Kathy Crain was kind enough to provide us with the following synopsis of tonight’s meeting. We have heard similar concerns (really shock and dismay) from other parents who attended the meeting:
“The Committee discussed the ramifications of the mediated version of Criterion Based Hiring and its implications for the next three years. The SB Attorney was there to answer questions on behalf of the District.
Here are the main points:
- The District expects that we will have many schools identified by RIDE as “Persistently Low Achieving” (“PLA Schools”) within the next three years. At an earlier meeting, Dr. Lusi speculated that up to half of our schools will receive that designation by 2013. Pursuant to the Federally mandated alternatives for PLA Schools, the District expects that up to half of the staff at each of those schools will be removed from the school, thereby becoming “Displaced Teachers”. According to the agreement entered into by the Mayor and the PTU, the District will still be obligated to provide those Displaced Teachers with employment. Therefore, in accordance with the mediated version of CBH, every year (beginning in Jan/Feb and continuing until there are no longer any Displaced Teachers), the District will begin identifying displaced teachers and vacancies around the District. Displaced teachers will be placed into existing vacancies through a match process. The assignment will be permanent. There will be no criterion based hiring processes implemented in the District until ALL displaced teachers have been matched with positions, effectively ending Criterion Based Hiring.
- The Union is arguing that if there are too many displaced teachers and not enough vacancies, the mediated version of CBH gives a Displaced Teacher the right to “bump” the most junior teacher with the same certification if the Displaced Teacher has seniority over that teacher. It is unclear whether or not that means the Displaced Teacher is then “matched” into that position. The School Board Counsel noted that it is unclear what the Mayor’s position is on this.
- The SB Attorney also noted that the School Board was opposed to the Mediated Version of CBH and passed a new Criterion Based Hiring Policy in late May that removed seniority as a factor in hiring. It was passed in Executive Session and the minutes were sealed. They were unsealed about a month ago. When asked why the minutes were sealed, the SB President stated that it was because the Board had been asked not to vote on the policy until the Mayor had finished negotiations with the Union. I then added that the Mayor had specifically asked the Board not to vote on it, but we did so in Executive Session anyway. Despite the sealed minutes, the School Department had been made aware of the new policy, but failed to enforce the policy because the Mayor issued an “Executive Order” to the School Department to stop all CBH processes until he was done with negotiations. Despite the protests of the School Board, the School Department complied with the request of the Mayor.
-My additional comment on this is that this is exactly why the Mayor came up with the Jabbour Bill that stripped the Board of its powers. He knew we were going to reject the CBA and had to figure out a way to get around it. It’s a sad day for education in Providence.”
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The following meetings are scheduled for the next 2 days:
So what’s your proposal? Teachers in your neighborhood should be completely safe and teachers in the low-income schools should be fired?
Mr. Hoffman, if you could see beyond the concept of “your neighborhood” versus “not your neighborhood” moving forward, you may realize that the enemy is not who you keep thinking it might be. The union and PPSD likes it when us parents divide our interests – it empowers them. Let’s not divide – let’s stick together.
We have much bigger problems; please read my post below. Thanks.
I was also at this subcomittee meeting tonight and it was sobering and depressing.
Ultimately,it is so ridiculous that Senator Jabour passed his bill stripping the Providence School Board of its powers – 180 degree opposite of his initial intention and did so sneakily in the 11th hour. And then he laughably plans to re-present this bill in its original form next session. What a joke. Does he have any principles whatsoever or just political aspirations and could he be anymore obvious than he was? So he simply weakened under political pressure – the mayor’s pressure and the union’s pressure and evidently is okay with allowing the 3 year CBA to go through – at the expense of what he truly believes in – an elected school board. What a coward and what a Machiavellian politician….and if he is not either of those two things, he was duped by the mayor and Steve Smith to pass this bill in its manipulated form. What is even sadder is that his own constituents are as hurt by his backroom politics for the next 3+ years, but I am sure that most of them are unaware of what he has done to them. (For the record, I am completely for an elected school board)
So for now, all the parents/children of the WHOLE CITY of Providence are screwed for 3 years if the new teacher’s contract is approved and we be will playing musical chairs with teachers – both good and bad teachers – as schools that are underperforming are forced to let go of 50% of teachers to “turn around that school”. And believe me, there will be plenty of schools forced to “turn around” by the state. And while this is all going on, no “new blood” of teachers will essentially be allowed to get into the system with the new CBA and the loophole of non-CBH hiring every January-February. Paradoxically, it will be harder to get a teaching job if you are a teacher new to the system in Providence; and unless you are an existing PTU member, it will be tougher than before the concept of CBH was presented two years ago.
