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Vox populi

August 3, 2012

Comments of the week: A payroll exposé opens the floodgates

by Philissa Cramer, at 6:12 pm

We’re always excited when our news stories prompt readers to share on-the-ground details about their schools. That’s what happened when we wrote about Fort Hamilton High School, where an investigation is underway into illicit payroll practices that seem to have allowed the principal to hire long-term substitutes instead of replacing teachers.

Some of the thoughtful and informed comments that our readers submitted in response to the article are our comments of the week.

Our readers said the payroll improprieties might have been egregious at Fort Hamilton, but they exist elsewhere. Rtzimm88 wrote that the scenario happened to him:

I think the DOE should look into more schools with high sub budgets. I thought my school was the only one who did this. I just completed my first year as a “long term substitute,” made 27,000 dollars, and completed a full time teaching position. I made a deal with the devil. I was able to teach, yet made half of what I should have been making (54,000).

“The grandmarist” wrote,

Ft. Hamilton wasn’t the only high school engaged in this kind of subterfuge. As any [member of the Absent Teacher Reserve] can tell you, there were numerous full-time positions being filled by substitutes who received no benefits throughout the city.

And a reader posting as “Former teacher” called the practice “the new normal”:

This is the newest game to save money.  The administrators want new college graduates preferably from outside of New York City so they think this is normal.  Actually, this has become the new normal.  There are “UFT Chapter Leaders” supposedly in these buildings and they let this go on.

Another reader piped up to say that the allegation “Former teacher” made against union leaders isn’t always fair. “CourseBoss” wrote:

Some of us “Chapter Leaders” have blown the whistle, have made the reports, only to see nothing happen, except seeing the young individuals at times, unable to work, with nothing happening to those “at the top” for whom one might say they could have been found guilty of filing a false report (something the courts do frown upon if it ever gets there), except that the tacit approval of those at the top of DOE allows this method for reducing costs so schools can open.

The Department of Education’s accounting practices give principals a real incentive to get creative with their payroll, argued another commenter, Vincent Muccioli. He offered a solution:

The biggest issue with the DOE and the ATR’s is the way schools have to pay more for more experienced teachers. There are some teachers in the ATR that nobody wants in their school, but I bet more of them are just more expensive than a school wants to pay for. I know that principals wanted control over their budgets and hiring decisions, so what if the DOE paid for everything above a teacher’s base pay. Schools should have the choice to hire another teacher for $50,000 or use the money a different way. It should not be a choice of 1 teacher for $90,000 or 2 teachers for $45,000 each. That will easily relieve pressure on principals to hire new teachers instead of ATR’s. That way, we can get all of the decent but expensive teachers out of the ATR pool and be left with only those that are not wanted. Then we can decide what to do with only the unwanted teachers.

And speaking of teacher quality, the week kicked off with the release of a new report from TNTP, a nonprofit that urges changes to teacher hiring and firing practices. The report, called “The Irreplaceables,” argues that districts need to do more to retain high-quality teachers and urge low-quality teachers to leave.

Our article about the report kicked off a firestorm about hiring and firing rules in New York City, with many commenters arguing against changing the rules in order to make removing teachers easier. But one commenter, “anonymous,” said teachers do vary widely in quality, suggesting that some changes might be merited:

Please. I attended public schools in a middle-class suburban community. I was enrolled in all honors classes — most of which served between 15-18 students because they screened for achievement. My classmates and I were motivated and hard-working. This was back in the pre-helicopter parenting era and we were all strivers. I had some amazing teachers and some average teachers and some truly abysmal teachers. I could quote lessons from the best of them verbatim. And I still get angry about some of the really poor-performing teachers I had more than two decades after graduating high school.

My kids currently attend NYC public schools. They likewise have some good teachers and some bad ones. My older child is in a selective high school and his classes are “streamed” so he takes all his classes with the same cohort of high-achieving students. The same thing was true in his non-selective middle school. Some of the teachers were good, some were mediocre, some were awful. Same kids, same parents, the only difference was the teacher. My younger daughter is in elementary school and her class gets pulled out for science with a teacher who shows videos about 75% of the time. What’s more, he shows the same videos to the same kids in successive years. The kids are bright, motivated, and well-behaved. Is he a good teacher? I can’t say with any certainty that the impact of these differences would be picked up on standardized tests. I can say that I see the impact on my children’s learning and they can themselves identify the difference between good, mediocre, and lousy teachers with complete clarity.

