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Even without a new teacher evaluation system, New York City will ramp up efforts to weed out teachers who “don’t deserve to teach,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced today.

In an early-morning speech to the Association for a Better New York, a business and political group, Walcott said the city would adopt new policies to insulate students from teachers deemed “unsatisfactory” under the current evaluation system. Under the new policies, no student will be allowed to have a teacher rated unsatisfactory multiple years in a row, and the city will move to fire all teachers who receive two straight U ratings.

“If we truly believe that every student deserves a great teacher, then we can’t accept a system where a student suffers with a poor-performing one for two straight years,” Walcott said. “One year of learning loss is bad enough — but studies indicate that two years could be devastating.”

The policies would go into effect if the city and union do not agree on new teacher evaluations by September, when the new school year begins. Under the existing evaluation system, two consecutive U ratings can trigger termination proceedings but do not have to. Two “ineffective” ratings on teacher evaluations now required under state law would automatically trigger termination proceedings.

Walcott also announced that the city would capitalize on a clause in its contract with the teachers union to offer a resignation incentive for teachers who have spent more than a year in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers without permanent positions. Buyouts would have to be negotiated for each teacher, and Walcott promised that the incentives would be “generous.” The move represents a shift in approach for the Bloomberg administration, which has previously sought the right to fire members of the ATR pool.

Walcott’s complete speech, as prepared for delivery, is below. We’ll have more on his proposals later today. (more…)

The city might have agreed to temporarily halt hiring decisions at turnaround schools because of a union lawsuit, but it is still moving forward with other massive changes for those schools.

This week, the Department of Education announced new names for the 24 schools set to undergo the overhaul process and continued making leadership changes in them. It also posted job descriptions that will be used to decide which teachers are picked to return in the fall.

The job postings could be the most crucial step toward shaping what the schools will look like in September. That’s because of a requirement of the 18-D process, the process embedded in the city’s contract with the UFT that the city is trying to structure rehiring. (The union’s lawsuit argues that 18-D does not apply to the turnaround schools.)

Under turnaround, every teacher at each of the schools will be “excessed,” but all who want to may reapply for their jobs. 18-D mandates that replacement schools hire back, in order of seniority, at least half of the teachers who apply from the previous school — provided that they are qualified.

The job postings are where those qualifications are set. Principals of the turnaround schools, who have been attending weekly planning workshops, devised them and union officials reviewed them before they were posted, a union official said. (more…)

Parents and students rallied at City Hall this afternoon to protest the city's closure plans

Replacing teachers at the remaining 26 turnaround schools could cost the city as much as $60 million, according to a new analysis released today by one of the city’s most vociferous opponents.

The report, released by the Coalition for Educational Justice in advance of an organized student and parent protest at City Hall, also took aim at the process the Department of Education used to assessed many of the schools that remain on the turnaround list. A dozen schools are doing well enough on their annual progress reports that they cleared the city’s own closure benchmark.

The CEJ cost analysis found that up to 849 teachers in the 26 schools could be replaced in order to qualify for federal school improvement grants, which require that no more than 50 percent of teachers can be retained under the turnaround model. The analysis omitted teachers who were hired in the last two years because they are likely to be exempted from the total pool of teachers that must reapply to their positions.

The final figures will almost certainly be less than CEJ’s projections because DOE officials have begun telling principals they won’t be on the hook any specific number of teachers.

The report details the salary and tenure profile at each of the 26 schools. For instance, teachers at John Dewey High School, where college-readiness rates exceed the city average, earned the highest average salary, $82,641, and just 7 percent of its staff was hired in the last two years. At Banana Kelly, where more than half of its teaching staff joined the school in recent years, just one teacher would need to be removed at the school to qualify for the funds. (more…)

A slightly improved fiscal picture and a higher-than-usual number of anticipated vacancies mean more new teachers are likely to enter city classrooms this fall.

Two groups that prepare new teachers, the national nonprofit Teach for America and the city’s own Teaching Fellows program, both say they are planning to boost the number of recruits that they direct toward city schools. Together, they are anticipating hiring about 1,100 new teachers — far fewer than in their heyday but up by more than a third since last year.

The groups are by no means the only source of new teachers for city schools, whose principals also hire teachers trained through traditional certification programs and teachers who are already working in other districts. But their anticipated enrollment represents a barometer for evaluating the city’s teacher hiring climate, which for years has been dampened by restrictions introduced in 2009.

Then-Chancellor Joel Klein introduced the restrictions as a way to cut costs when economic recession kicked in and the city’s fiscal picture dimmed. They have not been lifted, but over time the Department of Education exempted some subjects and geographic areas and now says on its teacher hiring page that restrictions f0r the 2012-2013 school year “are unavailable at this time,” suggesting that principals might well face different or fewer constraints when filling open positions this year.

Why the change? One big reason is that the city’s finances are on the upswing: Unlike in recent years, Mayor Bloomberg is not threatening teacher layoffs this summer, saying that the city’s improving fiscal picture does not warrant them. In addition, the city is planning a massive organizational change, “turnaround,” at 33 schools that could free up as many as 1,700 positions for new teachers — many of which would fall under an exemption in the existing hiring restrictions. (more…)

The city has begun telling principals at some of the schools slated for a controversial overhaul process that they won’t be part of the changes.

The city is moving forward with plans to overhaul 33 struggling schools according to a federally prescribed school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.” Turnaround requires that schools replace at least 50 percent of their teachers, revise their curriculums, and get new principals.

The federal regulations make an exception for principals who have been in place less than two years or who arrived three years ago as part of a deliberate effort to overhaul their schools. Those principals are allowed to stay on.

