Many New York City principals are unhappy that the city is planning to place teachers directly into their schools — and in some cases, they’re vowing resistance.
Department of Education officials announced last week that they would place up to half of the 822 teachers who currently do not have positions into jobs that haven’t been filled by Oct. 15. Those teachers are part of the Absent Teacher Reserve, a collection of educators moved to the pool for disciplinary reasons or when their positions were eliminated. They remain on the city payroll in an arrangement that has generated political tension for years.
The move by the city reverses Chancellor Carmen Fariña’s promise in 2014 to avoid “forced placement” and raises questions about principals’ already fraying sense of autonomy. The city claims the plan is not forced placement because it would only apply to vacancies, as opposed to displacing teachers who are already employed. Regardless, many principals aren’t on board.
Some say they’ll avoid any attempt to place teachers at their schools, even if that means obscuring open jobs from the city’s hiring systems past October.
“I’m going to make sure my school doesn’t have a vacancy,” said one Bronx principal who wished to remain anonymous due to the sensitive nature of the topic. “I’m not going to post a vacancy if someone will place an ATR there. I’ll be as strategic as I can and figure out another way.”
Some principals raised concerns about the quality of the teachers in the pool. Education department officials could not readily provide the percentage of teachers in the pool who are there for disciplinary reasons, but a 2014 report estimated it at 25 percent. The same report said another third had received unsatisfactory ratings and half hadn’t held a classroom position in two years or more.
“Many of them have been coming from schools that have been closed down or subject areas that were cut,” said Scott Conti, principal of New Design High School in Manhattan. “The majority of them were at schools that were highly dysfunctional.” He noted that some may have been out of the classroom for years and not getting proper professional development, effectively hindering their performance as teachers.
Conti said he did hire a teacher from the ATR pool three years ago, through the standard procedure he would use to hire other teachers. He objects to the idea of being forced to hire someone whose effectiveness he could not fully judge.
“It’s never good when somebody from outside a school decides to fill in a vacancy in a school,” Conti said. “ It’s scary that some teacher could be put in your school that you have no choice about.”
Other principals were more harsh. One Bronx principal said multiple experiences working with ATR teachers sent to the school for monthly rotations in the past left the impression that those in the reserve are “not qualified, with very few exceptions.” Other principals agreed, suggesting that if the teachers were high-quality candidates, they probably would have found positions on their own.
To circumvent the new policy, some principals said they might check in with all their teachers early in the hiring period to be aware of potential future vacancies. If there is a vacancy in October, others said they’d consider hiring a long-term substitute to fill the position rather than leaving it open to an ATR placement.
The city says the new approach will be more stable than having teachers in the ATR rotate monthly, and will allow schools to more closely support and supervise the teachers in their building. It plans to work closely with principals on the hiring.
“We will work to find the right fit, and hear and work through concerns that they might have,” education department spokesman Will Mantell told Chalkbeat last week. “But ultimately, we do have discretion to place an educator in a vacancy that exists, and it kind of makes sense.”
Schools will still have final say over whether the teachers are permanently hired. If at the end of the school year, the teacher is rated as “effective” or “highly effective” in the observation portion of their evaluation — performed by principals or other school administrators — that teacher will be permanently hired to that school.
It is unclear if any of the ATR teachers placed into schools this coming fall could have a background of poor disciplinary conduct, or if the teachers placed would come solely from the share that are in the pool because they were excessed.
“The DOE has discretion on which educators in the ATR pool are appropriate for long-term placement, and may choose not to assign educators who have been disciplined in the past,” education officials said.
Last year, the city offered an incentive system to encourage schools to hire from the ATR pool. During that school year, 372 teachers were hired from the ATR pool under a DOE policy that subsidized the cost of the teachers’ first-year salaries by 50 to 100 percent. Those incentives will not be offered with the placements expected this fall.
Daniel Russo, principal of Walton Avenue School in the Bronx, said he has had positive experiences with the two teachers he hired from ATR pool in previous years. He added that though ATR teachers sometimes have a gap because they are coming from a different school — and sometimes not a high-performing school — his school is able to fill that gap and assimilate the teacher to the school’s culture and expectations.
Still, he noted, finding the right fit between candidates and schools could be a “challenging undertaking” for the city.
New Design’s Conti fears that challenge will disproportionately fall on schools like his that struggle with fluctuating enrollment.
“These teachers are not going to end up at Lab, they will end up at places like New Design where the positions will open up,” Conti said, referring to the selective and successful NYC Lab School for Collaborative Studies. “Schools with the most unstable populations, serving the neediest kids is where the low-functioning teachers will end up.”