Field testing allows test makers to gauge the value of future test questions. Pearson, the company that currently makes New York’s state tests, is preparing a slew of new questions that are aligned with new learning standards known as the Common Core. This spring’s field tests focus on science, math, or reading, depending on the grade level. Students in selected schools already took the science test in mid-May, which was for grades 4 and 8. The math and reading tests are scheduled for the first week of June.

The parents and teachers, who are part of the Change the Stakes coalition, are calling on parents to protest the testing, which will be administered on behalf of Pearson Education, the test publisher that famously drew criticism for the “pineapple” test questions on the state’s eighth-grade English exam in April.

“This is just research for the company,” said Tony Kelso, whose third-grader is supposed to take the reading field test at Amistad Dual Language School in Inwood.

Kelso added that he doubted Pearson would get useful information from the tests. “My understanding is that the tests aren’t even reliable. The students know they won’t count so they don’t take them seriously,” he said.

A small number of students opting out would be unlikely to affect the big picture that Pearson is seeking to draw from the field tests, according to Sean Corcoran, a New York University researcher who studies testing. “Since the test is given statewide, inferences about performances will largely be based on how students do relative to all test takers statewide. It would take a lot of students opting out to change this distribution.”

Unlike regular state tests, students will not find out how they’ve performed on the field tests. Instead, Pearson’s field tests are supposed to provide data to improve future tests, according a memo sent to superintendents and principals in March from Ken Slentz, the state’s Deputy Commissioner of P-12. Pearson landed a $32 million contract with the state in 2010 to produce elementary and middle school tests over five years.

But several parents want to know why their schools didn’t inform them about the stand-alone field tests.

“I found out about it through the grapevine,” said Kelso, who isn’t allowing his son to take the test. “I plan on calling every third grade parent to see if they will join me in writing a letter to the principal. I’m against these high stakes tests. It just results in teachers being forced to teach for the test.”

The protest is part of the grassroots organization’s campaign to reduce the culture of high stakes testing, which the organization said “distorts classroom curriculum” and emphasizes “mind-numbing” test preparation.

“I have seen my son go from being excited to being bored by school,” said Diana Zavala, who is involved with the Change the Stakes campaign. “This is all about making money for Pearson. They create the tests and study guides. This is a huge business for them.” Zavala was one of the parents who chose to opt of the state testing for their children this year but her son isn’t required to take the field test.

Other parents are questioning why a stand-alone field test is being administered when Pearson already embedded field questions in the state tests this year.

“I don’t think it’s fair,” said Jinnie Spiegler, whose daughter is in fourth grade and feels pressured to do well because the state tests influence which middle school she is admitted to. “They’re basically doing free pilot studies.” Her daughter class wasn’t selected to take the field test.

“The schools should inform parents and give us the option to opt out,” she said.

Children who opt out of the state tests are assessed on a portfolio of work instead. Unlike the state tests, there are no consequences for boycotting the field tests, according Matthew Mittenthal, the press secretary for the city’s Department of Education.

But there is no opt-out option for teachers like Lauren Cohen, who teaches the third grade at P.S. 63, a Lower East Side elementary school. Her students will take Pearson’s reading test during one class period.

“It’s hard because I feel like I’m caught between ethics in what I believe and my ethics that I need to be doing my job,” said Cohen.

Many of Cohen’s students receive special education services and struggled to sit through the 90-minute state tests in April, which were longer this year because of the embedded field questions.

“I definitely want to make it a stress-free situation for my kids,” added Cohen. “I’m not going to hide the fact that the field-test doesn’t count toward anything.”

“Personalized education” is the emphasis for the U.S. Department of Education’s third iteration of Race to the Top, a competitive grants program that launched in 2009. New York State won $700 million in the first year after legislators approved new teacher evaluation requirements and allowed more charter schools to open.

It’s an approach the city has embraced for years, providing data tools for schools to zoom in on each student’s weaknesses and creating an “Innovation Zone” that allows schools to restructure their space and time in a bid for stronger scores. The principal of Olympus Academy, an Innovation Zone school that allows students to progress at their own pace, appeared in Washington, D.C., today as part of the competition announcement.

But some of the federal government’s proposed eligibility criteria — including a requirement that school board members undergo formal evaluations — could make it tough for the city to qualify for the grants. Large cities could receive up to $25 million, or about .1 percent of the city Department of Education’s annual operating budget.

Perhaps most crucially, the city and its teachers union have spectacularly failed to adopt new teacher evaluations, despite commitments set out in the state’s first Race to the Top bid and in an application for a different federal program, School Improvement Grants. The latest competition requires that districts commit to having new evaluations in place by the 2014-2015 school year.

In line with previous Race to the Top rules, the proposed requirements also call for districts to get local union sign-off on their applications — something New York City has not been able to muster as the state has parceled out its federal funds. “If folks are at each other’s throats, we think it’s probably not the best investment to make,” U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said during a call with reporters today.

The proposed eligibility criteria also call for districts to commit to putting evaluation systems in place for superintendents and school boards — a requirement that would be anathema for districts, such as New York City, where those officials serve at the whim of the mayor.

When Mayor Bloomberg gained control over the city schools in 2003, he restructured the longstanding school board so that he appointed a majority of members and christened the new body the Panel for Educational Policy. Since then, the panel has served as a rubber stamp for Department of Education policy proposals.

Patrick Sullivan, a panel member who was appointed by the Manhattan borough president and regularly opposes mayoral policies, said state law requires school board members to advise the chancellor on policy matters.

“If a member simply shows up and votes as requested by the DOE without investigating the matter under consideration or even speaking at all then they’re not fulfilling their role,” Sullivan said. ”Most mayoral bloc members would fare poorly on any real evaluation rubric.”

The eligibility criteria are not set in stone. City officials said today that the Department of Education would submit feedback about the proposed criteria by the June 8 deadline and would wait for the final eligibility rules before deciding whether to apply.

Even though the Obama administration has just $400 million to hand out — a fraction of the $5 billion it awarded in 2010 — Duncan said the promise of the new program is “infinite” because districts would lay the groundwork for change during the application process, not upon receiving an award. To apply, districts will have to “scour their ranks” for top teachers, build consensus around new approaches to boosting student achievement, develop strategies to target every student population, and form implementation teams, he said.

At least 30 legislatures changed teacher evaluation laws during or after Race to the Top’s first two rounds in 2010, in which 11 states and Washington, D.C., ultimately took home federal funds.

The proposed rules for the latest competition make it open to any “local educational authority” with more than 2,500 students. Charter schools are LEAs but would have to band together in what the U.S. DOE is calling “consortia” to apply. The consortia can cross state lines, some some city schools might apply as part of their nonprofit networks, but others would have to work together if they want to seek the federal funds.

U.S. DOE officials said that while the technology-infused approach that Olympus Academy uses is one way to achieve the personalized learning requirement, creative uses of technology are by no means required to win. Neither is adoption of the Common Core learning standards, which 46 states have said they will begin using in the coming years. The only non-negotiable is that districts be willing to craft reforms that strike at the classroom level.

“We need to take classroom learning beyond a one-size-fits-all model and bring it into the 21st century,” Duncan said.

At the panel, held in Washington and broadcast online, Olympus’s principal, Seth Schoenfeld, said district-level support was crucial to carrying out his vision for a school based on a “blended learning” model. The city successfully lobbied the state to eliminate a longstanding “seat-time” requirement for blended learning courses.

