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Since the first protesters arrived at Zuccotti park nearly five weeks ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement has ignited protests from California to the United Kingdom. The city Department of Education could be next.

Calling Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott a member of the maligned “1 percent,” city education activists say they are planning to bring hundreds of protesters to next week’s school board meeting for an “Occupy the DOE” action.

The idea to form ODOE came to organizers, many of whom are city public school teachers, during a Sunday afternoon “grade-in” for educators at Occupy Wall Street, according to Leia Petty, an organizer who works as a guidance counselor in a Bushwick high school and is a long-time activist.

As the teachers discussed how the OWS movement intersected with public education, she said, they united around a shared concern that educators and families have been shut out of DOE decision-making process. So they decided to protest the entity that does ratify DOE decisions: the Panel for Educational Policy, which is holding a special meeting next week about new academic standards.

Petty said ODOE protesters will fill the 350-seat auditorium and draw attention to the PEP’s track record of ignoring public testimony before approving the DOE’s proposed policies. Most of the panel’s members were appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. (more…)

The Department of Education is preparing for the high volume of new assignments it will have to make starting Tuesday, as Absent Teacher Reserve  teachers are shifted to a new school every single week.

Starting next week, the nearly 1,300 teachers in the ATR pool will report to a fresh school every Monday, an arrangement set in a deal between the city and teachers union to avert teacher layoffs. Teachers enter the pool when their positions are eliminated, usually because of budget cuts or school closures. While some teachers quickly find new positions in the city schools, others do not, and some stay in the pool for years without finding a new position.

A computer algorithm and multiple DOE staffers are tasked with making matches between ATR members to their weekly school placements, DOE officials told reporters today in a telephone briefing. The officials said the process is a work in progress, acknowledging that it may require more time and energy from central office staff and principals than the previous ATR arrangement. Previously, ATR teachers held long-term assignments. The relatively comfortable stability was seen by some as a reason why longstanding members of the pool failed to find new positions.

Union officials explained to skeptical teachers in the ATR pool earlier this week that the arrangement is meant to help them land permanent positions.

DOE officials echoed that explanation. The placements should be seen as a tryout that could easily result in a full-time position, according to Larry Becker, the chief executive officer of the DOE’s human resources division.  (more…)

Students and teachers protest the proposed closure of Jamaica High School on Wednesday. Photo courtesy William McDonald.

Tis the season to light candles, exchange gifts, visit family — and protest school closures?

Last week marked the beginning of what promises to be an unusually heated season of rallies organized by opponents of the city’s plan to close 20 schools.

Some activists point to a heightened sensitivity around this year’s school closings. But the spike in public demonstrations may also be due to changes in school governance law that has required DOE officials to explain and defend their closure proposals in public, where those decisions were once made behind closed doors.

“I think the amount of activity this year is definitely unusual,” said parent activist Leonie Haimson. “Among people who pay attention to these things, I think there’s an overwhelming sense of enough is enough and an attitude that we’re going to fight back.” (more…)

Chelsea families have been organizing for weeks to oppose a city plan to relocate their middle school. But city school officials say no such plan has ever existed.

In fact, they say they never even made a formal proposal to move the Clinton School for Writers and Artists, a small school currently sharing space with an elementary school on West 21st Street.

The apparently mistaken idea has its roots in the popular school’s desire to expand. Department of Education officials suggested moving Clinton to PS 33, a nearby, lower-performing elementary school that has classrooms to spare. But Clinton’s principal, Jeanne-Marie Fraino, convinced DOE officials that the move would not be good for her school, so they dropped the idea, DOE spokesman Will Havemann told me today.

“We have no intention of moving Clinton for Fall 2009,” Havemann said.

The news has not gotten to Clinton parents, who are sending frenzied e-mails in advance of a meeting tomorrow of the Community Education Council for District 2, the elected parent council that is supposed to advise the DOE on school siting decisions. “We should dress in red so we can make our presence felt,” read one e-mail sent to Clinton parents. (more…)

Here’s what David Cantor, the DOE’s chief spokesman, has to say about the United Federation of Teachers’ forthcoming proposal for how to reform mayoral control:

We are looking forward to a constructive discussion with the UFT about its proposals. Some of the union’s recommendations, however, would send us back to the days when making change was impossible. In particular, the union’s proposal for a central, political Board, with 13 members appointed by nine different elected officials but accountable to none, is an almost exact replica of the worst part of the old system.

City Hall (via Flickr)

Data specialists, new small schools, and empty seats in gifted programs could all go the way of cash bonuses to top-scoring schools if the City Council gets the budget cuts it wants.

The Council is proposing $170 million in additional budget cuts, on top of the millions Mayor Bloomberg already suggested, in an attempt to preserve a $400 rebate to homeowners that the mayor says the city can’t afford.

