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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…)

Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. was among Dennis Walcott's (left) vocal questioner today.

On the first day back to work since 672 school aides were laid off, City Council members unloaded criticism on Chancellor Dennis Walcott for what they said was an intentional failure to notify them about the layoffs.

In several tense exchanges with Walcott, Finance Committee Chair Domenic Recchia, Jr. repeatedly claimed that council members were kept in the dark about the layoffs. If they’d known the layoffs were possible, Recchia said the Council would have acted to stop them, just as it did for teachers this summer.

At one point, Recchia ordered a staff member to hand deliver a budget document to Walcott, seated 30 feet away at the testimonial desk, and asked him to read it.

“Nowhere in the executive budget did you say you were going to lay off school aides,” Recchia said. “We would have done something about it and you didn’t tell us.”

But in his testimony and in subsequent exchanges, Walcott pointed out that Recchia and his colleagues in the Council actually signed off on a budget agreement that “made clear” that an additional 1,000 non-uniform and non-pedagogical employees could lose their jobs.

Echoing previous statements, the Chancellor said the layoffs did not show up specifically in the executive budget because they were cuts made by principals in July to reduce individual school budgets by an average of 2.4 percent. (more…)

Teachers union officials fought back today against the city’s claim that they’re delaying negotiations over a new teacher evaluation system.

Responding to a story in the New York Post about the stalled talks over a pilot teacher evaluation program in 11 schools, union officials said negotiations were progressing smoothly until city school officials decided to turn one aspect of the evaluation system into a sticking point.

According to United Federation of Teachers Secretary Michael Mendel, when talks began last summer, he told city officials that the union would not agree to let teachers’ first evaluation under the new system affect their job security. But after the first year, if a teacher received two “ineffective” ratings in a row, the termination process would begin.

“I said we can’t attach any high stakes to the ratings in the first year because it’s a pilot, it’s a brand new thing,” Mendel said. “They [city officials] never said a word. We went along and negotiated under the assumption that they didn’t disagree,” he said. (more…)