Making Experience a Liability

In a twist on the old plaint about not being able to get experience unless someone gives you a job, a sizable contingent of veteran Teachers fears that having too much experience has made it more difficult to get new positions.

They are known as Absent Teacher Reserves, instructors who became full-time substitutes after their schools were closed or downsized. As recently as during the past school year, 90 percent of them wound up with new, permanent positions, but so far in the current one, 700 of them are still drifting. In some instances, they are teaching outside their specialties; in all cases, they can be moved to other assignments according to the needs of their schools and the Department of Education.

The uncertainty of being like a utility infielder in baseball would not be so unsettling except for a threat to their job security posed by DOE.

The United Federation of Teachers has resisted previous demands by Schools Chancellor Joel Klein that all ATRs who haven't found permanent positions within 18 months should be fired, but there is a new concern about the creation of a unit meant to expedite the firing of incompetent Teachers. Some of the ATRs told this newspaper's Meredith Kolodner that they feared they would be targeted by the unit. On the surface, they would seem ripe targets: after all, if you can't find a permanent job in some school, isn't that an indication you're not up to par?

The reality is more complicated, and UFT President Randi Weingarten said she suspects something more insidious may be at work: a form of age discrimination. Under the budgeting rules used by DOE, ATRs are not initially expensive hires for schools that give them permanent jobs: they are "charged" at the same salary rate as for new Teachers during their first year and at 50 percent of their actual salaries in their second. For the third year, however, an ATR's full salary is counted against a school's budget; in some cases that makes them more than twice as expensive as hiring a new, albeit inexperienced, instructor.

The UFT is considering filing an age-discrimination suit. DOE should not let it come to that. If Mr. Klein is sincere about transforming the school system, then capable Teachers should not be jettisoned because they have become too expensive.