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Nearly three-quarters of New Yorkers approve of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s carrot-and-stick approach to getting new teacher evaluations in place, according to poll results released today.

Last month, Cuomo vowed to withhold increases in state school aid to districts that do not settle in short order on new teacher evaluations that take test scores into account.

The poll, conducted last week by the Siena Research Institute, asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose the Governor’s plan to link school aid increases to the implementation of an enhanced teacher evaluation process?” Seventy-one percent said they support that plan. (The poll of 807 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.)

The support was evenly split between respondents in New York City and the rest of the state and was especially high among black New Yorkers (77 percent) and young people between 18 and 34 (78 percent). Households with union members (61 percent) and Jews (63 percent) supported Cuomo’s plan least often, but even they stood by it in large numbers. (more…)

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo issued his state budget speech two weeks ago, he offered a stark choice to districts and unions working on new teacher evaluations: agree, or face the consequences.

In Albany today, Chancellor Dennis Walcott suggested that the city would prefer the consequences — widely assumed to be an effort by Cuomo to use his budgeting process to impose new evaluations without the consent of local teachers unions

“I think the law, and the governor is so right about this, is broken,” Walcott said. “It’s not going to work as constructed.”

Walcott would not comment on the status of negotiations with the United Federation of Teachers but said that the issue dividing them — the appeals process for teachers rated ineffective — had not been solved.

Cuomo, who has said the 2010 evaluation law was “destined to fail,” seemed willing but not eager to expend political capital on changing the law when he delivered his budget address. He said he preferred districts and their unions to agree on a “protocol” for new evaluations within 30 days.

But, Cuomo said, “If they can’t do that then we’ll do it for them.”

Walcott’s comments reflect pessimism about the state of negotiations in the city just days after UFT President Michael Mulgrew praised Cuomo for his “intervention” to induce the city back to the table. Walcott said he was in Albany to lobby them about changing the law. (more…)

Two weeks after Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to to replace half of all teachers at 33 struggling schools, efforts are underway to soften the threat.

Department of Education officials said today that the city is exploring the option of replacing fewer teachers at the schools under an allowance included in federal guidelines for the school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.”

The turnaround process, which Bloomberg announced two weeks ago to sidestep a requirement of other school improvement strategies to negotiate new teacher evaluations with the teachers union, mandates that 50 percent of teachers be replaced. But the U.S. Department of Education makes special allowances for some teachers who have been hired in the last two years.

Now the city is looking to take advantage of that flexibility when it files formal turnaround applications with the state next month.

The catch is that not every teacher hired in the last two years is automatically eligible for the exemption.The federal guidelines make an allowance only for teachers who were selected “according to locally adopted competencies as part of a school reform effort” headed by a principal handpicked to lead it. That means, according to the guidelines, the teachers should have been screened for an ability to “be effective in a turnaround situation.”

It’s not clear how many of the roughly 3,400 teachers at the 33 schools would fall into this category. As recently as Monday, Chancellor Dennis Walcott told state legislators that there would be “possibly up to 1,500, 1,700 teachers” cut loose from the schools. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott testifies before legislators during a hearing about Gov. Cuomo's proposed education budget.

State Education Commissioner John King spent most of his time before legislators today going to bat for Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposed schools budget.

But on one key point, he said the Board of Regents would prefer a change. The Regents would rather not hinge so much of the state’s funds on a competition among districts, King said.

Cuomo proposed using $250 million of a proposed $800 million school aid increase to reward districts for strong academic performance and management efficiency. King said the Regents, whose agenda is similar but not identical to Cuomo’s, would slash that number by 80 percent. They would still hand out $50 million through a competition but think the remaining $200 million would be better used helping high-needs districts cover their expenses, he said.

The proposal is similar to what was proposed by the Alliance for Quality Education, a group that Cuomo’s office has named as a nemesis, and augurs a possible battle over the budget in the two months before it must be approved.

During today’s joint State Senate and Assembly hearing on the state’s elementary and secondary education budget in Albany, legislators wanted to talk about another one of Cuomo’s strings-attached school funding proposals: to tie districts’ state aid to new teacher evaluations.

Last month, King cut off federal funds to 10 districts, including New York City, when they did not meet a deadline for negotiating new teacher evaluations. King said today he expected all of those districts to appeal his decision and was helping most of them redo their applications to include promises of tougher teacher evaluations.

The “nagging issue” of appeals for low ratings, which caused the negotiations impasse in New York City, is trickier to resolve, King said.

“Certainly that is a source of concern for the governor, for the mayor, to me,” he said. “But at the same time it’s not the department’s role to mediate local collective bargaining agreements.” (more…)

“Everything you ever do, there’s going to be days where it just doesn’t work,” Mayor Bloomberg told a group of high school students today. “There’s going to be days where somebody says something you don’t like or something goes the wrong way.”

Bloomberg’s message to an 11th-grade English class was meant to inspire students for the future. But it could have just as easily been a self-esteem booster as he slogs through a battle over teacher quality that he started waging when he became mayor 10 years ago.

“Successful people,” Bloomberg told the students about adversity, “recover from that and they learn how to deal with that.”

