Common sense absent
Data released Friday by the city underlines the extreme irresponsibility of its plans to force disproportionately subpar educators on schools that didn’t ask for them. More than 800 teachers who lost their jobs for one reason or another, and who are unable to find permanent positions in the nation’s largest public school system, work in the Absent Teacher Reserve, an employment purgatory of sorts.
They’re generally sent into schools to plug holes on month-by-month assignments, and now Mayor de Blasio and Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña want to help them get permanent gigs — by foisting them on schools where, after a set period of time, principals are unable to fill vacancies.
This breaks a promise Fariña — a former school leader who rightly guarded her vital authority to hire and fire staff — made back in 2014.
It’s not just the broken promise, however, that stings. It’s the real-world educational pain that will likely be inflicted on thousands of children, most of whom start out disadvantaged.
According to the city, about 38% of the teachers in the reserve got there following a school closing or phase-out; about 30% are there as a result of budget cuts or enrollment losses; and about 32% were there because of a legal or disciplinary case.
Which is to say, these are not necessarily bad apples — but a large portion of the barrel is.
In fact, about 12% of those in the pool earned an ineffective or unsatisfactory rating in 2015. That’s a shockingly high figure, roughly 12 times higher than in the teacher population at large.
A quarter of teachers in the pool last year had languished there for more than six years.
Six years without landing a permanent position — while collecting an average salary of $94,000, thank you very much — ought to be a sign that teachers should be cut loose.
Alas, this is New York City and State, where, thanks to legal and union protections, almost no public school teacher ever loses his or her job, and the powers that be bend over backward to find work even for burnouts and incompetents.