Almost $80 million of the proposed cuts would come from the Department of Education, the largest amount from any single city agency. Nearly $40 million of that would be programs associated with the department’s flagship Children First initiative, such as the school-based “inquiry teams” that analyze data about individual students. Other cuts would come in the form of delays, such as opening fewer schools each year and tabling plans to buy new data systems to manage enrollment and hiring information. And the proposal would require teachers to do jury duty on their own time, during the summer, so that schools won’t have to pay for substitutes. (more…)

Teachers rallied outside the Department of Education yesterday.

A few hundred teachers and union leaders rallied outside Department of Education headquarters last night to urge the DOE to fully implement a recent agreement creating incentives for principals to hire teachers who lost their jobs when their schools closed or were phased out.

The teachers, known as Absent Teacher Reserves or ATRs, have been covering classes and doing other assignments in schools, their salaries paid centrally by the DOE. The agreement will require Chancellor Klein to send a letter to all principals encouraging them to hire ATRs, and will provide financial incentives over the next 8 years for schools to place these teachers on their own payrolls. The incentives are meant to counteract the higher cost to a school of hiring a more-experienced teacher.

Several ATRs I spoke to at the rally said they were optimistic that the agreement will work because it is such a good deal for principals, though one added that even a letter from Klein will not convince all principals to look past the stigma attached to ATRs, since they have been portrayed negatively in the press. And another teacher said with school budgets as tight as they are, she doubts anyone will get hired, incentives notwithstanding.

Layoffs have started at the Department of Education’s central offices, beginning the round of 475 personnel cuts ordered by the mayor earlier this month, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte confirmed for me today.

Forte said she couldn’t tell me how many employees have already gotten pink slips. But she said that some people who work at the department’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters in lower Manhattan have already been let go. So have some people who have administrative jobs that are not based at Tweed, a category that could include human resources staff, who are housed in downtown Brooklyn, and staff at the Integrated Service Centers that are sprinkled throughout the five boroughs.

Forte said that more employees will be laid off “in the next couple of weeks.”

Our understanding is that all of the DOE’s department heads were told how much of their budgets they needed to cut, and then it was up to them to decide how.

Have you heard of anyone who’s been told to pack up his or her desk? Let us know.

At the same time as it is trying to trim its budget, the Department of Education today announced that it would distribute more than $8 million to high school teachers and administrators in schools with good progress report scores.

This year, the DOE is giving out bonus money to two groups of educators. A program for principals and assistant principals awards bonuses ranging from $7,000 to $25,000 for leaders of schools in the top 20 percent of progress report scores. Fifty-eight principals are taking home $1.3 million through that program.

A separate initiative awards pots of money to all teachers union members at schools participating in the pilot year of a school-wide performance bonus program. That program was open to schools the DOE considers “high-need,” and this year 39 schools that serve high school students chose to participate. Most of those, 85 percent, met the requirements to earn $3,000 per UFT member. A team of teachers at each school will decide how to mete out the funds.

An additional bonus program was eliminated in the budget cuts the mayor announced last week. That program would have given all schools scoring an A on their progress report an additional $30 per student in discretionary funds.

The school-wide bonus program this year is being funded with private investments. The DOE is paying for the principal bonus program, which accounts for $1.3 million of the total bonuses, with taxpayer dollars.

View an Excel sheet of schools that are eligible for the bonus programs and the amounts they will receive.

People inside Department of Education headquarters weren’t the only ones fretting about the possibility of losing their jobs today.

Afraid they’re just a month from being laid off, a handful of new Teaching Fellows who still haven’t landed positions in schools gathered on the steps of Tweed Courthouse tonight to demand a meeting with Chancellor Joel Klein.

The teachers are seeking, at a minimum, an extension of the deadline to find a permanent position. Newly hired teachers without jobs on Dec. 5 will be removed from DOE payroll, a condition they agreed to when they accepted their job offers this summer.

A security officer stopped the teachers at the door, but a DOE employee spoke briefly with the group and instructed them to contact the chancellor in writing. She took a signed letter and at least one of the teachers’ signs, saying she’d pass their message on to Klein.

According to DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte, 115 new Teaching Fellows are still without jobs, down from 139 in mid-October. Teachers tonight told me they are working as substitutes and assistants while they seek permanent positions.

Earlier this week, the executive board of the United Federation of Teachers set Nov. 24 as the date for the delegate-mandated rally to support teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve. ATRs are experienced teachers who lost their positions when their schools were phased out.

The UFT says it has also filed a grievance on behalf of new Teaching Fellows without jobs, who are not technically ATRs because they have never held a job in a New York City public school. But a Teaching Fellow who has worked to organize Teaching Fellows without jobs said the teachers aren’t putting much stock in the UFT. “At this point, this is just about the DOE,” he said.