To UFT: Denounce Police Presence at Public Ed. Meetings

Thank you, Ed Notes, for this crucial piece re the growing police presence at Panel for Education Policy meetings.

He wrote on the mayor's actions of creating an intimidating police force at meetings, a deeply undemocratic step. This harkens to some of the uglier moments of American history, Mitchell Palmer's raids, the Joseph McCarthy era.
Shame on the corporate media for not writing editorials denouncing this (by now, they must be reading the blogs and should know full well what is happening with the NYPD at the PEP meetings), and ditto for the United Federation of Teachers. (actually, I place this trend as appearing earlier than the Washington Irving PEP: at the Seward Park PEP very early in the 2011-2012 year with the same kind of police force in the building and additionally ominously, posted at the street corners adjacent to the entrances to Seward Park HS.)

I wrote a piece yesterday about the police presence at the PEP - and put together a short video focusing on that aspect.
NYC Police Turn Ugly Since Occupy Movement Began

And then this came across today -

Washington Irving HS Protest - Monitored by Large (15) Police Presence

A peaceful gathering of teachers was watched by riot police and regular police and 2 white shirts from across the street. - Teacher report

Now, there weren’t many police in riot helmets. Maybe 3 or 4, plus another 15 police (including two White Shirts) milling around. When I arrived there were two NYPD squad cars, two vans, and three mopeds. You might say to yourself, as someone responded to me on Twitter, Hey man, 3 or 4 riot-helmeted cops with their hands in their pockets, looking bored, isn’t such a big deal. Well, you’re wrong. It’s absolutely a big deal. Not because the police were going to beat up anybody, or arrest anybody, but simply because 50 teachers protesting the closing of their school do not deserve to be treated like potential rioters — even by 3 police officers. -----Political media

The above is from two separate reports. Note my [EdNotes] last post (NYC Police Turn Ugly Since Occupy Movement Began) on the growing police state (with video) from Bloomberg's private army - the NYCPD. I pointed to the growing threat education-based protests are facing. After all, Bloomberg's legacy is steeped in the schools and the growing opposition movement will be met with increasing monitoring.

We have been doing Fight Back Friday events for a few years in front of schools. But to send 15 cops with 2 white shirt supervisors?

Here's an idea: Let's do these in front of 50 schools on the same day and see how they handle it. Or maybe 1500 schools one day.

I noted in the video below a few UFT officials. They should be concerned at the presence of 15 police at a rally of 50 people.

DEMAND THE UFT LODGE A FORMAL COMPLAINT ON WASTE OF TAX PAYER MONEY IN A TIME WHERE CLASS SIZE ARE RISING ON WASTED POLICE PRESENCE AT PEACEFUL EXPRESSIONS OF PROTEST.

Here is a report with video from a teacher who is at another school in the building:

The Department of Education (=Bloomberg) announced the closure of Washington Irving High School. The school, the teachers, the parents, the students and the community who knows and cares about this school fight back!

A peaceful gathering of teachers was watched by 3 riot police and about 10 regular police and 2 white shirts from across the street. What's the message? Figure!

The video sums it up beautifully. There is some inspirational testimony by one parent in this video. Great testimony by teachers as well. Feel free to watch and share!

http://vimeo.com/34010240


And another from reporter John Knefel.

