Turnaround schools' job postings offer window into city's plans

The city might have agreed to temporarily halt hiring decisions at turnaround schools because of a union lawsuit, but it is still moving forward with other massive changes for those schools.

This week, the Department of Education announced new names for the 24 schools set to undergo the overhaul process and continued making leadership changes in them. It also posted job descriptions that will be used to decide which teachers are picked to return in the fall.

The job postings could be the most crucial step toward shaping what the schools will look like in September. That’s because of a requirement of the 18-D process, the process embedded in the city’s contract with the UFT that the city is trying to structure rehiring. (The union’s lawsuit argues that 18-D does not apply to the turnaround schools.)

Under turnaround, every teacher at each of the schools will be “excessed,” but all who want to may reapply for their jobs. 18-D mandates that replacement schools hire back, in order of seniority, at least half of the teachers who apply from the previous school — provided that they are qualified.

The job postings are where those qualifications are set. Principals of the turnaround schools, who have been attending weekly planning workshops, devised them and union officials reviewed them before they were posted, a union official said.

Principals can hire teachers who don’t meet all of the qualifications, but they don’t have to. So when the qualifications are specific and numerous, they can reduce the number of teachers who must be rehired — and influence which teachers are eligible to come back, according to Richard Mangone, a retired teacher and union official who participated in the rehiring process when the city overhauled a system of alternative schools.

“Depending on what the posting states usually [principals] have enough leeway to sidestep or negate seniority,” he said.

But Mangone said the sampling of qualifications he reviewed for the turnaround hiring seemed fair. Instead of requiring “knowledge of” instructional practices, the turnaround schools are calling for “willingness or ability to learn” about them — meaning that a wider swath of teachers are likely to meet the qualifications and be queued up for rehiring according to 18-D.

Teachers who want to work at Throgs Neck High School, what the city plans to call the revamped Lehman High School, will have to show “ability and/or willingness to utilize technology to communicate with community members,” for example. At Greenpoint High School for Engineering and Automotive Technology (nee Automotive High School), successful applicants will have to show a willingness to work as an advisor to a small group of students using a curriculum developed by Brown University’s Education Alliance. And the replacement for Long Island City High School wants teachers to show an “ability to communicate effectively with colleagues, parents, students and collaborate in interdisciplinary SLC teams,” reflecting the small learning communities promised for the new school.