The UFT profiles PS 107 in Flushing, Queens as part of a new video series about the amazing work going on in our public schools today. The school, which is home to a diverse population of more than 900 students, prides itself on its forward-thinking programs and the strong collaboration between teachers and administrators.

[Editor's note: Peter Goodman blogs at Ed in the Apple where this post originally appeared.]

A teacher relates:

I’ve been teaching math for a quarter of a century in the same school until it closed. Once in a while I’d be observed, it was always complimentary. I was a mentor and for the last few years the acting Assistant Principal. When my school closed I was hired in a small high school. The principal is young, he’s not from the Leadership Academy, he taught for a while and was an assistant principal. He’s a strong disciplinarian and the students respect him. He came into my room for a few minutes almost every day, he’d make suggestions. I told him I knew what I was doing and found the visits intrusive. Tells me that he viewed frequent classroom visits as an essential part of his job. His suggestions became criticisms: discipline was poor, I didn’t make use of the disaggregated student achievement data, I didn’t differentiate instruction, etc. He thought I could benefit from videotaping my lesson and he’d go over it with me. I spoke to the union rep and he advised against it. “What can he do to you, you have tenure?” I told the principal these kids came to school unprepared, they lived in the projects, weren’t interested in school. He has to understand their limitations. He told me my attitude was unacceptable and perhaps I should find another school.

A principal responds,

I drop into classrooms everyday for a few minutes, most teachers are used to it. Later in the day I may ask a question or make a suggestion. At the beginning of the term I provide each teacher with an ‘error matrix’ of the State exam results. I ask them, regardless of their subject area, to address the areas that need support. I urge them to develop projects and give them planning time to work with colleagues. One of the math teachers has been teaching a long time, his classroom discipline is poor, he has no rapport with the students, he pays no attention to the disaggregated data, he plods along, and resents any suggestions. At our last meeting he denigrated the kids and uses the neighborhood and their background as an excuse. I told him it was our responsibility to move them forward, the neighborhood was an obstacle, not an excuse. I suggested he might be happier in another school, he ran to the union rep who tells me I’m trying to push him out because of his age and salary.

Generational differences both within the union and between senior staff and younger supervisors are deep-seated problems within schools. Susan Moore Johnson at Harvard University is involved in extensive research exploring this issue. More »

I remember the late Mitch Jayne, who played bass for the Dillards, reminiscing that in the winter the backhouse was 50 yards too far and in the summer it was 50 yards too close. Mitch said sometimes you’d run in to find an old hound dog sleeping inside, just like he owned the place. Now don’t get me wrong, New York City schools have indoor plumbing, and I’ve yet to find an old hound dog in my trailer. And it’s certainly true school trailers are never too close.

Still, the trailers of Francis Lewis High School are full of surprises. If you’re not inclined to travel to parades, you luck out because the marching band practices right outside. Whether it’s “Louie Louie,” “La Bamba,” or a peppy John Phillip Sousa number, they come right to you. You can hear the volume ebb and flow as they march up and down the street. And take it from me, nothing livens up a tedious English exam like an old-fashioned military march. More »

This AFT ad began airing on Sunday:

There’s also an accompanying Facebook page.

In a bold dramatic headline of the type associated with reports of international events that threaten global annihilation, a tabloid announced a few days ago that a handful of teachers were busted for faking illness in order to go on a honeymoon or for some other absurd motive. The story was accompanied by a spread of six pictures and had the flavor of a “perp walk.” The fruit of this investigative report was the revelation that some teachers took days off, with pay, to which they would have been entitled had they actually been a bit under the weather. More »

Adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the Renaissance Society of America.

The Wall Street Journal, attack dog for the righteous marketplace, apostle of “bang for the buck” for civil servants, and conscience of the all-day businessman’s lunch for dividends gluttons, decried in an April 28 piece the alleged statistic that public school teachers tend to exhaust their annual ten-day “sick bank,” especially in poorer areas of the city.

They suspect that teachers’ claim of sickness is often a ploy and mask for their contemptuous attitude towards professional duty. They see teachers who get sick as slackers who if they cared about kids would have immune systems better able to repel microbes. They plainly feel that unions are the enablers of teachers’ audacity.

Perhaps it’s true about teachers burning through their ten days over ten months. But a fragment of truth without context is no truth at all, but as an instrument to exploit the public’s gullibility, it’s more serviceable than an out and out lie.

Does anyone, other than the founder emeritus of the Flat Earth Society, trust the WSJ to be a pure journalistic enterprise that seeks and accepts the truth wherever it may lead? Would their editorial board ever disseminate an unvarnished and verified truth that would make public school educators look good? Of course not. And neither would sectors of the erstwhile “progressive” movement who have attached like barnacles to the rusted hulk of “reform.” More »

The Teacher Reassignment Centers (“rubber rooms”) were an affront to taxpayers, a waste of productivity and an insult to human rights. At last they have been busted up. Much has been written about the agreement that ended them and there is a lot of speculation about what the future will bring.

Certainly the reaction to the abolition of the TRCs has been on the whole celebratory. The terms of their dissolution have been presented and analyzed at length. This post will not add to the discussion or make judgments about the settlement’s conditions or make observations about the DOE. Instead I will share a concern and make an appeal to our Edwize readers.

