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The Brooklyn KIPP school I’ve been focusing on isn’t the only KIPP school likely to get its first-ever labor contract, courtesy of the United Federation of Teachers. The teachers union is also pushing to negotiate a labor contract on behalf of teachers at KIPP Infinity, a middle school that got one of two of the highest grades in the city on the Department of Education’s progress reports last school year.

While the teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn asked to be represented by the union, the teachers at KIPP Infinity are in a different situation. Randi Weingarten, the president of the union, told me on the phone today that the union has represented Infinity’s teachers for a while, as part of a deal through which the union provided them with health benefits through something called a “welfare fund.” (Not sure what that is.) But the union’s relationship with Infinity did not extend into the more confrontational territory of helping the teachers develop a labor contract.

Today, the union’s secretary, Michael Mendel, informed Infinity’s board members that the union wants to go there and negotiate a labor contract. Here’s the letter he wrote explaining the union’s intentions. What I’m not clear on is what sparked the union to push for a contract at Infinity: Did teachers ask for this, or was it a separate push by the union?

Per request, I’m uploading the letters the KIPP charter school teachers in Brooklyn wrote explaining their decision to form a union. A tiny, wonderful detail enclosed within: In their organizing efforts they apparently used the e-mail address yeswecan.brooklynteachers@gmail.com.

Read the letters here (PDF). Here’s a visual for the PDF-shy of the e-mail the KIPP AMP teachers sent to other KIPP teachers in the city:

And the end of the e-mail, with that amazing gmail address they created:

The logo from KIPP AMP's web site.

If I hadn’t spent the last several hours in a meeting, I would have conveyed this dramatic news sooner: Teachers at one of the country’s most prominent charter school networks, KIPP, have decided to buck their board members‘ skeptical attitudes towards teachers unions — and organize.

Fifteen of 20 teachers at KIPP AMP in Brooklyn, a middle school, today sent a letter to the school’s board of trustees declaring their intention to form a union with the United Federation of Teachers. The president of the union, Randi Weingarten, signed the letter.

In letters to fellow city teachers, the KIPP AMP teachers explain that they want to “create a more sustainable culture so that we can better serve our students and reduce teacher turnover.” They said they’re asking for a “basic contract” that sounds, in their short description, kind of like the slim, tenure-less Green Dot contract: Administrators would have to prove “just cause” before firing a teacher, and discipline would follow a graduate scale, including measures to support struggling teachers.

The union also announced today that teachers at a second KIPP charter school, KIPP Infinity, would like to enter collective bargaining talks. KIPP Infinity’s teachers were already represented by the union, in an agreement that guaranteed them health insurance and other benefits, but now want to negotiate a job contract. In a letter released today, UFT official Michael Mendel asked KIPP Infinity’s board for detailed information on the school’s employees and their salary and benefits details.

The two moves represents a dramatic victory for the UFT, which has been campaigning to bring charter school teachers into its fold for at least the last year. (more…)

Dan Weisberg, the Department of Education’s chief labor negotiator, will leave the job this month, opening up a hole for who will lead contract talks this August.

Weisberg is heading to The New Teacher Project, the nonprofit founded by Michelle Rhee that works with school districts to help them recruit new teachers (they manage the Teaching Fellows here). TNPT is also a kind of think tank, studying teacher job markets around the country and recommending ways to improve them (think their work on the Absent Teacher Reserve). The latter will be Weisberg’s focus. His position is vice president for research and policy.

At DOE, Weisberg led efforts to raise the quality of teachers by making the process of getting tenure more strict. He also negotiated the latest contracts with the teachers and principals unions, which dramatically changed the way teachers are hired by creating a more open-market system, and he worked to strike deals to bring performance pay to both principals and teachers. One of my favorite Weisberg interviews was his defense of the “rubber rooms” on This American Life, the radio show.

Weisberg said on the telephone just now that his departure is purely personal; it has nothing to do with Chancellor Joel Klein’s reorganization of his senior staff. He said he’s working with top aides to Klein to help pick his successor.

