Sunday, August 19, 2012

When teachers don't show up to class

From the NY Post:

Educators at a new high school in Queens who were brought in to reverse years of poor student performance and truancy issues are instead giving kids lessons on skipping class, according to a shocking report by state officials.

The 15 teachers at Rockaway Park HS for Environmental Sustainability had collectively posted an 80 percent daily attendance rate when state reviewers came in March — 3 percentage points worse than the kids.

The review shows that while school administrators were moving mountains every day to bolster student attendance, they had no answer for how to deal with no-show adults.

At a minimum, absent students got daily phone calls to their homes and their parents could be summoned for face-to-face sit-downs.

By contrast, “interventions by school administrators regarding the improvement of teacher attendance was [sic] not provided at the time of the [state] site visit,” the documents show.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Teacher-bashing bias is nothing new at the Post, but it's especially glaring in this article. Surprised that the writer didn't also include some hackneyed union-thuggery images.

The article buries the fact that year-end teacher attendance was 95% more than halfway through the article, but touts the preliminary 80% number in the 3rd paragraph. Is the writer's implication that teachers need supervised sick leave? Or perhaps no sick leave at all?

NYC teachers get 10 days paid sick leave a year. The teacher who was out for a longer time, my guess, was on unpaid maternity leave. With only 15 teachers, one statistical outlier can easily skew an average (mean.)

The real shocker should be the fact that school administration had hired only one Special Ed. teacher for 40 special needs kids, which more likely than not were the ones who were "sporadically engaged."

Anonymous said...

That used to be a top- notch school....35 years ago.

Anonymous said...

Everyone has their own agenda. What happened to the phrase " for the public good ".

Albert Shanker said...

"When schoolchildren start paying union dues, that’s when I’ll start representing the interests of schoolchildren."