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human capital

August 15, 2012

Amid tenure crackdown, some targeted teachers get good news

by Geoff Decker, at 9:00 am

Later this week, when the Department of Education announces the number of teachers who received tenure last year, it’s likely that the tenure rate will be lower than ever.

It used to be that virtually all teachers who completed their third year were awarded tenure, which confers added rights. But ever since Mayor Bloomberg vowed to end “tenure as we know it” in 2010, fewer teachers have gotten tenure each year. Last year, fewer than 60 percent of teachers up for tenure received it; most of the rest had their probationary periods extended, sometimes for a second time.

But for a group of teachers who were told earlier this year that their tenure recommendations were being rescinded, there is better news. They’ll be receiving tenure after all.

In June, GothamSchools reported that tenure-eligible teachers working in some struggling schools were having their probationary periods extended, even when the superintendent, who is supposed to make the final call, agreed with their principal’s recommendation for tenure.

A teacher from Automotive High School, a low-performing high school that the city tried to close, said his colleagues got him cake to celebrate after his principal informed him this spring that the tenure recommendation she had passed along to the superintendent, Karen Watts, had been approved.

But weeks later, the teacher said he was told that the recommendation was taken off the table and that his probation would be extended instead.

The same thing happened to two of his colleagues at Automotive, and union officials said they were hearing similar reports from teachers across the city. The union said the cases had one thing in common: All of the schools where teachers’ tenure recommendations were rescinded had received a “D” or “F” on the city’s progress reports.

Union president Michael Mulgrew said he heard from principals that their superintendents were under pressure not to grant tenure to teachers in low-rated schools. But a department spokesman said no directive along those lines had come from the central administration.

And in an unusual reversal, the teachers said their superintendents apparently had a change of heart. A few weeks before school ended for the summer, they learned that they’d be awarded tenure after all.

At Automotive, there was no celebration this time around, according to the teacher, who asked to remain anonymous because he said he didn’t feel fully protected yet.

“I’m not officially tenured until the beginning of the school year,” said the teacher. “And, as we’ve learned, anything can happen.”

A spokeswoman for the department said the city did not receive any reports about tenure decisions being changed.

Bloomberg’s war on tenure has been part of a larger effort to make it easier to remove low-performing teachers. He has questioned whether is tenure is even necessary. The union maintains that the protection that tenure confers is a crucial part of due process.

To crack down on the ease in which tenure was granted, department officials first created a new rubric in 2010 that required principals to explain their reasons for recommending tenure more throughly.

Then, last year, pressed by the city to make tenure even harder, superintendents began rejecting more tenure recommendations from principals. Perhaps as a result, the portion of teachers who didn’t receive tenure jumped 33 percentage points over the previous year.

Altogether, 43 percent of teachers up for tenure in 2011 were denied or deferred, compared to just less than 1 percent in 2006.

Department officials won’t say if this year’s rate will be higher, but Chancellor Dennis Walcott himself offered a prediction last summer.

“You’ll see the number probably go up again next year as far as those denied,” he said.

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  • GUest

    Tenure, the same level of job protection every civil servant receives after only about six months on the job.  Can we end the myth now please and have a real conversation?

  • Anonymous

    And in such high need when idiots are running the system!

  • Michael Fiorillo

    Ah, Gotham Schools, inserting City Hall/Tweed talking points into its reportage once again.

    In an article about teachers whose principals recommended them for tenure – presumably a marker for satisfactory performance, especially in the current climate – only to have those decisions rescinded, you nevertheless continue to uncritically replicate the propaganda of “low-performing teachers.”

    This story has nothing whatsoever to do with “low-performing teachers,” and everything to do with ongoing attacks on civil service and due process protections, yet your reporters seem unable to keep ed reform talking points from slanting their stories.

    What is it, GS? Just can’t get those Microsoft Foundation/StudentsFirst tape loops out of your heads?

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    What this indicates is something we are seeing from new and recently hired teachers who plan to stay and teach: tenure is very important to them. Supposedly this new generation of teachers (other that some E4E slugs –  but remember how Rueben ran out with his tail between his legs after being extended — twice) really  want tenure because the climate of fear is so great. What does that tell you about the WalKleinBloom admin of our schools?
    And why give Walcott the last word on this? Did you ask him about his claim he wants quality teachers while allowing outside factors other than the quality of the teacher (the failing school being blamed on a newbie?) to keep people untenured — the DOE version of barefoot and pregnant.