Arne Duncan meeting the Senate.

Here‘s where you can see it happen.

Right now, Barbara Boxer’s saying she likes Duncan and intends to support him.

• A change to the way state tests are scored means schools will have to hire substitutes. (Daily News)
• The Hebrew language charter school got one step closer to opening yesterday. (Times)
• More than 10 Catholic schools will close in June. (Times, Post, Daily News)
• Schools are anticipating extra absences on Inauguration Day. (Daily News)
• For better or worse, NCLB will be one of President Bush’s legacies. (Christian Science Monitor)
• Arne Duncan’s tenure in Chicago was mostly positive, according to the Chicago Tribune.
• Even though he never taught, Arne Duncan always cared about kids. (AP)
• School districts are lining up to ask for slices of Obama’s forthcoming stimulus package. (USA Today)

• A professor in Chicago argues Arne Duncan is the wrong choice for education secretary.
• RiShawn biddle says the real school wars will be figuring out how to pay for pensions (or scrap them).
• Sara Mead has pre-K questions for Arne Duncan’s confirmation hearings tomorrow.
• Eduwonkette is aghast at performance pay for professors.
• A guide to how to watch the inauguration from school, from the Innovative Educator.
• Helen Zelon says the Hebrew charter school proposal looks solid.

Remember that Daily News story last January about the kindergartner who threw a tantrum at school and then ended up getting sent to a psychiatric ward? Well, the New York Civil Liberties Union believes that there are more cases like it, and it is now filing a lawsuit against the NYPD, which manages school cops, to find out exactly how many more cases there are.

Here’s one piece of information included in the lawsuit (PDF) that is one of the NYCLU’s reasons for being suspicious:

Upon information and belief as many as 25 of the 76 child adolescent visits in January 2008 to a Staten Island Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program were referred by schools.

NYCLU requested records that would list all times that city school students were sent by the NYPD to psychiatric hospitals. The NYPD — big shocker here for anyone who’s ever tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to squeeze documents relating to public school students — refused to give the records. The lawsuit is a challenge demanding the records. It will be interesting to see what the NYCLU finds.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (via Flickr)

The New York Post’s headline today — “SILVER IS DISIN-KLEIN-ED” — is a fun, gossipy way of getting at a really important story.

The thing is, it’s not just Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Assembly, who doesn’t like Joel Klein. Many of Silver’s colleagues in the legislature are in the same boat. I first cataloged the grievances of a list of state senators and Assembly members in August. That was more than a year after an assemblyman from the Bronx, Ruben Diaz Sr., became the first public official to call on Bloomberg to fire Klein. Since then, I haven’t found any lawmakers who don’t complain about Klein. In fact, I’ve actually met one state senator, Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, who ideologically is in line with the administration, but opposes its reforms.

The best explanation for this bad blood that the Post provides is this one, from “an official who knows both men”: “You have two guys who both think they’re the smartest guy in the room. Those two guys aren’t going to like each other.”

But my understanding is that there’s more than personalities at play here. There’s a substantive difference in policy. (more…)

Something has happened to the charter school teacher who blogs at Mildly Melancholy that almost never happens at traditional public schools: She has been forced to resign.

This teacher has been writing about her tough school year since September (without revealing the school’s name). At a non-charter school, her misery would probably have proceeded apace until June, mainly unchanged. If tensions with the administration escalated, she might have sought help from the union. But as it happened, Mildly Melancholy — who began teaching in September 2004 — got miserable and then was surprised to find she got fired. She plans to quit teaching altogether.

Her account:

I knew something bad was coming, but I didn’t want to think it was real, and I didn’t think it would happen so soon. This week has been really awful in my classroom (and across the entire grade, actually). I haven’t been a happy person at this job, and I haven’t been a very effective teacher. So it’s actually kind of a big relief.

I was pretty shaken by how fast it all happened; within an hour I finished teaching my last class, signed the letter, surrendered my laptop, and was packing up my belongings.

Here you can read her description of her first, much more optimistic days teaching, at a middle school in Queens.