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Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has for years been a proponent of paying some teachers more based on their performance, and he has made some headway in introducing merit pay in the city schools. But the policy has plenty of critics, from teachers who say merit pay divides them to statisticians who point simply to flaws in the measures on which pay calculations are based.

In the video above, University of Virginia psychology professor Dan Willingham gives six reasons in three minutes why paying teachers based on their students’ test scores isn’t statistically sound. But Willingham doesn’t totally rule out the prospect of paying better teachers more: “Merit pay can’t work until there’s a way to measure teacher performance that’s fair,” he concludes.

Responding to shrinking budgets and rising costs, the Department of Education is putting in place what amounts to a systemwide teacher hiring freeze, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein informed principals today.

Individual schools will still be able to use their budgets to add new teachers if they are able, but the DOE is planning to cut school budgets so far that many schools will have to shed teachers, DOE officials revealed. And any new hires, to replace teachers who leave, will have to come from teachers who are already in the system, according to new rules the department is implementing.

Klein informed principals about the hiring restrictions, which the department says should allow it to avoid actually laying off teachers, this morning during a Webcast and just now in a memo, which is included at the end of this post. The department is planning to give principals more detailed information about their schools’ budgets during the week of May 18.

Speaking to reporters today, a top DOE official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said she could not predict how many schools would need to eliminate teachers but said that a “high percentage” might be able to cut their budgets sufficiently by reducing non-teaching staff and axing programs. She said “the goal” for the department is for all schools to make the same percentage cut to their budgets. That size of that cut has not yet been finalized, she said, adding that principals would ultimately have discretion about how to cut their own budgets.

The new restrictions require principals to fill vacancies created by attrition by picking up current teachers who are either in a classroom elsewhere in the city or in the existing pool of excessed teachers, which already includes about 1,100 teachers. (more…)

With the economy in the shape it is, some people are considering pursuing teaching as a “fallback career.” But the reality is that the very same economy means that there are relatively few jobs for teachers this year. Looking at budget cuts and expecting fewer people to leave, many districts, including New York City, are cutting down on hiring.

The city’s Teaching Fellows program, the most prominent route into the classroom for career changers, is planning to accept significantly fewer applicants. I heard from one friend who got an acceptance last week, but far fewer applicants are being accepted than in past years. Two GothamSchools readers reported in the comments section of a post from January that their Teaching Fellows application statuses were finally updated last week: One was rejected, and the other was deferred even longer, until the city’s budget situation becomes clearer.

Still, the Department of Education has extended employment offers to some applicants it considers likely to be particularly successful in shortage areas such as math and English, through a new initiative called TRQ Select. (TRQ is the acronym for the Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality.) This week, the DOE’s hiring office is using its Twitter feed to profile some of those new teachers in under 140 characters. Here’s an example: “Pia, ESL Teacher- Fordham grad, taught English in Haiti and Panama, served in Peace Corps in Morocco.”

Council Member Simcha Felder displays one of the cue cards a teachers union representative handed him.

At today’s education committee hearing, City Council members took turns questioning Department of Education officials on the rise of charters schools. Their questions were passionate, specific, and universally accusatory. They may have also been scripted.

Just before the hearing began, a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools, discreetly passed out a set of index cards to Council members, each printed with a pre-written question.

One batch of cards offered questions for the Department of Education, all of them challenging the proliferation of charter schools. “Doesn’t the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?” one card suggested members ask school officials. “Isn’t the fundamental problem here the Department’s abdication of its most important responsibility to provide quality district public schools in all parts of the city?” another card said. (View more of the cards in a slideshow here.)

Several council members picked up on the line of thought. “Shouldn’t we aspire to have every school in the city good enough for parents to feel comfortable sending their children?” Melinda Katz, a Council member from Queens, said in questioning school officials. “I remember when Joel Klein became the chancellor,” the committee chair, Robert Jackson, said. “Back then, he used to talk about making every neighborhood school a good school where every parent would want to send their children. I don’t hear him talk about that anymore.”

Asked about the cards, union president Randi Weingarten provided a statement saying that she regretted the tactic. “We are often asked by the council for information and ideas about various issues. Additionally, when I am available, I often respond to what others testify to. In this instance, I was in Washington and couldn’t be at City Hall,” she said in the statement. “I am proud of the testimony we gave today, but I regret the manner in which our other concerns were shared.” (more…)

When Joseph Dell’Aquila learned that he would have to leave his students at a Bronx middle school for more than two weeks to grade state reading exams, he was determined not to leave them entirely high and dry. Instead, he figured out a way to be in two places at once: While he scored tests during the day, his students would listen to video and voice recordings of him explaining Power Point slides with lessons he’d made the previous night.

