Though I've temporarily suspended this blog during my involuntary career change to Bandleader, some things that catch my eye are worth repeating.
This is a comment Mr. Talk left on Chaz's blog about ageism in the Rubber Rooms:
"There should be real penalties for principals who abuse the RRs. And what ever happened to that age discrimination lawsuit that the UFT said they would pursue? The truth is, the RRs are a de facto early retirement system. If it isn't stopped, no one will reach 55/25 anyway."
To the first sentence about real penalties for wayward principals: Yes, and you can come to a RALLY in support of a teacher working for one of these principals with a fetish for rubber rooms. Iris Blige runs the Fordham High School for the Arts and has arranged stints at the reassignment center for several unlucky educators over the years. She's not the only one of course, but the union is focusing in on her this coming Friday. Be there.
To the second sentence, where Mr. Talk asks what happened to the age discrimination suit the union got us all excited about (me too, I was part of it until they made me remove myself from all lawsuits against the DoE if I wanted the arbitration to go in my favor), the short answer is that the lawsuits were dropped.
Each case was different, but I'll tell you this from what happened with mine. We offered lots of documentation — licenses, online application data, letters of commendation, years of S ratings — all stuff relating to the application process for which I never received a single response. The DoE's answer to that was a point-by-point "explanation" of why none of those applications led to an interview — such things like the job didn't really exist, or the principal didn't look at the online requests or had someone else in mind anyway — but offered no documentation to back any of those explanations up. It was all commentary, with no legal standing that I could discern. The NYSUT lawyers were as troubled as I was about that, but guess what: I never heard from them again. If what happened in my case happened to others, it's obvious the union just backed down. Otherwise, why wouldn't they have demanded documentation to support all those whimsical explanations the DoE put out in lieu of a proper response? Proof positive that the system failed, and the unions collaborated.
As for the "truth" Mr. Talk alludes to in his final two sentences: Damn right. The RRs are a de facto early retirement system, and so is the burgeoning ATR situation, with all the closing schools and the ads they keep running for new teachers.
PS: Shame on you, Cynthia Nixon, for taking part in that campaign. Decimating the ranks of senior teachers and filling up the schools with trainees is not what I think you had in mind for your children or anyone else's. Before you offer your services, please think the whole thing through, or you just become part of the "PR"oblem.
Mr. Talk: It's not that no one will reach 55/25 anyway, it's that BloomKlein's COUNTING on no one staying in it that long.
I feel remiss in not writing, but before I go on a proper leave from blogging, I feel obligated to explain why the sporadic posts.
Consider this explanation a treatise on licensing.
After a successful arbitration a couple of months ago, I was reclaimed from the ATR pool and restored to a full music position. There were two in the building at the time, and though it could have been played out in various ways at the principal’s discretion, it was decided that low man, a new teacher, would have to become the ATR that I had been, and I would get his general music position. It was a nightmare taking over someone’s classes near the end of a semester, and as little said about those six weeks the better.
Fast forward to the end of January, when principals make plans for the spring semester. Student attendance down, one music position would have to go. The band program was more in line with what principal wanted (who knows what the parents or the union reps thought about this, since the CEPs were not done on time), so general music was going to be axed.
The band position for the spring would involve two introductory bands, an intermediate and a more advanced one, and a new course, a percussion/drumline group. There'd be a spring concert and perhaps a nice stroll in the Puerto Rican Day parade.
I had actually been expecting to be placed into excess again as soon as the principal could find a way to do it. That would have been fine. Dabbling in a variety of subjects from day to day as an ATR — Shakespeare, Italian, health, algebra, volleyball, law and variety of other — was in a bizarre way the implementation of one of my youthful dreams, to become a “Renaissance woman.”
Alas, twas not to be. The band position had to be offered to me, though one could easily ask why, since I had never wanted to teach band and neither asked to or ever even tried to.
DoE regulation: The person with the most seniority holding the license gets the job.
The reason, then, for this ridiculous situation was simple and stupid.
When the DoE replaced the city arts licenses in 2001 with some new ones that were more in line with the state’s K-12 licenses, they gave us music teachers two of them: one for Music and another for Orchestral Music. I had activated the Music one and barely remembered I even held the other one.
