The city Department of Education is one of five large urban districts that have opened up their email Rolodexes to The New Teacher Project for a study about teacher recruitment and retention. The nonprofit group, which runs the city’s Teaching Fellows programs and studies teacher job markets around the country, sent the voluntary, 30-minute survey to about 68,000 of the city’s 80,000 teachers and one large charter school network.

The 50-question survey — which one teacher sent us in a series of screenshots, above — asks teachers what would make them want to work in, or remain in, a high-needs school.

The survey is a first step in TNTP’s efforts to produce a followup to “The Widget Effect,” according Dan Weisberg, a TNTP vice president who used to be the DOE’s chief labor negotiator. The influential 2009 report urged school districts to revamp teacher evaluations based on survey responses of 15,000 teachers from 12 districts across five states (New York City was not among them).

Now, dozens of states, including New York, are in the process of overhauling teacher evaluations. Weisberg said this year’s survey is the next step toward figuring out how to place the most effective teachers in classrooms with the neediest students.

“The intent is to study what motivates teachers to make decisions about what classrooms to teach in,” he said. “What’s critical is that districts use it to retain a higher percentage of their really good teachers, particularly those working with really high-needs kids.”

The survey’s questions cover a broad range of issues surrounding the teaching profession, including compensation, school culture, class sizes, student populations, leadership support, and quality of colleagues. A series of would-you-rather questions offer teachers a choice between poor working conditions and small classes or better working conditions and more students.

Some teachers we spoke to said they were wary of the motives behind the survey and declined to take it as a result.

One teacher complained that the questions seemed to be framed in a way that could easily elicit provide misleading results.

“I started to take it, but found the questions troubling, so I stopped,” the teacher said in an email. “I thought many questions were worded in a very biased way whose answers could easily be used for political ends.”

Another teacher said he declined to complete the survey because he distrusted TNTP and how the data would be used to influence policy.

“I can’t do a survey if I don’t trust the intentions of the people doing it,” the teacher said.

TNTP was founded by former Washington, D.C., Chancellor Michelle Rhee, a controversial national figure in education whose efforts to change how teachers are hired and fired has enraged teachers unions. TNTP, which handles the recruitment and training of the New York City Teaching Fellows, also has a robust research arm that regularly studies the teacher job market across the country.

Weisberg said he’s not surprised that, in a city with so many teachers, some object to the survey. He also said he doesn’t expect every teacher to complete it. (Many of the teachers we reached out to hadn’t checked their official DOE email accounts in weeks and saw the survey only after hearing about it from us.)

Still, Weisberg said he expects thousands of teachers to respond and inform TNTP’s report, which he said would be complete by September 2012.

“What we’re looking for is to create a practical roadmap here to retain teachers,” Weisberg said. “It doesn’t help much if you don’t ask teachers.”

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.

Two charts billboard the number of positions for which ATRs were eligible that instead were filled by new teachers. Last year, the audit documents, 1,796 new teachers were hired for positions that 273 ATRs could have filled, the charts show. The report estimates that the city could have saved $12.4 million if all 273 ATRs had filled the positions for which they were eligible, and the city hired 273 fewer new teachers.

Under the principle of “mutual consent,” adopted in the 2005 teachers contract, teachers gave up the right to claim positions without principals’ approval, and the city gave up the right to place teachers unilaterally into open positions. The change gave principals more control of their staffs but also created the ATR pool.

In a response appended to the audit, the DOE’s deputy chancellor in charge of human capital, David Weiner, says the charts signal that the comptroller would prefer that the city abandon mutual consent in favor of forced placement.

The audit’s “analysis regards teachers not as individual professionals with unique strengths and/or weaknesses as candidates for teaching jobs in unique schools, but rather as fungible, replaceable parts,” Weiner wrote. He echoed language in the 2009 “Widget Effect” report by The New Teacher Project, which has urged the city to save money by terminating teachers in the ATR pool.

A spokesman for Liu said the charts are merely food for thought in a 20-page audit intended to spur the department to gather and crunch more data about the ATR pool.