“Without the whole city and state support we couldn’t be doing what we’re doing right now,” Schoenfeld said.

But he cautioned districts against rushing into the new opportunity without fully thinking their plans through. “Without a plan for scalability, there will be a lot of money used for four years without a lot of gain from it,” he said.

The Obama administration is aiming to release the application with final eligibility rules in July and will give districts until October to apply. It anticipates making 15 to 20 grants by the end of 2012.

Xuereb, a sixth grade math teacher at Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School, is among the city math teachers preparing to swap the state’s learning standards for the Common Core this fall. And like many, she is struggling to keep the two sets of standards straight as the new standards move some topics an entire grade-level earlier than in the past.

“A lot of what used to be sixth grade standards are now taught in fifth grade,” Xuereb said. “I feel that I’m going to have to be really mindful and cognizant of this in my planning for next year. The kids are going to have these huge gaps.”

New York City piloted the Common Core standards in 100 schools last year and asked all teachers to practice working with them this year. Next year, every teacher in every elementary and middle school will be expected to teach to the new standards, and state tests will be based on them. Department of Education officials have argued that a full-steam-ahead approach is required because moving slowly would deprive students of the Common Core’s long-overdue rigor.

But some say that this approach will pose a special challenge for math teachers, particularly in the middle school years, as students begin learning advanced concepts that build on each other sequentially. William Schmidt, an education professor at Michigan State University who has researched the effect of the Common Core on learning, said students who miss a lesson the first time around are at risk of missing the concept entirely.

“If it’s done really carefully it might work, but that would be my worry, that this would require fairly careful thought about how to do that across the grades so that what’s happening in one grade will line up with the next,” he said. ”If they’re not ramping this up from first grade on in a logical fashion … then the transition to more advanced math will be horrendous, too.”

The city has offered some help. Two weeks ago it published suggestions for topics teachers might tackle after the state tests, the last aligned to the old standards. And officials recently urged principals to use unused snow days in June as planning days for teachers preparing for the next phase of the rollout, which will feature two Common Core-aligned units and exams aligned to the content of the standards.

But some teachers say they have had to wait too long for clear direction. Molly Elverson, a seventh-grade math teacher at M.S. 228 in the Bronx, said she anticipates many stumbling blocks next year as she reconciles the new curriculum expectations with the realities of what students come to class prepared to learn.

“Integers are in seventh grade in New York State, [but] for Common Core, in sixth grade. So when do we start?” said Eleverson. “It’s all the logistics of it, figuring out when am I going to incorporate this, when am I going to have the time? And when am I supposed to assume they have learned it all?”

Similar shifts abound. For example, the Common Core tells teachers to move their units on computation with fractions  backwards, to fifth grade, even though that unit is now typically introduced in sixth grade. It also moves some concepts forward a year — such as the Pythagorean Theorem, which is taught in seventh grade but will be taught in eighth in the future.

Elverson said she feels fortunate to be part of a small math department of just three teachers who talk frequently. They have met as a group to discuss the rollout and agree upon when to teach integers and other concepts. But Department of Education resources to aid their discussion have been slow to arrive.

Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky said the city has helped schools as much as it can, given that the state has not yet released a “final blueprint” for next year’s math expectations or offered sample Common Core-aligned test questions. For the 80 percent of city schools that are still using the math curriculum the city mandated in 2003, the Common Core is going to mean radical changes, he said.

“It’s true that this is going to be a change in terms of the topics that are taught and the number of topics. Planning for that is difficult given that we don’t know all the information at this stage,” he said.

Polakow-Suransky said the city would be delivering more guidance to schools as it learns more. “I don’t know if it will be as early as everyone wants it to be but it will be before the end of the school year,” he said, adding that the department would allocate funding so schools can pay for curriculum planning sessions, ideally over the summer.

Xeureb said she would welcome the additional resources but is worried about waiting too long for them.

“What I do during my summers is I plan. If they don’t have a curriculum, that’s what I’m going to do this summer. I’ll have to sit down and really start doing it myself in July,” she said. “I can’t just take something and print it out — if they have a curriculum on the internet, I’m going to edit and revise it myself based on who the students are, so it would be nice to have it now, while we’re still in school and can plan as a department more easily.”

Xuereb and the other math teachers at WHEELS will attend a training conference held by the National Council for Teaching Math this summer, and she also devoted some time this school year to preparing her students for concepts that have been moved from seventh grade to sixth.

Tacking Common Core topics onto their existing curriculum increased Xuereb’s workload, but in some ways it was no different from what she does every year to get her students to the same starting point after they arrive with widely varying math backgrounds.

Indeed, some students have always arrived in class in September without adequate preparation, a reality that Josh Thomases, the city’s deputy chief academic officer for instruction, said justifies the city’s speedy Common Core rollout.

“As long as I have been an educator, there have been complaints from schools kindergarten through college about how their students are unprepared,” he said. “This work becomes more challenging in the face of a push towards understanding what it is to have standards. In this city, you can find examples of schools that are figuring this out, with the same resources as other schools, in really exciting ways.”

New York State is rolling out the Common Core in full earlier than many other states, but teachers elsewhere are being asked to adopt the new standards with even less preparation than city teachers are getting, according to Schmidt — making teachers across the country in for a rocky transition, he said.

“Any time you shift — and this is a fairly radical shift — there is no simple, easy way to do this,” Schmidt said. “It’s going to be hard on the kids, hard on the teachers, and when the first set of tests come out it’s going to be a miserable set of results. It’s all part of the process, and this is simply the best chance we have to give our students a good mathematics education.”

Already, teachers say the approach of next year’s Common Core-aligned tests have already wreaked havoc on their students.  Xuereb and Elverson both said questions on this year’s sixth- and seventh- grade exams threw students for a loop by asking them to complete tasks that under the current standards they weren’t expected to know.

“My kids kind of had breakdowns in the classroom because they saw a lot of these questions this year that I had never taught them because it was Common Core,” she said. “I know I had prepped my kids to say there are some field questions for next year, but you could see the effect on my students. They were visibly upset. It made me feel like they lost confidence in me a little bit.”

To avoid test anxiety and smooth the transition, Ryan Hall said teachers at his school, Williamsburg Collegiate Charter School, opted to align all of this year’s lessons to Common Core math standards. That practice-run far exceeds the city’s one-unit mandate, and he said they hoped it would leave students better prepared for high school, where the curriculum expectations are also changing, though more slowly.

“It was tough this year because I had so much more material to cover,” Hall said. “I taught every eighth-grade math standard, I taught every eighth-grade Common Core standard, and I’m trying to teach every ninth-grade algebra Regents standard.”

But he said no amount of planning will be able to compensate for the scale of the changes.

“The transitional years are really confusing because the Common Core is designed assuming a certain knowledge that [students] are coming into the grade with,” Hall said. “It is going to be pretty complicated for the next couple years, to ask, ‘what have they been exposed to, and what gaps will we need to fill anyway?’”

Danielle Boone at work in her U.S. History class.

Danielle Boone’s U.S. History class at Olympus Academy High School had just begun, but she didn’t need a teacher to tell her what to do. The glowing screen looking back at her told her everything she needed to know.

