.

One Automotive teacher who was invited to return to the school estimated that about 15 teachers opted not to reapply for their jobs.

“A lot of teachers who didn’t interview have expressed that they found it degrading to interview for a job they already have, that it’s baiscally going to be the same old story,” the teacher said. “But basically everybody who applied knows whether they will have jobs at the school or not.”

Linda Rosenbury, the principal of M.S. 22 in the Bronx, said her hiring committee is also barreling through interviews, scheduling them at 20-minute intervals three days a week for 10 hours a day. She received more than a thousand applications for the 50 available spots; 4o of her current teachers applied.

“It’s been kind of sad, but I’ve had to miss the field trips, the eighth-grade trip, and other activities” that take place at the end of the year, Rosenbury said. “It’s intense interviewing but I know it’s worth it. … Teachers are coming to the interviews and saying, ‘I’m recommitting to this school.’”

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  • bee

    Perhaps Sternberg et al. should have thought about the “magnitude,” of project destroy and privatize before euphemistically dismissing the problems as “hiccups.” 

  • Future ATR

    Bumpy?  Wow, that’s an understatement.  Between portfolios, resumes, people walking in and out of your classroom and you have no idea who they are, interviews scheduled, canceled, rescheduled, canceled again, rescheduled for late at night, then having to travel to another borough to grade another school’s Social Studies Regents, almost a full day of training to grade a test we’ve been grading for more than a decade… there has never been a more chaotic end to a school year… and did you notice I didn’t even mention the students since obviously they are an afterthought in today’s NYC public school system.  

  • Stopturnaround

    Marc (The Scum Also Rises) Sternberg is an educational terrorist. All of the so-called “turnaround” schools were set up to fail and neglected. For him to suggest that somehow he and the DOE care about the students in the 24 schools that are going through this “turnaround” madness is ludicrous. This process has accomplished nothing more than to continue the demoralization of both the students and the staff. If the DOE really wanted to improve these schools they could have provided meaningful staff development and allowed the EPOs assigned to the schools the opportunity to work with the school community to create the Small Learning Centers within our schools that are now being planned. I am tired of the “bad teacher” narrative that continues to be the focus of all of Mayor Bloomberg’s and his DOE lackey’s attacks against this city’s teachers.

  • teacher

    Why are the Teachers Fellows being hired when you are going to have thousands of experienced teachers as ATRS being paid anyways??????

  • A Brooklyn Turnaround Victim

    Welcome to the world of Turnaround School Teachers….

  • A Brooklyn Turnaround Victim

    Welcome to the world of Turnaround School Teachers….

  • TeachmyclassMrMayor

     Because as usual the answer is, it has never been about anything but trying to break the union.

  • Bronx Turnaround Teacher

    The turnaround process destroyed our school and the DOE knows it.  Attendance is down, scholarship down, cutting up, suspensions up.  They sent us a first year Principal who doesn’t know a thing about running a school.  Sternberg should be embarrassed for causing our kids to lose a whole year of schooling.

  • MHaber8643

    This  Weinberg should be flogged,  along with every one of these assassin principals…Mulgrew should get off the drafting table and call a  massive demo as done in Chicago  …this is Stop & Frisk Teachers via Portfolio!!!

  • Paladin55

    I am from a large western Queens HS that is being “re-birthed.”  I recently learned that one of the top math teachers in the school and a respected language teacher were not asked back after having their respective interviews.They had two things in common.  Each was an excellent teacher- I know, for instance, that the math teacher had some kind of ridiculous passing % on the math Regents his students took, something like 100/104. The language teacher was generally considered one of the better Spanish teachers in the school.They had another thing in common, both are outspoken, and both had been part of an official complaint against a prior principal over the special treatment his son was receiving in the school. (Many of the teachers he had were department APs, and a young language teacher who had dared to give him a 55, was subjected to severe criticisms from the then principal’s wife, and was eventually pushed out the next year through the machinations of the principal, who is now in the same position at the original building my school was moved from in 1995.).The woman who was appointed to be the new principal in September most recently worked as the head of the DOE “cluster” attempting to work with the school, and was an AP with the prior principal in question, and had also gone to high school with him. Teachers less deserving of being rehired, in my opinion, were taken back before and after these two teachers were given their walking papers. These included our burned out union rep with his 33+ years in the system, and a number of teachers whose only “redeeming” qualities were their tendency to pass their students. I’m not sure about the classroom passing percentages (differentiated from their Regents passing records) of the two teachers in question, but I know both to be fair graders, who were not going to pass undeserving students. I would expect that stories like this can be found throughout the system at the 24 schools in question.

  • Manhattan70

    Long Island City High School.  I don’t know who you are but you should be more judicious when talking about which of your colleagues YOU have determined have “redeeming” qualities.  I was hired back in the first wave of interviews and while I agree with you about the two teachers in question, I don’t appreciate being disparaged in a public forum, even anonymously.   However, please, if you have the guts to question my teaching abilities to my face I’m in 282 all week.  I don’t think it’s too difficult to figure out who I am. 

