One teacher couldn’t stop teens from microwaving their textbooks and gawking at porn. One was a knitter with a nasty temper. Another was a screamer who couldn’t control her students — or her spittle.
It took years for the city Department of Education to fire each of these bumbling instructors — and only after compiling dossiers on their flaws, giving them chances to improve, and finally calling witnesses at tedious trials to convince a hearing officer they must go.
In a blustery State of the City speech last week, Mayor Bloomberg threatened to oust up to half the staff at dozens of low-performing schools to secure $58 million in federal grants. But he didn’t mention that any tenured teachers yanked would join more than 1,100 castoffs who keep their DOE paychecks while working as substitutes.
“The system to get rid of the worst teachers is so burdensome, and has such a low probability of success, most principals don’t even try except in the most extreme cases,” said Marcus Winters, a Manhattan Institute expert on teacher evaluation.
Only a handful of the city’s 55,000 tenured teachers are terminated each year for incompetence. Here are some recent examples:
* Darwin Bailey, at MS 118 in The Bronx, finally got the boot in 2010 after 17 days of hearings — and years of failing to teach science. Bailey was “smart,” but couldn’t command his students’ attention. “Saying, ‘All eyes on me,’ did not make it so,” an arbitrator noted.
The DOE kept Bailey in class even after his arrest in 2002 on charges he rubbed up against a 14-year-old girl at IS 33 in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Criminal charges were dropped, but in 2005 schools investigator Richard Condon found that Bailey ogled a student’s butt, making her feel uncomfortable. He stayed another five years.
* Verona Gill, a $100,000-a-year special-ed math teacher at Robert Wagner MS 167 on the Upper East Side, snapped at students, “Shut up and do your work” — while knitting at her desk. “I was not knitting. I was making connections between math and knitting,” she said.
She gave wrong explanations for the Pythagorean theorem and a vertical angle. She let students nap or do nothing but lick a lollipop because, she said, “they needed a break.”
“I’m under siege,” she insisted. After nine days of hearings in 2010, an arbitrator issued a 90-page ruling, finding her inept.
* Naomi Davies, a 22-year veteran and English teacher at East Bronx Academy for the Future, was terrorized by her “at-risk” kids. She could not give lessons or take attendance.
Students went on a porn Web site in class and displayed pictures of half-naked women. Others typed sexual obscenities into a computer, which sounded them out in robotic speech.
In the cafeteria, where Davies held classes, students tossed soda cans. They heated their textbooks in the microwave. They walked in and out, talked loudly, played music, and did dirty dancing.
Davies said she was physically, verbally and even sexually assaulted when a boy grabbed her breasts. Evidence did not back up her claim that students stalked and thrust their pelvises at her.
* Sylvia Hassock, a teacher at PS 59 in Bedford-Stuyvesant, shrieked at her students, “Put your hands on your head!” As she scolded one pupil, she “inadvertently” spit in the kid’s face. Hassock’s 20 days of hearings over six months found little or no learning occurring.