Boone typed out the final section of an assignment on immigration – “a FIVE-sentence summary paragraph (including analysis sentence) about immigration and urbanization” – which she emailed to her teacher, sitting nearby, for grading. She then watched a short video online about the Civil War to research her next assignment, an essay on the Transcontinental Railroad.

Boone will continue knocking off these assignments on her school-issued Mac computer at her own blistering pace until, finally, she’s completed what is required to pass the course and earn a credit. The day after she completes the last assignment for the U.S. History class, she’ll start working on another course she needs to pass to graduate.

“I’m a student who works fast and this school helps me get credits,” Boone said during a brief break in her work. “The faster you go, the faster you get credits.”

Boone is the kind of self-starter that city officials envisioned when they tasked Olympus Academy, a transfer school, with creating an online learning model in its school for its over-aged population two years ago.

Olympus is part of the iLearnNYC initiative, a division of the city’s Innovation Zone. Until now, the initiative, which included 124 schools this year, mainly provided technological resources to schools that were devising ways to mix traditional classroom instruction with online curriculum, an approach known as blended learning.

Next year, iLearnNYC will expand to nearly 200 schools and be reorganized around eight clusters that the DOE hopes will provide more support and help develop ideas for best practices. Olympus will lead one of the clusters, which will include 13 other transfer schools, in what DOE officials hope can chart a new way of educating the city’s over-aged student populations.

“We have seen over-aged and under-credited students make significant academic progress when they have access to a personalized online curriculum and out-of-classroom instruction,” said David Weiner, the Deputy Chancellor for Talent, Labor and Innovation.

When he founded the school in 2008, Principal Seth Schoenfeld designed a 17-credit trimester schedule to fast-track his students toward graduation. But after two years of using the schedule, he noticed that students were falling short in a key college-readiness measurement.

Nearly two years into the experiment, Schoenfeld and his staff are ready to declare the experiment a success. New York State Regent passing rates spiked in nearly every subject, and are up particularly in Living Environment and U.S. History. Credit accumulation among his most dedicated students is also up – Fifteen of 58 students who graduated last year would not have done so under the school’s old trimester model.

Students at Olympus, located in Canarsie, spend most of their day buried in their personal laptops, seated around large tables on the room. Many listen to music on headphones while they work, a practice Schoenfeld said teachers accept as long as students don’t also surf the web.

Students earn credits and diplomas on a rolling basis, based on how quickly and proficiently they complete the work. Curriculum consists of assignments worth anywhere from one to more than ten points. All classes are made up of 100 points.

Boone entered the school with 15 credits, but she has already doubled her credits this year. Another student, Stephanie Paulino, has moved at a slower clip but both said that the school’s online credit-tracking program kept them more focused on completing school work than at their previous schools.

“We would have to wait for the whole class,” Paulino, 17, said of her former high school. Paulino said that so far she’d earned eight credits during this school year after earning 16 over the previous three years.

Not all students have excelled and overall credit accumulation rates has actually fallen because many students have struggled to adapt to the new online curriculum.

“Not every student found it as easy,” Schoenfeld said. “But those students who were willing to push and engage in the new learning experience were able to be successful and we feel they’re better prepared to be successful for college and post-secondary work.”

U.S. History teacher Adrian Scott helps a student during class.

A Kurt Hahn student reads his personal story to a resident of a Brooklyn nursing home as part of a project aimed at building students' "fluency" in English.

Jes Kruse, an English as a second language teacher at a Brooklyn high school, wanted to boost her students’ “fluency” — their ability to read and write accurately, quickly, and with comprehension.

So she turned to the topic her students know best: themselves. Students wrote personal essays, many drawing on the disasters or conflicts that led them to the United States. Then they read the essays aloud to senior citizens living in a local retirement home and wrote “reflection” papers about their conversations.

Kruse has shared some of the essays and reflections today in the GothamSchools Community section. Here’s a taste of what Emmanuelle Desmourses, an immigrant from Haiti, wrote in her reflection:

While I was at the nursing home I read aloud and asked” does my story affect your life”?  One of them said, yes your story affected my life because when you finished reading it I felt so much pain about the event that happened to you. After I heard it I felt like it was me who was there during the earthquake. I asked one questions again “how did my story change your life? One of them answered me, yes your story change my life because after you read to us your story and you say how this moment was struggled for you and how you have courage to survive after that.

Kruse’s students will be reading aloud from their personal stories at the Crown Heights Library on Tuesday. They are also selling copies of a book of their essays, ”Stories That Changed Us Forever.” Proceeds from book sales will go into a scholarship fund for the students who worked on the project.

We love featuring students’ work. Let us know if you have students whose work deserves a wider audience.

In reflecting about my teaching with English language learners in the summer of 2011, I thought about inspiring the imagination of storytelling as bridge between the spoken word and the written word. Ultimately, as a teacher of English Language Learners, I am on a quest for fluency. Only by attaining proficiency in writing as well as speaking can we truly say a student is fluent in English. In my experience, the level of engagement has a significant impact on my students’ progress, and designing lessons that are consistently relevant and engaging to my students, has been both a challenge and inspiration to me.

So I designed a project in which my students would write their own stories. Working with graduate students in creative writing from Columbia University, my English as a Second Language students described their experiences leaving their families and home countries and living in the United States. Students read their stories aloud to seniors at the Cobble Hill Nursing Home, and we published a book of those stories, ”Stories That Changed Us Forever.” Proceeds from book sales will go into a scholarship fund for the students who worked on the project.

My guiding questions for myself for this project were: 1. How do adolescent immigrants find their voice in writing and in life? 2. What strategies engage students in using their voice to transform their writing, while also building confidence, strengthening literacy skills, and providing real audiences for their stories?

My guiding question for my students for this project was: What impact does my story have on peoples’ lives?

Below are excerpts from my students’ stories and from reflections that they wrote after reading their stories aloud.

After dinner, my brother went to his room to change his clothes, but he probably was looking at himself in the mirror.  I was in the kitchen, helping my mother clean up when suddenly, our house started wavering. It was like our house was being swallowed by the earth. We were really scared. My mother grabbed my hand, and the both of us were trying to get out of the house, but the building started to really shake. My skin was burning with fear. The dishes were dancing on the shelves and falling on my mother. At that moment, I knew it was an EARTHQUAKE. My mother started yelling “Jesus, protect us!’’. My brother ran toward us wearing only his underwear. The three of us collapsed in a corner of the room and we yelled together ‘’Jesus protect us!’’. As soon as we finished the sentence, the EARTHQUAKE stopped. Our next door relatives came and helped us to get out of the house.

By Darlie Firmin — Born in Haiti

I was in born in Ghana, which is in West Africa. I left my mom and her mother, my grandmother, when I was 5 years old. From that time I began a new life. My grandparents are the only parents I have ever known as parents, I grew up with them as parents. I never knew where my Mother was at while I was growing up. My Mother told my Pop’s parents to come and get me and take me to another country, Burkina Faso. All I know about my father is that he was living in New York for my entire childhood. My father left the country before I moved to Burkina Faso, he left in 1998. So I never got a chance to know my father. All I knew was what he looked like, I had a picture. After I left my Mother I didn’t know where she was or what she was doing.

