TEACH, BACK TO WORK!
Leader to retool reserve pool
BROOKLYN TECHNICAL High School’s principal is taking a city Education Department post in a fresh push to shrink the controversial and costly pool of unassigned teachers, the Daily News has learned.
Randy Asher, a 20-year city educator who’s captained the nation’s largest high school for more than a decade, will join schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña in a new effort to reduce the public schools’ Absent Teacher Reserve, a floating pool of roving instructors that costs the city an estimated $100 million a year.
“Teachers are the heart and the soul of the program,” said Asher, 44, who’s assuming the newly created position of senior adviser for talent management. “They’re on the front lines, and they’re with students every day. This is about making the right matches and finding the right people for schools.”
The city schools currently maintain a reserve of 981 teachers, a figure that is down 26% from 1,332 in 2013. Reserve instructors have lost their permanent posts for a variety of reasons — such as school closures or budget cuts — but they continue to draw their full paychecks as roving substitutes under the city’s contract with their union.
Education Department officials declined to put a precise number on the cost of the pool, but previous estimates have gauged the price of each unassigned educator at roughly $100,000 per year.
Asher, who will be replaced at Brooklyn Tech by Assistant Principal David Newman, hired multiple reserve teachers as the school’s principal. Under his leadership, Brooklyn Tech enrollment grew from 4,200 to 5,700 students. Fariña said financial incentives the city uses to reduce the number of reserve teachers have already yielded strong results, but she expects Asher to deliver more solutions. “While we have made steady progress on reducing the number of teachers in the (reserve) pool, Randy Asher is a systems thinker and brings the right experience, vision and strategic lens to accelerate this important work,” Fariña said. Asher begins his new job Tuesday at a salary of $185,298 — $25,000 more than he made at Brooklyn Tech. Brooklyn Tech is one of the city’s elite specialized high schools, occupying a stately building that spans a city block and stands a dozen stories tall. Mayor de Blasio’s son, Dant
graduated from the 94-year-old school in 2015 and went on to attend Yale University. The mayor delivered the commencement speech at his son’s graduation.
Asher’s new job will be a challenge. Education Department officials have struggled for years to cull the ranks of the city’s cadre of roving teachers.
The arrangement has drawn criticism because the unassigned teachers usually earn far more than typical substitutes.
Under the city’s current arrangement, principals who hire teachers from the pool don’t have to pay the salaries from their budgets for the first year of the instructors’ employment.
Asher said he intends to use his long experience managing teachers to help more people in the pool find permanent jobs.
“Sometimes it’s very hard to find a teacher with a certain skill set,” he said. “There are some people in the . . . pool who are highly desirable.”