This does not even speak to what happens to teachers that fail their evaluations with our new evaluation process at a Providence school; are they going to be forced hired during the loophold period in Jan-Feb and allowed to get a job at another school in the Providence school district (i.e. passed along to some other poor unknowing school in the system), sort of like just what happened with recent forced placements – but worse? There is no clear answer to that one yet.
The mayor lied to us; he does not really care about our children’s education. He cares about some other political agenda.
You really need to provide some kind of plausible alternative for the teachers in high poverty (thus “low-performing”) schools. What should happen to them?
I left that meeting absolutely stunned. I don’t think Ms. Crain and I agree exactly on what the outcome of this whole contract negotiation should be… but regardless, I think anyone can agree that the process that has occurred over the last 6 months has been an absolute mess and, following the information I heard tonight, sounds pretty damn illegal. They’re going to get away with it, too.
Mr Licht you seem to naively believe that the evaluations will be fair an unbiased. Imagine the following scenario. A friend whines about being underpaid at his private school, his friend the principal at XXX says, “No worries”. I have a teacher in your area who is underperforming-wink wink!”
Then, poof like magic the friend has a job and the other teacher is labeled underperforming.
At the end of this shell game, what happens if after changing teachers, changing curriculum and changing/closing schools, there is still low performance?
when will the district administrators and mayor be held accountable for closing improving schools if what they claim they are working toward improving schools?
Mr. Hoffman. Get off the anti-East Side/ my neighborhood/your neighborhood rhetoric. You sound like a broken record. Nothing here is East Side specific.
Machiavelli: take a look at the proposed evaluation system:
http://www.ride.ri.gov/educatorquality/educatorevaluation/EvalStand.aspx
It isn’t as capricious as you suggest. Nothing will happen with a “wink” or a “poof”. In fact, it creates what some might label an inexorably long, drawn-out process that affords teachers numerous protections and opportunities to improve.
If schools are low performing, the system will need flexibility to deal with it. Having to keep the same pool of teachers for the next three years, no matter how “right-sized” the system becomes, and no matter how ineffective some (hopefully only a small number) may be, limits or actually prevents that flexibility. What other organization limits itself by prohibiting the introduction of “new talent” from time to time? The contract as presented, with all of its efforts to side-step CBH as originally presented, is akin to moving the deck chairs on the Titanic… the ship still sinks.
So what’s your proposal? Be specific. All teachers at “persistently low-performing” schools should be fired outright and new teachers hired by criterion-based hiring?
It’s all here:
http://www.ride.ri.gov/ride/Docs/Protocol_for_Interventions.pdf
Just need the flexibility to carry out whatever specific proposal is chosen for a given school, chosing the best administrators and/or teachers for whatever positions become open.
And if turnaround, restart or closure are selected, what happens to the teachers from those schools? Are they fired?
Just for reference, here are the PPSD schools in the “persistently lowest achieving” pipeline.
Tier 1: Alvarez, Hope IT, Fogarty, Mt. Pleasant.
Tier 2: Central, E-Cubed, Gilbert Stuart, Bridgham (?).
Tier 3: Asa Messer (?), Lauro, Fortes, Flynn, George J. West, Kizirian, Hope Arts, Pleasant View, RFK, Textron, Veazie St., D’Abate, Windmill St.
If you’re bargaining position is “all of the teachers in some or all of the above schools may be fired at some point in the next three years,” you’re going to have a hard time getting a contract.
Mr. Hoffman, please read my above post about what happens to these teachers.