By Adboul Zoure — Born in Ghana

“Dont worry” the black cars pass again but this time they stop and five black boys come out the car with a ak-47. Trison takes out a gun. Bruce drops on top of me I never saw Raquira, the gang  starts throwing bullet on us. I was so scared I peed myself.  I was crying and nervous, when everything stopped I was looking for Raquira and she was in a corner bleeding.

By Shanikua Barrows — Born in Panama

The morning of the day I found out my mother had cancer was the last day of school. I should’ve felt happy but instead I felt as if something bad was going to happen. I thought to myself that maybe the bad feeling was that I was going to have an argument with someone. When I got to school the feeling went away. I had forgotten all about it.

By Jackie Perez — Born in Puerto Rico

Reflections:

My story has impact on peoples’ lives. By asking other people their opinions about my story I found out that it affect their live, and have connection with it. At first I wasn’t sure about asking people for their opinion about my story, because I know that I wouldn’t like some of the answers that they might give me. We went to a nursing home to read our story to elderly, and ask them questions about it. Does my story have an impact on your life? I asked. Yes because you can remember the past, and write about it but I can’t do that the man answer. By hearing that I know that it affects him in a way because he can’t remember anything from when he was a child, and I was able to.

By Joaking Jean-Baptiste — Born in Haiti

It impact people’s lives by making connections with others. When I was in the nursing home I ask an adult: How do you feel now after you heard my story? After she listened to my story she feels good and my history is interesting and amazing and she also said that it’s important to learn about others peoples’ stories. The second question I asked is: Did you have any connection with my story? She did have connections with my story because a few days ago she lost her roommate. She had a connection with my story because my story is about my little brother who passed away. Isn’t easy to deal with someone that you know and this person gone forever. When someone gone people would ever see that person anymore. My story feels amazing to read to others and they also can learn a lot from my story, to never give up when you lost something that is really important to you.

By Kimberly Volcimus — Born in Haiti

My story changed people because when I read my story at the nursing home for the patients they said it’s emotional because my family could be in the same position as you. While I was at the nursing home I read aloud and asked” does my story affect your life”?  One of them said, yes your story affected my life because when you finished reading it I felt so much pain about the event that happened to you. After I heard it I felt like it was me who was there during the earthquake. I asked one questions again “how did my story change your life? One of them answered me, yes your story change my life because after you read to us your story and you say how this moment was struggled for you and how you have courage to survive after that. Now I would be brave like you and if will have an earthquake in N.Y I will remembered how you survived in Haiti. I felt so much pain and the other person said your story is emotional because your story has so much pain and suffering in it.

By Emmanuelle Desmourses — Born in Haiti

Jes Kruse is an English as a second language teacher at Kurt Hahn School for Expeditionary Learning in Brooklyn. Kruse’s students will be reading aloud from their personal stories at the Crown Heights Library on Tuesday. More information.

State Education Commissioner John King observes an English and Language Arts class at the Dual Language Middle School.

Hiring is set to resume at the 24 “turnaround” schools under an agreement city and union officials reached late Friday afternoon.

But the hiring decisions could be reversed if an arbitrator ultimately decides that the unions’ complaint — that the city is attempting to circumvent contractual hiring and firing policies at the schools — is valid.

The city teachers and principals unions sued to stop the hiring process, but on Wednesday, a State Supreme Court judge urged both sides to accept arbitration rather than pursue litigation. Today, the city and unions agreed “in principle” to seek arbitration, selected an arbitrator, and selected a first meeting date — June 5.

In the meantime, the city will continue the process of rehiring or replacing teachers at the schools — but will have to run the risk of having those decisions undone if the arbitrator rules in the unions’ favor.

The outcome of the contractual dispute could affect the state’s ability to approve those 24 schools for a pot of federal funds, Commissioner John King told reporters today.

King said he is still hoping to decide about the city’s applications for federal School Improvement Grant funding at the 24 schools in early June. But he also cautioned that the city might not be able to fulfill some of the promises made in the applications if the city-union dispute prohibits the city from carrying out its plans for the schools.

To be eligible for School Improvement Grants, “turnaround” schools are typically expected to meet a rigid set of expectations, including replacing veteran school leaders and replacing half their teaching staffs or more.

“In order to be able to do the turnarounds as they described it, they’ll need to get a resolution to the litigation,” King said. “One of the challenges is the level of discord between the city and the UFT. I think it is incumbent on both to figure that out.”

King said another area of the applications he is looking closely at is what programs the schools promise to offer students next year and beyond.

“Certainly in the School Improvement Grant program the idea is to match the spending to the needs of the students. As we look through the applications, we are looking for whether or not the city has good, clear plans for programs at the schools that will meet the needs of the student population,” he said.

But an agreement on new teacher evaluations would be a more straightforward path toward federal funding, King said.

“I think the best thing for the city will be if they can move forward on an evaluations deal with the UFT so they can access not only the School Improvement Grant funds but also some of the other Race to the Top funds,” he said.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said yesterday that the city would prefer a teacher evaluation deal but would pursue other initiatives to improve teacher quality even without one.

Some critics of Walcott’s new proposals called them a distraction from the more pressing need for a teacher evaluation system. King’s response was more sympathetic.

“They’re in a difficult spot. The city wants to move forward on the teacher effectiveness initiatives and clearly they’ve had a hard time getting this resolution with the UFT,” he said. “They’re right to have a sense of urgency. I wouldn’t call this a distraction, but it is a small part of everything that needs to happen: an evaluation system that supports good professional development, and that teachers and principals buy into.”

King spent the morning touring the Upper West Side’s Dual Language Middle School with two top Department of Education officials, Shael Polakow-Suransky and Josh Thomases. The discussion focused on the rollout of new curriculum standards, known as the Common Core, and best practices for teaching English language learners. The middle school, which Walcott visited last month, has a high population of ELLs (35 percent) and special education students (25 percent), but consistently performs well on the city’s measures of student progress.

King and other city and state officials popped their heads into several English and math classes and watched a dance class with two dozen seventh-graders practice the mambo.

When King asked his guide, Principal Claudia Aguirre, the describe the biggest challenge the school faces, she did not hesitate before responding: “This is just hard work.”

She said teachers and administrators struggle with the added workload required to help high-needs students progress — work such as offering extra tutoring or grading multiple assignment revisions per student that other elementary schools may be able to forgo.

“How far can you push it? How many revisions can you do, and how much time can you spend in a day? My teachers are doing this work knowing that if they just go downstairs [to P.S. 84, which shares the building on 92nd street], they don’t have to do any of this.”

When I spoke to Valerie Reidy, principal of the Bronx High School of Science, earlier this week, she said criticism about how she manages teachers and the student newspaper distracts the public from her students’ accomplishments.

“They work so hard, they study so hard. I hate to get caught up in administration-kid rivalry,” she said, adding that she doesn’t hold criticism by students against them. “The kids who push back — that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. I fully understand.”

A teacher at the school followed up on Thursday, sending a picture of 221 Bronx Science students taking Advanced Placement World History exams in a school gymnasium. The test took place on the penultimate day of a two-week spree of AP exams.

“As Principal Reidy mentioned to you, so much is written in the press that focuses only on the negative aspects of teenagers; this photograph is a testament to the seriousness of purpose with which so many of our students pursue their academic studies,” wrote Alex Thorp, an English teacher who also advises the senior class, the school’s print publications, and the yearbook staff. Thorp took the photograph that appears above.

