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Wait you are telling me that there is an “incentive bonus” for lowering the salary costs? Please back up that claim. I would hate to think of myself as an experienced successful tenured teacher of 20 years who my principal has been given a “real” incentive to fire me for their own income.

 I know a troll when I see one.

 Call up any of the lawyers who represent teachers (including several who I know personally) who’ve experienced what I described above, and they’ll explain it to you.
  OR call up Betsy Combier, and she’ll explain it to you.

If you’re really not a troll, you must be an ostrich, or perhaps you’re one of the increasingly rare teachers who has a decent principal who’s been in since before Bloomberg took office, and who somehow still doesn’t care about those bonus incentives for lowering their schools’ budgets, including salaries spent on the school. 

Perhaps you teach at one of those schools where they don’t cut corners like that, at the expense of ruining the careers of perfectly wonderful teachers.

I apologize for the “name calling,” but you sound like one of those nut cases who actually thinks everyone in the ATR pool — including those who’ve survived the 3020a process (meaning they’ve been VINDICATED!) — deserves to be there and that the ATR pool is truly the “inferior merchandise” Bloomberg is trying to make them out to be.  Maybe you also believe that standardized test scores should make or break a teacher’s career, EVEN if that teacher works with a severely underperforming student body where attendance is abysmal and homework is a joke — often due to factors beyond the students’ control.

But here in the real world of the inner city, even if a teacher’s students’ test scores are better than those at any other school of its type (for example, transfer high schools), if those scores are still relatively low in that subject area compared with other subjects — for example, Physics vs. Earth Science — the Physics teacher is labeled with “U” ratings, and gets picked on for completely unimportant arbitrary things that the crony teachers get away with all the time.  Even out-and-out lies end up in their personnel files: Throw everything, even lies, at the teacher, and surely some of it will stick or the teacher will be too beleaguered to successfully challenge every single crazy letter or action against them.  This is constructive dismissal action at work.

When that Physics teacher is  finally brought up on 3020a charges, the school doesn’t replace that teacher due to the Politically Incorrect reality no one wants to admit, that the school shouldn’t be offering subjects like Calculus, Chemistry, and Physics to kids who are at the third grade reading level and who seldom show up to school.  Meanwhile, that teacher’s name is mud.  So is their career, because even if they are vindicated of the 3020a charges, at best they end up an ATR. And the principal has now successfully lowered the salary budget for the school, by eliminating a teacher completely (and not even replacing them at all, not even with a cheaper untenured newbie).  And their principal’s bonus, for meeting goals of lowering spending at that school, is at the expense of that teacher’s career.

It is hard for me to believe you don’t have any colleagues who’ve
experienced the Bloomberg admin’s attempts to do constructive dismissal
techniques against good but too-well-paid (by the principal’s or DOE’s 
budgetary goals) teachers.

But maybe you work in one of those
rare schools that’s still run by someone who doesn’t stoop to the level
that many of the other principals do  who’ve begun their “leadership”
work during the last 11 years

Mr. Flerporillo:
Ask any recently retired principal to explain the system of how DOE principals can earn monetary bonuses for meeting certain goals, including budgetary goals.  They will explain it all to you. 

You yourself just made the excellent point, which I of course agree with, in response to the story about adding guidance counselors to the ATR pool:

“DOE has to change this system.  Take staff wages out of individual
school budgets and put them into the DOE budget.  The current system
creates bad incentives and screws principals, students, and teachers,
and staff.  I understand that the DOE needs to balance its budget, but
it shouldn’t just outsource that job to principals.”

Either you want to change the system, as you said above, or you want to quibble over “financial incentives” and “bonuses,” which in reality amount to the same concept.

But, like I said, call up the lawyers, Betsy Combier, or any recently retired principal. They’ll tell you how principals can benefit in their own personal pocketbooks when they meet certain goals by cutting the overall salaries spent by their schools.  Call it what you want, but it is a part of the problem.

Now, shall we focus together on what’s important, or do you still want to pick troll-like arguments with me–an ally who agrees with what you said above (the quote), or what?????

Dear Mr. Flerporillo,

I know what the teachers I know have told me, and I know what their lawyers have told me.  

If that’s not good enough for you, I suggested that you ask a retired principal, who will likely feel more at liberty to explain the Bloomberg DOE’s various incentive programs for principals than will a still employed principal.

If you are misunderstanding where I’m coming from and trying to make some kind of point, such as to imply discrediting my information, all I can say is that the facts are the facts.  Either you take my word for it, or you satisfy your further curiosity by going to a better source than me — a recently retired principal who has no vested interest in continuing the doublespeak of the Bloomberg administration, who can explain it in the great detail you seem to so thirstily seek.

I’m not interested in further debating this matter.  If you can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, in a non-politically-tainted or questionable way, that no principal in Mayor Bloomberg’s DOE system has ever been given a bonus or any other similar incentive compensation for lowering their school’s salaries budget, and that a whole cadre of DOE lawyers has NOT been available to provide infomation to DOE principals on how to use constructive dismissal techniques against tenured teachers, in order to harass them into quitting, retiring, or otherwise leaving the DOE workforce (or at least ending up out of the school’s payroll budget and in the ATR pool, clinging to the wreckage of their career usually through no fault of their own) — then feel free to “prove” that right here on this website.

Until then, I stand by the facts. And thus I stand by every statement I have ever made on Gotham Schools.

Meanwhile, which side are YOU on, Mr. Flerporillo?  Who are you anyway?

Flerp 
Explain that your not a teacher and you just hang around and play both ends against the middle. Your actually a lawyer who just enjoys putting your two cents into education discussions to stir the pot. The fact that you have commented 900 times should show where you are coming from. You never were interested in the truth just the hidden agenda that you bring here.

The grammar . . . my God, the grammar.