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hiring thaw

August 31, 2012

City lifts some restrictions on schools still in need of teachers

by Rachel Cromidas, at 12:50 pm

With days to go before the start of the new school year, the city has lifted years-old hiring restrictions on six teaching areas: physical education, fine arts, music, theater, and high school social studies and Spanish.

But teachers who are new to the city’s public schools and licensed to teach those subjects won’t be able to find jobs anywhere; some are restricted to Queens, Manhattan and the Bronx, or the Bronx only—where schools typically have the toughest time recruiting teachers.

The city lifted the restrictions on August 24 to deepen the candidate pools for schools that still have open jobs. A Department of Education official said the department adjusts its hiring rules throughout the year to reflect city schools’ hiring needs.

Since 2009, the teacher hiring climate has been dampened by restrictions introduced by then-Chancellor Joel Klein to save the city money. But over time the department has exempted some subjects and geographic areas.

The most recent reprise spells new hope for teachers still looking for jobs within the school system for this fall, and for schools unhappy with the candidates who have applied for open positions so far.

At one recent hiring fair, dozens of school leaders were interviewing teachers for a slew of still-open positions, though some lamented the hiring restrictions in place. Flushing’s John Bowne High School, for example advertised vacancies in English, special education, and Spanish, which is one of the areas newly open to new teachers. The Bronx’s Pelham Academy, East Bronx Academy, and Bronx Theater Arts School each posted several vacancies and drew long lines of teachers to their booths.

The hiring restrictions are designed to make it easier for teachers who have lost their permanent positions to school budget cuts to find new ones. Department officials said the ATR pool held 830 teachers in June, and has grown slightly since then. But it is still far smaller than it was at this time last year, when there were 1,900 ATRs.

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  • Givemeabreak

    I can’t even believe people want to start a teaching career anymore, especially in NYC.  And it should be mandatory that positions be filled by ATR’s.  Lifting the hiring restrictions sounds pro-teacher, but it’s not.  It just allows schools to hire cheap, untenured labor, and then torture those people until they quit after a couple of years.  I’m sure there are ATR’s available for all those subjects.

  • bob schwartz

    I know teachers in a number of different schools and they all said between 5 to 7 teachers were excessed.  There were about 850 in June(allegedly).  I can’t see any way this year does not begin w/ under 2,000 ATRs.  the city is full of you know what

  • Turnaround Teacher

    The DOE makes it nearly impossible for teachers to get jobs. Be it ATRs, open market transfers, or brand new college grads. There is little to no assistance, and the 1 or 2 hiring fairs are a farce. You either no someone or you are stuck.

  • http://twitter.com/nycUrbanEd Urban Ed

    Here’s an example of exactly how much some principals want to avoid hiring ATRs:

    There are at least three high schools in Queens (one of them mentioned in this piece) that, instead of filling needed positions with teachers from the reserve last year, just kept assigning the new (weekly) ATRs to substitute 5 classes. This occurred from week one of each semester. Each week, the reserve teachers were given a book with indication of where the last ATR had left off. That ‘sub’ was expected to move through a chapter or two each week from a text book and indicated where he or she had left off before submitting the book back to the principal (or AP in larger schools) at the end of the week. This was similart practice across all three schools. The students of these classes never had a steady teacher. Just subs.

    So, in these schools, these students -in no less than 15 classes (about 450 NYC kids) had principals who made the choice -the choice- to not assign a teacher (to English classes no less) for at least an entire semester rather than hire an ATR. They placed their own students in jeopardy rather than assign these teachers. 

    Call it poor leadership, call it destructive practice (I do on both counts) but it’s an example of how determined some of these principals are to not hire these (many senior salaried) teachers.

  • http://twitter.com/nycUrbanEd Urban Ed

    I keep hearing the same thing: That there are far more ATRs than the city is asserting.

  • Z111m

    Yet we are allowed to hire and the City spends millions for unqualified, uncertified folks from Teach For America via The New Teacher Project. Oh wait, I mean TNTP, it now is just a meaningless bunch of initials. That makes more sense as it is a BS organization set up as part of the corporate drive to privatize education.

  • Cantbelieveit

    Absolutely.  Part of the DOE’s propaganda campaign is to convince the public that any new teacher is better than any experienced teacher.  As if somehow, experience is a negative—that people start out as great teachers and only become worse as they gain experience.  Now, those in the DOE (Bloomberg included) don’t actually believe this, I’m sure.  However, they only care about saving money, so they would obviously much rather hire new teachers.  And the public buys this.  It’s scary.  Remember, people voted for Hitler.

  • bob schwartz

     asside from the money(which we all know to be the paramount reason atrs cannot find jobs) and age(we know principals love to treat the 22 year old teachers like dogs) why do principals not want atrs? 

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