I find the utter arrogance of this stunning. It shows contempt for experienced teachers, and it means that they are going to give 5 million to private companies to hire cheaper teachers.
That tells you right there what their priorities are. Not good teachers...teachers who will cost the system less.
Keep asking yourself. Why are they spending 5 million to recruit new teachers when they might have to lay off thousands.
Ask yourself...why don't they take the 5 million and apply it to teacher salaries instead of paying private companies to recruit new ones. I doubt you will like the answers.
Bloomberg calls for no teacher pay raises to avoid layoffsMayor Bloomberg called this morning for the city to eliminate pay raises for public school teachers for the next to years to forestall teacher layoffs.
The mayor said that cutting the two percent pay raises the city had planned to offer teachers — already a decrease from a planned four percent raise — would prevent the city from laying off 4,400 teachers.
A spokesman for the city’s teachers union said he had just learned of the mayor’s plan to eliminate pay raises. The mayor’s statement is silent on whether the teachers union has agreed to this proposal, an important omission as any decisions regarding pay have to be made in contract negotiations.
UPDATE 11:30 am: Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew released a statement saying the union has not agreed to freeze teacher salaries.
And here is more about the 5 million dollars the city is receiving to contract with companies to hire new teachers while the city is on the verge of thousands of layoffs.
City gets 5 million to hire new teachersOf course this $5 million expenditure is going to the New Teacher Project, a "non-profit" founded by Joel Klein crony Michelle Rhee, so really this expenditure is less about hiring new teachers and more about paying off cronies.
The DOE has also hired eight new deputy chancellors, continues to spend millions on new testing programs, and hand out no-bid contracts for busing services and the like (even with gangsters who bring guns to the negotiations.)
The City Council gave 4% raises to its staff, Bloomberg gave raises to his staff, and he gave bonuses to his campaign people (albeit, this money came from his own pocket.)
With all this money going from hand to hand, there IS money to AVERT layoffs even if the state and the feds do not give more money to the city. They just have to reallocate it from other things - like the testing programs, the no-bid contracts, the new deputy chancellor hires, and the payoffs to cronies.
Yep, it is all about priorities, and Bloomberg and cronies make clear that teachers are low down on his list of priorities.
More about the meeting where the board had a preset agenda, and the teachers' anger mattered not at all.
UFT at the Panel for Educational Policy meetingAs usual, the majority of the PEP ignored what the public school teachers said and voted to co-locate several new charter schools in public schools. In addition, Gateway Secondary School to Health Sciences will also expand to include a grade 6 against the wishes of the Gateway School Leadership Team and the community. This expansion will probably mean even fewer high school seats in Queens as this school will be capped around 800 but the PEP couldn't be bothered with this triviality. Next up on the agenda was expenditures.
The DOE asked the PEP to approve an allocation of $5,000,000 to recruit new teachers while at the same time they are threatening to lay off thousands of us....
..."The UFT was in the house and they made a great case on the issue of this ridiculous expenditure. The best speaker was clearly UFT Secretary Michael Mendel who spoke for two minutes of the folly of the DOE's spending 5 million dollars to recruit teachers during these tough fiscal times when they are talking about layoffs. When the PEP chair tried to shut off Michael's microphone, Mendel resisted and refused to leave. He told them they would have to have him removed.
.."Speaker after speaker followed. They lambasted the $5 million DOE boondoggle but in the end it didn't matter. The four Borough President Representatives voted no (Staten Island was absent) and the eight mayoral representatives voted yes. There's another $5 million of our money that will go down the drain.
And where is the 5 million going?
Here is more about that.The agency's Panel for Educational Policy will vote later this month on the hefty contract, but already critics are questioning the need to spend money to recruit during a time of layoffs.
"We should put a freeze on any spending related to new hiring. We should not even be going through the expense of negotiating a contract now," said Patrick Sullivan, the panel's Manhattan representative.
Since 2000, the New Teacher Project has contracted with the city to recruit New York City Teaching Fellows. For this school year, the group received $2.8 million for recruiting 705 teachers.
They might get 5 million this year or so it appears.
And who started that New Teacher Project? Glad you asked.
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a United States non-profit organization founded by Michelle Rhee.
The New Teacher Project (TNTP) is a national nonprofit dedicated to closing the achievement gap by ensuring that high-need students get outstanding teachers. Founded by teachers in 1997, TNTP partners with school districts and states to implement scalable responses to their most acute teacher quality challenges. Since its inception, TNTP has trained or hired approximately 37,000 teachers, benefiting an estimated 5.9 million students nationwide. It has established more than 75 programs and initiatives in 31 states and published four seminal studies on urban teacher hiring and school staffing.
Michelle Rhee is the very well-paid head of the DC school system. She earns a lot of money and lays off a lot of teachers, some of the layoffs being questioned by the court now.
And that's how the corporate wheels turn while they take over public education. And they are doing it with little opposition.