My annual golden turkey award finds two returnees. Chancellor Carmen Farina, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, new to the list is the DOE's ATR incentive and Hillary Clinton .
Chancellor Carmen Farina, a two time winner, has persistent in her disappointing regime. The Chancellor has continued many of Michael Bloomberg's anti-teacher policies. Using the Danielson rubric as a weapon against teachers, failing to remove many terrible principals, visiting schools and asking principals to identify their weaker teachers in order to terminate them, and keeping both the "fair student funding" and the ATR crises as part of the Bloomberg/Klein ideology in place. Chancellor Carmen Farina is still the problem and not the solution when it comes to better public schools.
Mayor Bill de Blasio has continued to fail to live up his to campaign promise to reduce class size as class sizes remain the highest in the State. Moreover, with a 6 billion dollar surplus, he still allows the DOE to practice an "education on the cheap" policy and blames the State for the lack of resources in the classroom. Finally, the Mayor remains tone deaf to the distracting use of cellphones in the schools that make teacher classroom management difficult and the student learning environment hostile to good academic achievement.
ATR Imitative: The DOE's ATR imitative has been less than successful, with only a bit over 100 ATRs offered permanent positions, many of them were provisionally hired at "bad schools" with higher teacher turnover and usually teaching Special Education. Since there are over 1,300 rotating ATR's and more than 400 ATRs provisionally appointed or filling a maternity leave, the ATR imitative has only resulted in 6% of the ATRs being offered a permanent position. Moreover, there is a disturbing and persistent rumor that some people at Tweed are discouraging principals from hiring ATRs who survived their 3020-a hearings. While principals have the sole authority to hire in their schools some weak and scared principals (there are many of them) will follow what DOE Central recommends. In addition, "Leadership Academy " principals are using this as an excuse not to hire ATRs that won their 3020-a termination hearings. Unfortunately, the UFT leadership has remained silent about either confirming or denying this rumor.
Hillary Clinton who snatched defeat from the jaws of victory with her corrupt and untrustworthy ways, lost the Obama coalition, the rust belt workers, and even 51% of White women.; Thanks to her baggage and deceit, we will have to cross our collective fingers and hope that the demigod, Donald Trump, does no real harm.