Chancellor Carmen Farina Has No Clue What An Effective Teacher Is.

Since Carmen Farina has taken over at Chancellor of the New York City Public Schools she preaches to whomever would listen that she wants every child to have an effective teacher in the classroom.  It matters little to her whether her audience are principals, the media, teachers, or even at the secret February meeting with the 3020-a State arbitrators, NYSUT, and DOE lawyers.  Her message is the same;  "I want all students to have effective teachers instructing them".  Nice words if you ask me but as this post will point out the Chancellor fails to "practice what she preaches".

If the disappointing Chancellor really wanted to have effective teachers in the classroom she would be pushing policies that encourage principals to hire experienced teachers to cover their vacancies and implement polices that eliminated the ATR pool by giving schools an incentive to appoint an experienced ATR to their school.  However, Chancellor Carmen Farina has instead, continued the Bloomberg/Klein ideological policy called "education on the cheap" that shortchanges the schools of vital resources and deprives students of proper educational material for their classrooms.  Her freezing of the already tight  school budget for the 2014-15 school year, despite the City's economic recovery and more money sent to DOE Central is a prime example of the continuation of the Bloomberg/Klein policy to starve the schools and the classrooms in their "education on the cheap" policy.

Moreover, rather than save over $160 million dollars annually and place experienced teachers in vacancies, Carmen Farina continues the destructive "Fair Student Funding"(FSF) formula that not only shortchanges schools of proper funding for their students but forces principals to hire the "cheapest and not the best teachers" for their schools.  The result is the most needy students get the inexperienced teachers who suffer from their own steep learning curves in the classroom.  While 50% of new teachers leave the New York City classroom in five years, over 80% will leave the school they started at by that time.  With the Open Market Transfer System, a principal cannot keep an effective teacher if a better school offers that teacher a position.  Therefore, struggling schools suffer from high teacher turnover, which a recent study shows reduces student academic achievement, and lose their best teachers to higher achieving schools.The result is while highly experienced and effective teachers languish in the ATR pool, students in low achieving schools are subjected to many inexperienced teachers who lack the classroom skills to effectively teach and the few who become a "quality teacher" will leave for more comfortable classroom environments in a higher achieving school or district.

Finally, if Chancellor Carmen Farina was really serious about having effective teachers in the 

classroom, she would reduce class sizes to the State average, penalize schools that rely on teachers uncertified in the subject they are teaching in, and ensure that inclusion classes are not being abused by putting too many special education students in the class, a common abuse of Federal and State requirements.  Even in the New York Post, an article showed the problems of having an inexperienced and uncertified teacher instructing poor and minority students. More proof can be found Here!

When it come to Chancellor Carmen Farina she talks the talk but fails to walk the walk.She's shown to be more the problem than the solution.