Ax dodge by inept teachers
This is the second in a four-part series shining a light on the opaque system of school-employee disciplinary hearings, which for years has been criticized as slow, costly and ineffective at removing misbehaving or incompetent personnel.
Today's article looks at the monumental costs -- in terms of time, dollars and resources -- typically needed to remove incompetent teachers.
Tomorrow's story focuses on slam-dunk cases of teacher misbehavior that still took school districts years and years -- and hundreds of thousands of dollars each -- to resolve.
The trial dragged on for two years -- marked by 46 days of hearings, 18 witnesses on the stand, and a hefty 89-page ruling by the judge.
Mob crime of the century? Complex terror case?
Nope. Just trying to get rid of a bad public-school teacher.
The city Department of Education and school administrators have railed for years about how difficult, time consuming, and expensive it can be to remove a teacher for incompetence -- backed by numbers showing that only a handful of the city's 55,000 tenured teachers are successfully dismissed each year.
Now hearing records obtained by The Post detail the onerous process by which administrators must prove not only that a teacher doesn't belong in the classroom but also that there's no chance he or she can be rehabilitated.
In the case cited above, tenured second-grade teacher Amy Woda -- a 14-year veteran working at PS 62 in Forest Hills, Queens -- had received nine specifications of incompetence over two years.
Over a dozen observations conducted by superiors as well as by an independent "peer intervention" educator agreed to by the union found that Woda lacked classroom-management and lesson-planning skills.
Woda was offered numerous attempts to correct her flaws but kept making the same mistakes, according to the arbitrator who presided over the lengthy trial-like disciplinary hearing known by its state statute number, 3020-A.
After the city spent nearly $200,000 on Woda's salary as it battled to remove her, she was finally terminated for cause last November -- more than four years after her first unsatisfactory rating.
"The hardest thing is to get somebody [dismissed] for instructional incompetence or instructional weaknesses, because there's always the argument: 'Did they get enough support?' " said a former Queens principal.
He said the "interminable" lengths to which administrators must go to document a teacher's failings -- including detailed observations, independent monitoring and reams and reams of evidence -- are enough to scare most principals away from even trying to bounce bad teachers.
"The dotting of every I, the crossing of the T's, is to the point of absurdity," the former principal said.
Woda, however, disagreed with the arbitrator's ruling.
"It's a kangaroo court, where the outcome is always predetermined," she told The Post. "Basically, it's a way to get rid of the people who've been around for more than five years and cost the city too much."
Among the most bizarre cases on record was that of a teacher whom the city initially fired in 1997 -- and then battled for years to terminate again.
Former teacher Earl Soleyn was fired for incompetence as a substitute teacher at A. Philip Randolph HS in Manhattan back in June 1997.
He sued the city, alleging racial discrimination, but his case was dismissed in summary judgment in October 1999 and bounced on appeal in May 2001.
Shockingly, the Department of Education shot itself in the foot the following year by inexplicably rehiring Soleyn as a full-time teacher -- a move it says occurred because he had reapplied under a different license.
After getting assigned to South Shore HS in Brooklyn in 2005, Soleyn proceeded to earn three straight years of unsatisfactory ratings -- stemming from 14 separate observations between December 2005 and January 2008.
He was paid more than $120,000 in salary while he fought his termination over 23 hearing days -- including eight hearing days he spent on the stand testifying on his own behalf.
It wasn't until April 30, 2010 -- in a 123-page ruling -- that the judge cleared the way for Soleyn's dismissal.
He was fired on May 3 -- making him one of just 12 teachers terminated for incompetence last year, according to the substantiated cases made available to The Post.
Remarkably, that figure -- which excludes teachers who resigned or retired rather than face hearings -- is the highest it's been in years.
Several arbitrators interviewed by The Post said there were few options to avoid long hearings for cases of incompetence because of protections in the 3020-A statute.
In another lengthy case, failed Queens high-school teacher Ken Ping Teoh had been labeled "unsatisfactory" for four consecutive school years, starting in 2003-04.
The Department of Education's first attempt to boot Teoh resulted in a settlement in 2006, when she was fined $19,000 and mandated to undergo retraining.
What ensued was a slew of remediation efforts normally reserved for student teachers -- including full-time mentoring by an assistant principal and lesson modeling by master math teachers.
But several administrators continued to rate Teoh unsatisfactory -- including for making mathematical errors and not speaking in an audible tone.
Based on testimony documenting 114 examples of her poor work, the arbitrator concluded that Teoh "failed at the most rudimentary aspects of teaching . . . Her classroom management was awful and bordered on dangerous."
She was canned in December and declined comment.
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