That means that about half of the principals at the schools slated for turnaround are likely to keep their jobs — and half will have to go. Some have already started getting the bad news.

“Most principals found out that they would be leaving as of June 30 and they’re concerned to keep up the progress that the school has made,” said one of the principals who is being removed. “It’s a very upsetting thing because we’ve worked very hard to make progress in our schools.” (more…)

In the last month, nearly 10 percent of teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve have found new positions, according to data the Department of Education released today.

Chart showing the exit paths of teachers from the ATR pool during October

The hiring took place during a time when the department shuffled teachers in the ATR pool to new positions every week, under the terms of an agreement with the teachers union.

The city and UFT say the agreement is meant to match more teachers with open positions. But at a union meeting for ATRs last month, some teachers speculated that the weekly assignments were intended to frustrate ATRs into resignation.

Numbers from the first month have not borne out that theory. Of the teachers who left the pool, 172 found new positions, 11 took a leave from the DOE, and 18 exited the school system entirely. Altogether, nearly 750 teachers have exited the pool since mid-August, when the city said 1,940 teachers were without permanent positions.

The new numbers show that the pool of teachers without permanent positions has settled at roughly the same size every year for three years, even though principals faced with shrinking budgets have cut jobs each summer. There are currently 1,200 teachers in the ATR pool, 77 fewer than last year at this time and 47 fewer than in November 2009. (more…)

Chart from Comptroller John Liu's audit of the Absent Teacher Reserve.

The Department of Education could potentially be doing more to help teachers whose positions have been eliminated find new jobs.

That’s one conclusion of an audit conducted by Comptroller John Liu of the DOE’s efforts to help members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose jobs were lost to budget cuts, enrollment changes, or school closures. The audit concluded that the vast majority of ATRs — 95 percent — are working full-time in teaching jobs, but that the department doesn’t maintain data sufficient to conclude whether its efforts to help the teachers find permanent positions are paying off.

“Without such information, we believe that DOE is significantly hindered in its ability to evaluate the success of its efforts in helping ATR teachers find permanent positions,” the report concludes.

The audit is not meant to dictate policy and is intended only to draw attention to what the report said was an information gap within the DOE on the ATR pool.

But an unwritten conclusion also seems to be that the city is wasting money by hiring new teachers when ATRs are licensed to do the job. (more…)

Budget cuts caused principals to cut thousands of positions this year, but the total number of teachers without permanent jobs rose only slightly, the Department of Education revealed today.

The Bloomberg administration also announced plans to lay off nearly 800 school employees who do not belong to the teachers union, which negotiated a deal in June to avert layoffs. Most of those employees — 737 of 777 — belong to DC-37, which represents school aides and other auxiliary school personnel. The layoffs are set to start in October.

When the city announced in July that schools would have to cut an average of 2.43 percent from their budgets, many principals complained that they had little fat to trim. They said they would have to turn to eliminating necessary positions and sending junior teachers to the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose positions were cut or lost as a result of school closures or enrollment changes.

In the end, they sent 2,186 teachers to the ATR pool this summer. More than a thousand of those teachers have already left the pool, either by finding new positions or leaving the system. A DOE spokeswoman said many of the teachers were rehired by their original schools after funding became available to keep them there.

That leaves 1,940 teachers in the ATR pool with just weeks before the start of the school year.  Last year, the pool contained 1,779 teachers just before classes began.

Though small, the growth in the size of the ATR pool still places added financial stress on the department. (more…)

For the first time in more than two years, city principals are being told they can look outside the city’s current teaching corps for new English and social studies teachers.

The deadline for new English, social studies, and math teachers to enter the city’s hiring system has been extended until Monday because ”opportunities may exist for schools to hire new teachers in these areas,” according to the Department of Education’s hiring website.

The schools aren’t being given carte blanche to hire teachers externally in those subjects, but they are being told they can apply for exceptions to the city’s two-year-old hiring freeze. In the past, principals have been granted exceptions from the freeze if they could show they had searched exhaustively within the system.

“We are pleased to share that schools may be able to receive an exception” to hire teachers in the subject areas, read an email sent by a DOE official to colleges and universities that supply student teachers.

Principals are responding to the encouragement. In the last week, the DOE’s online hiring system has had positions added by schools that would not previously have been allowed to hire externally under the restrictions. (more…)

Percentage of Teachers Who Had Tenure Denied or Extended

In a stark departure from tradition, more than 40 percent of city teachers up for tenure this year did not get it.

Just over 5,200 teachers were up for tenure this year. Of them, 58 percent received tenure and 3 percent were denied it, effectively barring them from working in city schools. The remaining portion — 39 percent — had their probationary periods extended for another year.

The number of extensions inched up in 2010 to 8 percent, but skyrocketed this year after the Department of Education revamped the tenure evaluation process in an effort to make the protection tougher to receive.

Yet the rate of tenure denials actually fell slightly from last year, from about 3.3 percent in 2010 to 2.7 percent in 2011, or 151 teachers, despite Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s insistence that the figures were the first step toward “ending tenure as we know it.”

The numbers, which Bloomberg touted at a press conference today, confirm anecdotal reports pointing to a sharp rise in the number of probation extensions under the new system. Before last year, that option was rarely used and the vast majority of teachers received tenure almost as a formality.

But last fall, Bloomberg vowed to make tenure a reward not for time served but for pushing students forward. In December, the city unveiled a new evaluation rubric for teachers up for tenure and said that teachers falling in the bottom two categories of four should not receive tenure.

“Tenure ought to be reserved for only the best teachers, and unfortunately, as we all know, for far too long it has been awarded primarily on the basis on longevity, not performance,” Bloomberg said today.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said today that he expects the number of tenure denials to rise next year. (more…)