I work in a public NYC high school with an extremely high-need population. Some kids behave marvelously in one class and are “incorrigible” in another. Some teachers have cut rates well outside the norm for other teachers in the building — and the students who cut their classes show up for everyone else. And student outcomes align pretty strongly with these patterns. Do you not think the teacher might be playing a role here?

It’s one thing to be critical of this report or proposed reforms to teacher evaluation systems, but can we refrain from pretending that there aren’t meaningful differences among teachers’ when it comes to performance? And this is true even within the same building, working with the same exact kids. Anyone who has children, who works in a school, or whoever attended school knows that all teachers are not created equal. To pretend otherwise is ridiculous.

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  • Anonymous

    [ But one commenter, “anonymous,” said teachers do vary widely in quality, suggesting that some changes might be merited: ]

    1) The commenter’s main points are that teacher quality varies from lousy to amazing and that this affects student achievement. WHO is arguing the opposite!

    2) It has not been my experience as a student or as someone involved in education that there are significant numbers of ‘lousy’ teachers or ‘amazing’ teachers or as the commenter puts it, ‘some were good, some were mediocre, some were awful’. In the schools I have attended most teachers were somewhere in the range of mediocre to pretty good, as I recall. Some were very strict, some were tough, some were very lax or easy graders, some overly teacherly for me, some very long winded, some clashed with my learning style, some were plain odd to me, but almost none were truly awful or lousy, though I can imagine some of my cohort saying and spreading that undeservedly for a few of the qualities above. At the same time, I didn’t have any truly great teachers that I recall.
    I had some pretty good ones who went all out in some respects, but I didn’t find them to be really outstanding educators.
    Professors (lecturers), that’s a whole different story, and an unfair comparison.

    3) I think many tend think in general, “Well some are good, some are bad”, about just about anything from appliances to waiting service. On further thought they refine it to “some are good, some are okay, some are lousy”. But often the reality is statistically different from our sort of offhand perception. And often we are impressed or disappointed by specifics that don’t fully characterize, and shade our perception hugely.

  • Bluethezoom

    As usual, the comments are one sided against administration. Under the emperor, one must fear expressing one’s first amendment rights so I must remain anonymous. However, given the draconian hiring restrictions unless you are lucky to be the the leader of one of the emperors pet schools and thus free of restrictions, there are obstacles and challenges that cause principals to hire “creatively.” I know of a high performing school that tried to hire at least 3 ATR’s. Given the choice between floating the system with no accountability and working in a good school with accountability, each of the ATR’s turned down the job! Without the ability to hire due to restictions and no other appropriately licensed ATR’s, the school was told to just use weekly out of license ATR’s for the next 8 months or find a day to day sub for a long term assignment. Hence, no choice but to hire the day to day. And had there been no hiring restrictions, the day to day could have been hired full time or offered a full time for the next year. Yet the city has no money for teachers yet plenty for consultants an computer systems that don’t work. Having said this, schools should make good faith efforts to hire quality ATR’s or teachers in excess like this school did (in other areas, it did hire 2 ATR’s).

  • burned

    Good job, no: extra good job, Gotham Schools.  I hope this is just the beginning of opening and exposing this can of worms. 

  • Anonymous

    For an excellent point of view on the Randi Weingarten/Campbell Brown duel on Twitter, you should read NYC Educator’s piece on the dust-up. If you haven’t been following it, what happened, briefly, was this:

    Campbell Brown, formerly of CNN, wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, basically accusing teachers unions of protecting sexual predators. Randi Weingarten jumped into the fray to defend teachers, claiming that even teachers who are accused of sexual infractions are entitled to due process, and can certainly be removed if arrested or if an arbitrator rules the against a teacher. Ms. Brown claims that due process is “protecting” sexual predators, and that teachers should be summarily fired if accused in order to protect children.

