Francisco Olivares was Declared Innocent of all Charges at 3020-a, But the Charges Must Remain in his Record, Appellate Court Rules

The case of Francisco Olivares is interesting because he was totally exonerated by the 3020-a panel of arbitrators only to have the NYC BOE appeal to the New York State Commissioner to overturn the panel's decision, find Mr. Olivares guilty, and terminate him. The New York City BOE lost their appeal, fortunately. See the decision linked below.

However, all is not rosy. Mr. Olivares, now declared innocent of all charges, asked that the files held at the Administrative Trials Unit about the false allegations be expunged from his record. The Appellate Court said no.


Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Removing information about disciplinary charges from an employee’s records

Removing information about disciplinary charges from an employee’s records
Olivares v Board of Educ. of the City School Dist. of the City of New York, 39 A.D.3d 230

Francisco Olivares, a tenured teacher employed by the New York City Department of Education (DOE), sued in effort to have references to misconduct charges filed against him that had been dismissed expunged from the files of the DOE’s Administrative Trial Unit (ATU).

Olivares contended that removal of such information from his records is required by Education Law §3020-a(4)(b).

The Appellate Division disagreed, ruling that the Education Law does not require DOE to expunge references to dismissed charges from the ATU files, since those files are not “employment records” within the meaning of Education Law §3020-a(4)(b).[1]

In addition, said the court, 8 NYCRR Appendix I, requires the ATU to maintain records of dismissed disciplinary proceedings and charges for a minimum of three years after a final decision has been rendered.

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[1] Education Law §3020-a(4)(b) provides: (b) Within fifteen days of receipt of the hearing officer’s decision the employing board shall implement the decision. If the employee is acquitted, he or she shall be restored to his or her position with full pay for any period of suspension without pay and the charges expunged from the employment record. If an employee who was convicted of a felony crime specified in paragraph (b) of subdivision two of this section, has said conviction reversed, the employee, upon application, shall be entitled to have his pay and other emoluments restored, for the period from the date of his suspension to the date of the decision.

By Harvey Randall, Esq. on Tuesday, January 22, 2008

One way that you can end up in a re-assignment room is by not obtaining any Individualized Special Education plans and 504 programs from your Principal. When or if some parent becomes dissatisfied with the school, school personnel, administrators, or other person, and complains, the Principal will accuse the teacher of wrong-doing.

Be prepared! Get the IEPs/504 plans of your students!

DOE violates state special ed law, union says
Jan 17, 2008 6:08 PM
NY Teacher

The UFT has called upon New York State officials to investigate the Department of Education’s “widespread failure” to comply with a state law designed to help students with disabilities.

The union charges the DOE with “systemic and ongoing” violation of Education Law 4402(7), which requires the administration to ensure that each regular education teacher, special education teacher and related service provider responsible for implementing a disabled student’s Individualized Education Program receives a copy of it before it’s put into action.

“A teacher who works with a disabled student is supposed to have a copy of that student’s IEP – plain and simple,” said UFT Vice President for Special Education Carmen Alvarez. “How can educators be expected to help a student learn if they don’t have the specific information they need to guide their instruction?”

In October and November 2007, the union surveyed chapter leaders to determine whether all appropriate staff members in their schools receive copies of the IEPs of the special education students they teach, serve or work with.

Chapter leaders from 415 schools reported that copies of IEPs were not provided to all general and special education teachers and related service providers responsible for executing the student programs. In addition, chapter leaders from 549 schools reported that paraprofessionals who assist in helping students with disabilities did not have access to the IEPs of the students they work with.

Survey results were recently sent by the union to the State Education Department. The union wants the SED to step in and direct the DOE to inform its relevant offices and special education administrators of the requirements of the law, and has further asked the state to require that principals be held accountable by certifying in writing that they are in compliance.

January 21, 2008
New York Measuring Teachers by Test Scores
By JENNIFER MEDINA, NY TIMES

New York City has embarked on an ambitious experiment, yet to be announced, in which some 2,500 teachers are being measured on how much their students improve on annual standardized tests.

The move is so contentious that principals in some of the 140 schools participating have not told their teachers that they are being scrutinized based on student performance and improvement.

While officials say it is too early to determine how they will use the data, which is already being collected, they say it could eventually be used to help make decisions on teacher tenure or as a significant element in performance evaluations and bonuses. And they hold out the possibility that the ratings for individual teachers could be made public.

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward,” said Chris Cerf, the deputy schools chancellor who is overseeing the project. “If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

The effort comes as educators nationwide are struggling to figure out how to find, train and measure good teachers. Many education experts say that until teacher quality improves in urban schools, student performance is likely to stagnate and the achievement gap between white and minority students will never be closed. Other school systems, including those in Dallas and Houston as well as in the whole state of Tennessee, are also using student performance and improvement as factors in evaluating teachers.