Across the city, more students are taking and passing AP exams after a push in recent years to enroll students in college-level courses. In 2010, 14,522 high school seniors took at least one AP exam, up from 13,697 the year before. This fall, AP course participation will be among the college-readiness metrics factored into high schools’ city progress reports for the first time.

But Alphonse is different in one key way: She is not technically a student at the school. Instead, Alphonse, who is wheelchair-bound, attends Q811, the District 75 school for severely disabled students sited on QHST’s campus.

All city schools include students with special needs in some way. Many have self-contained classes that serve only students with disabilities. Others operate some classes where special education and general education teachers work together to serve both kinds of students. But few are “fully inclusive,” as QHST is.

Full inclusion means that every student with special needs who is admitted to QHST is educated in the same classroom as general education students. There are no self-contained classes.

It also means that students such as Alphonse, whose disabilities are so severe that they are enrolled in District 75, taking classes alongside general education students and joining in with all of the QHST’s day-to-day activities, clubs, and programs. About three dozen Q811 students are enrolled in QHST classes, but all of the District 75 school’s students can participate in the high school’s extracurricular activities, and many do.

QHST is not just different because of how it has included students with special needs. Its success with them is also substantially different. Across the city, only a little more than one in four students with special needs graduates from high school in four years. At QHST, it’s well over 70 percent — not far off the school’s overall 88 percent graduation rate.

Laura Rodriguez, the Department of Education’s outgoing deputy chancellor for special education, has hailed the school’s graduation rate, and Nigel Pugh, the former principal, says the school has been singled out for having the smallest graduation rate gap between general education and special education students.

QHST administrators are baffled when they hear school communities sometimes point to oversized special education population as a reason for lagging performance.

“Given what they’re saying, the demographic we have should lead us in one direction, but it’s not,” said Jae Cho, the school’s interim acting principal.

Soon, all schools will look a little more like QHST. The department is in the middle of introducing special education reforms aimed at distributing students with special needs equitably among schools — and encouraging schools to place those students in the “least restrictive environment” they can handle. For many students, that means being included in general education classes for at least some of the school day.

“Their stated goal is not about inclusion, but it is about educating more and more students with disabilities in community schools,” Maggie Moroff, coordinator of the ARISE Coalition of special education advocacy groups, said about the Department of Education. “The way it’s playing out, it looks like there will be less self-contained [classes] and more inclusion for greater access to the academic curriculum.”

The shift is likely to be challenging for schools that are used to handing off disabled students after explaining that they can’t meet the students’ needs. Some educators and parents are complaining that the shift is motivated by finances — it costs less to include students than keep them in self-contained classes — rather than by what’s best for students or schools.

“For schools that don’t have structures in place, it’s a shift in thinking,” said Cho.

Moroff said inclusion can’t succeed unless schools have extra resources, administrative support, and “continuing, ongoing, at-the-elbow professional development.”

But she said it is worthy work. “Life is inclusive,” she said. “Or should be.”

This was the belief Pugh emphasized when he founded QHST in 2003. “The question is: Do you value these kids?” he said recently, speaking from his new office at the Department of Education’s central administration, where he is helping roll out the new special education reforms.

In addition partnering with Q811, the District 75 school, from its opening day, QHST made it a custom to recruit eighth-graders with special needs.

And even after a large number were admitted through the regular high school admissions process, Pugh sought out more. The first time Pugh called the department’s central enrollment office, the person who answered the phone thought he was calling to complain about how many special education students he was assigned. He was so used to hearing principals resist that he just assumed Pugh was doing the same, Pugh recalled.

But Pugh had realized that more students with Individualized Education Plans could be a boon to his fledging school: They brought with them additional funds. About 10 students with IEPs would buy a special education teacher, Pugh calculated. Then he set out to play the numbers game.

“If I want to fund a robust program, I need more students,” he said. “The more kids you have, the bigger the budget will be for special education and the better services you’ll be able to offer.”

Now, the school maintains a special education enrollment rate of about 20 percent — with about 16 percent of students on QHST’s roll and the balance Q811 students who are included. The consistency allows the school to maintain a structure to absorb the students without scrambling for services for them.

That means flooding the school with a stable team of adults. Some classes have two teachers — one with special education certification — for Integrated Co-Teaching, and others have paraprofessionals on hand to support inclusion students from the District 75 school. Teachers work together each week to brainstorm ways to serve students.

It also means being able to sustain a consistent spread of students by past academic performance. The school uses the “educational option” approach to make sure about two-thirds of each entering class performed close to average on middle school exams, and the rest of the students are evenly divided among high and low performers.

Once accepted, students are divvied up into three “small learning communities,” with the District 75 school making up an unofficial fourth SLC. Each community includes an even proportion of students by past performance, and each has three classes of 34 students.

In each community, the three classes offer different services. In integrated co-teaching classes, about 10 of the 34 students has special needs and many of them were in self-contained special education classes at their past schools. A second class offers Special Education Teacher Support Services, a type of small-group support that happens multiple periods a week for the eight or so students whose IEP mandates it. And a third class boasts inclusion for a handful of District 75 students such as Alphonse. (QHST shares the costs of serving the District 75 students, but their performance counts only for Q811.)

That means there’s not a single classroom at QHST that doesn’t have students with special needs. Every student and teacher is involved in inclusion.

Parents say the effect is positive for all students. Sandra Dastagirzada, the PTA president, is gearing up to send her third child to the school. She said that her older son, a strong student now pursuing medicine, benefitted from working with mixed-ability classmates.

“He was helping other kids who were not doing as well and he was still being enriched by the students he was helping,” she said.

But inclusion doesn’t always mean everyone always feels included. Even with intentional structures, staff, and leadership, the school’s arrangement can still be an adjustment for students — in both general and special education — who have never been mixed before.

That became clear to Alphonse as she tackled a project in her senior seminar this year. The assignment was to make a presentation about a day in the life of a QHST student, and while putting hers together, Alphonse realized that her day was not quite typical. She added pictures to her presentation of District 75 students sitting separately in the cafeteria and walking alone in the hallways and juxtaposed them with photographs of general education students eating in groups and chattering together. She was making the case that inclusion is more than just being educated side-by-side — it should also mean being treated like a regular kid by other kids.

After Alphonse delivered her presentation the first time, teachers started bringing their advisory groups for encore presentations. Now, Alphonse is making weekly presentations within the school. Over the summer, Cho plans to have incoming ninth-graders watch the presentation, too.

The presentation kicks off with a warning: “This film may cause your heart to overflow.” Pictures illustrate Alphonse and other District 75 students doing things that all students do: playing video games, dining out, shopping.

“So, tell me why can’t we be friends?” the presentation asks.

On a Thursday in late March, Alphonse posed that question to a few dozen QHST juniors. When the powerpoint finished, Alphonse addressed her audience. “So can you guys try to make a change?”

When her classmates’ response was a quiet “yes” in unison, Alphonse pressed on. “And what are those types of changes?”

An Adidas-clad junior said, “I promise to start talking to people in wheelchairs.”

“But we’re not all in wheelchairs, you know,” Alphonse replied. She said other students’ simple efforts “really would make the world a better place.”

That’s a message that underlies the school as it pushes students to grow academically and interpersonally — and aims to lift the stigma of disability.

