6,100 Teachers To Be Laid Off, Good for Tea Party

"Bloomberg makes a great point that the tenure rule needs to be revisited. If he's forced to cut teachers due to harsh budget realities the tenure rule would mean the hits only go to new teachers regardless of whether or not the older teachers are performing."

Bloomberg only wants to dump older teachers because they make more. There is ZERO evidence that newer teachers perform better than oder ones, and if there is evidence, I would like to see it. HALF of all new teachers in NYC leave the profession within their first 5 years.

Socialist, no one is saying new teachers are better than old teachers.... you're missing the point.

Goal is to keep the best teachers, new and old. Keep the old good ones, yes. But better for a multitude of reasons to keep the great new teachers insteady of lousy old ones.

> HALF of all new teachers in NYC leave the profession within their first 5 years.

And it is probably the wrong ones. We should work to keep the best ones.

If you want to keep the best teachers, then you will need to pay them more.

What else are the best teachers suggesting they'll leave to do?

> If you want to keep the best teachers, then you will need to pay them more.

I'm fine paying the better teachers more. Absolutely, great.

But that is one more thing the teacher's union has fought HARD against...

Maybe you're on our side after all, socialist!

What is a "better teacher"?

Is it one who hails the leader most vociferously?

Is it one who successfully teaches to the test, but fails the students so that they're incapable of analysis and synthesis, and thus creative innovation and entrepreneurship.

There was a recent NYT article in which young Japanese people whined about being shut out of the job market. and/or hired at much lower wages without job stability, so that older workers could remain in place. But guess what? Few of those smart, well-trained young people have sat down at their laptops and come up with viable businesses. They're generally incapable of doing so, because they excel at rote skills and recitation, but not at THINKING. Thus no Google, no Ebay, no YouTube or (hock phlegm) Facebook or Twitter, no Groupon. Just Hello Kitty, who now has feline diabetes.

Is that the future you want for the US?

How do you effectively test, evaluate, rate, rank teachers' job performance?

If a school is underperforming, do you boost its resources? Or do you cut its resources? Do you promote stability, or switch teachers and administrators in and out at lightning speed? After all, that works for McDonald's, both at the counter and in the kitchen.

>They're generally incapable of doing so, because they excel at rote skills and recitation, but not at THINKING. Thus no Google, no Ebay, no YouTube or (hock phlegm) Facebook or Twitter, no Groupon. Just Hello Kitty, who now has feline diabetes.

Finally! An optimistic point of view about American ingenuity and why the U.S. isn't Japan or other centrally-planned non-American countries. Thank you alanhart, you are 100% right on this. Real estate may be expensive and owning may not beat renting today, but gloom and doom scenarios about the U.S. and our society are absolutely just wrong. We have our problems, but on a relative basis, we beat it all - we have faced adversity in the past and do so today today, but we are best positioned to surmount these problems.

Alan--I think you're starting to echo teacher's union propaganda.

Do you really think it's impossible to differentiate between good teachers and bad? Certainly there must be some obvious cases where we can do so, and we'd prefer to keep the good ones rather than the bad ones regardless of how long each has been in the job. In theory, someone who has been doing the job for a while ought to be better than someone who just started, so on average we ought to prefer more tenured teachers to less, but it seems inconceivable that we can't find some young teachers who produce better outcomes for their students than bad teachers.

(Incidentally, the obvious way of avoiding "teaching to the test" is not to make the test cover a relatively narrow set of factual elements. If it tests, e.g., critical thinking skills, then if you "teach to the test" you've done well by your students. At the same time, there's some amount of factual knowledge that is useful as well, so an ideal test would incorporate a broad range of factual material as well.)

We have to stop letting "bad ones" get past 3 years on the job. And we have to give a kick in the ass to those who become disaffected after 15 years on the job, in part by not allowing tenure but instead allowing frank conversations between principals and their schools' teachers that generously favor the teacher during the first discussion but allow termination thereafter.

> Is that the future you want for the US?

I'd take the Japanese future for the kids who currently CAN'T READ in a second.
Where can we sign up?

That our inner city kids can come out with the ability to HANDLE a job, that would be awesome.

> Few of those smart, well-trained young people have sat down at their laptops and come up with viable businesses.

If you think that is the schooling, you are wrong. Note that none of those things are in New York. That is a factor of job culture, not education.

That being said, not everyone can start the companies. We need college dropouts to do that.

Someone has to work there.

Overall, you are presenting a false choice. Giving folks BASIC SKILLS is mandatory.

Could you found a company without being able to read?

"Could you found a company without being able to read?"

Japan and the US both have literacy rates of 99.0%
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_rates

Overall, you are presenting a false choice.

