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Revisiting the topic of his first policy speech, delivered in September, Chancellor Dennis Walcott today said efforts to reform the city’s middle schools are well underway.

In a speech this morning, Walcott outlined efforts that the Department of Education has already made, such as opening new schools and recruiting 150 new teachers to get extra training before starting in middle school classrooms this fall.

He also announced additional new initiatives, including a summer program to give extra help to middle school students who score just below proficient on state tests and a training program for prospective middle school leaders that will be run in part by Teach For America.

We’ll have more about Walcott’s speech and the initiatives he discussed later today. For now, here’s the complete speech as prepared for delivery at New York University this morning. The university is hosting an all-day symposium about research about what works in middle schools organized by the Research Alliance, the independent body of academics given access to city schools data.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott repeated a promise not to touch principals’ budgets next year, saying that a proposed cut in school funding that would cost the city more than 1,100 teaching positions would likely disappear once the city finalizes its budget later this spring.

Of the 5,000 teachers who typically leave the system each year, the preliminary 2013 budget projects that only about 4,000 would be replaced, which would save about $64 million, according to the city’s preliminary budget . But Walcott said that funding would likely be restored in time for the final budget and that principals would be able to hire for any vacated positions.

City Council members pestered Walcott about that and much more at a hearing this afternoon on the agency’s $19.6 billion budget, a 1 percent increase that won’t cover the added expenses the department expects. While last year’s hearings focused almost solely on opposition to a proposal to layoff thousands of teachers, the concerns raised by elected officials today spanned a range of the city’s education policies, including increased class sizes, the small schools initiative, spending on technology and contracts, and Medicaid collection.

But they reserved most of their early criticism on the $64 million cut in areas that directly fund schools. The decreased sum represents a headcount reduction of 1,117 teacher positions, according to the city’s projections.

“Year after year the DOE has made cuts to school budgets,” said Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson. “How are schools supposed to make do next year given the loss of funding proposed in the budget?”

Walcott warned that preliminary projections were just that and insisted that principals would not have their budgets slashed for a fifth straight year.

“It’s my goal and our hope to make sure that the budget stay flat without having any cuts to our schools,” Walcott said. “We’re going to work very hard within the system that any type of absorptions be done centrally.”

It’s a brighter fiscal situation this year, thanks to funding that is being restored at the state level. Last year, the city lost a total of $1.7 billion in state and federal aid. (more…)

The Department of Education is moving to fire eight employees who continued to work in schools even after being found guilty of sexual misconduct.

The eight people were identified during a thorough review launched last month after multiple school workers were arrested and charged with inappropriately behavior toward students.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said today that he was disturbed “as a chancellor and a parent and grandparent” by some of the “horrendous acts” that the review had turned up. He said the review had highlighted inadequacies in the teacher discipline process, a process over which the city would like more authority.

The review examined all school workers found to have behaved inappropriately since 2000 and referred by investigators for discipline. Walcott told reporters today that he personally examined about 250 cases and concluded that in some of them, appropriate action had been taken. In others, he said, the workers had left the system. And in even others, the investigations had concluded more than three years ago, meaning that it is too late for the department to issue a new punishment, even if one was merited.

Walcott said the department had alerted principals who supervise workers the department would prefer to discipline but legally cannot. Those people will be monitored closely in the future, he said.

“I am not going to tolerate any individual having any improper contact with any of our students,” Walcott said.

After the winnowing process, the department identified eight people – including four tenured teachers — whose punishments Walcott determined had not been adequate. (more…)

They might have returned to the negotiating table, but officials from the teachers union and the Department of Education still can’t agree on what they’re talking about.

Union and city officials met this afternoon to discuss teacher evaluations for the first time in months without a imminent deadline hanging over their heads. The city said the meeting was a first step toward a citywide evaluation deal, but the union indicated that it would continue to push for talks that focus on evaluations in just 33 schools.

Earlier in the day, the union petitioned the state’s employee relations board to force the DOE back into talks over a system for the 33 schools, which were supposed to be using evaluations this year. In an earlier petition, the union wanted the Public Employee Relations Board to assign a mediator to deal with a sticking point over teacher rating appeals. This petition is designed to finish the job.

The 33 schools at the center of the disagreement were part of a federal school reform program that promised $60 million in funding in exchange for the evaluations. Both sides agreed this summer to work toward a deal on the pilot and to use it as a model for the citywide system, but those talks broke down at the end of last year. Shortly after, Mayor Bloomberg announced plans to close and reopen the 33 schools with new teachers, and the city has insisted ever since that it only needs to negotiate a citywide deal.

The city’s insistence came only after Gov. Cuomo helped break a standoff on how teachers should be able to appeal their low ratings. In a letter sent to Mulgrew shortly after, Chancellor Walcott said that was all it would take to negotiate a citywide system.

“With all major issues resolved, it is incumbent on us to finalize an agreement for a new evaluation system for all teachers in New York City, and to do so without delay,” Walcott said in the letter. (more…)

Big-city mayors and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan during a panel discussion today in Washington, D.C.

Last week, Chancellor Dennis Walcott spent Friday morning cautioning reporters not to take the city’s Teacher Data Reports too seriously. The city was releasing the information only because news organizations had won a legal battle for it, he said.

This morning, after a week in which Mayor Bloomberg defended the release, Walcott revised his message.

“It’s all about accountability,” he said, appearing on a panel in Washington, D.C., with Bloomberg and the mayors and schools chiefs of Chicago and Los Angeles.

