Stubborn Facts, Pliable Statistics and The Manufactured Crisis of Excessed Educators

“Facts,” John Adams once said, “are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” That may be true, Mark Twain later wrote, but “statistics are more pliable.”

Faced with a set of “stubborn facts” around the situation of excessed teachers serving as ATRs, the Department of Education and the New Teacher Project manufactured a crisis using what, it has now become clear, are “pliable statistics.” In the days since they first published their paper and launched their assault on these teachers, we at the UFT have been engaged in the careful research that should have been done by the DoE and NTP, if there was an honest and sincere attempt to ascertain the actual facts of the situation. In this morning’s New York Sun, Elizabeth Green reports on some of what we found. Here is our account.

One of the very first things that struck us was how often excessed teachers serving as ATRs said they were teaching full programs, with regularly scheduled classes, just as they had done when they were regular assigned to schools. There are also guidance counselor ATRs with full caseloads of students. We began a systematic study of how often this was taking place, and kept coming across more and more instances of it. To date, we have identified almost 200 teachers and guidance counselors in these circumstances, and we fully expect to have more cases identified. [A list of the school sites where these educators have been assigned is reproduced at the end of this post; where the site appears more than once, it has more than one educator in a full-time program.] Since the DoE has announced the total number of excessed educators serving as ATRs is 665, the “stubborn fact” is that close to 1/3 of them — and perhaps even more — are teaching regular teaching programs and counseling regular caseloads of students.

Who are these educators? Here are two teachers I interviewed.

John Murray is a dedicated 30 year veteran who until this past September worked with the neediest students in New York City public schools, those in the Alternative High School Superintendency. In an ill-considered, ill-planned and ill-executed move undertaken late last June and over the summer, the Department of Education decided to close down most of the schools and programs in that district, which serves pregnant teens, students involved with the legal system, students in drug and alcohol rehabilitation programs and students in GED programs. As his old school was closed down, Murray was assigned in September to Stuyvesant High School. With a Ph.D. in English and a background in Art History, which he studied in Rome on a sabbatical, Murray is now teaching a full program in Art History at Stuyvesant.

Tom Nixon teaches at Tilden High School in Brooklyn, a school the DoE first slated for closure last year. The school administration thinks so highly of Nixon that they have asked him to be the person who opens up the school every morning. He teaches classes that culminate in Regents exams and serves as a dean for the school. When I spoke to him on Saturday afternoon, he had just returned from doing tutoring that morning at the school.

Murray and Nixon and the other educators lay bare the disgraceful lie the DoE and the TNP have propagated, that the excessed teachers and guidance counselors serving as ATRs are incompetents that no one wants in their schools. To the contrary, these are excellent, dedicated educators who have lost their positions due to decisions by the DoE to close their old schools, decisions over which the teachers and guidance counselors had no control. The administration of the schools in which they are now located clearly have the confidence in many of them to assign them a regular teaching program or a regular counseling caseload. Indeed, the DoE is the victim of its own system of perverse incentives — so long as the teachers and guidance counselors remain as ATRs, they remain on the central DoE payroll, and the school can have the benefits, but not the cost, of their services. And since the DoE has done nothing to find permanent positions for excessed teachers and guidance counselors serving as ATRs, preferring to use them as pawns in its campaign to gain the power to fire without due process, these educators remain without a regular appointment and on the central DoE payroll. [The Chapter Leader at one closing school told me that without the ATRs teachers teaching regular programs, the school would collapse. In this regard, it is worth pointing out that among "the cuts to the central DoE budget" made in January, an Orwellian named category as most of these cuts were cost transfers to schools, were cuts in aid to phase-out schools. The ATR positions have become a crucial lifeline for those schools.]

Having failed to exercise due diligence in their own research and been caught red-handed, the DoE and TNP are flailing about, with Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf attacking the revelations reported in the Sun as a “red herring.”

Would that Chancellor Klein, Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf, DoE Chief Executive for Labor Policy Dan Weisberg or The New Teacher Project’s Tim Daly, the four individuals who have been the media spokespersons of the DoE’s campaign against the excessed teachers serving as ATRs, had ever done the hard work that Murray, Nixon and other ATR educators do every day for New York City public school students. Instead, they have disparaged and misrepresented these dedicated teachers to serve their political ends. In his report, Daly goes on at some length about how many excessed teachers serving as ATRs have not sought permanent positions through the open market, implying that they do not want to teach. In fact, 270 of the 665 educators now with ATR status, those who came from the Alternative High School Superintendency, never had the opportunity to go on the open market. Against our advice, and to the detriment of the students served by the superintendency, the DoE closed down the schools long after the Open Market season, which starts in late April. Virtually all of those teachers applied last summer for positions in the new schools and programs in the Alternative High School Superintendency in the 18D process, named after the section of the contract that governs it, but Daly simply ignores this process and those applications in his drive to misrepresent those teachers. Facts are stubborn things.

While the misrepresentation of the ATR educators is most egregious, what also becomes clear is that the “pliable statistics” of the DoE and TNP have completely misrepresented the cost of ATRs. If tomorrow everyone of the 200 ATRs with full programs were fired, as the DoE is demanding it be given the power to do, it would then have to hire 200 educators to replace them. If tomorrow the other ATRs who cover the classes of absent teachers were fired, as the DoE is demanding it be given the power to do, it would have to hire substitutes to cover those classes. When the real cost of ATR educators is calculated, therefore, it is a fraction of the $81 million claimed by the DoE and TNP — the “stubborn fact” of the true cost, the UFT economists calculate, is $18.7 million. [So, yes, Eduwonk, the $81 million figure is manufactured, just as the entire crisis has been manufactured to pursue the political objective of giving the DoE the power to fire without due process.]

The role of the New Teacher Project in the production of these “pliable statistics” demands special note. Far from being an independent and objective research entity, the New Teacher Project has millions of dollars in DoE contracts. There is a direct conflict of interest between the New Teacher Project’s role in at least one of those contracts — running the Teaching Fellows program — and a complete and accurate account of the situation of the ATRs: if the DoE actually followed the contractual procedures and sent ATRs to open positions before novice teachers, it would mean less positions for new Teaching Fellows.

Since we have published here the account of the practical proposals we have made to the DoE, again and again, to diminish the pool of ATR educators by moving them into regular appointments, their response has been one of silence. There is no answer, because the “stubborn facts” are that they have no interest in solving the problem so long as they believe that they can use it to win the power to fire educators without due process. That is a very poor estimate of the UFT: all that they can secure by such tactics is shame.

SCHOOLS WITH ATRS WITH FULL-TIME PROGRAMS

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