At a time when we need all the talented educators we can find to work in New York City public schools, Chancellor Klein tells the Daily News he wants to terminate skilled, “excessed” teachers who, through no fault of their own, find themselves without classroom assignments.
Instead of proposing innovative solutions (such as using excessed teachers to fill vacancies and lower class size), the Chancellor puts forth a counter-productive and wrong-headed alternative that would waste talent and most certainly thwart future teacher recruitment efforts. After all, who would want to work in such an unimaginative (and punitive) educational system?
5 Comments:
1 Language of the Brave New World: Klein says fire ‘excessed’ teachers. « PREA Prez
· Sep 4, 2007 at 5:43 pm
[...] writes about one. NY teacher union president Randi Weingarten writes about the issue. They’re called ATRs, Attendence Teacher in Reserve. They’re [...]
2 Teacher News of the Day | Edwize
· Sep 4, 2007 at 6:21 pm
[...] . . and UFT President Randi Weingarten responds on the issue of [...]
3 jd2718
· Sep 4, 2007 at 7:08 pm
The Chancellor has been fairly clear about wanting to get rid of senior teachers. He pretended that he was out to get “bad” teachers, but I think we all saw through that lie.
No surprise today: the two most prominent groups of ATRs are the batch from D79 who you wrote about in your letter to all of us, and the senior teachers excessed by formerly large, phasing out schools, I’d guess mostly in the Bronx. Both groups are ATRs by restructuring, not through any fault of their own. He wants to get rid of satisfactory teachers, good teachers, experienced teachers.
When we deal with him, we must be vigilant for his sneaky, nasty, anti-teacher, anti-union biases. Who looks foolish reasoning with a rabid dog? Not the dog.
Jonathan
4 R. Skibins
· Sep 4, 2007 at 10:22 pm
This is a prime example of why we MUST allow mayoral control to sunset!
5 windhover
· Sep 7, 2007 at 3:34 pm
I am an ATR who has had a perfect record for the 7.5 years I have been teaching. At the school which I am currently assigned to, there are MANY MANY young and possibly untenured teachers here–a good number of whom were hired at the “last minute” to fill positions that should have been available to those of us who were excessed. There is no doubt that Bloomberg and Klein encouraging age discrimination and anti-tenure tacticts to rid the DOE of more “expensive” and experienced teachers. We need to file a class-action lawsuit against the DOE–ASAP!!!