“All students benefit from learning how to respect, understand and accept all students, regardless of ability or disability,” Cho said.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott speaks to business leaders at the Association for a Better New York breakfast.

After years of trying to win new powers to fire under-performing teachers, the city is turning to rights it has had all along.

Speaking to a coalition representing the city’s business elite this morning, Chancellor Dennis Walcott announced that the city would move to fire any teacher who receives “unsatisfactory” ratings for two years in a row. He also announced that the city would ask the UFT to allow buyouts for teachers who have been without permanent positions for more than a year.

Both policies are already permitted under the law and the city’s contract with the teachers union— a fact that drew ridicule from UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

“It’s theater of the absurd. It’s getting old,” he said. “I think they believe that everyone’s a fool. They’ve made an announcement about something they already have the ability to do.”

Mulgrew noted that the union contract already allows Department of Education officials to do exactly what Walcott’s two plans announced today would do—incentivize teachers without permanent jobs to take buyouts, and require schools to remove teachers who receive consecutive unsatisfactory ratings. He also said the buyout plan was proposed by the union several times over the past three years, but the city rebuffed it.

“In their own minds they’ve convinced themselves they’re out there making news and being bold,” he said, adding that the city should already know the union is willing to negotiate a buyout program. “I don’t know how you can negotiate just by making a speech.”

Negotiations between the city and union over new teacher evaluations broke down in December. Those evaluations would have done away with the current teacher rating system and made it harder for teachers to earn top ratings and would have required the city to try to fire teachers with the lowest ratings.

Walcott said today that the city still wants to adopt new evaluations — and that the new policies would not go into effect if new evaluations are in place by next year — but the announcement shows that the city is seeking a plan B.

The question of how to rid the school system of weak teachers has perplexed the Bloomberg administration for years. The Department’s attempts to fire teachers in the ATR pool when Joel Klein was chancellor fell short, as did efforts to end the last-in-first-out policy that governs which teachers principals can ask to leave schools.

Educators for Excellence, a teacher advocacy group, also suggested that the city’s plans were un-novel solutions to a bigger problem: the lack of a teacher evaluation deal.

“These are band aid solutions,” the organization’s founders said in a statement. “The only way to ensure that students are in classrooms with effective teachers is for both sides to finally negotiate a meaningful multi-measure evaluation system that gives educators the support, feedback, and recognition they deserve and need.”

Walcott declined to take questions from reporters, an atypical choice for him, but department officials filled in some details this afternoon.

Of the 831 teachers now in the ATR pool, most would be eligible for the program if it begins this fall, officials said. The program will be open to any teachers who have spent one year or more in the ATR pool, and its start date will be determined during union-city negotiations, which are scheduled to begin next week.

City officials said the buyout offers will be more generous than a similar buyout program that has been used in other cities, including Dallas and D.C.. Depending on their number of years teaching, city teachers can expect to receive offers ranging from $1,000 (for one to five years of teaching) to $20,000 (for 20 years) or more.

According to statistics provided by the city, the average salary for members of the ATR pool is $82,420, plus an average of $30,000 in annual benefits. ATR teachers are expected to actively search for permanent jobs while they are fulfilling their week-to-week assignments. But officials said nearly half of the ATR teachers have not submitted a single city job application or attended a city recruitment event in the past year.

The total cost of the ATR pool has ranged over the years, and the exact figure has been a source of disagreement between city and union officials. But the city has never strayed from its position that the cost is too high.

Other figures the city provided portray the ATR pool in a somewhat bleak light: Nearly a third of its teachers were removed from their last permanent job assignment through some formal disciplinary action, nearly a quarter have been in the pool for two or more years, and nearly one fifth have received at least one U-rating. 

The ATR pool could grow this summer as the city moves to close more schools at once than ever before, and relocate many of their teachers. Department of Education spokesman Matt Mittenthal said the pool has been shrinking this year, perhaps thanks to a policy change that requires ATRs to act as substitute teachers, rotating through schools from week to week. That change has motivated some principals to offer permanent jobs to teachers they may otherwise have never met, but it has also encouraged some teachers to quit their jobs or retire.

But without this extra push from the city, Mittenthal said, “We don’t think the pool is going to get much smaller, given how it is now.”

The city’s second proposal of the morning, to prevent elementary school students from being taught by a U-rated teacher for two years in a row, would effect the student class assignments for 217 elementary school teachers who received U-ratings in 2011. The city is planning to issue some kind of policy guideline to principals that they may not assign the 4,000 students being taught by those teachers this year to another U-rated teacher in the fall.

The third prong of Walcott’s announcement calls for schools to formalize a practice already in use—the removal of classroom teachers who have received U-ratings in the past two years. 235 teachers fit that bill, and half of them are still teaching in permanent classroom jobs. The rest are either in the ATR pool or are awaiting dismissal decisions.

Many of those teachers have appealed their second U-ratings. If the U-rating decisions are upheld after the appeal process, the city will formally see their dismissal. Officials said the DOE currently relies on principals to file these charges against teachers, but principals often decide not to. In the future, the DOE will initiate the dismissal process from its central office.

When they revised the state’s charter schools law in 2010, legislators included a requirement that the schools register a “comparable” number of high-needs students. Now the state has proposed a methodology to calculate enrollment targets for charter schools based on how many students attend the school and the overall ratio of high-needs students in each district. Schools that currently enroll too few students with special needs will be required to show at least a “good-faith” effort to enroll more.

But a top official in the Success Academies network said Wednesday that she objected to any such requirement. Setting enrollment targets creates a disincentive for schools to help students get to the point that they no longer need special services, said Emily Kim, general counselor for the Success Academies network.

“For us, our goal is not to hit a number and stay at that number for English language learners,” Kim said. “Our goal is that they learn English, that they perform at the highest levels, and that they graduate from high school college ready and are successful in life.”

“So if our figures go down, we’re proud of that,” she added.

Updated: A state education official said the proposed targets would not penalize schools schools if their students are declassified as special education or ELL. Through what’s being called a “three year lag,” schools would get credit for students who had been classified anytime in the last three years. “With the three-year lag, there is little to no chance that there will be a dinging of schools for declassification of a child,” said Assistant Commissioner Sally Bachofer, who helped developed the targets.

Bachofer also said that declassification rates at individual schools, while not a part of the proposed methodology, could be presented during the charter renewal period as a “good faith effort” to serve these high needs students.

Kim was part of a four-person panel recruited by the New York City Bar Association to discuss charter school co-locations.

That topic soon gave way to a discussion of the general merits of the charter school movement. UFT Vice President Leo Casey, Coalition for Educational Justice organizer Zakiyah Ansari, and New York City Charter Center CEO James Merriman also sat on the panel, which Inside City Hall host Errol Louis moderated.

Kim said she wasn’t speaking on behalf of the Success network, but a spokeswoman later said Moskowitz agreed with her.

Moskowitz is a critic of the way the state currently tracks ELL students and believes a more telling metric is the rate of students who pass a state proficiency exam for English language learners.

Across the city, many students do not pass the exam even after attending city schools for several years. According to a Success network review, 36 percent of first-graders identified as ELLs in 2003 had not passed the exam seven years later.