No one at the DoE knows a thing about music or they'd have realized that being an orchestral conductor or bandleader is altogether different from being a teacher of music appreciation or directing a chorus. The person in charge of these groups should know how to handle each of the instruments (and none of them are cheap), as well as how to play them, clean them, repair minor problems and replace parts, regulate their use in the room, and transpose parts. I won’t even mention being able to play the piano while you’re conducting, or making an occasional arrangement if the players you have don't match what the music calls for. Heck, I would have liked to know where each player should be sitting.
Horrified, then, at being offered the position, I whipped out my contract — Art.17.B., which allows voluntary excessing — and put my request for me to excessed instead of the band teacher in writing. HR quickly rejected it. That's because the UFT and the DoE have agreed not to excess high school teachers in the middle of the year, so you can’t at this time of the year voluntarily put yourself into it.
Instead, "leftover" educators become teachers without a program, and in this case, they resolved that it wasn't going to be. I was the most senior person holding that dusty, unactivated, all but forgotten Orchestral license lying in the bottom drawer of my file cabinet. The job had to be mine, it couldn't go to the real band teacher. The only option would have been to retire on the spot, but with the financial crisis being what it is, I don’t think so.
So, here I am a bandleader for the first time in my life, a few weeks away from my 62nd birthday. And I must be the only person in the school with four preps a week, three classes of 40-50 on register and a circular 6-R duty that has nothing to do with my skills. Shell-shocked is a good word for it, and it applies just as much to the principal, AP, and the original band teacher as it does to me.
This should go a long way to explain the sporadic nature of my recent posts.
Surviving this semester will mean hundreds of hours of extra work, from learning how to blow, pound, care for, and draw reasonable sounds out of more than a dozen instruments to making up some simple arrangements for the beginner bands and lesson plans for all of them, particularly the new percussion group, which no one at the school has really thought through.
I’m actually thinking of this as a career change, from ed blogger to bandleader, and at this point I have far more experience with the former.
Look out for my next post sometime in late spring, when 17.B. will come in very handy.
Sometimes blog posts get to have sequels.
Back in November, I brought up the subject of blacklisting, because so many senior teachers remain in ATR limbo, way out of proportion to the number of young grad students who do land jobs. Maybe it's salary or age discrimination, and maybe there's a blacklist. We're not going to find out the back story any time soon.
In response to that post, someone sent me an account of her own job search for an AP position. Here it is with her permission, but edited a bit because it was written as a personal note and not originally for publication:
I read your writing regarding the question of a blacklist, given your HR [Human Resources] and job inquiries.
I wrote to the DOE simply because after well over 100 job applications as an AP, with stellar written recommendations from my principal (since then forced into retirement due to malfeasance) and department chair, no one would hire me. My graduate school MAED in School leadership cum was 3.83 and [I got my] undergraduate degree from NYU. I am hispanic and when invited to interviews apparently did well.
I was only asked to a second interview on three occasions. At one, the principal greeted me with her mouth full and after asking me a question, in the middle of my answer she thanked me for coming. At the second, the principal lauded me, and upon rejecting me wrote a sterling letter.
Last year I received a phone call from a superintendent in my region on a Sunday evening. He introduced himself, and I recognized his name. He told me that I had been very highly recommended by a member of his team and [asked if I would be] interested in joining his team. I paused and said YES. He asked to meet me the very next day right after school. We spoke for over two hours, during which time he introduced me to the other members of the Instructional Leadership team and welcomed me aboard. He added that all he needed to do was call my Principal. I was confident, given that my principal had written so many eloquent letters recommending me. The next morning he sent me an email acknowledging receipt of my resume and saying he would get back to me in a few days. To this day I never heard from him again. I wrote asking him to inform me of the decision. I called, and [he did not even have] the courtesy one should accord to a fellow educator. The salary jump that I was looking at had me so happy.
In the meantime I have seen new APs with less than stellar credentials obtain AP positions, and I have finally given up on the whole process.