The visit to the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science was the mayor’s latest stop on a publicity tour to promote a strategy to retain effective teachers and fire the least effective ones. It began in the Bronx last week, at the Morris High School Campus with his State of the City Speech, and continued into this week with a speech on Martin Luther King Day.

In the process, he has picked up substantial support from state officials. Yesterday, both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and State Education Commissioner John King demanded that the state teachers union, NYSUT, drop a lawsuit challenging the state’s teacher evaluation law. King also backed Bloomberg’s plan to win back suspended federal funds by removing teachers at 33 low-performing schools through a process called “turnaround.” (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew appears on Inside City Hall on NY1

On the first workday after negotiations with the city over new teacher evaluations broke down shortly before a deadline to maintain federal funding, UFT President Michael Mulgrew is defending his call for a third-party negotiator to broker a compromise.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott laid out a case against the union’s request in a New York Post op/ed today. Mulgrew, in contrast, has taken to the airwaves, appearing Monday night on NY1′s Inside City Hall and this morning on John Gambling’s radio show.

Whether third-party arbitrators would rule on appeals for teachers who get low ratings was a key sticking point in negotiations between the city and the union. Now, a secondary impasse has opened over arbitration about the arbitration — that is, whether a third-party negotiator should figure out final teacher evaluation details for the city and union.

Both Inside City Hall host Errol Louis and Gambling, whose show airs daily on WOR 710, pushed Mulgrew to explain how third-party arbitration would close the ideological divide separating the city and union.

“Tens of thousands of teachers elect you, millions of New Yorkers elect the mayor, and yet some third unelected person now has to decide one of the most important questions?” Louis asked. (more…)

In a school sweatshirt, Chancellor Dennis Walcott congratulates WHEELS seniors as they approach the local post office.

When William Taveras approached the Washington Bridge Post Office on West 180th Street, college applications in hand, with whoops and applause from hundreds of classmates in the background, it was a step toward a goal he set five years ago.

As a member of the first class of sixth-graders at the Washington Heights Expeditionary Learning School, Taversas said he often heard founding principal Brett Kimmel tell students his main objective was to get everyone into college.

Kimmel brought Taveras’s cohort a few steps closer to that goal today, when all 76 seniors marched the three blocks from their Upper Manhattan school to the post office that would mail their transcripts and applications to universities.

Each student was required to apply to CUNY and SUNY colleges, and some said they were applying to other schools as well. WHEELS — which lists “high-dose” tutoring as one of its strategies to build college readiness — required each student to apply to a minimum of six colleges. (more…)

Eight months on the job has done little to boost Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott’s image in the eye of New Yorkers.

A Quinnipiac poll released today shows Walcott’s approval rating as essentially unchanged since he became chancellor in April. But his disapproval rating is way up.

According to the poll, 33 percent of New Yorkers approve of Walcott’s handling of his job. That’s up just 2 points from a similar poll in May, a month after he became chancellor.

During the same period, his disapproval rating swung from from 21 percent to 34 percent. His disapproval rating among public school parents rose from 32 percent to 45 percent.

It appears that many of the people who have made up their minds about Walcott since April have decided they do not approve of his job performance. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott is interviewed by WNYC's Brian Lehrer at a forum on public school options.

Many of the parents and teachers attending a forum last night about school choice said it was their first time hearing Chancellor Dennis Walcott talk about the Bloomberg administration’s school policies.

Walcott defended the school choice model that has developed during Bloomberg’s tenure at the event, which was organized by the New York Times and WNYC in conjunction with their SchoolBook reporting project.

(Listen to WNYC’s coverage of the event.)

The event took place against the backdrop of a spate of school closures announced by the Department of Education earlier in the day. The city’s closure strategy, meant to clear space for better school options, has in large part fueled the increasing number of choices that families face, especially when applying in middle and high school.

Parents and teachers we spoke to said the apparent options could be dizzying, even for the most involved families. educators, some parents said they didn’t think Walcott’s answers got to the root of their concerns.

“It’s very confusing. The whole process reminds me of voting. People don’t engage because there’s too much information out there. They don’t know how to process all of it,” said Tania Cade, who has a child in third grade at P.S. 278 and another in seventh-grade at a gifted-and-talented program in Washington Heights. “I don’t think that [Walcott] addressed that issue at all. It’s all up to the parents, and God bless those parents who don’t have the time or don’t speak the language.” (more…)

Among the press releases that went flying after the city announced its first set of school closures earlier today, the one from principals union president Ernest Logan stood out for its stridency.

In a statement the length of a short essay, Logan decried school closures as “a losing strategy” that traumatizes needy students, shuts out educators, and prevents scrutiny of the city’s reform efforts. Adding eight months to mayoral control’s age, he said twice that the Bloomberg administration has had a decade to fix all schools but has not.

Nine of the 15 schools whose closures or truncations were announced today have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools; one replaced a failing elementary school just three years ago. Logan suggested that at least two additional Bloomberg-started schools would show up on the second installment of the closure roster when it comes out tomorrow.

“The fact is that closure is an admission of failure by City Hall, whose weak or non-existent interventions amount to either a cynical statement of indifference to children of poverty or an inferiority complex about their own ability to come up with solutions,” Logan said.

The statement elicited a rebuttal from Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who called Logan’s statement “embarrassing” for the union. (more…)