Unfortunately, I don’t know much more about the New York City excess teacher issue after reading Jennifer Medina’s NYT story than I did beforehand…it’s a lot of back and forth rather than the kind of authoritative accounting The Times could really add some value by providing. Based on the story it seems like the crux of the UFT’s calculations and argument that this is not as costly a problem as the city says is an assumption that all of the teachers in the excess pool should have been given jobs before new ones were hired.
But, that’s a really debatable premise seeing as the whole point of the new placement system was the idea that schools had to want to hire teachers for them to work there. In other words no one is guaranteed a job. And that, of course, is the larger backdrop here anyway.
There is also the question of how many reserve teachers are teaching full time now. The UFT says about 200, the city says about 30. Hmmm…can they both be right? Doesn’t seem so. The title of the article, “City and Teachers’ Union Disagree on Reserve Pool” illustrates the problem here. Somewhere there is an actual fact base and the city and the UFT cannot both be right about it based on their current positions…it’s, you know, more than a disagreement!
Medina! We turn our lonely eyes to you…
Is there a formal definition for “reserve teacher” and specific parameters to define “teaching”? If they consider filling long-term sub post to fit the teaching category, that would result in different numbers than if only those with full time contracts count toward the total.
I agree with your comments about the article.
Here’s some insight into the numbers: I have two friends who are ATR’s teaching regular programs (I also know another who had a regular program last semester). I don’t know how to calculate the odds that 7% of NYC’s ATR’s with regular programs just happen to be friends of mine(this is a big city), but I’m sure they’re miniscule.
You can be pretty sure the UFT’s numbers will shown to be the correct ones. They might even be low. When Edwize posted the names of schools, one of my friend’s school wasn’t listed (he’s an excessed Spanish teacher teaching 5periods of French).