“There may be cost-effective ways for placing ATR teachers that the DOE may not have considered,” said Matt Sweeney, a Liu spokesman. “One of the audit functions is to provide the agency as much information as possible that it may have overlooked.”

Other interesting data points uncovered in the audit: the DOE sometimes assigns ATRs back to the schools where they originally worked, despite a policy prohibiting that practice; no formal review took place before the DOE decided to eliminate salary subsidies for principals who hired teachers from the ATR pool; and more than 300 teachers in the pool as of March 1 had landed there after settling or being cleared of misconduct charges, likely many after the city rushed to close the “rubber rooms” several months earlier.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said the audit vindicated the union, which has always said that teachers in the ATR pool were pulling their weight within the system.

“[Ex-]Chancellor [Joel] Klein’s constant public pronouncement that this was costing the city $100 million was fraudulent and that’s the nicest way that I can say it,” he said.

Mulgrew said the biggest force keeping teachers in the ATR pool is the fact that DOE charges principals for the real salaries of their teachers, creating a disincentive to hire senior teachers when newer ones are available.

The ATR audit is one of several audits that Liu undertook into the DOE after a series of town-hall meetings where New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. At least three other DOE audits are expected to be released this month, according to Crain’s New York.

A spokesman for the comptroller’s office said that the five-year contract with The New Teacher Project was rejected this morning because of problems with the DOE’s submission. In reviewing the contract, officials in the comptroller’s office said that the DOE did not include information on conflicts of interest or what the dates of service would be. The department can choose to resubmit the contract.

The New Teacher Project, or TNTP, is a non-profit that handles the recruitment and training of New York City’s Teaching Fellows. It also studies teacher job markets around the country.

In a statement sent to reporters, Liu — a possible candidate in the next mayoral election — said he objected to the contract’s premise. The city does not need to spend money recruiting new teachers, he said.

“Twenty million dollars to recruit teachers as the DOE insists on laying off thousands of teachers seems curious at best,” Liu said.

Currently, Mayor Michael Bloomberg is threatening to shed over 6,000 teaching positions next year, with more than 4,600 lost through layoffs.

DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz defended the contract with The New Teacher Project.

“Mr. Liu’s hasty and ill-informed decision completely disregards the needs of thousands of special education and English Language Learning students, who deserve the best possible teachers we can bring in to our system,” she said in a statement. “If Mr. Liu had asked the DOE about the contract, he would have known this.”

Similar concerns surfaced last May, when the DOE proposed to spend nearly $5 million on a different teacher recruitment contract with The New Teacher Project. At the time, the mayor was calling for a similar number of teacher layoffs. The Panel for Educational Policy approved that contract.

Department of Education officials did not respond to requests for comment — I’ll update when they do.

NEW YORK, NY – City Comptroller John C. Liu stated the following in response to inquiries about his rejection of a $20 million teacher recruitment contract for the Department of Education (DOE):

“Twenty million dollars to recruit teachers as the DOE insists on laying off thousands of teachers seems curious at best,” said Comptroller Liu.

The five-year contract, with the “New Teacher Project,” was submitted in early February. The DOE was seeking the contract to “recruit, select, train and provide job search support to non-traditional candidates to become public school teachers.”

The contract submission comes at a time when agencies are being asked to cut services, including the DOE’s plan to lay off 4,600 teachers.

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.

The majority of them plan to work in special education and 100 will teach science. Of those with special education licenses, 225 will look to work in secondary special education, 100 in District 75 schools, and 25 in bilingual special education.

Because the city pays TNTP based on how many of its recruits it eventually hires, the payments have dropped significantly over the last several years as school budgets have tightened and hiring has slowed. This school year, the city paid the organization $2.8 million, down from $4.1 million in 2007.

The payment next school year will be even smaller, said Ann Forte, a spokeswoman for the DOE, as the incoming group of follows has gone from 705 this year to 450 next year.

Forte said having The New Teacher Project — an non-profit that also studies teacher job markets around the country —  manage the recruitment process saves the department money.