http://www.thefastertimes.com/politicalmedia/2011/12/20/teachers-protest-closing-hs-nypd-don-riot-helmets/
POLITICAL MEDIA
Teachers Protest, NYPD Officers Don Riot Helmets
John Knefel
DECEMBER 20, 2011JOHN KNEFEL
This morning I attended an event at Washington Irving High School, in Manhattan’s Gramercy neighborhood, to protest the proposed closing of the school. Gregg Lundahl, the United Federation of Teachers chapter leader at Irving, lead teachers and students in chants that highlighted the increased income inequality that results from closing public high schools. The 50 or so participants marched up the block on sleepy Irving Street, then down the block, staying on the sidewalk the entire time. And across the street, the NYPD put on their riot helmets.
Now, there weren’t many police in riot helmets. Maybe 3 or 4, plus another 15 police (including two White Shirts) milling around. When I arrived there were two NYPD squad cars, two vans, and three mopeds. You might say to yourself, as someone responded to me on Twitter, Hey man, 3 or 4 riot-helmeted cops with their hands in their pockets, looking bored, isn’t such a big deal. Well, you’re wrong. It’s absolutely a big deal. Not because the police were going to beat up anybody, or arrest anybody, but simply because 50 teachers protesting the closing of their school do not deserve to be treated like potential rioters — even by 3 police officers.
Police departments across the country are becoming increasingly militarized. Security contractors devise new methods of coercion against protesters constantly. As a result, confrontations between peaceful activists and cops often resemble paramilitary-style raids rather than restrained police action — most obviously in the way police have dislodged Occupy encampments nationwide. The aggressive theater that the PDs engage in is meant in no uncertain terms to intimidate anyone with the gall to raise their voice in dissent. Speak up and you will be kettled, pepper sprayed, jailed, beaten with truncheons, or simply advanced on by a phalanx of heavily armored stormtroopers. This morning’s action only serves to illustrate how deeply embedded the militarized reaction to all forms of protest is in the NYPD.
Why were there police there at all? Honestly, does anyone believe that one or two officers is an insufficient force to observe 50 teachers assembled, as is their right, outside their high school? It’s completely beside the point that the officers were bored, and that there were no confrontations. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe the lazy, uneventful, automatic militarized response is what I find so distasteful. The teachers I spoke with after the event were mildly concerned, but not seriously, about the police presence. They seemed to be bewildered by it more than anything else. But an activist and journalist who writes under the name Dicey Troop and I were more incredulous. Bloomberg’s army has become omnipresent for anyone participating in OWS, but their presence at Washington Irving was almost comically disproportionate.
Organizers of the event are calling for a massive public showing on January 31st at 6:30 at Brooklyn Tech to defend Washington Irving against the city’s proposed shut-down. According to information circulated this morning, 6% of the students at Manhattan’s high-need schools (of which Irving is a part) are special needs. At Bloomberg’s new Manhattan schools, the percentage is much lower, between .5-1%, according to the flier.
Bloomberg’s New York City is a city of increasingly privatized education, and an increasingly militarized response to all forms of protest. We would do well to remember his legacy accurately.

In the NYC DOE we are seeing a blatant swindle, government used for private agenda, private gain.
[See also, this post at CounterPunch of a political arrest of a photographer by Bloomberg's de facto private political police:
"37 Hours in Lock Up: Snatched For Photographing Michael Bloomberg’s Cops"
http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/12/19/snatched-for-photographing-michael-bloombergs-cops/
Photo is of arrest of arrest of Stanley Rogouski.]

N.J. "is Roiling Over Charter Schools": Wave of Student, Parent Teacher Fight-Backs

No, it is not just New York City parents, students and teachers protesting at Panel for Educational Policy that oppose charter schools.

A wave of push-back against the imposition of charter schools is taking place across New Jersey. This time the fight-back is in middle class or upper-middle class suburbs.

Rutgers Prof speaks and organizes against charters
(From Princeton.Patch.com:)

Julia Sass Rubin, a founding member of Save Our Schools NJ, says public schools are being undermined.

“This is happening across the country,” said Rubin, during a visit to the Lawrence branch of the Mercer County Library on Wednesday. “It’s a national phenomenon.”

Rubin is an associate professor at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. Her talk was hosted by the Lawrence chapter of the League of Women Voters.

Rubin's talk, "Keeping Public Schools Public," covered the state of education in the Garden State and how Save Our Schools NJ is working to strengthen public school systems.

Save our Schools NJ is grassroots campaign that advocates for equal access to high-quality public education and for reform of state charter school law, including a local vote to allow charter schools to open in a community.

“Local communities should have a say if they want a charter school,” Rubin said.

Schools districts throughout the state – including Princeton, South Brunswick, East Brunswick, New Brunswick and Highland Park – have taken steps to oppose charter schools they oppose.

“Busloads of suburbanites are supposed to have an Occupy DOE [Department of Education] on Dec. 16,” Rubin said. “The state is roiling over charter schools.”