Many of our fellow professional educators who are currently in a TRC will before long return to schools and be amongst their former colleagues. This return has the potential to be a very joyous occasion but also a quite stressful one. Much depends on the sensitivity and discretion of the personalities in the school environment. It is important that our colleagues be welcomed back with a full and embracing spirit and be graciously supported in every way.

Such “open arms” would be a defining moment and finest hour for every school family.

Imagine that you have been a successful practicing pediatrician for many years and have retained your original idealism and smarts over all that time. You’re a great diagnostician with a “bedside manner” to match. You’ve sharpened your skills, deployed your intuition, kept up to speed on research and treatments, dog-eared your much-consulted Physicians’ Desk Reference, tapped the fruits of your experience, balanced empathy with detachment and volunteered pro bono to heal indigent patients who lack the means to fund the biannual new Lexus your peers expect you to drive. There have been no complaints and two generations of community residents swear by you.

Enter the inquisitors. More »

Superintendents across the nation are meeting in emergency session to draft memos to educators laying down the parameters for accepting gifts from students and their parents during this holiday season. In Boston the value of the gift may not exceed $50. That’s certainly more reasonable and realistic than the prohibition by Chancellor Klein a few years ago in which a gift of $5.01 or more would need to be returned.

Fresh from ripping the upholstery off the Polar Express, superintendents/chancellors and other educrats of exalted title have redefined contraband as any token of love, gratitude or holiday cheer, worth over an arbitrary retail value, gifted to teachers.

They seem to regard teachers as more prone to corruption than is the general population and assume that they must be protected from their impulse to put their soul and job on the line for a silk tie. In some districts, anything in excess of a slice of cherry pie must be returned to the sender. More »

Though local newspapers did not bother to ask them, any teacher could have named a key reason why state math scores are soaring while the federal TUDA for NYC is largely flat. In spite of their own best professional judgment, their complaints, and their protests, teachers in New York City have been compelled to teach narrowly to a narrow state test, and to use test results to determine what to teach. Teach to a test — and worse, teach to a bad test — and you can’t expect kids to know very much. In fact, you can’t expect them to get much of an education at all, beyond the education that is politically convenient for some and gratifies the ideological enthusiasm of others. NAEP asks for more of education, and that’s the more we are denied from giving them in NYC.

The ideology to which I am referring of course is the penchant everywhere to replace real learning with a spreadsheet education: education by the numbers sliced and diced and then sliced and diced again. More »

In her Dec. 6 “Edwatch” commentary in the Providence Journal, columnist Julia Steiny says, “No evidence anywhere shows that merit-pay systems aimed at individual teachers improves education. Incentives to groups of teachers are effective, but not individuals.”

She is to be commended for making this both striking and strikingly obvious observation. She cites Jeffrey Pfeffer, who in a 1998 Harvard Business Review essay, exposed the fallacy “that individual incentive pay drives creativity and productivity.” It has instead, he notes, “been shown to undermine teamwork, encourage employees to focus on the short term, and lead people to link compensation to political skills and ingratiating personalities rather than to performance.”

Steiny identifies several “boondoggles” that she associates with individual merit pay. More »

[Editor's note: Marie Boo is a school psychologist at PS 45 in Queens.]

“Brace yourself — I have bad news and you’re not going to believe it.”

The phone call came on the eve of Memorial Day last year from our school secretary. I listened in disbelief as she told me that our guidance counselor had died that afternoon. She explained that it appeared to be a sudden heart attack but I don’t really recall the rest of the conversation as I tried to absorb this horrific news. I kept thinking No…not Steve…it can’t be true…he was at work last week and seemed fine…his poor family…how will we tell the students? Then it hit me as I was telling my daughter about the call. I didn’t just lose a coworker; I just lost a very dear friend.

The next few days were the most difficult of my twenty-two-year career. As a member of the district crisis team for several years, I have had to report to other schools and assist staff and students cope with the loss of someone from their community. Now I had to call the crisis team and ask for assistance. With a constant lump in my throat I had to offer support and comfort to my own and I remember one moment when I thought, “Damn it Steve, you’re suppose to be here with me helping others deal with the death of someone else. It’s not supposed to be you.” More »

The skeptical take of The American Prospect‘s Dana Goldstein on the Obama adminstration’s promotion of individual merit pay for educators has led to a widely read exchange on a number of different blogs. Take a look at Matt Yglesias’ two posts, here and here, as well as the comments by The Quick and Ed’s Kevin Carey, the Core Knowledge blog’s Robert Pondiscio, and the conservative Atlantic blogger Megan McArdle.

What is interesting about the exchange is the commonplace conceptual slippage between the idea of individual merit pay and the broader concept of differentiated pay. More »

A teacher in Grimsby, England was recently suspended and is threatened with termination for “bringing the school into disrepute.” Her offense was that in a private conversation on Facebook she referred to a particular class as “just as bad” as another class on the grade. She said that and nothing more.

An investigation was launched after a colleague, maybe more out of ambition than conscience, ratted out the impeccably-credentialed teacher who now, despite her immaculate record, may be booted from the livelihood of her dreams.

Certainly no teacher should indulge in destructive criticism of students whether they are individuals or groups, identified or not. And the proverbial line must be drawn somewhere on the much trodden pedagogical field of scrutiny. But the human frailties of teachers tend to be tested on the job more so than is the case in most other lines of work. More »