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Percentage of teachers who had tenure denied or extended, 2006-2012

The city’s two-year-old crackdown on “tenure as we know it” continued this past year with nearly half of the teachers up for tenure not receiving it.

Just under 4,000 teachers were up for tenure in the 2011-2012 school year, fewer than usual because hiring restrictions sharply cut the number of new teachers in 2009. Of them, 55 percent received tenure and 3 percent were denied it, effectively barring them from working in city schools. The remaining portion — 42 percent — had their probationary periods extended for another year.

The extension rate was slightly higher than in 2011, when 39 percent of teachers up for tenure had their decisions deferred under a revamped tenure evaluation process. But it is five times the extension rate from 2010, which was the first time that the city used the deferral option in large numbers.

Mayor Bloomberg vowed in 2010 to move toward on “ending tenure as we know it,” a change he favors because teachers who do not yet have tenure can more easily be fired.

Last year, Chancellor Dennis Walcott predicted that more teachers would be denied tenure this year.

UPDATE: But  the denial rate for teachers in the tenure pool for the first time actually fell. Last year, 104 teachers eligible for tenure for the first time were denied it, for a denial rate of 2.2 percent. This year, that rate was 1.9 percent, meaning that just 42 teachers up for tenure for the first time were told they could not continue to work in city schools.

The Department of Education’s chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said today that the department had no firm goals for how many teachers should receive or be denied tenure.

“This is not about hitting some numerical target at all,” he said during a call with reporters. “What we’re asking principals to do is treat this as a big decision about: Is this teacher ready for lifetime guarantee of employment?” (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg called this morning for the city to eliminate pay raises for public school teachers for the next to years to forestall teacher layoffs.

The mayor said that cutting the two percent pay raises the city had planned to offer teachers — already a decrease from a planned four percent raise — would prevent the city from laying off 4,400 teachers.

A spokesman for the city’s teachers union said he had just learned of the mayor’s plan to eliminate pay raises. The mayor’s statement is silent on whether the teachers union has agreed to this proposal, an important omission as any decisions regarding pay have to be made in contract negotiations.

UPDATE 11:30 am: Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew released a statement saying the union has not agreed to freeze teacher salaries.

“The Mayor has the power to unilaterally rescind the proposed layoffs, and I’m glad that he has made the right decision to avoid massive disruptions to our schools,” Mulgrew said, adding that the mayor does not have the power to “unilaterally decide on the teachers’ contract.” (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein threw out a surprise at today’s City Council hearing on next year’s education budget — that the number of teachers currently in the Absent Teacher Reserve pool has now dipped to 1,092 teachers, down about 600 people since the fall.

In its teachers contract demands this year, the city has asked for the power to fire teachers who remain in the excess pool for more than four months. Assuming the teachers currently in the pool have been there since the fall, if not longer, they would lose their jobs under the city’s proposal. (more…)