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One month into the school year, the United Federation of Teachers is hosting a series of meetings for the teachers without permanent assignments in city schools who comprise the controversial Absent Teacher Reserve.

Set for each borough over the next week, the meetings are meant to explain the deal the teachers union struck with the city this summer over the ATR pool to avoid teacher layoffs, according to Peter Kadushin, a UFT spokesman.

Representatives from the union will also field feedback from teachers about the deal, which requires teachers in the ATR pool to be reassigned to different schools multiple times over the course of the year. In previous years, teachers whose positions had been eliminated were typically assigned to one school for the entire year.

The first meeting was scheduled for today at the union’s Bronx office — with meetings at UFT offices in other boroughs to follow. In the past, the union has held meetings for teachers in the ATR pool at its central office at the beginning of the school year, Kadushin said.

Teachers in the ATR pool have been working in temporary jobs inside schools that were assigned by the DOE for the month of September. Next week, the teachers will begin rotating to substitute teaching positions throughout the school system on a weekly basis — assignments they expect to receive from the DOE later this week. (more…)

A cornerstone of Chancellor Joel Klein’s reforms has been what you might call the principal-as-CEO principle, the idea that principals should have the freedom to run their schools as they’d like, in exchange for consequences if they falter. The change has transformed not just principals but also another familiar school leader: the superintendent.

Superintendents used to spend their days inside the schools in their districts, coaching and evaluating principals. They’re still legally required to rate principals. But under the Department of Education’s latest reorganization, they have much less time to do these evaluations. That’s because they’re also required to train and support people at schools in other districts. The job has changed so much that superintendents don’t actually have to visit the schools whose principals they evaluate.

Some principals have said they appreciate being free from micromanaging superintendents. But others are now saying that school leaders benefited from the day-to-day scrutiny that the superintendents offered.

“Most people do a little better when we know that we are accountable, not just in two years, but in the day to day,” Jeffrey Scherr, who recently retired from Queens’ Francis Lewis High School, said at an event last week at Columbia University’s Teachers College for members of a TC-based principal fellowship program. (I wasn’t at the event, but Insideschools‘ Crissy Strining was and sent me her notes. TC also posted a summary.)

“A level of expertise was taken away” when superintendents lost their supervisory role, a principal of a Brooklyn secondary school said at the event. (more…)