  • burned

    If you read it carefully, Paladin does not generalize about *all* the teachers who were re-hired.  He speaks of “a number” of teachers who had “redeeming” qualities, not all of them, and the other reference to hired back teachers is similarly not applied to all members of the group.  So, please don’t look for disparagement where none may be meant: we have enough real problems.

  • Bkbomb1449

    I got burned too. I was top rated teacher in my department but i too was outspoken.  A lot of cheating and hiding of incidents to make sure the data was good.  I even spoke with Michael Goodwin of the post. Everyone rehired but me. No U rating. No letters. The union was in on it. They make deals at the kids and teachers expense. The system is so corrupt i am thinking Goodwin might have been in on it!!!

  • Turnaround Teacher

    It is becoming more and more of a bloodbath everyday at Lehman. A few dozen staff members have already been deemed unqualified and there are still 3 departments who have not been interviewed yet…

  • guest

    Paladin55 – If your chapter leader is “burned out” (which he isn’t), the cause of it was defending your rights, trying to fix the disastrous programming snafu, trying to keep your school open, enforce the contract, and save your job.  Do you have any idea how many hours he spent doing that, on his allowance of 40 minutes a day and no C 6 assignment?  Meeting with politicians, community leaders, uft officials, parents, planning protests and the joint public hearing, phone calls and emails at all times of the night?  When he could have just walked away as he has the years to do so, but instead he fought the good fight for you, and you stab him in the back with this nonsense?  I saw him fight for you in many different venues. Burned, how is calling someone you owe a debt of gratitude burnt out “looking for disparagement where none was meant”?  Really?  Your union rep did basically two jobs over the past year – I know because I had the same exact responsibilities, though thank God my school was saved at the 11th hour and I did not have to watch my UFT brothers and sister rip each other apart like this.  Don’t you see this plays right in to the Mayor’s divide and conquer strategy? This has nothing to do with the quality of the teaching at your school, or how successful it iand everything to do with the Mayor trying to break the UFT – none of the 24 schools deserve what they have been dealt.  We need to stand together, not take cheap shots at people trying to help us.  And by the way, at some point, if you are fortunate, you too may have 33 years of experience and you will realize it for the asset it is, rather then the negative conotations you and the folks at Tweed have for it.

  • Paladin55

    I’ve seen a lot of fear and desperation as teachers scramble to prepare themselves to make a good impression in their respective rehiring interviews, without realizing that their efforts were probably futile, because for the most part, decisions had already been made about who would be asked back and who would be sent walking. Being interviewed by a “new” principal who comes in with a lot of baggage, a person who was both an administrator and friend with the man who started the school on its path to oblivion, makes me wonder about any kind of objectivity in the rehiring process at my school. Most likely she is looking at the  passing percentage (not necessarily Regents scores) of a teacher and their passivity within the building community.

    By the way, those Goodwin articles were probably the only good things he ever wrote and about the only good things ever said about teachers in the NY Post.

  • Paladin55

    Please, no lecturing.  This entire mess is a testimony to the fact that the UFT, as an organization, has shown itself to be lacking in creativity, persistence, and strategy as schools and lives were being made miserable and disrupted by Bloomberg’s DOE and his media proxies.  Perhaps if the UFT had not remained neutral in the last mayoral election, things would be different today. Perhaps if it had provided effective counterpunches to the relentless media attacks on teachers and their craft which have reduced an honorable profession to one worthy of the ridicule we face on a daily basis when we read or watch the news, we would not be in the situation we are in today.  Perhaps if the UFT had sensed which way the winds were blowing and been more proactive and recognized/accepted the fact that not everyone is made up of the stuff needed to be an effective teacher, we would be better off as a profession today.  I also object to the idea that some people think being critical of the union amounts to heresy and anti-union sentiment.  I fully appreciate what the union and those who represent it have done over the years, but I am also aware that a system, organization, or leadership position which has become institutionalized to a point where maintaining its status and power takes precedence over doing what needs to be done, is one which must be examined, and if need be, torn down and rebuilt.

  • Bkbomb1449

     The crazy thing is the constant saving of the “higher ups”. Failed principals become network leaders and then have their own people become principals. It is a sick thing of recycling bad administrators. This is the scandal that Goodwin should be writing about.

  • Bkbomb1449

     Mr or Ms guest- you are completely misguided and it is teachers like you that is why this is happening to be quite honest. You defend the union when they could not care less about the teachers. You cannot see what is in front of you out of fear. Fear the DOE says and what the union follows,just to keep their own cushy jobs. If your union rep does not recognize this then he or she is in on it. POINT BLANK.