Of the nearly 2,500 students who attended a Success school last year, 7 percent were ELLs, according to state data. In some of the districts where the network operates, the ELL rate is twice as high. But in the 2009-2010 school year, 36 percent of students in Success schools tested out of ELL, twice the citywide rate, Sedlis said.

“That is a major problem in this city,” said the spokeswoman, Jenny Sedlis. “Charters should not be forced to replicate the dysfunctions of the district.”

Merriman said special education enrollment targets could run the same risk by incentivizing schools to identify students as having disabilities excessively.

“Special education has been used, unfortunately, sometimes as a tool for discrimination against African American males, as a way to isolate them in self-contained classrooms,” he said. “We don’t want to make normative what we all know is a bad system.”

The charter school center that Merriman runs released a report last month acknowledging that the city’s charter schools don’t serve as many high-needs students as they should. He said during the panel that changing the distribution of students isn’t as simple as it might seem.

“It’s not easy sometime to get ELLS to come in to your school,” Merriman said. “They tend to come in as a community. They want to make sure as a community that their students will be served well.”

Plus, with many city charter schools still scaling up, they lack the kind of specialized teachers to serve even small populations. Some charter schools, such has Achievement First Bushwick, which received a shortened renewal in part because of its struggles, have hired English as a Second Language teachers specifically to serve larger numbers of ELL students that live in the district.

In an early-morning speech to the Association for a Better New York, a business and political group, Walcott said the city would adopt new policies to insulate students from teachers deemed “unsatisfactory” under the current evaluation system. Under the new policies, no student will be allowed to have a teacher rated unsatisfactory multiple years in a row, and the city will move to fire all teachers who receive two straight U ratings.

“If we truly believe that every student deserves a great teacher, then we can’t accept a system where a student suffers with a poor-performing one for two straight years,” Walcott said. “One year of learning loss is bad enough — but studies indicate that two years could be devastating.”

The policies would go into effect if the city and union do not agree on new teacher evaluations by September, when the new school year begins. Under the existing evaluation system, two consecutive U ratings can trigger termination proceedings but do not have to. Two “ineffective” ratings on teacher evaluations now required under state law would automatically trigger termination proceedings.

Walcott also announced that the city would capitalize on a clause in its contract with the teachers union to offer a resignation incentive for teachers who have spent more than a year in the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers without permanent positions. Buyouts would have to be negotiated for each teacher, and Walcott promised that the incentives would be “generous.” The move represents a shift in approach for the Bloomberg administration, which has previously sought the right to fire members of the ATR pool.

Walcott’s complete speech, as prepared for delivery, is below. We’ll have more on his proposals later today.

The following is text of Chancellor Dennis M. Walcott’s address as prepared for delivery at Association for a Better New York breakfast event on May 17, 2012

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It’s been an honor to serve in your administration for the last ten years. And thanks to Bill Rudin for your leadership and for making New York City a better place.

“Good morning. Let me start by thanking ABNY for hosting us today. It’s a pleasure to be joined by so many New Yorkers who share a passion for this great city, especially those who work hard on behalf of our students. I’ve attended my fair share of ABNY events over the years, so I am truly honored to speak to you this morning as your Chancellor.

“Today, I’d like to talk about the extraordinary work happening in our 1750 schools, and discuss some bold new ideas we believe will make a lasting impact on the lives of our students.

“Let me start with some perspective on the size and complexity of our school system. Everyone, please take out a piece of paper and sharpen your number two pencils. It’s time for a test. First, does anyone know how many meals we serve each day in New York City public schools? Eight hundred thousand. Other than the US military, no single organization buys more food than we do.

“Here’s another question: if our public schools were a large US city, how do you think it would rank compared to the population in other cities? 20^th in the nation? 15^th? The population of our public schools would make it the 10^th – largest city in the United States, right behind Dallas.

“Think about this for a second: with over a million children in our schools, one in every 311 Americans is a New York City Public school student.

“I have one more question: how many languages are spoken by students in our public schools? Any guesses? By our latest count, it’s 184. Some of our fastest-growing languages include Punjabi, Albanian, Mandinka and Fon, to name a few.

“So with those facts in mind, let’s talk a little bit about how we got where we are today. I remember that summer day in 2002, at an East Harlem school, when I stood with Mayor Bloomberg to celebrate a pivotal moment in New York City history. State lawmakers had just voted to give control of New York City’s public schools to our elected Mayor.

“Remember that for decades, the quality of education in our schools was stagnant. Student performance was flat and high school graduation rates hovered at 50 percent. Only one in two students who started high school left with a diploma.

“In some corners of the city, jobs at schools were handed out as favors. A well-connected parent could make a phone call and get their child into a particular school. No one was held accountable. And I assure you, no one talked about a school’s college and career readiness rates.

“So in 2002, our first priority was to reform a broken system that didn’t serve our students. And that’s what we did. Under mayoral control, we have improved teacher quality and created schools that put students on a path to success. Instead of making excuses for those schools that graduated as few as one in four students, we took action.

“It wasn’t easy, but today, with higher standards, graduation rates are at an all-time high, and the dropout rate has been cut in half. We made our schools safer. Today, crime is down by almost 50 percent. Working together with the New York City Police Department, we have made our schools some of the safest of any large American city. We infused more money into our schools. Since 2002, the Mayor has increased funding for schools by more than $11 billion – that’s up over 100 percent.

“We created the best school choice system in the nation, as recently recognized by the Brookings Institution. Ten years ago, a child could be forced to attend his or her neighborhood high school, no matter how bad it was. This is no longer the case.

“We empowered principals to manage their own budgets and become the CEOs of their buildings. Before 2002, the school system was designed around compliance and following the rules, and that stifled creative thinking. Now, principals are encouraged to innovate, problem-solve, and make hiring decisions to help their students succeed.

“We instilled a culture of accountability throughout our organization. Today, the conversation in schools and across America is focused on student achievement – that simply wasn’t the case ten years ago.

“We created 535 new public schools, including 139 charter schools. Together, they would make up a school district comparable to the size of Philadelphia. We will continue this strategy into next fall, bringing the total number of new schools created to 613. And our new small schools work: students in these schools are graduating at rates 20 points higher than graduates at schools they have replaced.

“Some of our most exciting new schools are Career and Technical Education models, or “CTE”.  Just two weeks ago, TIME magazine highlighted the positive impacts of CTE schools for students, businesses and communities. CTE schools are perhaps the best way to train students for the jobs that exist today and those that will be created tomorrow. That is why I am thrilled that we will be opening 12 new CTE schools in the next two years, on top of 18 we’ve opened since 2002.

“We’ve also recently taken on a problem seen throughout the United States: the lagging achievement of students in middle school. In the next two years, we will open 50 new middle schools and embark on a citywide campaign to improve literacy in those grades.

“And we’ve doubled down on efforts to make parents our true partners and find new ways to communicate with them through surveys, meetings, and online tools. Next fall, we will launch a Parent Academy to help parents reinforce learning and help their children with homework. And we will begin a new series of webinars for parents on a range of topics.

“To those of us who work in our schools, it’s clear that lawmakers made the right choice in 2002. And they did so again by renewing Mayoral control just a few years ago. It’s important to take stock of what this means for our students – and, more broadly, for New York City. We would not have been able to give students and families more options, make schools safer, and improve teaching and learning without this authority.