I firmly believe that somewhere there is something or someone who has blacklisted me — in spite of my education, my SAS, SDA, experience in staff development, curriculum development, ESL, Spanish and French licenses, and experience in teaching those languages and Special Ed. It seems so peculiar that there was not one position for which I was qualified in the past four years of steady applications.
You have no idea how disheartening it is to watch such mediocre new APs come in, out of the blue with no experience, no tenure, while one has all the qualifications.
So, I guess I am just sharing what I have gone through. I have to work another ten years as a teacher before I can leave the NYCDOE. I hope God gives me the strength to stay put.
Yes, I do know how disheartening it is, and so do many others who've had similar things happen to them.
I hope more people will tell their stories, on this blog or someplace else. Everywhere, in fact.
About ten days ago I wrote something about warehousing music in New York City. Yesterday I was told my position would be closed. Coincidence?
The principal said something about the "tallies" didn't work out. For student enrollment? budget constraints? I don't know what she meant, but I do know that ATRs who are excessed out of a position in a school that hasn't closed don't save the principal money. They remain on the school's budget until they get placed in another school.
So it's far from clear why she's closing one of the positions down. Why not use the two music teachers who'll be floating in the building this spring to make two smaller music classes out of the 50 kids per class they've scheduled up to now? This would be a great chance to let the students get their required semester of high school music in a more normal — and way more appropriate — learning environment. One can only speculate on her reasoning, but I can't imagine it has anything to do with quality education for children or tapping into staff expertise.
My other question is: Whose idea was this, hers or the DoE lawyers, who seem to be running the ship. I recall a comment she made when I had a step I with her a couple of months ago: "I don't understand this stuff. I just give it to the lawyers."
What a way to run a school system.
There is a kink to this situation, because being the senior music teacher in the building, I had to be offered the remaining band position. I assume she's speculating I won't take it, and instead opt for voluntary excess.
It may be that this cavalier way of marginalizing me for the past couple of years, with one extended tour of ATR duty through improper excess (was reinstated by the arbitrators last month) and another legitimate one looming, is linked to the concurrent issue of blacklisting explained in my earlier blog.
In other words, it's hard to know whether there's a directive from the region to handle me this way or if the principal is just on some kind of personal crusade.
As a chapter leader, delegate, activist and blogger, I've certainly not been invisible. Over the past five or six years, I made no bones about the fact that one principal was a downright liar, then stood up to a Manhattan superintendent who was trying to alter the makeup of a C-30 committee I had to put together. I reported a Bronx principal to New Visions for fraud: he had me sign a document as chapter leader, then changed the text to something he knew I would not have agreed to. (Their response, by the way, was that the man and I shouldn't be in the same school. LOL.) Then, of course, there's this blog, where for a year and a half I've railed against this chancellor, his non-existent credentials for the job, and the failed system he's created the whole length of his tenure.
Some people think this school system is a game.
But who loses are the kids, and all the qualified professionals that are trampled underfoot.
This press release just posted on the UFT website (Sep 25, 2008):
UFT urges DOE to save city funds by helping ATRs find permanent posts
I'm going to the theater so I don't have time to comment, but here's her proposals:
Weingarten noted that the union has worked hard to help ATRs find permanent jobs, having filed an age discrimination suit against the DOE as well as a union-initiated grievance that is pending. The union has also sought to negotiate a moratorium on new hires to give the DOE a chance to place ATRs and has cited the funding formula for its negative effect on them. Today Weingarten reiterated her call for the DOE to cover the additional salary costs of ATRs and end the pay disincentive for principals in order to put them on equal footing with new teachers in terms of seeking placements.
She added that in light of Mayor Bloomberg’s latest rounds of budget cuts, the DOE should:
— Establish an immediate hiring freeze at the central DOE and at schools for any license areas where there are people in excess and available for placement.
— Embark upon a redeployment of teachers and other excessed personnel in the ATR pool.
— Develop a program to recertify excessed personnel in additional license areas so that they are available to fill vacancies as they arise.
The last one is new, and pretty interesting . . .
I've been teaching health for a couple of weeks and am getting really into Maslow, Erikson, and Sigmund Freud.
Though I've temporarily suspended this blog during my involuntary career change to Bandleader, some things that catch my eye are worth repeating.
