More teachers get low marks
BY KATHLEEN LUCADAMO, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

LINK

Nearly 1,000 city teachers were flunked by their principals this year - a 40% leap from last year - after orders from Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to weed out incompetents.
Klein had chided principals for dumping their lousy teachers on other schools, rather than giving them low marks on evaluations. "Someone who is not good enough to work with your students is not good enough to work with any other students," Klein wrote in an E-mail to principals last summer.

Principals often make quiet deals with bad teachers, promising them a satisfactory rating in their annual review if they agree to transfer. Last year, 679 teachers got failing grades; this year the number rose to 988, according to the Education Department. But the spike in bad grades is a sign of bad management, not flawed teachers, charged United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

Klein's chronic threats to teachers have lead to painfully low morale, she said. "The overheated rhetoric has just created a huge gulf between teachers and the Bloomberg administration," she said.

Jacqueline Rodriguez, a Spanish teacher at Lafayette High School in Brooklyn, was in tears when she received a career-blowing grade for frequent absences. The rookie was out with the flu for 17 days, which doctor's notes proved, she said. "The Education Department doesn't care about us. They want virtual slaves," Rodriguez said.

Weingarten wondered why more teachers were being punished when there were across-the-board gains in elementary school reading scores. "Teachers did a great job this year. I don't get it," she said.