“But it’s still not enough. In some areas, we continue to do things the ‘old-fashioned way.’ We know that teachers are the most important factor in helping their students learn and grow. The data is clear: during the course of a school year, a student can learn three times as much material from a high-performing teacher as they would from a low-performing teacher. Even more: an above-average teacher can help their class earn an additional $400,000 over their lifetimes. That’s the effect of just one year of great teaching. If you expanded that to our entire city, we are talking about adding billions of dollars to the city’s economy, just by improving teaching.

“The facts speak for themselves: teaching matters. That’s why we’ve gone to great lengths to make New York City a more attractive place for aspiring educators. Mayor Bloomberg has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation, raising teacher salaries by 43 percent.”

“But if we can’t find a way to improve teacher quality even further, it will be impossible to ensure our students are being taught the skills to succeed beyond high school. Unfortunately, in many of our efforts, we have been unable to find a partner in our local teachers union, the UFT. In some cases, they have even stood in our way.

“But that’s no reason to stop trying. Today, I want to share a few key ideas that I believe will help greatly improve the quality of our teaching force.

“Right now, our teacher evaluation system is outdated. More than 97 percent of teachers get “satisfactory” ratings. The ratings offer no feedback to help teachers improve, and leave us unable to remove teachers who get low ratings in multiple years.

“The teachers union knows this. In February, the UFT committed to a new evaluation system that would allow us to identify great teachers and reward them accordingly, support those who are still developing, and allows us to remove those who are poor-performing. The UFT President celebrated this deal with Governor Cuomo in Albany, and I applauded him for it. Three months later, we have made little progress. As each day passes, we are still waiting for the UFT to return to the table and finalize this agreement.

“If you don’t know me, I’m an eternal optimist, and I am still hopeful we can complete this deal in time for next school year. But right now, the clock is ticking. Rather than come together on behalf of our students, the UFT takes every opportunity to stall, often suing us in court and complaining to a State panel when they don’t get their way.

“We don’t have time for stalling tactics. We need the UFT to finalize a citywide evaluation system before it’s too late. Until that happens, our 1.1 million students – the 10th largest city in the country – are stuck in this system. It is upon us to find another way.

“Early in this administration, we made a decision not to force any principal to accept a teacher they don’t want. We believe that principals should be empowered to make the best choices for their students. As a result, some teachers have ended up without permanent teaching jobs, and are placed in something we call the Absent Teacher Reserve, also known as the ATR pool.

“Unfortunately, we, the taxpayers, continue to foot the bill. If they can’t get hired by another principal – and even if they don’t try to find a job at all – we still have to pay their salaries. There have been over 3,600 teachers in the pool at some point this year, and that’s now down to 800.

“But those who remain will cost the city an estimated $100 million in salaries. That’s a huge, wasteful expenditure that doesn’t help our students succeed. More than a quarter of these teachers have been disciplined for bad behavior. Almost half of them have not even submitted a job application or attended a recruitment fair in the past year. That’s unacceptable.

“Think about that: when unemployment is still high and budgets are tight, we are spending more than $100 million on teachers who aren’t interested in teaching.

“Today, I am proposing an idea. If you’re a teacher who can’t find a permanent job in our schools after a year, we will offer you a generous incentive to resign and pursue another career. It would reduce a significant burden on our budget, allowing us to divert millions of dollars back to schools. Every dollar we save, we can use to benefit our students, instead of wasting it on teachers who probably chose the wrong profession. This buyout proposal will be more attractive than any we’ve seen across the nation—for teachers, and for the taxpayers of New York City.

“Of course, we can’t limit ourselves to focusing on teachers in limbo. We need to find a way to ensure every child has a good teacher right now, and support or remove those who can’t get the job done. But without a meaningful evaluation system that allows us to remove ineffective teachers, we are left with few options.

“Now, let me be clear: singling out bad teachers for the woes of education is a convenient, over-simplification of our problems, and I won’t stand for it. The vast majority of our teachers deserve our praise and support. Blaming them for our challenges is simply unacceptable. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t evaluate teachers based on how much our students are learning.

“When I think about the fact that a child’s future could be opened up to great opportunities – or closed off forever – by a single teacher in elementary school, I am both hopeful and worried. Teaching is just that important. Plain and simple: we need a way to ensure that no child gets stuck with one of the few teachers who are ineffective, especially in the early grades.

“So today, I am proposing a solution. If the new evaluation system isn’t in place by the beginning of next school year, I will implement a new policy that would protect these young students:  First, it would prevent any elementary school student from being taught for two consecutive years by a classroom teacher found to be incompetent.

“If we truly believe that every student deserves a great teacher, then we can’t accept a system where a student suffers with a poor-performing one for two straight years. One year of learning loss is bad enough—but studies indicate that two years could be devastating.

“Second, this new policy would set a trigger: after any teacher receives two consecutive unsatisfactory ratings for incompetence, we would remove that teacher from the classroom and seek their dismissal from our public schools. In my view, if you are one of the few hundred teachers who gets poorly rated two years in a row, you don’t deserve to teach in our schools and in front of our students.

“That’s the spirit of the new evaluation system—so we will move forward, whether or not the union decides to join us.

“The union and others would rather stay silent than cheer the progress our students have made since 2002. Some would even disparage the hard work of our students and staff these past few years.  So you have to wonder: with students doing better by every measure, who is the union trying to protect?

“We are focused on the students, and the reasons are obvious: The effects of these proposals will pay dividends now and well into the future. We know that higher levels of education lead to greater incomes for individuals and their families. And that’s true today more than ever.

“Over a lifetime, a high school graduate makes half a million dollars more than a dropout. And a college graduate makes even more than that. Only 11 percent of jobs today are available to those without a high school diploma—that’s way down from just a few years ago. And the fastest-growing industries – such as healthcare, engineering, and education – require college diplomas.

“So we’re not going to stop at high school graduation: in this economy, our students need to be ready for college and careers. That’s why we are hard at work introducing the new Common Core Standards in our schools. This year and next, students in every school will be exposed to more critical thinking, essay writing, and real world problem-solving.

“New York City is leading the way in these efforts. While most states are waiting until 2014, our work has been underway since 2010. Next year, we’ll expand it even further. Today, I am proud to announce that the GE Foundation has decided to renew their commitment to our students with a gift of $14.3 million. This gift will build upon GE’s previous investment and help give our students the tools they need for college.

“So, increasing graduation rates isn’t just about data—it means thousands of families being put on the path to economic-self sufficiency. And as more and more New Yorkers earn their high school diplomas and complete college, New York City’s workforce will become more globally competitive.

“Now, this is really personal for me. I am the son of a high school dropout, a city worker who enabled me to stand before you today. As many of you know, I am a graduate of New York City public schools. I still live approximately two miles from the elementary school I attended as a child.

“Every morning, when I see children in my neighborhood and across the city attending our public schools, I think about their futures. I know that the workforce and the economy today are far different than they were when my father dropped out of high school. If he was navigating today’s job market, his prospects would be bleak.

“So my message to you today is this: if we’re going to make college and careers a reality for all our children, we need to continue our bold approach to reforming education. I know that some adults might not like it. The teachers union may stand in the way. But the best interests of our students need to come first.

“We can’t rest until every family in New York City can send their children to an excellent public school. I believe, and I hope you do too, that a better school system today will mean a better New York City tomorrow.

Thank you.