  • Anonymous

    For an excellent point of view on the Randi Weingarten/Campbell Brown duel on Twitter, you should read NYC Educator’s piece on the dust-up. If you haven’t been following it, what happened, briefly, was this:

    Campbell Brown, formerly of CNN, wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal, basically accusing teachers unions of protecting sexual predators. Randi Weingarten jumped into the fray to defend teachers, claiming that even teachers who are accused of sexual infractions are entitled to due process, and can certainly be removed if arrested or if an arbitrator rules the against a teacher. Ms. Brown claims that due process is “protecting” sexual predators, and that teachers should be summarily fired if accused in order to protect children.

    One issue that came up in the debate is that Campbell Brown failed to disclose in her piece that her husband, Dan Senor, is on the board of StudentsFirstNY–an organization run by Michelle Rhee.

    A cynic might believe that Ms. Brown has an agenda here because of her conflict of interest, but she eventually came clean and admitted that she should have disclosed her close ties to such an staunchly anti-teacher group.

    So, who is right? Normally, I would side with Randi on this one, as I believe everyone deserves due process. But recently I heard a case of perverted behavior with a child that can not be ignored in a discussion such as this. This kind of sick behavior must be punished, and I am sure Ms. Brown and Ms. Rhee would agree.

    The case involves a teacher who allegedly groped a 16 year old girl. The police recorded a phone call from this teacher apologizing to the girl for what happened. The case was investigated by the police, who declined to prosecute. In the end, the teacher reportedly paid a settlement to the girl to end the matter. As bad as this case was, yet another accusation surfaced against this teacher. A student again complained of inappropriate behavior by this teacher, although she later recanted. Nevertheless, in light of the first settlement paid, coupled with a subsequent allegation of similar misconduct, we should in this case agree with Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown that this teacher needs to lose his job and shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near young girls.

    Oh, wait. My bad. It wasn’t a teacher against whom these allegations were leveled. It was a politician, namely Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento.

    The husband of Michelle Rhee.

    I’m sure that any moment now, we can expect Michelle Rhee and Campbell Brown to call for the ouster of Kevin Johnson as mayor. After all, although none of the charges were substantiated and no charges filed, I’m sure they would agree that we can’t allow a little thing like due process stand in the way of protecting our children.

    Right, Michelle and Campbell?

    Hello?

  • DebbyNYC

    I agree with anonymous that there are differences in teacher quality– although as Akademos says below that’s true of everything human beings do– but what’s the point?  Not only are there inherent differences between teaching skills; there are wide differences in temperament and style.  Just like in romance, there is a chemistry between teacher and student.  The best teacher for one child isn’t necessarily the best teacher for another.  The solution for parents is to meet your child’s teacher, stay involved, and talk with, and listen to, your child.

    Anonymous certainly seems to have flourished, given her uneven education.  We ALL had uneven educations, and EVERYONE ALWAYS WILL.  I’m not saying we shouldn’t rate teachers.  But the way we had been rating them, with a principal who came up through the ranks of teaching, who observes the teacher in her classroom, formally and informally; and gives an “S” or a “U” with explanation, is the most practical.  Rating teachers doesn’t help them improve.  Struggling teachers (like struggling kids) need help, not punitive judgment. 

    Judging teachers will always be subjective, because teaching and learning is a HUMAN endeavor that can’t be reduced to a meaningful statistic.  The variation Anonymous refers to is not a drawback.  It’s a plus.  Imagine Harvard employing the “reformists” focus on standardized curriculum and high stakes testing.  Imagine Harvard without a range of professorial temperament and teaching ability.  No one would go.

    The individual variation kids encounter prepares them for real life.  They have to develop ways of coping with all kinds of satisfactory and unsatisfactory situations, and that’s good.  With our help, they’ll be flexible and hopefully ll grow up to have fulfilling lives.

    I’m not trying to say we should be complacent.  Like every other profession, teachers should be evaluated by their supervisors.  Teachers who are struggling should be helped, and after due process, those who can’t succeed should go.

    But let’s not pretend that “reform” will do that.  Let’s not pretend “reform” means anything other than allowing politicians and businessmen to profit from education.  If we want to improve schools, we have to trust teachers.  We have to accept that every teacher won’t be teacher of the year, and every student won’t be valedictorian.  But that’s because we’re human.

  • Best Dot Net Training

    Good job, no: extra good job, Gotham Schools.
    I agree with anonymous that there are differences in teacher quality.

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