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Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. called on the citywide school board to postpone or vote down a contract that would pay an outside group to recruit new teachers, saying today that it “does not make any sense” with impending layoffs.

The contract, which the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on at tomorrow’s meeting, would pay The New Teacher Project a maximum of $4.9 million to recruit and train New York City Teaching Fellows. In a statement sent to reporters, Diaz said the money should be used to stave off layoffs rather than bring in new teachers. If Diaz’s appointee votes against the contract, she’ll likely be joined by panel member Patrick Sullivan, who criticized the contract in the Daily News.

But Department of Education officials have said that new teachers will be needed to fill vacancies in areas like science and special education regardless of layoffs. To meet this anticipated need, the roughly 450 Teaching Fellows who will enter the job market this summer will only be certified in either of those two subjects. (more…)

School districts should abandon lay-off policies that require principals to dismiss the newest teachers first and instead incorporate measures of teacher quality into firing decisions, a new report out today from The New Teacher Project argues.

The report proposes a scorecard that would rank teachers, weighing their classroom management skills, attendance, performance evaluations and length of service to the district to determine who should be laid off. Under the group’s proposal, a teacher’s performance rating would be given the most weight, while his or her number of years served would count for only a tenth of their score.

By doing so, the report argues, school districts can avoid laying off their best teachers who may not have worked in the system the longest. (more…)

City principals rated more teachers unsatisfactory this year than they have since at least 2005, suggesting that the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to escort more struggling teachers out of the system may be bearing some fruit.

Principals gave the scarlet-letter rating to 1,554 teachers this year, up from 981 in the 2005-2006 school year, data provided by the city Department of Education show. Both the number and percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose during that period, and the rise occurred for both tenured and non-tenured teachers, city figures show.

Even with the rise, the percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory remains low. About 2% of teachers, both tenured and without tenure, received what teachers call “U” ratings this year.

Ann Forte, a schools spokeswoman, sent us the figures this afternoon.

The rise follows a concerted effort by school officials to make it easier for principals to terminate poorly performing teachers, including a new group of lawyers assigned to targeting struggling teachers, called the Teacher Performance Unit. Rating a teacher unsatisfactory is often the first step toward removing him from the school system. (more…)

A group of 28 teachers, administrators, and policymakers have taken on a lofty summer assignment: They plan to come up with an ideal teacher evaluation system, or at least a report explaining the “essential elements” of one, and to do it by the fall.

The effort is the latest in a string of reports and announcements focusing on the way teachers are evaluated, a process that has been called broken by everyone from teachers union officials to The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit created by Michelle Rhee. A report by The New Teacher Project called evaluation systems “largely meaningless,” and the American Federation of Teachers union has launched an internal working group to build its own recommendations for what comprises a fair evaluation system.

A novel nonprofit called Hope Street Group is behind the effort to involve educators in the debate. Created in 2003 as a volunteer-only experiment, Hope Street Group now has a full-time staff that works to build “coalitions of the reasonable” around domestic policy questions by gathering diverse groups of people to solve them together. (more…)

Joanne Weiss

The Obama administration official in charge of an educational innovation fund yesterday issued a warning to a New York audience: Unless the state legislature revises a law now on the books about teacher tenure, the state could lose out on the $4.35 billion fund she controls.

Joanne Weiss said the Obama administration aims to reward states that use student achievement as a “predominant” part of teacher evaluations with the extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t. New York state law currently bans using student data as a factor in tenure decisions.

Test scores aren’t everything, Weiss said. “But it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part of the solution at all,” she said, echoing nearly word-for-word Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remarks last week to the National Education Association.

The pessimism about New York’s policies is a departure from Duncan’s tone during a visit to New York City in February, when he was cheery about the state’s chances in the competition. Duncan also briefly mentioned New York as one of several states whose firewalls around student and teacher data need to come down in a recent speech, and he indicated that New York’s cap on charter schools may also hurt the state’s chances at a slice of the stimulus pie.