“If there’s no consistency, they kind of lose track of how to act. I just wanted to remain consistent with them, let them know that I’m still there, that I’m still their teacher,” Dell’Aquila said. “It wasn’t like I was going to bounce on them and have a vacation. I wanted them to know that I was there for them.”

The result was that his students followed through a planned unit on hip hop and poetry, just by listening to their teacher’s voice. (A video of how this worked, provided by the school, CIS 339, is above.) (more…)

From the KIPP Infinity web site.

Yesterday, I wondered what sparked the move by the teachers union to push a second KIPP charter school, KIPP Infinity, into contract negotiations. I said I didn’t know whether the union had taken this initiative on its own or whether it was working in concert with teachers at Infinity, which is considered one of the best KIPP schools in the country.

This morning, Dave Levin, the superintendent of New York City KIPP schools, told me that, as far as he knows, teachers at Infinity did not approach the union to ask for a contract. That goes along with this comment from someone identifying him/herself as a teacher at Infinity on Ezra Klein’s blog. It also suggests that one of the United Federation of Teachers’ most dramatic claims yesterday — that 3 of 4 KIPP charter schools in New York City are now represented by the union — is a little misleading.

KIPP Academy, the original KIPP school in New York City, is unionized only because it was not originally founded as a charter school but as a traditional public school. When it changed to charter status in 2000, it had to keep its unionization, according to the charter school law. KIPP Infinity, as I reported earlier, has also been represented by the union since it opened in 2005, though it doesn’t (yet) have a labor contract. Only KIPP AMP will unionize because teachers organized together and pushed for it.

Something has happened to the charter school teacher who blogs at Mildly Melancholy that almost never happens at traditional public schools: She has been forced to resign.

This teacher has been writing about her tough school year since September (without revealing the school’s name). At a non-charter school, her misery would probably have proceeded apace until June, mainly unchanged. If tensions with the administration escalated, she might have sought help from the union. But as it happened, Mildly Melancholy — who began teaching in September 2004 — got miserable and then was surprised to find she got fired. She plans to quit teaching altogether.

Her account:

I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t want to think it was real, and I didn’t think it would happen so soon. This week has been really awful in my classroom (and across the entire grade, actually). I haven’t been a happy person at this job, and I haven’t been a very effective teacher. So it’s actually kind of a big relief.

I was pretty shaken by how fast it all happened; within an hour I finished teaching my last class, signed the letter, surrendered my laptop, and was packing up my belongings.

Here you can read her description of her first, much more optimistic days teaching, at a middle school in Queens.

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…)

Guest-blogging at NYC Educator, teacher Yo, Miss! wonders if she should anonymously help this student’s family:

“When are you putting up your Christmas tree, Stacey?” Tiffany asked. (Not their real names.)

“Oh,” Stacey said softly, “um, I don’t know.”

“I thought we were late!” Tiffany exclaimed. “I guess you’ll probably be later than us.”

“It’s not that,” Stacey said. “My dad said we might not have a Christmas tree this year.”

“Why?” Tiffany asked.

“He says we can’t afford one,” Stacey said. “He only gets paid when he works, and he isn’t getting work, really, right now. Like, one or two days a week only, sometimes.”

And two teachers blogging at Daily Kos recently related stories of their students’ fears and realities as their families make tough choices.

After a talented co-worker left their “dysfuctional” Brooklyn public school to work at a charter school, he told Ariel Sacks:

I didn’t fully realize it before, but all the craziness that was constantly going on around me was clouding my teaching. With all of that gone, I can identify my weak points and improve on them.

Sacks ponders what that “craziness” looks like — computers that don’t work and no money to pay a technician, chronic absenteeism among students — and how it forces teachers to plan for unexpected obstacles. What does it mean to compare teacher effectiveness in such different environments, she asks:

Teachers at schools like mine get used the multitude of x factors. In fact, we stop expecting everything to be “just so” and start going out of our way to plan for all of the unexpected things that might happen. Does this make us less effective? Maybe it does, in a way. It is harder to address problems quickly and effectively, when new problems present themselves simultaneously. But is it fair to call us less effective? Is it actually fair to measure my effectiveness in the same way my former colleague’s teaching is now measured, when the playing field is not level? Is the job of teaching in these very disparate environments even the same?

If the quality of my teaching is measured by my students’ scores on the same test that Joe’s students also take, and soon, I am compensated based on this same determination, then tell me—why should I keep on working at a school that can’t provide me everything I need to reach my full potential as a teacher?