  • guest

    Paladin and Bkbomb – please show me where I defended the UFT line on anything in the post.  You can’t because I didn’t.  Standing united in face of a determined foe is not a UFT policy, it is common sense.  Only a fool fights in a burning house. I defended a person who was ambushed unjustly. Please specify as to what cushy UFT job your chapter leader has.  Paladin, you attacked not only the man’s teaching ability but his character by calling him burnt out and measuring his ability in the classroom against others.  You didn’t attack the UFT or its policies, you attacked a person, one who has been reelected many times to his thankless volunteer UFT position representing you, has won wide recognition for his efforts, and has won lots of city wide recognition for your high school as a teacher.  You attacked an older person who has carried on despite ill health, when he easily could have backed off and appointed someone else to carry the burden for a while.  You are entitled to your views, where you most certainly do need to be lectured is in common decency.  The guy tried his best to save your school, I’ve seen him emotionally and physically drained by his efforts (as have I been for mine in defending my school), and this is how you act?  Why didn’t you run for chapter leader?  What did you do to save the others at your school?  Bkbomb – just what is the union rep “in on”?  He had to beg for his job of 30 plus years back – is that the enormous kickback he gets for supporting UFT policies? 

  • Turnaround Victim 4567

    Not Cool.  You shouldn’t air your school’s dirty laundry like this.  If you have evidence of any of this go to the media or the DOE OSI, otherwise this is just petty gossip and very unprofessional.

  • Bkbomb1449

     Ms. Guest- Regardless of if your union rep was nervous or not means nothing. The outcomes of these sham interviews are known well in advance. Seriously, is it that hard to see??? The union made a deal behind our backs. It seriously is not that hard to see. Your union rep must know that. Ours does. The district rep doesn’t even answer the phone calls or emails anymore. If you love your union rep so much then you should be upset at the union for doing this.

  • guest

    BkBomb:  Did you even read what I wrote?  I’m not writing about the misapplication of 18D or the sham that it is, I did not post to defend any UFT pov or policy, I was writing in response to the character assasination of someone who volunteered to lead the defense of the Alamo knowing the likely result of his efforts. I posted because of the sheer malevolence and bitterness of this nonsensical ad hominem attack.  Again, what is the reward for this individual you guys are attacking?  He gets to beg for his job back?  I repeat: did you read anything I wrote?   

  • Turnaround123

    I agree with guest that this entire string lacks common decency and good sense. Unfortunately, saying something doesn’t make it so and maligning long time teachers, union advocates and administers avails no one of any good.

  • Turnaround123

     agree with guest that this entire string lacks common decency and good sense. Unfortunately, saying something doesn’t make it so and maligning long time teachers, union advocates and educators avails no one of any good.

  • Schmurnaround

    in memory of one who recently passed, “Can’t we all just get along?”

  • Paladin55

    We are not treated as professionals anyway- why start now.  I have spoken to the people affected about doing something and not just accepting their fate. It is up to them.  At one point in the fall I also spoke to a NY1 reporter (female…blond…you may have seen her on TV) about other issues in the school and gave out my number.  Never got a call.

    Is their any transparency in this interview process?  Do we really know why  some people are kept and some sent packing?  My colleagues were told by an impersonal email whether or not they were back in. Is this how professionals are treated?

    Haven’t heard much from the UFT about the process. Haven’t heard much from the UFT in my school about the “petty gossip” and “dirty laundry” you refer to. 

    The only people held accountable for anything in the educational system these days are common teachers and, in my opinion, the union has not done its job in defending us through this entire process and waging a real campaign to rehabilitate our image.  

    There was a time when unions were more than just a press release president and some lawyers who go to court to wage battle in a legal setting. At some point it would be nice if our leadership would read some literature about how unions used to accomplish things.

  • Bkbomb1449

     Ok- here is where you go wrong. A union rep CHOOSES to represent the union at their school. So if the union does something wrong, which it definitely is, who do you think the teachers will complain to? The person in the school who represents them. The union rep should either understand the heat on him from the teachers, or resign in protest.

  • guest

    BkBomb -  A union rep is chosen BY THE STAFF via election, in your case your chapter leader was elected repeatedly to three year terms.  Obviously most people do not share your assessment of his abilities. He/she represents the members of that chapter, not the UFT leadership.  You use the term union when you should be using the term leadership.  Ok, so say the UFT members at your school don’t like a UFT policy.  The chapter leader goes to the District Rep. or officers of the union, expressing that dissatisfaction, airing their grievances.  They disagree with your staffs’ assessment of the situation.  How does the chapter leader compel the leadership to do what his staff wants?  Feats of strength? Thumb wrestling?  Hypnotism?  Kryptonite?  So if he can’t compel them to do what you want, he should resign in protest, leaving your school unrepresented.  That makes a lot of sense.  If you don’t like your representation, either at your school or at large, you will have an opportunity to vote against them, run against them, and persuade others to support you and your views.  Your chapter can vote to recall your chapter leader also if he is not representing their wishes. It’s very easy to sit back, criticize and be a Monday morning QB.  Not much responsibility there. 

  • Save our schools

    These new Leadership Academy Principals are makimg everything worse, like the one in W,C. Bryant High School. Nobody feels like workimg there, these tactics of intimidation these principals are using is just nonsense. Ms. Dwarka just leave us so we cam be the school we were once.

  • Somebody who cares

    Turnaround Victim:  IF you don’t like this site, don’t visit it.  This is a way for people to vent their anger.  I’ve experienced plenty of corruption.  People with 25 years were asked not to come back even though they’ve been superior teachers.  The 18D committee does not have to explain why a teacher wasn’t hired.  Don’t bring people down even more.  Either be on their side or our side.

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