“The teacher recruitment office does not have the capacity to read through several thousand applications, coordinate alumni interviews, and respond to these people,” Forte said. “If they did, they’d have to bring in additional staff they maybe wouldn’t need for the next year. It gives us a very flexible staffing model.”

STATEMENT FROM BRONX BOROUGH PRESIDENT RUBEN DIAZ JR.

RE: Panel for Educational Policy Contract Vote

“Tomorrow, the Panel for Educational Policy will be voting on 24 vendor contracts, one of which is a nearly $5 million contract to recruit and train new teachers as part of the New York City Teaching Fellow’s program. I do not understand why, at a time when we are facing the loss of thousands of teachers due to budget cuts, we are not using these funds to preserve the teaching positions we currently have.  This does not make any sense, and illustrates extremely poor planning and judgment by the Department of Education.  Instead of spending $5 million looking for new teachers, I would think that the DOE should spend that money keeping the ones we already have.

“I have asked my representative to the Panel for Educational Policy to call for a postponement on voting on this item at Tuesday’s meeting and am hopeful that the Department of Education will seriously consider our request. If that postponement is not forthcoming, I have asked her to vote against this contract,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.

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.

“Layoffs are not good for anyone, but they are worse when they result in the loss of top teachers,” the report states. “With so many jobs — and so many children’s futures — potentially at stake, districts and teachers unions must act now to reform these outdated rules so that schools will be able to hold on to their most effective teachers if layoffs become necessary.”

The report is based in part on a survey of 9,000 teachers in two large Midwestern city school districts (though the report does not name the districts, its description of the two districts seems to match Minneapolis and Detroit).

The survey asked teachers if they believed other factors besides seniority should be considered in layoff decisions. Around three-quarters of the teachers surveyed in both districts answered “yes.” Even among teachers with more than 30 years of experience in their district, more than half agreed that “additional factors should be considered” in excessing or firing criteria.

Eliminating the “last hired, first fired” requirement for excessing city teachers is one of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s major political priorities in education, and a change to the system is on the city’s teachers contract negotiations wish list.

Opponents of the mayor’s proposed changes, including the city teachers union, often attack the credibility of The New Teacher Project because of the group’s close ties to the Bloomberg administration. Dan Weisberg, the group’s vice president for policy, was formerly the Department of Education’s head labor negotiator, and the organization was founded by Michelle Rhee, the chancellor of the D.C. school system whose reform goals frequently align with Klein’s.

“Asking the New Teacher Project about personnel policies is like asking Bernie Madoff for investment advice,” said UFT president Michael Mulgrew in a statement. “It is impossible for the New Teacher Project to be an objective voice of reason when they receive almost $5 million a year from the Department of Education.”

“Carefully omitted from their survey is the real option that teachers are afraid would be the most prominent factor in any non-seniority layoff decision — the whims of administrators who too often know less about education than the teachers they are supposed to be supervising,” Mulgrew said.

The survey did gauge teachers’ support for a number of other criteria that could be used for layoff decisions. In both districts, classroom management and teacher attendance rates garnered the most support from teachers. Around half of teachers in both districts also supported the use of “instructional performance based on evaluation rating” as a criteria, though far fewer listed “principal’s opinion” as a factor that should be used in layoff decisions.

Around half of teachers in one district, and 41 percent in the other, listed total years of teaching experience as a criteria they would support, but less than half of teachers surveyed in both cities chose length of service in their districts as a factor the believe should be considered.

The report does not wade into the murky waters of how effective classroom management skills and performance ratings should be determined. A report from The New Teacher Project released last year called most teacher evaluation programs “meaningless” because of the extraordinarily high numbers of teachers rated satisfactory. But efforts to evaluate teachers on other measures, including test scores, frequently draw fierce criticism from those who argue such factors are overly simplistic and unreliable.

Here is the full report:

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.