The organization also has an issue with the the lottery system for charter school enrollment. Rubin said most disadvantaged families don’t have the resources to get the necessary information about charter enrollment, so charter schools end with mostly affluent children.

No community clamour for charters; no community say in imposition of charters; activist group pushes "opt-out" bill.
also from Princeton.Patch.com, December 9, 2011:

Save Our Schools NJ has proposed the Opt-Out Lottery Bill, which would require charter schools to automatically include everyone in their communities that qualify and give families the option to opt-out if they do not want to be considered for enrollment. The bill is designed to level the field for parents who don’t have easy access to information or are restricted by language barriers.

Rubin expects action on the opt-out legislation and other proposed bills will come soon. “This has become a headache for the administration,” she said. “There will be something done with the bills.”

Save Our Schools NJ wants to maintain the current school funding formula and opposes to school vouchers. She compared the current voucher bill, the Opportunity Scholarship Act, to money laundering.

“If you give me a dollar and I give that dollar back, have you actually given me a dollar?” Rubin asked. Although vouchers prevent money being taken away from public school funds it negatively creates new subsidy streams for private schools, Rubin said.

Rubin also wants to stop additional segregation in schools. According to Rubin, there are 500 heavily segregated school systems in the state and the ones that are mixed are being targeted by charter schools.

“We want to see suburban children going to urban schools and vice versa,” Rubin said. “It’s good to mix it up.”

Several members of the audience agreed there is a need for more school integration.

Retired teacher Lloyd Fredericks, who taught at a high school in Newark, said the state has forgotten the benefits of being a melting pot. He added that without public schools there is no nation.

Teaneck protest parallels NYC struggle against closing schools for charter schools
From the Record, December 7, 2011:
"Crowd rallies against proposed virtual charter school in Teaneck"

TEANECK —
School officials and police estimated about 200 people turned out at 3:30 p.m. for an event scheduled to last several hours. Students waved signs declaring “Don’t bleed our good public schools” and “Local $$ for Teaneck Scholars.”

Speakers took the microphone to call for a local vote on charter approvals throughout the state and to criticize the proposal for a full-time cyber charter — all while student drummers pounded to bolster the applause.

“This virtual charter will do much more harm than good,” declared Lev Herskovitz, 18. “In our society today we rely on technology far too often and this is not a case where it should be dominantly present. Classrooms are where the real learning takes place.”

Organizers of the Garden State Virtual Charter say it will draw only a few students, and therefore a small amount of funding, from Teaneck; most of its initial group of 1,000 in grades K-12 will come from across New Jersey, they say.

District officials balked, however, when they received a letter from the state Department of Education suggesting they set aside $15.4 million for the charter. State officials have said that figure was meant only as a budgeting tool, but Teaneck filed a legal petition Tuesday asking the state to rescind the letter and delay approving any virtual charters until New Jersey legislates a fair, manageable way to fund them. The Office of Administrative Law has not yet scheduled a hearing.

Home districts pay 90 percent of their per-pupil costs for students who attend charters from their towns.

Jason Flynn, a founder of the proposed charter, said in a release Tuesday that his group would push ahead. The charter “will bring state of the art digital technology to deliver a high quality, highly personalized education to our students who … are not succeeding in a traditional classroom setting,” he said in release. He could not be reached Wednesday.

The Teaneck Board of Education has stated it does not oppose charters, virtual charters or virtual learning; it’s against a process that requires officials to set school budgets before they can estimate how many students will head to charters.

Speak Up Highland Park handed out flyers in Teaneck inviting people to “Occupy” the Education Department in Trenton on Dec. 16 at 11 a.m. to call for a local voice in charter approvals.

In Highland Park, the District refused a charter three times, the charter is shoved at the district a fourth time
From the Daily Record, November 28, 2011:
"Highland Park charter school meeting forum for parents, legislators to discuss issues"

"VIRTUAL LEARNING", PHILANTHROPIST, CORPORATE TIE-INS CITED
The Teaneck charter is a "virtual learning" proposal. Lee Fang at The Nation has written a piece on "How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools."

From the Nation piece: commercial learning is a revolving door destination for former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein and former District of Columbia mayor Adrian Fenty.

Moe’s [investment banker Michael Moe] conference marked a watershed moment in school privatization. His first “Education Innovation Summit,” held last year, attracted about 370 people and fifty-five presenting companies. This year, his conference hosted more than 560 people and 100 companies, and featured luminaries like former DC Mayor Adrian Fenty and former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, now an education executive at News Corporation, a recent high-powered entrant into the for-profit education field. Klein is just one of many former school officials to cash out. Fenty now consults for Rosetta Stone, a language company seeking to expand into the growing K-12 market.

As Moe ticked through the various reasons education is the next big “undercapitalized” sector of the economy, like healthcare in the 1990s, he also read through a list of notable venture investment firms that recently completed deals relating to the education-technology sector, including Sequoia and Benchmark Capital. Kleiner Perkins, a major venture capital firm and one of the first to back Amazon.com and Google, is now investing in education technology, Moe noted.

See what can happen with representative democracy, instead of total mayoral control: Newark advisory board rejects a charter school proposal:
NJN News, April 7, 2011:

It’s been a tumultuous time in Newark since the controversial school overhaul plan was leaked to the press in February. It calls for consolidating some schools and co-locating others – both of which would free up space for charter schools, and creating new traditional public schools. In a surprising move, Newark’s School Advisory Board rejected the latter proposal.

In New Jersey we thus see a parallel to the New York City push-back. Yet, the people have more power, in contrast to the voice-less parents in New York City under mayoral control.

Update: 1, 2, 3, Many NYC Tahrir Squares as Parent, Student School Revolts in an Arab Spring in the Autumn

Rebellion is breaking out all over as parents and students are yelling, "No", to New York City Department of Education school chaos. The Occupy Wall Street or Tahrir Square energy is beginning to seep into the parent and student communities in the city's high schools, in quite different boroughs (Bronx, Queens) of New York City. A common thread is scandalous class scheduling that neglects to give students essential classes such as English.
UPDATE: THE QUEENS METRO HS CRISIS AND THE LEADERSHIP ACADEMY BACKSCRIPT (Scroll down.)
(Scroll to the bottom of this post for ignored ATR factor in DOE refusal to hire teachers scandal.)

It is disappointing that these stories for the most are in alternate media (blogs) or minor commercial media (outer borough newspapers). Few of these situations are covered by major media such as the New York Times.

As indicated in one of my blog posts earlier this week, 75 students at Frederick Douglass VI High School in Far Rockaway did not have an English teacher until they refused to attend class until the administration agreed to hire a regular teacher.

Yesterday, November 22, 2011, Ben Chapman authored "Students at Grace Dodge Career & Technical Education High School in the Bronx haven't had an English teacher for months: Kids at F-rated school cut class and 'smoke weed' instead" in the Daily News that Grace Dodge Career and Technical High School in the Bronx lacked English teachers, for a total of ten missing class sections. A total of 300 students lack an English teacher.

An F-rated Bronx high school has failed to provide nearly 300 students with English teachers since the third week of the school year, the Daily News has learned.

For nearly three months, the students at Grace Dodge Career & Technical Education High School have languished in their daily English lessons without regular instructors.

Instead of learning composition and grammar, the kids sleep, socialize or cut class, senior Michelle Sanchez, 17, said.

“We just sit there and stare at each other,” said the frustrated teen. “Kids cut school and smoke weed around the corner. Or they walk around the halls and get into fights.”

The 1,182-student school in the Belmont section of the Bronx has been targeted by the city because of its abysmal performance.

Just 35% of seniors graduated on time last year, and only 1% graduated ready for college.

Teachers at the school were outraged students have gone without English instructors.

“It’s horrendous in here,” said one teacher who wouldn’t give her name.

Education Department spokeswoman Barbara Morgan said the teacher shortage was due to two instructors retiring abruptly in October. That left 10 English class periods without full-time teachers, she said.

Read more from the original Daily News article click here.

Last week the Ed Notes blog published "Growing Scandal at Queens Metro Tech Exposes All the Ills of Bloomberg Ed Deform - Another Leadership Acad Principal Set to Take Fall."

The Queens newspapers have reported more negative news at Forest Hills' Queens Metro High School. The chaos echoes the scheduling disorder that the New York Times did report earlier this month:
November 23, 2011 from the Western Queens Gazette: "Queens Metropolitan H.S. Beset With Scheduling Problems"

For the second time in little over a month, a Queens high school has been revealed as awash in scheduling problems. Queens Metropolitan H.S., 91-30 Metropolitan Ave., Forest Hills, opened in September 2010 with relatively few scheduling problems. This year, some classes lack teachers, no physical education instruction is being imparted and students have yet to receive grades for some of the course work they have completed and handed in, according to parents who attended a meeting of the school’s Parent-Teacher Association on November 15. The situation echoes that of Long Island City H.S., where students have found themselves reporting to different classes with different teachers or spending hours seated in the auditorium and cafeteria, depending on how their schedules change from week to week.

Principal Marci Levy-McGuire declared that she is working feverishly to straighten out the scheduling mess affecting the school’s 650 ninth and tenth grade students. Some parents were less than convinced. Councilmember Elizabeth Crowley, whose two sons attend the school, expressed dissatisfaction with the efforts to correct the scheduling errors at a sparsely attended Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) meeting November 17. At that meeting, it was noted that the school lacks a science teacher, classes are taught by rotating substitutes and students who registered for elective courses sit in the auditorium instead, some for as long as three hours.

City Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he had heard of the problem at Metropolitan H.S. only a few weeks ago. His daughter, DeJeanne Walcott, is a physical education teacher at the school, but “shop talk” does not come up within the confines of the Walcott family home, the elder Walcott said. He attributed the school’s scheduling problem to “rapid enrollment growth”.

According to “Ed Notes”, a blog “providing information on current ed issues, organizing activities around fighting for public education in NYC and beyond and exposing the motives behind the education deformers”; “The pressure since the story broke about [Crowley’s] children at the school and the Chancellor’s daughter proved too much for the DOE and the network and Tweed types swarmed the building. They allegedly completed student programs and there is a special plan to disseminate it with scripted statements read by each teacher to their students explaining why the programs had to be changed again…The program rollout will not take effect until after Thanksgiving. There will be three days where administration will answer parent questions after school. Next Tuesday (November 29) is [a] PTA meeting where much of this will be announced.”

The Queens Chronicle reported a similar story today (November 23): "Parents livid over schedule ‘disaster’: Say students at Metropolitan High School go hours without classes."
A key quote:

Walcott said he, as well as Senior Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky, only found out about the issues at Metropolitan a couple weeks ago, despite the fact that Walcott’s daughter is a physical education teacher at the school.
“We try not to mix our respective lives as far as education is concerned because she is her own person and teacher,” Walcott said at the meeting.

[Really? We are well into the third month of the 2011-2012 year and Chancellor Walcott has not found occasion to ask his daughter, "How was your day?"???]
ANOTHER PATRICK SULLIVAN ON THE PEP?
The Panel for Education Policy, the mayoral appointee dominated panel that replaced the Board of Education is largely a rubber stamp for Mayor Michael Bloomberg's prerogatives. Patrick Sullivan (appointee of Manhattan President Scott Stringer) has been a frequent dissenting voice on the panel. Queens appointee Dmytro Fedkowskyj made statements that suggest that he might be moving in the Sullivan direction of independence:

“I made it quite clear during the PEP meeting that the lack of a proactive interest by the DOE has harmed the school community and that policy should change going forward when inexperienced leaders take on new responsibilities. What occurred at the Metropolitan High School and at Long Island City High School is clearly unacceptable.”

NY1's story Monday night (Nov. 21) on the Queens Metro HS disaster.

The Daily News' story, Friday, November 18 on Queens Metro's scheduling problems.

Sadly, the New York Times's article on the Queens Metro mess is a snippet, merely parroting the DOE line that "help is on its way." No parent or student quotes or interviews --just the DOE's #2, Shael Polakow-Suransky, and that quote was in the context of the now-old news Long Island City scheduling woes.

