Updating this recent post, Dave Andreatta at the NY Post this morning provides the final tally on teachers who received "unsatisfactory" ratings from their principals last school year.

Despite theories from angry factions within the UFT that believed the new teacher contract signed last fall would lead to a massive increase, the number of U-ratings handed out by principals was 981 - just a slight 2.5% increase over the previous year. The real increase comes when you compare this year's number to the 2002-03 school year (when Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein took over the school system.) Looked at through that window, the number of annual U-ratings has increased a whopping 70.6%.

So it's hard to hard to blame the new contract here if you are one of those people who believes there is no such thing as an unsatisfactory teacher.

The story quotes UFT President Randi Weingarten saying that there were spikes at specific schools, however. She blamed those spikes on new principals coming from the city's Leadership Academy, suggesting they have a thing against experienced teachers.

(Side note: Several years ago I sat in on a session for new principals that was run by the Leadership Academy. It featured DOE lawyers explaining to principals how to conduct teacher evaluations so that their U-ratings would hold up before an arbitrator. Dot the 'I's, cross the 'T's, that sort of thing. Despite the outrage in some quarters about this kind of lesson being blatantly anti-union, the very essence of the instruction revolved around how to work WITHIN the existing contract negotiated between the city and the UFT. It was not, so far as I could tell from the cheap seats in the back of the room, a lesson in how to work AROUND the contract. Big difference, ainah?)

What I do think will be interesting to see in NYC this year as a result of the new UFT contract, however, is what happens to excessed teachers that nobody wants working in their schools. From what I understand (and I'm sure if this is wrong I will hear about it within 15-minutes!) principals are no longer required to bump less senior teachers out of their buildings to accommodate dead weight with seniority that has been dropped on their laps because somebody else didn't want them. This could result in a comparatively unusual amount of workforce stability in the next 5-6 weeks in city schools, but it could also result in a massive pool of unwanted teachers with no classrooms in which to work.

Could be a nice problem to have?

PS - I don't think it is entirely fair or accurate to label the uptick in U-Ratings as an "alarming trend" as the Post's graphic above does. Put in a context that even many of Bloomberg/Klein's detractors will acknowledge, this clearly has more to do with a concerted effort to evaluate the contributions of the workforce than any increase in the number of bad teachers in the system. It is also worth noting that we're still talking about less than 1,000 teachers out of 80,000 in the city.