Only Georgia has a 100% literacy rate ... and that's a FACT!

Hmm! Strange because according to this research, "...14% of US residents would have extreme difficulty with reading and written comprehension. These people can legally be defined as illiterate..."
http://www.caliteracy.org/rates/
These people must have forgotten all they've learnt after they graduated (if they ever did).

1. I thought the percentage of Americans registered as Republican is much higher than 14%

2. The linked document has a sentence that reads, "According to international charts has a literacy rate of 21.8%." . . . ??? !!!

I'm not knee-jerk pro-union, but it's actually quite hard to figure out how to train teachers well and how to predict who will be a good teacher.

I have a tiny glimpse of this world through my kids, and if there were absolutely no worker organization allowed, and you had a less-than-benevolent principal, watch out!

commie

what's sad about the UTF or is it UFT is that they use the organization's $ to support causes and issues that the rank-and-file don't necessarily agree with. Most teachers, if you ask them, hate the rubber rooms & waste as much as the average person but would also like to be protected from arbitrary firing. And one very successful ploy that the anti-union forces have used and which resonates is that most ppl today are at-will employees and are paying taxes to support what appears to be guaranteed life-long employment. In some way or form, that's history. What needs (if the union is to survive) is to communicate the unique nature of a teaching job. You get assigned a high-needs class one year, and the scores are going to plummet. You get a principal or administration that's out to get you, you're out. As a teacher, you (it appears to me) stand alone against people who aren't in the classroom with you. And you have the parents to contend with or you don't have any parental support.

chew on this:

the best evaluated college professors are those who inflate grades most

very efficient!!

"I'm not knee-jerk pro-union, but it's actually quite hard to figure out how to train teachers well and how to predict who will be a good teacher."

But you don't need to predict anything. You just need to figure out whether they're actually a good teacher.

Some mix of student/parent satisfaction, test scores, and subjective (principal) evaluation seems reasonable. I've never understood why "what if the principal hates you?" is a unique problem to teachers--most of us have bosses who evaluate us, and yet those of us who aren't teachers seem to get by even with the risk of a vindictive boss.

Certainly you'll have enough signal to separate out people you really want to keep from people you really don't want anymore. If when you do layoffs a few people who are mediocre performers get categorized as bad, and a few people who are actually bad get categorized as mediocre, that's a lot less troublesome than the system today where you just fire the young teachers regardless of whether they're awesome or not.

Same goes for things like raises. No compensation scheme is perfect, but in general you want to try to reward good performance over bad performance and any reasonable scheme is better than just how long you've worked there.

> "Could you found a company without being able to read?"
> Japan and the US both have literacy rates of 99.0%
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_rates
> Overall, you are presenting a false choice.

No, alan just didn't actually look at his source.

"Many high-income countries, having attained high levels of literacy, no longer collect basic literacy statistics and thus are not included in the UIS data. In calculating the Human Development Index (HDI), a literacy rate of 99.0% is assumed for high-income countries that do not report adult literacy information."

US rate - 99.0%.

Meaning its made up.

"I'm not knee-jerk pro-union, but it's actually quite hard to figure out how to train teachers well and how to predict who will be a good teacher"

If you are claiming that you can't figure it out anyway, why not then just pay minimum wage to teachers?
If quality can't be determined, why not pay them much less, and then just hire more?

(of course I don't think this is a good idea... just pointing out the lack of logic in the claim)

Jordyn: I've never worked in the "public" sector but anecdotally, it seems worse.

Figuring out who is a good teacher is hard. I find it hard, and I'm an involved parent. One man's poison, another man's honey. Your opinion is exactly that of the general public, which is why teachers' unions are doomed. But I can imagine that my lot as a teacher in the public system would be way, way more unbearable if the principal had it out for me (but I was a good teacher). Also, I know that lots of jobs are stressful but I can't even imagine how hard it would be to be "on" for even half the time in front of a bunch of kids. You really want to add the stress of having to worry about the principal and getting reviews in from parents?

Another thing that bugs me is that personally, the best teachers I've had were "rebels" - they didn't care 2 hoots about the principal, the administration or whatever. They were truly passionate about teaching. Now I know the joy of knowing through Facebook that some were universally hated by the other kids. So, what gives?

"If you think that is the schooling, you are wrong. Note that none of those things are in New York. That is a factor of job culture, not education."

Sorry, are you saying that there's no startup culture in New York? Because that's actually changing very rapidly in the past few years.

SWE: that "quite hard to figure out" stuff isn't from me. It's from a bunch of studies I've read over the years. Also, class size doesn't seem to be the determining factor (we're not talking extremes). So hiring more at minimum wage won't help.

