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The final installment of Joel Klein's weekly memo to principals

In a nostalgic final missive to city principals this week, outgoing Chancellor Joel Klein suggested three things to do once he’s gone.

He urged lawmakers to end the last-in first-out process of teacher layoffs, pushed for an end to the Absent Teacher Reserve pool, and underlined his belief in the importance of closing struggling schools.

Klein’s statement that “we have to eliminate the ATR pool” ratchets up the city’s position on the pool of teachers — city teachers who lose their positions, don’t find new ones, but stay on the city payroll anyway. Previously, the city has asked the union, in contract negotiations, to add a limit to the amount of time a teacher can spend in the reserve pool. That would make the pool smaller, but it would not cause it to disappear altogether.

Describing the costs of keeping those teachers on the city payroll as exceeding $100 million a year, Klein argues:

We cannot afford it, and it’s wrong to keep paying this money. It amounts to supporting more than a thousand teachers who either don’t care to, or can’t, find a job, even though our school system hires literally thousands of teachers each year. That’s money that could be spent on teachers that we desperately want and need.

Klein also describes teacher layoffs as a sure thing. “I wish it were otherwise, but the economics of our state and city make this virtually impossible to avoid,” he writes.

The Bloomberg administration has a history of being bullish on layoffs in order to push for the end of the state law regulating how teachers lose their jobs. Klein reiterates that case in his letter:

If we have layoffs, it’s unconscionable to use the last-hired, first-fired rule that currently governs. By definition, such a rule means that quality counts for zero. Our children cannot afford that kind of approach. They need the best teachers, not those who are longest serving. (If you had to have surgery, would you want the longest-serving surgeon or the best one?) This doesn’t mean that many of our longest-serving teachers aren’t among the best, but this is not an area for “group think.” We need individual determinations of teacher effectiveness to decide who stays and who doesn’t.

Klein also quoted his favorite T.S. Eliot poem, “Little Gidding,” excerpting four cryptic lines that seem to summarize his “odyssey” as something more complex than a straight line of a progress:

We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.

Other curious lines from the poem:

… Either you had no purpose
Or the purpose is beyond the end you figured
And is altered in fulfilment. …

Klein has sent a memo to principals every week for years. Read the full letter here and below. (more…)

With less than a month to go before the teachers union contract expires, labor negotiation veterans are forecasting a “bland” contract that will disappoint those advocating for drastic reforms both from the city and United Federation of Teachers.

One issue that many believe will be left out of this contract is what to do about the absent teacher reserve: a pool of teachers who were laid off when their schools were closed or were let go as a result of budget cuts. Currently, there are about 1,400 “excessed” teachers who receive their full salaries though most are not teaching.

In previous years, Chancellor Joel Klein has urged the city to adopt the model Chicago uses, in which teachers have a year to find new work before they’re fired. When the city pushed for an 18-month period in 2005, arbitrators rejected the proposal, yet the chancellor has continuously said that this is the system he wants to see put in place. (more…)

Principals union president Ernest Logan is raising questions about Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s threat to take money away from principals who don’t fill their vacancies by Oct. 30.

The point of Klein’s threat, made in an e-mail to principals yesterday and first reported by the Web site Insideschools, is to get principals who might be trying to outlast the hiring freeze to pick up “excessed” teachers from the ATR pool. Those teachers, who currently number more than 1,500, are drawing full salaries even though they don’t have permanent positions in schools. Their salaries are “a fiscal liability we cannot sustain in this budget climate,” Klein said in his letter.

But principals can’t hire teachers who aren’t eligible for their vacancies or who don’t apply for jobs, Logan emphasized in a response today to Klein’s hiring deadline. “We would like to know more about what the DoE will do if appropriate licensing matches are not made or if excessed teachers fail to show up at the recruitment fairs,” he said.

The Department of Education is requiring teachers in the ATR pool to attend borough-based hiring fairs next week, according to an e-mail obtained by union activist Norm Scott. Ann Forte, a DOE spokeswoman, confirmed that the fairs are compulsory for ATRs. (more…)

The highly anticipated contract negotiations between the teachers union and the city are officially off and running.

In anticipation of the UFT contract’s October 31 expiration date, officials from both sides met yesterday to begin the negotiation process. The negotiations are colored by the city’s dismal financial projections and the upcoming mayoral election — the UFT has yet to endorse a candidate for mayor. They are also UFT president Michael Mulgrew‘s first significant challenge, and are likely to be a factor when he comes up for election in the spring.

