The Albuquerque teachers union recently fired back on district expectations for educators. Now, the grievance is facing criticism.

Last month, Albuquerque Public Schools officials sent out a memo to educators that outlined instructional expectations for teachers for the 2023-2024 school year.

The goal behind the memo, they said, was to “align our grading practices so they are clear, equitable, and consistent,” and many of the expectations have to do with how teachers grade students and communicate with their parents.

But not everyone was happy with the memo. Specifically, the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, which has a bargaining unit over 6,250 educators strong, said the memo had “impermissible, unilateral changes” that violated the teachers’ contract, and filed a grievance July 31 disputing many of those changes.

“What the memo addresses should be joint goals — how can we best assess students’ work, assign grades, and communicate with parents. And I know that when we work together, we’ll come up with the best answer,” union President Ellen Bernstein told the Journal.

“It’s the teachers who know how best to assess student work, assign grades, and communicate with parents,” she added. “I believe we would be more successful and productive if we figured it out together.”

Issues raised in the grievance — which has drawn criticism in recent weeks — include claims that APS violated the teachers’ contract by suppressing educators’ ability to exercise their professional judgment in teaching and by forcing teachers to communicate with parents in ways that are impractical, “unworkable” or against their contract.

The filing of the grievance just means APS and the union will get together in front of a district hearing officer to formally hash out their differences, Bernstein said. Nothing’s been scheduled yet, she said, but added APS has until Friday to respond to the grievance.

In an email, district spokeswoman Monica Armenta said “APS doesn’t comment on pending litigation,” and did not grant an interview centered only on the intent of the memo. Bernstein said it “would be inappropriate” to discuss specific issues raised in the grievance.

Some, however, have hit back on the union’s grievance, especially homing in on its argument against APS requiring teachers to “proactively notify parents” if their student is in danger of failing a class.

“I think the one thing that everyone agrees on is that strong partnership between parents and teachers is critical for the success of students,” said Amanda Aragon, executive director of the education advocacy organization NewMexicoKidsCAN. “So to see that there’s any amount of pushback of … identification of kids that might fail was really shocking to me, and, I think, very counterproductive.”

In its grievance, the union said the district’s proactive notification requirement violates the teachers’ contract, which says that if a high school anticipates a student may fail a class, they must provide a list of all such students to principals so the students can be scheduled for credit recovery.

Bernstein added that first and foremost, the grievance is about affirming the professional expertise of teachers, not about shirking their responsibilities to families.

“The most important thing that teachers do besides planning and preparing lessons is assessing students’ work and communicating with parents,” Bernstein said. “There is nothing about this grievance that denies how important those responsibilities are.”

“I don’t want anybody to think this grievance is about not doing the work. It’s about who is in charge of how I do that work,” she added.

Other issues raised by the union include:

Questions about whether language in the memo would require that teachers use the district’s student information access system, ParentVUE, to communicate with parents over other forms of communication. ATF argues such a requirement would violate the teachers’ contract, and that teachers know best how to communicate with parents.

• Disputing a requirement for middle and high school teachers to weight cumulative grades as 90% semester coursework and 10% end-of-semester exams, arguing such a mandate violates teachers’ responsibility, as established in their contract, to evaluate student progress and interpret grades.
• An argument, again citing the student evaluation language in the contract, that a requirement by the district for elementary educators to communicate students’ progress via the electronic gradebook would be “not merely impractical but essentially unworkable” because of system overload and the unique grading and lessons used by elementary-level teachers.

The ATF said in its grievance that weeks before the memo was released, top union officials reached out to Chief of Schools Channell Segura at least twice about the memo, but that “no consideration seems to have been given to the messages.”

The district’s “unilateral” changes also violate the New Mexico Public Employee Bargaining Act, the union argued, because that act requires the impact professional and instructional decisions made by employers have to be a subject of bargaining.

The grievance calls for the district to “immediately (rescind)” every part of the memo the union says violates the negotiated agreement.

The ATF also called for APS to cancel an early-August training — which Bernstein said took place anyway — for elementary homeroom teachers, which they say wasn’t included in training sessions the district and union had previously agreed on for that time.