What's your solution? Crush the union? Change the state constitution so that we don't have to honor pension obligations? All tempting and will save $, but I'm not sure that our children will be better educated.

Another prevailing viewpoint is that since we're paying all this $ into the public system and getting dross, fire 'em all and the end result will probably be the same. Definitely tempting on some days. It's sorta like the public special ed thing. Fund it, they will come, and you'll end up spending more. Don't fund it and what, you'll fund it anyway if those kids can't be mainstreamed.

nyc10023 : I agree teachers have hard yet valuable jobs. I also agree that it's probably hard to evaluate them effectively.

Having said that, if the alternative is "don't evaluate, just pay attention to seniority" versus "try to evaluate", it's inconceivable to me that "try to evaluate" is going to be the worse of those two choices. With an imperfect evaluation system, some good teachers will be underappreciated and some bad teachers will be overappreciated. Today, since we don't pay attention to performance at all, essentially all good teachers get screwed (because they're paid the same as bad teachers) and all bad teachers get unjustly rewarded (because they're paid the same as good teachers).

Jordyn: how about, make it really, really hard to get tenure? And if you can't get re-hired after X years of being in the teacher pool (should not be paid, but get to keep health insurance), then you're fired? If you have tenure, you can get released into the teacher pool if you do a bad job, but you get a chance at being re-hired again, and after that, you're out.

"SWE: that "quite hard to figure out" stuff isn't from me. It's from a bunch of studies I've read over the years. "

Point them out. Private schools and private enterprise don't seem to suffer from this "unfixable" problem. And forget just separating good from great... I think its easy to agree on the horrible ones. Can we at least start with them?

How on earth do we have a system averse to getting rid of the folks who are documented sexual abusers? Or the ones that sleep or read the newspaper at their desks.

Are we really asking too much? Can't we start with those?

Who exactly is against this?

"Also, class size doesn't seem to be the determining factor (we're not talking extremes)."

Source? Folks on both sides rarely argue with that one. The unions clearly, but Superman covers this as well.

> What's your solution? Crush the union?

Would be a great start. A lot of teachers would be happy, too.

> Change the state constitution so that we don't have to honor pension obligations?

No, just fix the part that got rigged... the formula was based on lower salaries, the fact that the unions pushed the salary range to screw younger teachers and reward the older ones... and then you jack it up with the overtime rules.

Really, just fix the overtime rules and that gets us a long way there.

But, the bigger part is, pay the better teachers more, and make it easier to get rid of teachers shown to be ineffective.

> All tempting and will save $, but I'm not sure that our children will be better educated.

Say its true.... having the same education at a lower price (or a non-increasing price) would be an awesome start. Why is it you have such problems with that?

And that the kids get better educated just makes it sweeter.

"Having said that, if the alternative is "don't evaluate, just pay attention to seniority" versus "try to evaluate", it's inconceivable to me that "try to evaluate" is going to be the worse of those two choices. With an imperfect evaluation system, some good teachers will be underappreciated and some bad teachers will be overappreciated. Today, since we don't pay attention to performance at all, essentially all good teachers get screwed (because they're paid the same as bad teachers) and all bad teachers get unjustly rewarded (because they're paid the same as good teachers)."

Well put, Jordyn.

SWE: Theoretically, I shouldn't have a problem with the saving $ part, because currently, I am paying more into the system than I am getting. If it came down to it, and there was huge labor chaos, and we have a multi-year long teacher strike to lower the system cost, I'm a huge beneficiary because I get to save tax $ and anyway, I'll make sure the kids get educated so my kids won't suffer. But, what about people who don't have that choice? So that's my issue. Where are the kids going to do who don't have parental support while the system is in the midst of its death throes? The whole rubber room thing is a problem, but it's one that people harp on over and over and over again. On that, I absolutely agree with you - the process was and is broken and needs to be fixed.

Private schools - different story altogether. If you find me a private school (and some argue that charters do this) with the same general pop. as your average NYC public who are not allowed to expel and who take all applicants that do better, tell me.

Bottom line, we're not going to agree. You want to blow away the system because you think that private enterprise and free-market theology should work here. Fine, that happens, I'll save some tax $ in the short-term so I can hire some Ivy-League governess. I'm an advocate of tinkering here and there because we have a huge and unwieldy system here that isn't completely broken.

"Where are the kids going to do who don't have parental support while the system is in the midst of its death throes?"

The system only goes into death throes if the union holds us hostage, and has illegal strikes. They're just perpetuating the problem they helped create.

And, bigger picture, if you are asking about "But, what about people who don't have that choice?"

Those folks are getting screwed NOW. The schools suck NOW.

So why do you want them to stay this way?

Tinker, completely break, whatever... all paths lead through fixing the heart of the problem.