Though both sides have signed confidentiality agreements allowing them to keep mum when the press pushes for details, neither has been entirely silent about changes they’d like to see made to the contract.

Chancellor Joel Klein has made no secret of his desire to see the Absent Teacher Reserve drained. The pools currently holds 1,695 teachers who previously worked in schools that have been closed. Though they remain on the city’s payroll, they do not have full-time teaching positions. The point of tension between Klein and the UFT is how to drain it.

On Wednesday, the first day of school, Klein reiterated his support for Chicago’s model, which allows teachers who’ve been laid off to spend one year searching for a new spot in the school system while receiving their regular salaries. At the end of that year, those who haven’t landed new positions are forced to move on. (more…)

The latest ATR numbers are out, and they suggest a mass exodus has occurred in the last few days.

In the last two weeks, the so-called Absent Teacher Reserve pool has declined by about 300 teachers, a third of whom found work in the last two days. Earlier this summer, the Department of Education estimated that roughly 3,000 former teachers who had lost their jobs because of declining student populations or because the school was shuttered due to poor performance remained in the pool and on the city’s payroll. As of Tuesday, that number is down to 1,695.

The sudden increase in hiring could be attributed to principals who were holding out hope that the DOE would lift the hiring freeze, allowing them to fill empty slots from a wider selection of teachers. As the summer has worn on, the DOE did relax the freeze to allow principals more flexibility in hiring special education and science teachers, as well as teachers for gifted programs.

A spokeswoman for the DOE, Ann Forte, said that currently, there are 1,375 vacancies in the city’s schools, which is about the same number there were last September.

Though the reserve pool is, by definition, a place for teachers who once taught in the city’s public schools, this year the DOE made an exception and added 15 Math for America recruits. Forte said the recruits were given special dispensation because of their “highly specialized training.” Fellows in the program have to make a five-year commitment to teaching in public schools, in exchange for close mentoring and support from master teachers in the program. In May, the father of a Math for America fellow wrote to GothamSchools to criticize Joel Klein for instituting the hiring freeze so late in the year.

A Teaching Fellows ad in the subway in March 2007. Photo via NYC Daily Photo.

I’ve reported before that the Department of Education has hundreds of teachers without permanent positions and that it took a judge to stop the department from firing dozens of new teachers last month.

So I was surprised recently to see recruitment ads in the subway for the DOE’s Teaching Fellows program, which places recent college graduates and career-changing professionals in high-need classrooms throughout the city. (Similarly startled by the ads, Pissed Off Teacher is, well, pissed off about them.)

In fact, the DOE has scaled back advertising for the Teaching Fellows program by more than a third since last year.

This year, the department spent $140,000 to advertise the program in subway cars and $75,000 to promote the program online, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte told me. In contrast, she said, the program’s advertising budget last year came out to between $300,000 and $400,000, and had spent even more in previous years when it bought advertising in print publications. (more…)

The resolution before the UFT delegates — that any changes to term limits be made by voter referendum — passed on a voice vote this evening with no changes.

But an amendment to deny UFT PAC funds to City Council members who vote to change term limits was voted down. It read:

Resolved, that the UFT unequivocally oppose the city council’s bill to extend term limits and the UFT will seriously consider withholding endorsements and COPE money from any Council member who votes in favor of this legislation that circumvents the will of the people.

Supporters of the amendment said they were pleased by how much support it got. James Eterno, the UFT chapter leader from Jamaica High School in Queens who introduced the resolution, estimated 30 percent of delegates voted for the amendment. But someone else who was there said that less than 25 percent of delegates supported it.

UFT President Randi Weingarten said the union doesn’t want to make term limits a top priority. (more…)

It will take “creative thinking and smart choices” to protect the schools from the mounting economic crisis, UFT President Randi Weingarten told Chancellor Klein in a letter today outlining three suggestions of how the DOE could cut costs and deploy its resources more efficiently.

All three recommendations, if implemented, would reduce the number of “excessed” teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, who are currently under fire from The New Teacher Project for costing the system millions of dollars even though they aren’t working. The UFT says most ATRs have tried for months to find jobs but that principals aren’t given incentives to hire the often highly paid teachers.

Weingarten’s suggestions to Klein:

1. An immediate hiring freeze at the central Department of Education, and at the school and district level for any license areas where there are people in excess and available for placement.

2. A redeployment of teachers and other excessed personnel in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) into vacancies as they arise.

3. Develop a program to recertify excessed personnel in additional license areas, so they are available to fill vacancies as they arise.

Read Weingarten’s full letter after the jump. (more…)