A recent bout of research argues that poor teaching is partly to blame for poorly performing schools, and a report by The New Teacher Project singled out poor teacher evaluation systems as part of the problem. The report specifically criticized evaluation systems that offer principals binary choices, either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, rather than encouraging more nuanced feedback. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the report, and his staff has urged school districts to improve their teacher evaluation systems.

New York City teachers receive either an “S” or “U” rating from their principals once a year.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the city teachers union and of the national American Federation of Teachers, has criticized the city’s efforts to target struggling teachers, decrying the Teacher Performance Unit as a “gotcha squad.”

Below is a chart showing the raw numbers of teachers receiving “U” ratings, and we’ve uploaded data from last year here.

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.

In a process officials at Hope Street Group call Policy 2.0, business executives and policy experts join with doctors or nurses or — in this case — teachers via small working groups, and then come up with a policy recommendation that everyone can agree on.

The team of 28 people who have signed up to write guidelines for a teacher evaluation system includes administrators, teachers, and policy experts, and they come from all around the country, Hope Street officials said. “This is a chance for an authentic and neutral voice,” said Catherine Cullen, a staffer who will work with the teacher-evaluation group.

The teacher evaluation project will be the first time the nonprofit, created in 2003, has built a policy proposal entirely on the Internet. The group built a new online platform that is essentially a specialized Facebook, where participants can talk to each other, divide into smaller groups, and share information.

The recommendations will also be published online, along with a database of examples of real evaluations used in school districts that principals and superintendents could search through.

A recent education recommendation by Hope Street Group won the endorsement of Arne Duncan, President Obama’s education secretary. The recommendation suggested that the federal stimulus package should focus on education, including five specific areas:

1. Building capacity to measure, manage, and improve performance;

2. Ensuring all students have access to a quality teacher;

3. Advancing teaching into a 21st-century profession;

4. Establishing high, competitive standards and assessments; and

5. Promoting best practices and rewarding innovation.

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.

The question, she said, is whether the district uses the evaluations in a meaningful way to drive high performance. “Can you pull it together in time and in a coherent fashion?” she said.

Currently, the teacher reports have no bearing on formal job evaluations or personnel decisions, and it was just after their creation that the city teachers union lobbied for the law banning test scores in decisions about tenure. The change stipulates that “a teacher shall not be denied or granted tenure based on student performance data.” The provision sunsets next year, but after the panel Weiss said that the sunset is too far away to help New York’s applications.

Weiss was in town to discuss The New Teacher Project’s report “The Widget Effect,” which was released last month and urged districts to overhaul their teacher performance evaluations. She spoke on a panel at the Carnegie Corporation alongside Rob Weil, the American Federation of Teacher’s deputy director of educational issues.

The federal Department of Education won’t release the exact criteria for receiving the competitive Race the the Top money until the end of July, and New York City is only just beginning to plan an application for a separate $650 million fund available to school districts. (A New York State Education Department spokeswoman did not return a request for comment this morning on the state’s progress.)

But Weiss’s remarks match the fund’s requirement that a state has made “significant progress” in four areas: raising academic standards, improving data systems, turning around struggling schools and improving teacher effectiveness. These are the same “four assurances” that states promised to pursue when they accepted the stimulus money that has already been distributed.

Weil, of AFT, said that the assurances are already affecting conversations around the country, where districts are using them as an excuse to push certain programs. In order to assure federal funding, the district officials tell union leaders, they need to make these changes, Weil said.

One reason federal officials have praised New York City while deriding the state could be that states and local districts are applying for two separate pots of money. The $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund is dedicated to projects at the state level. An additional $650 million of stimulus funds have been set aside for local district innovations. It’s possible, then, that the fund could award a grant to the city while passing over the state.

Daniel Weisberg, who co-authored The New Teacher Project’s report and who formerly headed up labor policy at the city Department of Education, said that he thought the change in tone at the federal level could drive a change in state law. The turmoil in the state legislature keeps everything up in the air, but he said the pressure from above makes significant reform to teacher evaluation a realistic goal.

“It’s a motivator,” he told me. “Will it get the job done? I don’t know.”

