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If you’ve noticed that your blog reader filled up today with the headline “Why teachers like me support unions,” it’s no coincidence — it’s part of a national teacher-led effort to share why they joined a union and what it means for their teaching.

Teachers from around New York City — and the country — have taken up the call to blog today in support of their unions, or to spread their message through other forms of social media. Bronx Lab School teacher and GothamSchools Community section contributer Stephen Lazar is one of the organizers of the initiative, which they’ve dubbed the #EDUSolidarity project.

In his post today, Lazar explains that union protections prevent great teachers from losing their jobs for arbitrary reasons. But it’s more than that, he writes:

I need the protection of my union and my tenured due process rights to consistently improve and innovate as a teacher. I am a very good teacher right now by any measurable objective standard, including that of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards who certified me two years ago, as well as by the subjective account of anyone who has ever observed me.  On my best days, I am great and every year, there are more and more of these days.

But here’s why I need tenure to get better: I need to be able to try new things to better improve my students’ learning.  If I did the same thing this year that I did last year, my students’ growth would stagnate.  This means taking risks.

New things do not always go well; most of the new things I try work, but some don’t.  By being able to try new things, over time, I am constantly improving in my ability to serve my students, bringing me ever closer to the sustained greatness to which I aim.

If I had to worry about arbitrary dismissal as an “at-will” employee, I would not have tried many of the great things I do.  I would continue doing what I have always done because it is safe.

Lazar isn’t the only city teacher speaking out today: Miss Eyre, Lynne Winderbaum, Mr. A Talk and a number of teachers at EdWize are just a few of those who’ve already posted their essays. The full list of posts from around the United States can be found here.

• Budget director Mark Page says the city may still cut education budgets by 2 percent. (Bloomberg)
• Diane Ravitch critiques Pres. Obama for endorsing the lion’s share of No Child Left Behind. (Newsweek)
• Randi Weingarten says the common ground she shares with Joel Klein will drive achievement. (HuffPo)
• Fifth-graders with autism at Staten Island’s PS 4 don’t yet know where they will go to middle school. (SIA)
• Harry Potter fans are holding a book drive (called “Accio Books”) for a Bed-Stuy charter school. (Patch)
• More advice from Stephen Lazar on how to combat the problem of teacher turnover. (GS Community)
• Conflicts over N.J. school budget cuts are being fueled by opposition to charter schools. (Star-Ledger)
• Pensions, not charters, are the real reasons for school budget cuts, says an advocate. (Centerpoint)
• Chicago’s new mayor’s goal for the schools: students focused on studies, not safety. (NPR)
• How Michelle Rhee is leading the charge nationally to remove low-performing teachers. (NYMag)
• Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan spent the day in Delaware, celebrating Race to the Top’s birthday. (Flypaper)

• The city earns millions from out-of-town students who pay tuition to attend school here. (Daily News)
• An analysis of the mayor’s budget showed decreasing spending on classrooms. (GS, DN)
• City officials say it’s good that schools can buy data programs to fill in ARIS’ gaps. (NY1)
• The city comptroller plans to audit two of the city’s ambitious technology programs. (GothamSchools)
• A lawsuit alleges that partitions in school gymnasiums are unsafe for children. (Wall Street Journal)
• The New York Times urges Albany to extend the surcharge on high-earners to mitigate cuts to schools.
• Public disapproval of Cathie Black could hinder the mayor’s third-terms education agenda. (Post)
• N.J. gov. Chris Christie said a Newark schools chief would likely not be appointed until May. (WSJ)
• A member of District 1′s parent council was arrested for threatening to burn down a school. (Post, NY1)
• An 11-year-old was arrested for bringing a loaded pistol to his Queens elementary school. (Post)

Spending going directly to schools would decrease along with the number of teachers in the city, while spending on instructional administration, transportation, and school food would all increase if Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed 2012 budget is passed.

Those are among the findings of an analysis of the mayor’s proposed 2012 budget released by the Independent Budget Office today.