Weiss, who worked at the New Schools Venture Fund before heading to Washington, said the “disadvantage” of the tenure law to New York could be counterbalanced by efforts here that the Obama administration admires. She praised a New York City program that is evaluating individual teachers based on their students’ test scores.  One strength of the program, Weiss said, is that city teachers generally accept the evaluations as an accurate and fair assessment of their performance. (more…)

A new report is urging school districts across the country to beef up their methods of evaluating teachers, which the report describes as so slipshod as to be “largely meaningless.” The report, by a nonprofit group that has clashed with teachers unions in the past, describes the poor evaluations as “just one symptom of a larger, more fundamental crisis—the inability of our schools to assess instructional performance accurately or to act on this information in meaningful ways.”

The report goes on:

This inability not only keeps schools from dismissing consistently poor performers, but also prevents them from recognizing excellence among top-performers or supporting growth among the broad plurality of hardworking teachers who operate in the middle of the performance spectrum. Instead, school districts default to treating all teachers as essentially the same, both in terms of effectiveness and need for development.

The report, conducted by The New Teacher Project, a nonprofit founded by the lightning-rod D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, calls on districts to develop more robust teacher evaluation systems that reward successful teachers and easily identify less successful teachers.

The report comes amid a growing push to improve teaching quality across the country. President Obama has said that teachers who are not helping students learn should be removed from classrooms, and even the national American Federation of Teachers union is working internally to build a new method of evaluating teacher quality.

The report bases its findings on surveys of thousands of teachers and administrators across four states and 12 school districts, plus a scouring of the districts’ evaluation records. New York City was not one of the districts studied. (more…)

Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool who did extensive job searches spoke at a press conference with teachers union president Randi Weingarten at the start of the school year. (GothamSchools)

A teachers union source surprised me recently by pointing out what the source described as the “dirty little secret” of the Absent Teacher Reserve pool.

The reserve is the group of teachers who will become the main hiring source for principals now that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has announced a freeze on hiring outside teachers.

It includes teachers who lost their positions at schools that either down-sized or closed, but failed to find new positions, and so remain on the Department of Education’s payroll without holding an official job.

The teachers who remain in the ATR pool are a minority; many teachers who found themselves “excessed” out of schools found new positions quickly, according to a report about the pool. The teachers who did not find new positions seem to be left out for a variety of reasons. Some simply could not get a principal to hire them, despite making major efforts to find jobs. Others remained because they were doing precisely the same job they had been doing before they entered the pool, but, affordably for principals, off of the school’s payroll. (The central Department of Education’s budget covers the salaries of ATR members.)

Another group of teachers, however, the source told me, sat tight in the ATR pool out of a kind of defiance. They simply did not apply for new positions. (more…)

Here are some key pieces of back-to-back interviews Randi Weingarten and Joel Klein gave to Diana Williams at Channel 7 yesterday.

Weingarten said that, rather than laying off teachers, the city should offer buyouts to teachers on the brink of retirement and should put a freeze on hiring young teachers from Teach For America and The New Teacher Project.

She said:

“Take all those signs down – the great beautiful signs…Just stop that stuff. If we’re serious that there’s a $1.5 billion deficit, there’s a hiring freeze.”

Klein’s response, when he came on later in the program:

“We have almost $100m of teachers who could not find a job, and those are teachers we ought to prioritize if there are in fact going to be layoffs. But, no, let’s not use great, talented, excited young new people to come into the system. Those are the people that our kids want, those are the people we need to go find.”

UPDATE: Edwize has video of the interviews here.

Dan Weisberg, the Department of Education’s chief labor negotiator, will leave the job this month, opening up a hole for who will lead contract talks this August.

Weisberg is heading to The New Teacher Project, the nonprofit founded by Michelle Rhee that works with school districts to help them recruit new teachers (they manage the Teaching Fellows here). TNPT is also a kind of think tank, studying teacher job markets around the country and recommending ways to improve them (think their work on the Absent Teacher Reserve). The latter will be Weisberg’s focus. His position is vice president for research and policy.

At DOE, Weisberg led efforts to raise the quality of teachers by making the process of getting tenure more strict. He also negotiated the latest contracts with the teachers and principals unions, which dramatically changed the way teachers are hired by creating a more open-market system, and he worked to strike deals to bring performance pay to both principals and teachers. One of my favorite Weisberg interviews was his defense of the “rubber rooms” on This American Life, the radio show.

Weisberg said on the telephone just now that his departure is purely personal; it has nothing to do with Chancellor Joel Klein’s reorganization of his senior staff. He said he’s working with top aides to Klein to help pick his successor.

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…)