In an interview after the panel, Weiss said that the state will need to get the job done to have top consideration for the grant funds. “We will reward accomplishments, not promises,” she said.

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.

Many of the districts evaluate teachers based on less than a handful of observations, each of which last under an hour, and in some cases just 15 minutes. Across all districts, almost no teachers are rated unsatisfactory, and virtually none are dismissed for poor performance; in districts that rate teachers either competent or not, the ratio rated unsatisfactory versus satisfactory stands at 1 to 99.

That’s despite teachers’ and principals’ reports, in surveys, that at least one of their tenured colleagues is performing poorly, a statement that 81 percent of administrators and 58 percent of teachers surveyed told The New Teacher Project they agreed with. The percentages of educators reporting that tenured colleagues are not competent rises as a school’s students become more impoverished, as the chart above shows.

In New York City, principals rate teachers as either “unsatisfactory” or “satisfactory” at the end of each school year, based on observations they have conducted during the year. A sense that the system was too perfunctory led the Department of Education to create new teacher data reports last year that look at how teachers affect their students’ test scores. The reports have been criticized for their shaky statistical grounding, and a law lobbied for by the city teachers union prevents principals from using the data reports when making tenure decisions.

The New Teacher Project has been criticized in the past by teachers union president Randi Weingarten, who called its studies of the New York City teacher market biased because TNTP has a contract with the city to help bring new teachers into the public schools. TNTP also is the group behind a report urging the city to save money by terminating teachers who are currently without positions. To write this study, TNTP worked with union leaders and school district leaders in the districts studied, which include Chicago; Toledo, Ohio; Denver, Colo.; and Little Rock, Ark.

In a statement, Weingarten said she embraced the thrust of the new report but noted that it ignores a pioneering method of teacher evaluation, peer assistance and review, that has shown gains where it is being used, most notably in Toledo. “We are excited that TNTP shares our goal of redesigning teacher evaluations, and we look forward to working with TNTP and others to improve the quality of instruction in our schools,” she said.

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.

The story is supported by figures collected by The New Teacher Project, the nonprofit that hires and trains new teachers and studies teacher job markets around the country. The group found that more than half of ATR teachers who remained without jobs as of December of 2008 had never applied for any jobs through the online Open Market system and never attended a single job fair. That’s 723 out of 1,367 teachers who were in the ATR pool at that time.

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten has emphatically insisted that the members of the ATR pool have been slandered by the Department of Education and The New Teacher Project. At the start of the school year, she organized a press conference with several ATR members who spoke about extensive job searches that turned up nothing.

And in a recent telephone interview, Weingarten told me that not hiring ATR members is a “waste of talent and money.” “A waste of talent and money!” she exclaimed again, for emphasis.

The logo for the Department of Education’s recruitment campaign for new teachers.

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.

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.

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.

September 24, 2008
Hon. Joel I. Klein
Chancellor
New York City Public Schools
Department of Education
52 Chambers Street
New York, NY 10007

Dear Chancellor Klein:
The latest effects of the Wall Street lending crisis has left us all with a deep sense of uncertainty and unease, but it also presents us with an opportunity to stand together for the children of this city. With families across the five boroughs already struggling, it is all the more imperative that we do all we can to insulate our students and their classrooms from this economic crisis and ensure that every student has a strong, safe and stable learning environment.

As we navigate through this crisis, tough decisions obviously need to be made. As is our practice, we have some ideas and proposals on how we mitigate some of the challenges ahead without adversely affecting the classroom. Creative thinking and smart choices protected schools from cuts earlier this year, and I strongly believe that we can duplicate that success now.

In the spirit of partnership and collaboration, we urge you to adopt and implement the following three measures:

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.

The first two measures should help the Department of Education recognize immediate cost savings, and the third recommendation would be a valuable investment in personnel management.

We look forward to discussing these ideas and others in the days ahead.
Yours sincerely,
Randi Weingarten

Cc: Deputy Mayor Edward Skyler
Commissioner of Labor James F. Hanley
Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf