Not the teachers themselves, but the slimy fly-by-nights who run the program. They deserve to be jailed.

I've spent the weekend corresponding with a math teacher who was lured by their BS, by their promises of a sure thing in a shortage area, and by their empty words. Now this teacher is doing day to day subbing and living in these United States without health insurance. It's unconscionable.

To show their support, the Fellows big shots are dropping the teacher from their program in a few months. This means being kicked out of school. It means starting over.

They're frauds, street hustlers, lowlifes. They make their living by preying on idealistic New Yorkers who want to contribute to teaching our children.

And if they aren't going to help, they ought to go away. No one deserves to have their time wasted like this.

In these economic times, the offense is even worse than usual.

In Time Magazine's elaborate puff piece about DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee, there are quite a few leaps of faith that go unchallenged. First there's this:

Rhee has promised to make Washington the highest-performing urban school district in the nation, a prospect that, if realized, could transform the way schools across the country are run.

It's odd to see people judged solely on the strength of their promises. But how else can one praise Ms. Rhee, who, from everything I can glean, cannot be proven to have accomplished anything whatsoever? I can't think of a politician anywhere who hasn't done an excellent job by this standard. On the other hand, I'd have to give much the same credit to lunatics standing on soapboxes in Washington Square Park. Or working in Tweed.

Here's another leap of faith. Actually, I understand people taking them for religion, but for those of us who've not yet accepted Michelle Rhee as our personal savior, this is a toughie:

Rhee suffered during that first year, and so did her students. She could not control the class. Her father remembers her returning home to visit and telling him she didn't want to go back. She had hives on her face from the stress.

The second year, Rhee got better.

But there's no objective proof of that, despite the fact she was working in a school that should have shouted such an achievement to the rooftops. I'm ashamed to admit that, after 9/11, when W. talked about the need to go into Iraq, and when he and his cohorts said the smoking gun could turn into a mushroom cloud, I believed him. After all, he was the President of the United States, and we'd just been attacked.

Rhee offers not only her word, but that of her principal, the one who neglected to mention this achievement to anyone of note when it was supposedly occurring. Pardon me if I grant him no more credence than our head of state.

And then we come to this tidbit, a gem of objective journalism:

The most glaring example of the backward logic of schools is the way most teachers receive lifetime job security after one or two years of work.

First of all, I know of no one who gets tenure, let alone "lifetime job security," after a year or two. If it does indeed work like that in DC, it's plainly idiotic to assume that it works the same in the rest of the country. As for the "lifetime job security," tell it to the ATR teachers in NYC, tell it to the ones whose schools have been closed, or renamed (depending on whom you're asking) tell it to my colleagues in the rubber room, and tell it to those facing dismissal hearings (and you won't need to remind any of them that their lives are not precisely over--so much for that "lifetime job security"). In fact, tell me, after I faced the wrath of my ex-principal for having the temerity to tell a NY Times columnist that two of my so-called ESL students were actually fluent in English, but were illiterate.

If he could have fired me that day, there's no question that he would have. And in the hours of meetings I was forced to attend afterward, not one moment was devoted to finding assistance for these kids. It was more, "Is your butt covered? My butt is covered," and the like. I wouldn't trust that principal, or Michelle Rhee, as far as I could throw them.

In October, Rhee vowed to purge incompetent teachers through any means necessary. She has brought on extra staff to help principals navigate the byzantine termination process...

Wait a minute. There's a termination process? I thought the writer just stated teachers got lifetime job security after a year or two. Isn't that a boldfaced contradiction? And who was it who gave those supposedly unfitt teachers tenure anyway? Hasn't Michelle Rhee had this job for the year or two it takes for them to earn tenure? Despite her failure to accomplish anything, and despite her lack of a verifiable record, isn't she herself actually accountable for anything that's happened under her tenure?

It appears not.

Will anyone offer a disparaging word, in this long love-fest for Ms. Rhee? Why yes, it appears part-time AFT President (and part-time UFT President) Randi Weingarten is willing to make a comment:

"Michelle Rhee believes in scorched earth," says Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, a national union that has become unusually involved in local matters in Washington. "I am not saying that D.C.'s school system doesn't need a lot of help. But I have been part of a lot of reforms, and the one thing I have never seen work is a hierarchical, top-down model."

Ms. Weingarten is absolutely right, of course. She should know, because the hierarchical, top-down model that is the UFT aristocracy has failed miserably, along with Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, to bring any meaningful reform to NYC, where kids still study in trailers, closets, hallways, and even bathrooms. She supported mayoral control, class-size reforms that didn't work, the ATR mess, and a reorganization that made it worse. She made sure teachers worked more hours and days, and had fewer protections.

In fact, her model enabled Joel Klein, who recommended Ms. Rhee. Ms. Weingarten has not opposed Mayor Bloomberg's grab for a third term, continuation of the disaster that's been mayoral control, the privatization of health insurance for city workers, or even Joel Klein as US Secretary of Education. With friends like her, I'm afraid teachers in DC have quite a lot to worry about.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg now proposes a "fair funding" plan, calculated to make it inconvenient to hire senior teachers. Principals will be able to hire two newbies for the price of one vet (Thanks to Schoolgal).

UFT President Randi Weingarten has spoken up against it, but had she not enabled mayoral control and the demise of seniority-based placement, it would not even be an issue.

Some schools, apparently, are staffed almost entirely by new teachers. While I've seen a lot of very good ones, I still think they can learn a lot from experienced colleagues (I know I did). Unfortunately, those nasty teacher unions insist that 20 years experience carry a price tag. If Mayor Mike were only able to get rid of salary scales and institute merit pay, he could ensure that no teacher lasted more than five years and eliminate pensions altogether.

When kids failed tests, he could simply blame the teachers and hire new ones. It would be perfect.

Are newbies any better off? You decide. Here's an email I received this morning:

I was accepted as a Midyear Fellow this year, and accepted my position. I completely picked up and relocated to New York City for the program and set up home in Queens. I started my training in December. I was never late to any sessions and always did the work that I was asked to do.


For the first few weeks of the program, I was subletting so that I could have the safety net of going back to my parents' house in case things didn't work out. At the midpoint evaluations, I was told that I was doing fine, so I went ahead and signed a lease for an apartment.


After that, the program's actions really left me in a bind. I had a field observer who decided on a whim that he didn't like my classroom management skills and then proceeded to complain to the office. When I asked repeatedly what my status in the program was, I was told not to worry about being removed from the program. This happened repeatedly when I asked for feedback on how I was doing in the program.


I finished my training period and spent the entire week afterwards taking interviews for teaching jobs. I also made two trips to my assigned university to get things set up there; I was even given an ID card and registered for classes. I then received a call tonight from the program essentially telling me that my evaluations led those in the office to believe that I was not ready to teach and that they had removed me from the program and removed me from my university classes.


I asked if there was anything that I could do as far as further training or ways that I could work to improve upon their concerns and was basically told that I was not eligible to apply for the Fellows program ever again and that they basically never wanted to see me again.


Bear in mind that when I got my apartment, I was also required to submit a proof of income letter to my landlord. The Fellows program gave me a letter that said that I would be eligible to teach beginning January 22nd and making over 40,000 dollars without any fine print saying that it was contingent upon successful completion of training.


They also allowed me to go to interviews at schools all of this week, which was a waste of my valuable time and a waste of principals' time if they were unable to hire me. Since I spent so much time searching for a teaching job, I was unable to even begin looking for other jobs and now am stuck with no way to make my rent and bills.


I feel as if I was very much wronged by the program and am writing to make you aware of this situation so that you can blog about it and make others beware of the Teaching Fellows program.

...there is a Santa Claus (but there's no teacher shortage). Of course there's a Santa--how else do you explain the opportunity to take a six-week paid program that allows you to start working almost immediately as a New York City teacher?

You get all the benefits of a union--salary, health, dental, due process--you even get to come in August to listen to all the speeches and notifications that preclude the extended Labor Day weekend teachers used to have. Nor only that, but if your school gets reorganized, you join the Absent Teacher Reserve and get to sub for full-time pay. But wait--what's this?

Dear Virginia,

If you don't find yourself a job by next Friday, you're fired. Also, we're kicking you out of your college program.

Have a nice day.

Love,

Santa

Well, that can't be good. It's odd, because even as they send such notes, New York City is running costly ads soliciting new teachers. I recently clicked an ad on the NY Times site that brought me here, offering me, among other things, a chance to join the very program Virginia's being kicked out of.

Is it wise to solicit candidates for a costly program, and then dump them like so much trash? And why, if there's no shortage, are we running these ads?

Well, it's all about your criteria. According to Mayor Mike and Uncle Joel, if we find one single candidate for each job, we don't have a shortage. Also, it doesn't make any difference which teachers we get rid of, as long as they don't stay around for those costly pensions.

Good teachers are good, because they help us to show we're doing a good job. And bad teachers are good too, because we can blame everything that goes wrong on them.

Don't even bother mentioning those schools in nearby Nassau County, where they get hundreds of applications for each opening, ensuring kids there get very good teachers. That's not cost-effective. So what if we lose good teachers? We can replace them with other good teachers. Or we can replace them with bad ones.

In New York City, it makes no difference whatsoever. It's made no difference for thirty years.

And that's why Mayor Michael Bloomberg, despite all the hoopla, will make no difference either.

Each day I learn our contract is more complicated than I thought.

Readers of this blog know that Chancellor Klein hires hundreds of new teachers even as he relegates working teachers to the "Absent Teacher Reserve." Under the proposed new contract, he'll be able to offer them a severance package, even though none of them, to my knowledge, have been established as bad teachers.

But here's something you won't read in NY Teacher---those teachers who are part of the city's Teaching Fellows program are not receiving this offer. They're being threatened with termination, and expulsion from college coursework. As I can't provide a link, I'll share the letter one of the Fellows received:

According to my source, the Fellows program guarantees its participants teaching positions if they complete the summer program. This is not the first time Klein's DoE has attempted to weasel out of a contract by simply ignoring its provisions. Can anyone help these teachers?

Can the Unity wonks still stand up and claim the new ATR program is better than the old UFT transfer plan?