“It’s all about accountability,” Walcott added. “And as the mayor indicated, parents have a right to have this information. What I’ve been trying to do is making sure that the entire New York City community understands that this is a limited piece of information and they have to view the teachers in their full context.”

Bloomberg jumped in to rebut philanthropist Bill Gates’ argument, made in a New York Times column just before the release, that no other industries release the results of employee evaluations.

“Incidentally Gates does give information at Microsoft to the people that need it, namely the managers to the people being evaluated,” Bloomberg said. “In our case it’s the principals and the parents who need that information. So we’re not doing anything differently from what Microsoft does.” (more…)

When the Department of Education’s embargo of Teacher Data Reports details lifted at noon today, news organizations across the city rushed to make the data available.

The Teacher Data Reports are “value-added” assessments of teachers’ effectiveness that were produced from 2008 to 2010 for reading and math teachers in grades 3 to 8.

This morning, department officials including Chancellor Dennis Walcott and Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky met with reporters to offer caution about how the data reports should be used. They emphasized the reports’ wide margins of error — 35 percentage points for math teachers and 53 percentage points for reading teachers, on average — and that the reports reflect only a small portion of teachers’ work.

“We would never advise anyone — parent, reporter, principal, teacher — to draw a conclusion based on this score alone,” Polakow-Suransky said.

Most of the news organizations that filed Freedom of Information Law requests for the ratings plan to publish them in searchable or streamlined databases, with the teachers’ names attached. GothamSchools does not plan to publish the data with teachers’ names or identifying characteristics included because of concerns about the data’s reliability.

At least two other news organizations that cover education are also not publishing the data: the local affiliate of Fox News, according to a representative of Fox, and the nonprofit school information website Insideschools.

Department officials are asking schools not to release the reports to parents. They issued a guide today advising principals about how to handle parents who demand that their child be removed from the class of a teacher rated ineffective. (more…)

The Department of Education is cracking down on graduation rate inflation, following an internal audit that uncovered errors and possible evidence of cheating at 60 high schools.

The audits, conducted by the department’s internal auditor, scrutinized data at 60 high schools that had posted unusual or striking results. Of the 9,582 students who graduated from the schools in 2010, the audit found that 292 did not have the exam grades or course credits required under state regulations.

At one school, Landmark High School, 35 students had graduated without earning all of the academic credits required for graduation. At another, Pablo Neruda Academy for Architecture and World Studies, 19 students had gotten credits through “credit recovery” that the school could not prove complied with state requirements. At two schools, Fort Hamilton High School and Hillcrest High School, an examination of Regents exams uncovered problems in the scoring of multiple students’ tests.

Department officials said they had asked Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon to launch inquiries at nine schools based on issues raised during the audits. (Schools where investigations were already underway were excluded from the audit.)

Students who graduated without sufficient credits won’t have their diplomas revoked, officials said. And schools won’t have their graduation rates revised to reflect the audited numbers, either, except potentially where the city found schools had purged students from their rolls without confirming that they had enrolled elsewhere.

Instead, department officials are cracking down on loopholes in city and state regulations about how to graduate students. Among the major policy changes are revisions to Regents exam scoring procedures, new limitations on “credit recovery” options for students who fail courses, and an alteration to the way schools determine whether a student has met graduation requirements.

The changes reflect a new understanding of the degree to which principals had become confused with — or, in some cases, ignorant of — graduation policies. They also reflect an unusual acknowledgment from the Department of Education that its strategies for delivering support to schools and holding them accountable are not always successful. (more…)

City officials won’t be heading to Albany this week after all to petition State Education Commissioner John King to restore federal funding for 33 struggling schools.

King cut off the funds, known as School Improvement Grants, last month when New York City failed to settle on new teacher evaluations by his end-of-2011 deadline. Nine other districts lost their funding for the same reason.

All asked for hearings to appeal King’s decree, and those hearings were set to begin last Friday. City officials were due to make their case for the funds Wednesday morning.

But starting just hours after the news broke on Thursday that the state and its main teachers union, NYSUT, had agreed on a framework for new evaluations, all of the districts asked for their hearings to be adjourned, according to an SED spokesman, Dennis Tompkins.

It’s not clear exactly how the state’s evaluations deal would change what districts planned to say during their hearings. (more…)

More than a month after Mayor Bloomberg announced that he would fulfill a state requirement by overhauling 33 struggling schools, the city still has not officially informed the state of its plans.

The announcement, which came during Bloomberg’s State of the City address Jan. 12, was an attempt to circumvent a requirement that the city and teachers union agree on new teacher evaluations. New evaluations were a condition of the previous improvement processes the schools were undergoing with funding from federal School Improvement Grants. But turnaround, which requires schools to replace at least half of their teachers, does not call for new evaluations.

The turnaround switch isn’t up to the city alone. State Education Commissioner John King must sign off on the plans if they are to get the federal funds. King has said the turnaround model Bloomberg described is “approvable.” But he still hasn’t seen any details.

That’s because the city hasn’t supplied them. For weeks, city officials — including Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott — had cited Feb. 10 as the deadline to complete applications detailing the turnaround plans, but the day came and went with no completed applications in sight.

Department officials now say the deadline was only internal, and now the city is aiming to finish them up by the end of this week. That way, the officials said, the applications can be on the table next week when the city has its hearing about the SIG grants with state education officials. (more…)

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…)