CLOSURE RAMPAGE HITS PRE-HIGH SCHOOL LEVEL SCHOOLS, UPRISINGS REACH THOSE TARGETED SCHOOLS
On Tuesday, November 22 parents, students and area elected representatives held a protest demonstration on the Tweed Courthouse steps of the NYC Department of Education.
This example from a Crown Heights, Brooklyn school is a characteristic sample of the woes that beset schools targeted for closure:
"'The Crown' (PS 161) was a top-performing school just two years ago, with nearly all of its students passing the state’s ELA exam. But the City then cut more than $700,000 and nine educators and other staff members, sending scores into a tailspin." (From Norm's Notes, "Schools Under Attack by DOE Fight Back: Parents, Elected Officials Representing 15 Schools Targeted for Closure to Continue Season of Protests With Rally at DOE HQ, Targeted middle and high schools serve almost entirely low-income Black and Latino families, lost tens-of-millions to budget cuts over past 3 years, Many schools represented were founded, moved or co-located by Bloomberg Administration; most house large numbers of high-needs students", 11/22/11)
Full list of schools participating in last Tuesday's rally: -PS 181, Jamaica, -PS 298, Brownsville, -General Chappie James Elementary and Middle Schools, Brownsville, -PS 19, Williamsburg, -Juan Morel Campos Secondary School, Williamsburg, -PS 137, Lower East Side, -PS 256, Bedford-Stuyvesant, -PS 22, Crown Heights, -PS 161, Crown Heights, -Frederick Douglass Academy II, Harlem, -IS 171, Cypress Hills, -Samuel Gompers High School, Bronx, -Cypress Hills Collegiate Prep, Cypress Hills, -JHS 296, Bushwick, -MS 587, Crown Heights

QUEENS METRO HS CRISIS APPARENTLY REACHES INTO FALL, 2010
Parent letter, which appeared in Norm's Notes, "Teacher/Parent Outrage at Queens Metro HS as DOE Ignored Problem - HS Supt Juan Mendez on Hot Seat - Network Too," (Nov. 17, 2011):

Thank you for taking the time to speak with my husband John Sadowski earlier today regarding Queens Metropolitan High School. Our son is currently a tenth grader. As you know QMHS opened its doors for the first time in September of 2010 and unfortunately this school has been a disaster since Day 1. Many parents tried to be patient, with the understanding it was a new school and it would need time to work things out. Month by month things progressively got worse. By the end of the school year parents were frustrated. We could only hope that the administration would work over the summer understanding where they went wrong and begin to improve. We found out on day one in September 2011 that we were sadly mistaken.

On the first day of school Sept 2011 the student schedules were not yet ready. My child did not receive a schedule until day 3 or 4. Some parents have told me that there child had to wait longer. What soon followed after this was schedule change after schedule change. On October 31st my son received his ninth schedule change. On some of those schedules he had five or six blank spaces and nowhere to go during those times. On one of the schedule changes he was not given a lunch period. Some parents have told me that their children still have blank spaces and they are pulling their children from the school during those times. Teachers and parents have told me that hallways and stairways are crowded with students with no place to go. One schedule my son had was filled with obvious errors. He repeatly went to the main office to report these errors and he was finally directed to the Guidance Counselor. The Guidance Counselor told my son to “find someone with a similar schedule and then just follow that student’s schedule. I was horrified to learn that this was the schools response. I later found out from other parents that their children were told the same thing. On October 28th I was at the school and Vice Principal Lambert called me and my son over. She asked my son what schedule he following, because they could not find him the past week or so. I find this very alarming!!!! He is following the schedule the school provided and they can not find him???? What if he was hurt in the halls, would no one know? Ms. Lambert answered this with a shrug of the shoulders and a roll of the eyes. On November 15th Principal Levy-Mcguire acknowledged that they schedules are still not correct and does not expect to have them resolved until sometime in December.

