City Hall is getting set to force public schools to hire teachers they don’t want — even when principals think students will suffer.
On Monday, the Department of Education said it will place up to 400 unassigned instructors now languishing in the Absent Teacher Reserve in permanent classroom positions at schools with vacancies.
The plan breaks a key vow from Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña in 2014: “There will be no forced placement of staff,” she told the City Council.
But now there will be: Teachers whom no principal wants to hire — in at least some cases, because they’re lousy teachers — will nonetheless be back in front of classes.
“Putting hundreds of bad teachers back into classrooms they’ve been kicked out of” leaves city schoolchildren “to suffer the consequences,” says Families for Excellent Schools CEO Jeremiah Kittredge.
Worse, the kids most in need are likely to get stuck with the worst teachers. “The vacancies aren’t in Park Slope but are in neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York,” notes another school reformer, Jenny Sedlis of StudentsFirstNY. She says it’s “the ultimate hypocritical act for a progressive” (that would be Mayor Bill de Blasio) “to send the worst teachers to the poorest kids.”
Under the union contract, teachers who lose their posts when a school downsizes or closes go into a pool and can apply for new positions. But many don’t get hired, often because principals don’t want them.
In fact, the city even agreed to pay the salary of an ATR teacher for a period of time if a school hires one, rather than saddle the school’s budget — and still some of these teachers couldn’t find jobs.
The contract means they can’t be fired. So they get paid for doing nearly nothing, except sometimes subbing for an absent teacher. The cost has run to over $100 million a year.
That’s pure waste. But the answer isn’t sticking needy students with subpar teachers. It’s getting rid of them, once and for all.