Please get off of your “neighborhood kick”; that “card” it does not always apply to every situation where you feel you are getting short-changed by the system. These sets of scenarios that we have presented up above about teachers hiring and re-hiring are real and will happen and so we need to focus “together” on that more than anything else.
In answer to your question directly and to the best of my understanding, 100% of teachers are fired in the closure of turnaround schools, and up to 50% or thereabouts are re-hired. The teachers that are not re-hired are presumably likely not as high quality as the 50% hired back right away. This is where the problem may be. The 50% that are not rehired back could actually get a job back without a formal interview process, etc in during the January-February loophole period – regardless of their abilities. These teachers can go to any school in the system (regardless of “neighborhood”) without regard to their abilities, and just based on their certification and openings at that time. So in essence “less able” teachers continue to re-cycle through the system trumping the ability of any “new” teacher who might be more qualified from getting into a teaching job. The CBH process of hiring during the other times of the year may totally be negated by this Jan-Feb loophole hiring period. We as parents need to protect our children to prevent that loophole from happening. We need to have these questions directly addressed by RIDE, PPSD, School Board and the PTU. As I have always said, none of these entitities look out for the true interests of our children’s education more than us the parents, regardless of what neighborhood you or I or anyone else lives in.
“The teachers that are not re-hired are presumably likely not as high quality as the 50% hired back right away.”
“Presumably.” That’s the rub isn’t it? We don’t really know, especially as a school can be named persistently low performing based on a single subject, out of school factors outweigh in school, we don’t have a working evaluation system, many or most teachers don’t teach tested subjects, the ratings are based in part on long term trends which may predate the current staff, we don’t know what the hiring process will be at these schools, etc., etc.
What you’re proposing is to punish teachers who choose to teach in high-poverty schools and create a strong and permanent incentive for the best teachers to flow to low-poverty schools.
You’d think the PTU would be all over helping to develop and implement an appropriate evaluation system that wouldn’t be biased by some of the concerns you raise.
And just to be clear, there are ineffective teachers at Bishop, a school that you would describe as “not” high-poverty (despite the fact that there is tremendous socioeconomic and racial diversity within the building), and at Classical, which one would hope would not be affected by the poverty level of the neighborhood.
And you were probably talking about a disincentive…
What I learned tonight at the Public Hearing (I think), is that any teacher laid off for school closure reasons because of low performing schools or shrinking school population, would either have to be hired back elsewhere in the PPSD or paid not to teach if they lose their job for those reasons.
If a “new” teacher not part of the PTU were to get a competing position, the city still has to pay the “displaced” teacher in full as if they were teaching – and all of this is regardless of any factors including teaching abilities and yes even seniority. All teachers get paid. So the affect of all of this is that all the teachers that exist today in the PPSD will exist in 3 years regardless of ability as it will take 2-3 years for the new evaluation system to be up and running and actually start to have any effect.
The city would financially be crazy to pay teachers not to teach and hire a “new to the system” teacher while paying an existing PTU member to sit around and do nothing. The city could not afford or justify such financial waste in such a time of crisis.
So here we are and Criterion Based Hiring is now a joke because the teachers being hired are all going to come from the same pool of teachers wherever there is an opening at any PPSD school over the next 3 years, with only “new to the system teachers” getting in when a teacher retires or goes to teach in another school system.
Wow, we are back where we started and I think even worse than where we started, as the city is firmly financially handcuffed by what was manipulated into the new contract being presented and soon voted on.
The Mayor should be ashamed that he got so duped by the PTU in the negotiations and the City Council should seriously reconsider the details of the contract to protect our children’s education and taxpayers before voting in favor of it as it stands now. Remember the devil is in the details!
I predict that in 1-2 years there will be a front page article in the ProJo that there are “30 PPSD teachers getting paid not to teach” and I will be the first to remind everyone that it all stemmed from this contract if approved as it stands now. This is politically unwise for the city council to approve this contract in present form.
Yes, firing all the teachers in the more difficult half of the district’s schools would work much better, since we have such excellent leadership I’m sure they’d hire the right people to solve our problems. It would be no problem finding hundreds of good urban teachers, especially when there are no teachers to assist in the hiring process since THEY’VE ALL BEEN FIRED.