A few things that you may not have gleaned from The New York Times story about the temporary rejection of a contract for TNTP to recruit and train new teachers by the city’s comptroller. First, the idea that Comptroller Liu is at all independent is ridiculous. He held his victory party at UFT (the city’s teachers union) headquarters for God’s sake. Second, this is about politics, but more than just back and forth on some others issues the article references and Liu’s mayoral ambitions and desire to jab a current mayor Bloomberg – it’s also about TNTP’s advocacy for the outrageous idea of ending “last in/first out” policies in New York, too. There is a quote in there about that but it’s delightfully backwards! Finally, substantively, teachers are not interchangeable and attention to shortage subjects is a big deal. That’s not a minor issue, it’s a key reason districts are changing how they hire. In any event, this is all politics and playing for the crowd, the contract will be approved in the end.
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this would be more convincing if there were statistics that showed NY teaching fellows actually work in hard to staff areas. Maybe those exist, but I couldn’t find them on the org’s website.
You can find those stats on the NYC Teaching Fellows website: http://www.nycteachingfellows.org/purpose/impact.asp
That’s hilarious, holding his victory party at a public employee union headquarters!
What I don’t get is why have an interview at the Washington Irving highschool in NYC if most of the recruits are from Denver, Wisconsin and massachhusettes. I along with several others that I have met over the years are born and raised in NYC and know all about the inner parts of urban living but NONE of us got recruited. We had to end up going on our own the hard way by going to a grad school, getting a masters, taking all the teaching cert exams, internship, while still maintaining a full time job in something else. As a sub I get to see these fellows in action… They suck…they will never understand what it is to be a new yorker