It’s time to push Fariña on unfair funding, bad principals

There are a ton of major issues to push with the NYC Department of Education. But my gut says these two should be priority. What do you think?

Unfair Funding Formula

The unfair funding formulas pressure principals to discriminate against experienced teachers. This hurts teachers, schools, kids, and, well, principals. There is no benefit to the schools, and no benefit to the system. Every teacher should be charged the same amount against every school’s budget (or we should use units).

A teacher who is not hired under the current system, they are already in the system, there is no actual cost savings. And a lower cost, brand new teacher? That’s someone who was not already on the books. That brand new teacher costs the system extra.

By linking teachers’ actual salaries to the individual school “budget” (really paper internal accounting, not an actual budget) Bloomberg and Klein created a system where schools, principals, kids, and teachers all lose. We should end this.

The UFT Unity leadership agrees. And Fariña will not take action. She needs to feel pressure. Getting the UFT to apply this pressure should be a priority. This should be the last year of this unfair system.

Incompetent Administrators; Abusive Administrators

We have always had a mix of good and bad principals. But post-Bloomberg our system is littered with administrators who are incompetent, abusive, or both. Many have had inadequate experience. Some never taught, or only spent a year or two in the classroom. Some had poor training. In the last 20 years we have moved away from a system where an administrator would work under an experienced principal for years before taking the reins him or herself. Instead, beginning teachers did a one year boot camp to get ready. The “Leadership Academy” took candidates with zero pedagogical background.

The abuse often follows the incompetence. A principal who does not know what to do may feel threatened by subordinates who do, and last out. The abuse sometimes follows insecurity. If the position was not earned through years of hard work, but rather handed to someone with little experience, that person may treat their authority as a gift, and not something that was earned, and see almost any assertive act as a threat to that (arbitrarily granted, now arbitrarily exercised) authority. And some administrators just don’t have the kind of temperament we would expect from someone supervising adults and children.

Whatever the cause, incompetents and abusive administrators should not be in the those positions (or, in some cases, might be retrained). In theory our union leadership agrees, but is frustratingly unwilling to press the issue. Certainly Fariña has not challenged the Bloomberg/Klein ethos that the judgment of a principal cannot be challenged (despite case after case affirming that we have people with bad judgment, poor tempers, and lack of necessary knowledge and/or experience running our schools). She needs to feel pressure to act correctly.

Push Fariña? We need to motivate our leadership

Both of these issues can be addressed, immediately. Neither is part of contract negotiations. Both would help many, many teachers, and many many schools. And our union leadership is not opposed, in theory, to addressing either issue. They have been, however, bizarrely reluctant to press either issue with the Chancellor.

Yesterday our allies in MORE met and set priorities for the coming year. Likely these two were highly ranked on their list.

There are other issues of importance to the members of our union. But in theory these two would be 1) relatively easy to make progress on and 2) would impact a great number of members, and 3) would shift the “tone” of the current administration. They seem to be good places to begin the new school year. What do you think?