The budget also calls for cutting spending on general education and special education instruction by between 1 and 2 percent and making large cuts to funds for school facilities and safety. The cuts to classroom spending include the loss of more than 6,000 teaching positions, with more than 4,600 of those positions lost through layoffs.

Meanwhile, spending on the DOE’s central administration would grow by 10 percent from this school year, though it would still be lower than it was between 2005 and 2010.

The IBO analysis also predicts that the city will have a slightly smaller surplus to roll over into next year than the Bloomberg administration has estimated, $2.9 billion compared to the mayor’s estimate of $258 million more. The surplus has attracted attention from the teachers union, which points to its existence to argue that the mayor shouldn’t have to lay off teachers.

But the analysis shows that neither surplus would be enough to use to plug the projected 2012 shortfall. (more…)

For months, Department of Education employees have been trying to mobilize parents to public meetings and to sign petitions in support of city political goals, parent coordinators said today.

Evidence of that effort came to light yesterday after a staff member of the DOE’s parent outreach office distributed a petition to hundreds of parent coordinators urging state lawmakers to abolish the current seniority-based teacher layoff system. City officials renounced the petition and said that political organizing would stop going forward.

But parent coordinators from schools in Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens said today that the Office of Family Information and Action’s push to have parent coordinators politically mobilize parents began months ago and that the message was spread by several OFIA staffers. The coordinators spoke on condition of anonymity to protect their positions at their schools.

In January, OFIA held a parent organizing workshop for parent coordinators in Manhattan. Staffers did not mention advocating against the current layoff system at that meeting, said a parent coordinator who shared detailed notes taken at the session. Instead, staff focused on asking the coordinators to build relationships with satisfied parents who would be willing to show support for the DOE at Panel for Educational Policy meetings.

“I felt like I was in the Twilight Zone, honestly, and I didn’t really trust my own ears, so I wrote things down,” the parent coordinator said.

OFIA officials said that they were frustrated that the panel meetings — which have been frequently contentious — have been dominated by parents angry at city policies. OFIA staff encouraged parent coordinators to bring “Happy Harry” parents to citywide meetings, according to the parent coordinator’s notes, rather than “Angry Sally” parents. (more…)

• City and union officials have not discussed teacher evaluations since January. (Daily News)
• City principals are spending $2 million this year on a private alternative to ARIS. (NY1)
• Just 17 percent of voters approve of Chancellor Cathie Black, according to a new poll. (Post)
• City officials apologized for trying to recruit parent coordinators to lobby. (GS, WSJ, DN, NY1)
• Several principals told Black yesterday that it needs to be easier to remove bad teachers. (WNYC)
• Gov. Cuomo’s proposed school cuts are unconstitutional, argues the leader of the CFE lawsuit. (DN)
• More high-achieving students are opting for CUNY over private colleges. (Daily News)
• A Brooklyn principal attributes high test scores to a mentoring program. (Daily News)
• Parents at Brooklyn Heights’ P.S. 8 want to expand it to a middle school. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A bill to end tenure for new teachers in Florida is headed to the governor for signature. (Times)

An office inside the Department of Education improperly recruited its employees to lobby against the state’s seniority-based layoff system, city officials acknowledged today.

Staff at the city’s Office of Family Information and Action asked hundreds of parent coordinators to distribute a petition urging state lawmakers to abolish the current layoff system. In the e-mail, an OFIA staffer asked parent coordinators to gather signatures from parents and other members of their school communities and return them to the DOE. The e-mail message went out to nearly 400 of the 1,000 parent coordinators around the city.

The petition asks state lawmakers to “allow the City to keep it’s [sic] most effective teachers by ending the State’s ‘Last-In, First-Out’ policy, allowing teachers to be retained based on their performance, rather than just seniority.”

The message, which was first reported this morning by the teacher activist Norm Scott, echoes the position of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black, who have made ending the seniority-based layoffs this year a chief political goal. The city teachers union strongly opposes ending the system and has argued that the city should instead focus its lobbying efforts on fighting budget cuts.

DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said that the petition had not been approved by top city officials.

“While we strongly encourage parents to speak out on issues concerning their children’s education, it was not appropriate for Department of Education staff to prescribe a specific solution for parent coordinators, or parents, to advocate,” Ravitz said in a statement. (more…)

The city is putting in new measures to help the schools that it is closing, the Department of Education’s top deputy said yesterday.

Those measures, which include formalizing the city’s plans to support the schools and developing best practice guidelines for closing schools, come in response to criticism from the Panel For Educational Policy and others, Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky told GothamSchools.

But parents and teachers should still monitor the city’s progress and hold the department accountable, he told people attending a public meeting in Brooklyn last night organized by City Councilman Brad Lander.

The exchange took up just a few minutes of a two-hour meeting that focused on the effect of testing on city classrooms and on Polakow-Suransky’s hopes for new tests based on national standards.

At the meeting, Ann-Marie Henry-Stephens, an assistant principal and English teacher at Paul Robeson High School, one of the schools that the city plans to phase out, asked Polakow-Suransky how the city planned to better support teachers.

“The teachers who are at my school or at any school really don’t feel supported by the DOE — when is the DOE going to treat us as equals and treat us with some professional courtesy?” Stephens asked, prompting applause from the audience of teachers and parents. She continued:

Right now, we have a new evaluation system, we are hearing about layoffs, the Teacher Data Initiative. A lot of what you are doing and saying to teachers is punitive, and we want support because it’s really hard, there’s so much to learn, so much to do…. So really, when are we going to get the support especially in schools that are struggling?…Schools are struggling and they’re crying out for help, but we don’t get the help, we get evaluated.

Polakow-Suransky responded:

I think you’re right that there’s not been consistent set of supports for the schools that are phasing out as part of the process of creating new schools. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor Andrew Cuomo agree that the state should abandon the “last-in, first-out” layoff system — they have just differed about the appropriate time. Over the weekend, state Republicans who support Bloomberg’s plan proposed a compromise: use their criteria for layoffs now and the governor’s for layoffs starting next year.

The new language was included in a budget proposal that Republicans introduced in both the Senate and the Assembly on Saturday. It incorporates Cuomo’s proposal to speed up implementation of the state’s new teacher evaluation system and proposes to use that system to determine layoffs beginning next year. But if layoffs happen this year, then they would proceed according to criteria that are very similar to those in the original Senate bill, which was introduced by State Senator John Flanagan.

The bill addresses two perceived shortcomings of both Cuomo’s plan and the original bill that the State Senate passed two weeks ago. City officials attacked Cuomo’s proposed bill — which relies on new evaluations that would have to be negotiated in part by local districts in their unions — arguing that stalled negotiations could delay implementation of a new layoff system for months if not years. The new proposal calls for an arbitrator to rule if the district and union have not agreed on a plan 90 days before the start of the school year. (more…)

Data released by the Department of Education today.

The city gave a glimpse today into the results of its new sped-up process for terminating teachers, the one that the Bloomberg administration said would put an end to the teacher holding pens known as rubber rooms.

The rubber rooms are technically gone; now, most teachers charged of incompetence or misconduct await verdicts in real schools and do administrative work. But the city failed to meet its goal of erasing the “backlog” of teachers who had been removed from their classrooms by the beginning of this calendar year. Roughly 11 percent of the teachers who made up the backlog — 83 out of 744 — are still waiting for their cases to wrap up.

Of those who have completed the process, nearly two-thirds of the teachers charged with misconduct or incompetence have returned to their classes, according to data released today by the Department of Education. Some were cleared of charges; others were fined or assigned additional training or counseling.

Roughly a quarter of those who began the termination proceedings are no longer in schools. Some were fired, and others either were forced to retire or resign.

The new numbers come at a time of heightened tension between the city and its teachers union over how to identify bad teachers and remove them from classrooms. (more…)