  • Second Career Bronx Teacher

    Tenure is another management issue, not a “teacher” issue. Any manager worth their salt who cannot determine after three years whether or not the job and the person are a match needs some more management training! The reality is that “low performing teachers” usually have not been mentored or coached which again is a failure of management. Any effective manager would have weeded out an unsatisfactory employee BEFORE 30 months had passed. If principals were held accountable for their schools performance and the training and retention of new teachers instead of passing the buck and blaming the contract and  teachers, we would see some progress. Why doesn’t someone talk to the principals in high performing Title 1 schools who have the contract in place and still manage to achieve? Could it be because they are actually doing their job?? Might they have some viable ideas that low performing principals could try to implement??? All this tenure talk is just propaganda that the deformers use to confuse the uninformed public and hide their real agenda: union busting and privatizing for profit the Great American Public School system…..

  • Second Class Citizen

    The reality is that there is absolutely nothing that teachers or the UFT can do in the tenure battle. Tenure protections for teachers are provided under NY State law only after a school district grants it to a teacher. There is nothing in the law that says a school district has to give anybody tenure. I can see two classes of NYC teachers in the future: Those who work at “good” schools where the students do well on standardized tests where the teachers kiss the butts of administrators will get tenure. The other class will be everybody else who will never get tenure. Tenure will become the same as a NYC pistol carry permit. Sure, most law abiding citizens are eligible to get a carry permit if the NYPD grants one to them. However, that does not mean that the NYPD will ever grant them a permit. 

  • Guest

    Tenure is NOT allowed to be connected to the rating of the school. It is against the rules and regulations dealing with tenure.  When it came out (at the end of the school year) that there was a higher rate of denial at troubled schools the UFT was getting ready to go to court. I heard Mulgrew say it at a delegate meeting.  Maybe the threat helped.  We shall see.

  • BK

     I agree that if Gotham Schools wants to stand out,then they have to understand what they are actually reporting on. It is very easy to connect the dots and see that the plan is to blame the schools failing on the teachers. The main premise of the article shows that it is an obvious political motivation to not give tenure at the schools the city rates badly. How else can they justify their grades and/or closures.  Its the teachers of course!!

  • guest

    Question….isn’t there something in labor law about past practices?  Isn’t this a big enough change in the process for the UFT to grieve on past practices?  They may well have lost but grieving and taking ther city to arbitration would have shown those members who were screwed by Principals and Superintendents that there might be later consequences.  Just, I guess, this is another example of the union being afraid to do anything that night make them look as being against “educational reform” whatever that is.

  • Second Class Citizen

    Tenure is not a grievable issue. I was told that personally by upper level UFT honchos many years ago. 

  • Turnaround Teacher

    At Lehman a (formerly now) Turnaround school with two F ratings in a row, not one single 3rd teacher was granted tenure. I believe about 15 were eligible. The only people granted (about 5) were teachers who were in their 4th year and extended the year before…looks like they are after low performing schools indeed.

  • NYC Teacher

    This is less a question of whether or not these teachers at low-rated schools deserve tenure as it is a vote of no confidence in the administrations of those schools. The message I see between the lines here is that the ratings officers in those schools are not trusted by the DOE. If the DOE doesn’t trust their own management structure then they should U rate and oust those administrators, not take it out on hard-working teachers. The CSA is much weaker than the UFT. The problem is finding qualified replacements. 

    If Walcott & Co. can’t manage to recruit and retain quality school leaders then they should reconsider, for starters, their ridiculous process of vetting Principal candidates based on a process that exists nowhere outside of the NYC DOE. A lot of good people who would make good Principals refuse to jump through the bureaucratic hoops now in place. Instead you get people who are willing to play politics (some of whom are great, I’ll admit…even a broken clock is right twice a day) and have above all else a strong stomach and high tolerance for BS. The Leadership Academy is likewise a sham, fast-tracking unqualified candidates who might know how to meet corporate bottom lines but wouldn’t know educational leadership if it came up and bit them.The societal focus on attacking teachers is misplaced. If a car company is not doing well do you blame the line workers? No. You blame poor management…from the top down. But this is the US so we bust unions and count the hedge fund profits that result from the capital shifts. We put sociopaths in suits and call them examples of the American Dream. Meanwhile, the good people who might wish to go into teaching think more than twice about it. Why go to six years of school and take on debt when, even if you can find a job, you’ll likely spend your career under assault? All this in the name of privatization and the neoliberal agenda. The day politicians demand the same structures in public schools as they do in the schools THEIR kids attend (experienced teachers, low class size, little or no focus on high stakes testing, proper funding) is the day I take the call for reform seriously. Until then it’s all a political shell game for vanity and profit. As always, the kids are the last thought and the biggest losers in the whole process…with untenured teachers not too far behind.

