I am amazed!

Our union lead us to a poor contract last time, this time around she is looking to see how much more can give back to the mayor at out expense this time around.

It is obvious that Randi does not have tearchers’ best interests at heart, she is more concerned with herself & her own future. She gets my vote of “No Confidence.”

I honestly feel like our leader is not looking out for our best interest. Our union leader should be calling us to ready for a strike. This is the only way we can flex our muscle as a group.

The police nor fire departments do not have to work extended shifts, would their union leaders entertain such contract proposals? Why should we? We are the city’s most educated employees but we are not acting like it. We need to strike now before the election, this would result in pressure on the mayor to come up with a contract.

We need a new union leader and we need to strike!

When people want to disparage the New York City Department of Education, they often call the school system a “zoo.” But if a zoo were run like the DOE, the beasts would be falsely identified, the cages would be flung open, the shifts confused, and the keepers constantly reassigned in the wake of mass disappearances and feedings gone awry.

If the Bronx Zoological Garden were really the model for DOE management, recruitment of teachers wouldn’t be such a problem. There’d be no need for Human Resources to fly to Tierra del Fuego, the Khyber Pass, and the lost continent of Atlantis to drop tantalizing leaflets from the sky. risaac.blogs.com

I live on Long Island. The top teacher salary here is $128,000. The top teacher salary in NYC is $81,000….we are losing more and more teachers because they can’t make a living and are working under the most deplorable conditions….doesn’t that impact upon the students?

Do you really, really think that Joel Klein or Mike Bloomberg gives a rat’s behind about any kid in NYC? I mean look at the awful curricula he has imposed. I see these kids every day. To most, I am a surrogate parent. I am still in touch with students I taught 15 years ago. I was even invited to one of my former student’s medical school graduations. I taught in an awful inner city school.

I wish I could tell you that I am unique in my dedication, but I am not. Almost all the teachers I know (both in my school and others) have similar stories to tell.

We don’t trust this mayor or chancellor. If we cannot trust them, then the kids certainly cannot trust them. I am tired of volunteering my time so that the mayor and chancellor can claim credit while castigating teachers. The conditions for teachers in schools has deteriorated greatly. Morale is at an all-time low. Is that good for NYC kids???

How do you fix it? First, stop attacking the union. Compare our contracts with the contracts of teachers in the metropolitan area. We have the fewest benefits, the longest work year, and the most severe conditions….it is so disheartening for both the staff and especially for the students to endure the mass exodus of teachers. Kids need stability these days…..with so many teachers leaving, there is a sense of instability in the schools.

Where do you send your kids to school, NYC parent???? Do you think that your kids’ teachers are well compensated?

It’s not the union and it’s not the “true agenda” of hte union that is hurting kids or not even trying to help them (au contraire…who operates…at teacher expense…a homework helpline, for example?) It is the mayor’s capricious, vindictive policies. He is going to run the schools in the ground. I am on the inside and that’s how I see it.

I have stayed in the NYC schools despite the awful conditions for 18 years because I believe in my students. This year will probably be my last if things continue as they are going……

Can I be replaced? Sure. Will my replacement be as good as I am? I doubt it highly. Who suffers? The NYC students.

What nonsense. A principal’s disinclination to hire an excessed teacher could be an indication of many things (a nephew with a teaching license, for example), but it is not an indication that the excessed teacher stinks. What’s more, Klein forgets what Klein always forgets: this is not a very attractive profession, and anything that makes it less attractive hurts our schools. Perhaps if college grads were banging down the doors to teach in New York City, Klein could afford to be so cavalier about the few benefits we teachers have. As things are, however, he has to send to Australia and the Philippines just to staff the class. A modicum of job security isn’t much of an incentive when one considers the working conditions (reluctant students, ugly buildings, constant fear), but it is something. Take job security from quality teachers, and potential teachers have one more reason not to come, and not to stay.

But what is especially disgusting about Klein’s comments is that he surely must know that the issue of excessing is not really an issue at all. How much excessing can there be when the schools are barely staffed?

What Klein has in the excessing issue then is exactly what Klein wants to have: a good excuse. Klein wants the union like Halliburton wanted Iraq, and when one cannot find the WMDs, one can easily, simply make them up. The agenda here, for the long haul, is not better schools but broken contracts, cheaper teachers. To understand what that means for our city, we need only recall the grim images of another city that have haunted us all week: images of the fallout from the politics of poverty in New Orleans.

Also, this implies that top step teachers will not get a raise unless they accept that designation. It’s remarkable how cost of living, let alone supply and demand, fails to show itself in this calculation.

Let’s raise the top salary to 90K and offer a bonus on top of that for folks foolhardy enough to allow Klein such power over them. Anyone who trusts this man farther than he can be thrown is simply not paying attention, and hardly worthy of a “master teacher” designation.

As an adjunct, you can be fired, scheduled to work at the university’s convenience and so on.

All I can say is that most teachers in my building want to quit. I have never seen morale so low.

Also, new teachers are plain confused. One new teacher said to me today that everything she is being asked to do in the classroom in counterintuitive to what would benefit the students.