SUPERVISOR QUALIFICATIONS SUBTEXT TO ABOVE: The Board of Education before being supplanted in 2002 by the Department of Education did have some problems. But basic things like student scheduling were handled competently. Why then and not now? School administrators had teaching experience and came up through the ranks. They acquired their supervisor licenses by attending classes at NYC area colleges. City schools chancellors had proper supervisor licensure. Today, it is a Keystone Kops merry-go-round carnival of reinventing the wheel; supervisors often have no education experience or proper supervisor qualifications. They instead have been fast-tracked into power by the NYCDOE's "Leadership Academies." Now, there are some fair and compassionate supervisor products of the Academies, but a disproportionate number of supervisors come out with a cavalier attitude as we see with Levy-Mcguire.

LATE NOVEMBER QUEENS METRO NEWS
The EdNotes blog reports that

It's too bad Turner was at Queens Metro on a Sunday.(November 20) If he had been there on a school day he would have found that the free enterprise school system instigated by WalBlackBloomKlein offers up fairly brand new school where kids had no regular schedules, were left in a gym "class" – taught by Chancellor Walcott's daughter no less - where they didn't get gym, a physics class "taught" by an unqualified special ed teacher, and no chemistry at all after the teacher quit in October. The principal actually did have an idea for a school that on paper seemed to offer a lot of good ideas. The only problem was that she was a grad of the Leadership Academy, the Tweed training ground for future principals ¬without a clue – with many people coming from Turner's vaunted "free enterprise" system without knowledge on how to organize or run a school. Of course, after Walcott and his minions ignored the problem for months - especial knocks to Queens HS Superintendent Juan Mendez (who was so arrogant at the Beach Channel school closing hearing last year) and network leader Gillian Smith – they finally responded – once the story hit the press.

CRITICAL ATR FACTOR SUBTEXT IGNORED
A critical point in any of these discussions of rotating substitutes from week to week is that the so-called "substitutes" that are coming and going are actually absent teacher reserve ("ATR") teachers. These are teachers that have lost their regular positions when the DOE has closed down schools and broken apart schools into smaller units. At best, one-half of the teachers in the former school are placed in the new smaller schools.

(Back to the gap of teacher positions.) Yet, while ATRs are placed as substitutes in the gaps of English or science teacher positions, the DOE has placed them in the positions, willy-nilly, paying no regard to whether the license of the ATR temporarily filling the vacancy actually matches the subject of the teacher vacancy.
The dirty secret is that there are over one thousand absent teacher reserve teachers in the "ATR pool." Potentially there are a few hundred or at least several score of experienced English teachers in the ATR pool that can fill the vacancies at Frederick Douglass VI or Grace Dodge. The same can be said for the science vacancies and potential science teacher assignees to Queens Metro.

So, why won't the city place these ATRs into the vacancies? The principals have limited budgets. They have a budgetary incentive to hire novice teachers. The experienced teachers go unhired. (It was not always this way. Bloomberg's DOE instituted this school-unit accounting in 2005 when it created the ATR fiasco. It is curious that the United Federation of Teachers ever went along with this.)

But let us return to the details of these teacher vacancy sagas. The Western Queens Gazette neglected to cite several vital nuggets from the Ed Notes post it cited. Ed Notes wrote, "Breaking: The principal “can’t find” a physics teacher so she is using a special ed teacher to teach physics with packets prepared by another physics teacher. Parents don’t know this." Ed Notes went on to mention that physical education students are actually missing on actual phys ed lessons. With the DOE neglecting to hire experienced science teachers from the ATR pool and the DOE allowing phys ed teachers to teach the complex subject of physics one cannot help but wonder, could the DOE (Tweed, the principals, the assistant principals) be refusing to hire science teachers out of spite? (In all of this scheduling neglect, is it any wonder that "Audit Finds City’s Schools Short on Physical Education," as the New York Times reported a city comptroller John Liu audit of physical education in today's NYC Department of Education?)

UPDATE with tidbit from NYC Educator:
She or he has great list of inconsistencies of interest to those who care about teacher hiring, teacher placement and budgetary decisions in general, like no money for the Teachers Choice program (teachers routinely spend $100s each year; Teachers Choice would cut teachers' costs with a $125 or 150 check made out to the teacher for costs). NYC E pointed out that it was eliminated while the city has money to add new teachers to the rolls.