The United Federation of Teachers, the city’s teachers’ union, has known about the experiment for months, but has not been told which schools are involved, because the Education Department has promised those principals confidentiality.

Randi Weingarten, the union president, said she had grave reservations about the project, and would fight if the city tried to use the information for tenure or formal evaluations or even publicized it. She and the city disagree over whether such moves would be allowed under the contract.

“There is no way that any of this current data could actually, fairly, honestly or with any integrity be used to isolate the contributions of an individual teacher,” Ms. Weingarten said. “If one permitted this, it would be one of the worst decisions of my professional life.”

New York invited principals from hundreds of elementary and middle schools with sufficient annual testing data to participate in the program, which will produce an elaborate stream of data on 2,500 teachers.

In 140 schools — a tenth of the roughly 1,400 in the system — teachers are being measured on how many students in their classes meet basic progress goals, how much student performance grows each year, and how that improvement compares with the performance of similar students with other teachers.

In another 140 schools, principals are being asked to make subjective evaluations of roughly the same number of teachers so officials can see if the two systems produce widely disparate results. New York City schools employ roughly 77,000 teachers. In all 280 schools, the principals agreed to participate in the program.

Deputy Chancellor Cerf said that how students performed on tests would not be the only factor considered in any system to rate teachers. All decisions will include personal circumstances and experiences, he said, but the point will be to put a focus on whether or not students are improving.

“This isn’t about how hard we try,” Mr. Cerf said. “This is about however you got here, are your students learning?”

Ms. Weingarten said the system was not needed. “Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective,” she said. “These tests were never intended and have never been validated for the use of evaluating teachers.”

The experiment is in line with the city’s increasing use of standardized test scores to measure whether students are improving, and to judge school quality. A new bonus program for teachers and principals, as well as the letter grading system for schools unveiled last fall, are all linked to improvement in scores. Nationally, too, school systems are increasingly relying on these measures to judge schools.

Virtually all education experts agree that finding high-quality teachers is critical to improving student learning, particularly in high-poverty urban areas, where good teachers are usually more difficult to find. Recent research has found that the best teachers can help struggling students catch up to more advanced students within three years.

But experts are grappling with how to determine what makes a good teacher. Neither graduate programs in education schools nor previous academic records are reliable predictors, they say. The federal No Child Left Behind law requires that districts place a “highly qualified” teacher in every classroom, which typically means one who has completed a certification program, but this, too, is not necessarily a good indicator of quality.

“It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom,” said Thomas J. Kane, a professor of education and economics at Harvard, who is conducting several research projects on teacher quality in New York City, and who is involved in the new effort.

Mr. Kane said there was little evidence that teachers with the “right paper qualifications” were any more effective than those without them. “But most school districts spend very little time trying to assess how good teachers are in their first couple of years, when it is most important,” he said.

Nationwide, more than 95 percent of teachers receive tenure within their first three years of teaching, according to some studies. And once teachers receive tenure, it is extremely difficult to have them removed from classrooms.

In some sense, New York’s effort to judge teachers partly on their students’ improvement is a logical extension of the grading system for schools that was unveiled last fall, although officials adamantly say they have no plans to assign letter grades to individual teachers.

“I don’t think anyone here would embrace the formulaic use of even the most sophisticated instrument — you get tenure if this, you don’t get tenure if that,” Mr. Cerf said.

He added that the new effort was just one of several ways in which the city was exploring how to evaluate and improve teacher quality. In recent months, city officials have begun training new lawyers to help principals navigate the considerable red tape required to remove inadequate teachers.

They have increased recruiting efforts to attract talented teachers to hard-to-staff schools. And they are allowing schools to earn merit bonus pools to distribute to teachers based on test scores.

“This should simply be one more way to think about things,” said Frank A. Cimino, the principal of P.S. 193 in Brooklyn, who said he was participating in the experiment. “It is going to tell you some things you don’t know, but it will miss the other things that go on in a classroom.”

William Sanders, a researcher in North Carolina who was one of the first to begin evaluating teachers and schools based on student test score improvements, said that while such a system could be used to make broad judgments, it was difficult to use it with precision enough to find differences among teachers who are simply average.

“Can you distinguish the top teachers? Yes,” Mr. Sanders said. “Can you distinguish the bottom teachers? The answer is yes, too. But it would be risky to make decisions using information at the classroom level for teachers who are just in the middle. You might miss a lot that way.”

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors.

Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

The two-page report for each teacher examines information both from one year and over three years. The information also compares the teacher with all other teachers in the city, and with teachers who have similar classrooms and experience levels. The second part of the report measures how well a teacher does with students with different skill levels, showing, for example, whether the teacher seems to work well with struggling students.

Mr. Cerf said officials expected to decide by the “early summer” whether they would use the analysis to evaluate individual teachers for tenure or other decisions, and if so, how they would do so. Such a decision would undoubtedly open up a legal battle with the teacher’s union.