  • burned

    I agree with you, guest, and I’ve said this for years: When DOE first started changing the process and rules for tenure, the UFT would have had an excellent past practices case. To “Second Class Citizen,” an individual’s tenure decision is not grievable.  The employer unilaterally changing a long-standing district-wide practice  IS grievable.  The union is the grievant, because it was not consulted.  See the difference?    I think its doubtful the UFT can be successful on past practices grounds today, after years of doing nothing but writing “angry letters”  as the DOE unilaterally changed long-existing city wide policies w/o consultation.  UFT leadership did not want to look like it was “protecting ineffective teachers.” 

  • Afraid To Say..

    It is truly unfortunate that hard working people would be treated as SLAVES..under this present administration …we see our rights violated.. the persistent lies told on teachers…any story to discourage workers ..even not getting paid in a timely manner..when working.. affects people credit… bills etc..all of this is allowed under this Administion ..is there anyone that can stand & help us..God help us…

  • http://ednotesonline.blogspot.com/ Norm

    I believe if you start digging into the UFT response, or lack thereof, on the tenure issue, they want tenure to go away so they don’t have to answer for it ala Campbell Brown attacks, etc. But if they are too open about it they face some wrath from the members. So in the ideal world of the UFT, the politicians take it away and they say, “See, it wasn’t out fault we just have to give more money to COPE to elect OUR politicians,” which of course they know they never will but it takes them off the hook. This is part of the consistency of the UFT/AFT/NYSUT policy — try to appear as one thing to the members but as another to the rest of the world.
    Thus the policy of pushing collaboration because the alternative would be to engage in a war which given the way they operate internally (lack of democracy, total top-down, lack of engagement of the members) they cannot win. (Vs Chicago TU which has mobilized its membership to engage in the war). Why won’t they do what Chicago TU has done? You can only mobilize people effectively if they feel they have a say in union policy and the ability to influence it. Giving people such a say is a bigger threat to the union/Unity Caucus leadership than the ed deformers. Thus the support for charter schools and even co-locations in the hope that they can organize teachers in charters even if a small percentage. They know that in the long run the teachers unions without a fight will suffer slow strangulation but given that within the straight jacket of their political framework they are helpless to stop it, at least the people at the top can exist for quite a while and if they make the proper deals with ed deformers (Gates, Broad, etc) they might be able to keep the shell of a union going with them at the top. Ed deformers are not unified. The right wing Republicans want to kill the unions and the leadership completely while the Dem/liberal deformers (Obama, Bloomberg, Gates) see the usefulness to them of keeping the shell and as long as the union gives them pieces of what they want and keeps giving they will support the existence of the current leadership. That is why Chicago is such a massive threat to the entire arrangement between the unions and the Dem deformers.

  • guest

    Norm…I agree with you 100%.  Much of what has happened to the teachers of this city dates back to the last contract when Randi gave up the excessing rules in favor of Joel Klein’s Open Market idea.  Just think if the excessing rules still existed what would have happened every time the Supreme Leader tried to “close” a so called failing school and it was the responsibility of the distrrict office to place all excessed teachers in liense area within the district and failing that within the city wide high school districts.

    But it goes on and on.  Aain, people might disagree but I would love to have been a fly on the wall when they discussed the turnaround plan and their chances of winning the arbitration.  While they do deserve credit for winning that arbitration, I wonder how much they really thought they could or would win.,  Obviously there has been no follow up.  There’s only been cooperation in trying to get the schools re-opened.  There’s been no follow up on the lies told by the Tweedites that there was no pressure on the Principals to get rid of at least half the teachers in the turnaround schools when documents came out showing that was their intent all along.

    Of curse, as I’ve said before, we understand why.  Randi calls the shots; we all understand that.  Randi is after Arne Duncan’s job and can’t be seen as somebody opposed to educational reforms at the expense of her members.  Look at the way they threw the New Haven teachers under the bus.

    They will never understand the lessons we learned in 1938.  Appeasement will get you nowhere.  If you give a finger, they take the hand.  If you give a hand, they take the whole arm.  Unions exist to protect their members from arbitrary and capricious management.  The UFT seems to have forgotten this and every time they say we can’t do this or can’t do that because how will it look, the protection of good teachers (and let me make clear, that doesn’t mean I do not want teachers or who are truly inefficient or commit criminal act dealt with) will continue to be subject to the whims of people who think the only people responsible for the poor performance of schools are the teachers.

  • http://twitter.com/MrPortelos Mr. Portelos

    I watched this video while in the ” rubber room” . I found it on Betsy Combier’s site. Found it interesting.

    Listen to David Brodsky, Director of Labor Relations, Theresa Europe, Director of the Administrative Triels Unit, and Florrie Chapin, the Director of the Teacher Performance Unit, explain the ”Tenured Teacher Removal with Charges” Process . https://admin.acrobat.com/_a34442951/p12487663/

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