GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

When the first graduates of Green Dot Charter High School move on to college next year, the school’s founder is hoping to manage two more schools in the Bronx.

Steve Barr’s renamed organization, Future is Now Schools, is planning to take over a middle school and a high school in the South Bronx in fall 2012. But unlike in Green Dot’s model, Future is Now wants the two schools to remain district schools, not become charter schools.

That model, which the group announced in March, still requires complicated negotiations over teacher contracts, and especially teacher evaluations, where the city and Future is Now differ greatly. For now, FIN is growing its staff, developing curriculum, and continuing its three-way negotiations with the UFT and the city.

“We’ve made good progress and have come to a general agreement on the form of an evaluation system that is based on Green Dot’s,” said Gideon Stein, FIN’s president. “The difficulty has been all of the other priorities that the DOE and the city have.”

FIN’s most recent hire strengthens the group’s alignment with one of the DOE’s top priorities: Pushing models that blend online and in-person instruction through the two-year-old Innovation Zone. This week, Barr brought on Daniel Gohl, who was previously in charge of innovation efforts in Newark’s public school system, as the company’s chief academic officer. (more…)

Bloomberg announced his budget today, which continues to propose thousands of teacher layoffs.

Mayor Bloomberg reaffirmed his plans to cut 6,000 teaching jobs in his budget address today and said that even if the state restores some funding, he will not promise use it to avoid teacher layoffs.

The budget for 2012 includes 4,100 teacher layoffs and the loss of an additional 2,000 teaching jobs through attrition. These job losses would amount to an eight percent decrease in the size of the teaching force — from 75,000 teachers down to about 69,000.

If the layoffs become a reality — threats in the last two years never bore fruit — it will be the first time since the 1970s that the city has laid off public school teachers. City officials have previously estimated that these layoffs will save the city roughly $300 million.

In his budget presentation today, the mayor blamed cuts to school spending from the city and state for the impending layoffs. In 2002, the city and state each covered roughly 50 percent of the city’s education costs. Next fiscal year, the state will contribute 39 percent and the city will fund the remainder. This year, the city has also lost $850 million in federal stimulus funding for schools. (more…)

Chancellor-designee Dennis Walcott testifies at the New York City Council's Education Committee's Budget Hearing

City school officials said today that they would need roughly $300 million to avoid laying off thousands of teachers next year.

Today’s twice-delayed City Council hearing on the DOE’s preliminary expense budget for 2012 focused on how to avoid teacher layoffs and the current “last in, first out” rules that require the city to lay off teachers based on seniority.

Testifying before the City Council for the first time in his new role as chancellor-designate, Dennis Walcott fielded questions about how the city can avoid mass layoffs. And, although he’s still being referred to by some DOE officials as Deputy Mayor, Walcott was treated just like his predecessors by the Committee: with skepticism.

Council members were quick to offer their congratulations and support to Walcott, but then became less welcoming when the subjects of teacher layoffs and ending “last in, first out” rules were raised.

Many council members questioned whether or not Mayor Bloomberg had requested enough funds from Albany, with several suggesting that perhaps the $600 million Bloomberg requested ($200 million of which was set to go to schools), was deliberately low, perhaps as a strategy to continue pushing for changes to “last in, first out” rules. (more…)

After wrestling down a unionization attempt and struggling with academic performance, a Brooklyn KIPP school is bringing in a new principal and letting go of teachers.

Concerns about high teacher turnover surfaced at the KIPP AMP (Knowledge is Power Program: Always Mentally Prepared) school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, two years. The concerns were the driving force behind teachers’ decision to join the teachers union against the will of the school’s board. A year later teachers opted out of union membership, kicking off a prolonged fight in which the United Federation of Teachers accused KIPP of intimidating teachers who wanted to unionize.

Now, the school could experience what teachers initially feared: turnover and instability. It’s unclear how many teachers will lose their jobs.

A teacher at the school said today that the school’s leadership has informed most of its teachers that they will not have jobs next year.

KIPP co-founder David Levin, who is also the superintendent of KIPP’s New York schools, said that claims that the majority of KIPP AMP teachers would lose their jobs were incorrect. He would not say how many staff members had been asked to leave the school. (more…)

Data released by the Department of Education today.

The city gave a glimpse today into the results of its new sped-up process for terminating teachers, the one that the Bloomberg administration said would put an end to the teacher holding pens known as rubber rooms.

The rubber rooms are technically gone; now, most teachers charged of incompetence or misconduct await verdicts in real schools and do administrative work. But the city failed to meet its goal of erasing the “backlog” of teachers who had been removed from their classrooms by the beginning of this calendar year. Roughly 11 percent of the teachers who made up the backlog — 83 out of 744 — are still waiting for their cases to wrap up.

Of those who have completed the process, nearly two-thirds of the teachers charged with misconduct or incompetence have returned to their classes, according to data released today by the Department of Education. Some were cleared of charges; others were fined or assigned additional training or counseling.

Roughly a quarter of those who began the termination proceedings are no longer in schools. Some were fired, and others either were forced to retire or resign.

The new numbers come at a time of heightened tension between the city and its teachers union over how to identify bad teachers and remove them from classrooms. (more…)

The argument that heated up today between city officials, Governor Andrew Cuomo and members of the state legislature over abolishing the state’s seniority-based layoff system for teachers essentially boils down to one thing: timing.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Education officials want to do away with the “last-in, first-out” system immediately so that they can use new criteria to lay off teachers at the end of this school year. Cuomo and other state officials — several of whom support changing the layoff system generally — counter that abandoning seniority-based layoffs must wait until the state has a better system it can use instead.

Yesterday, Cuomo introduced a bill that would speed implementation of the teacher evaluation bill that Albany passed last May up by a year but did not propose any changes to the layoff system. City officials immediately blasted the bill as “a sham” and a distraction, and Bloomberg said today the governor’s proposal “simply kicks the can down the road.”

Part of the disagreement lies in whether or not the city and the state have time to kick that can. City officials speak of the need to change the layoff system with a sense of urgency, arguing that a budget crisis necessitates laying off more than 4,000 teachers this year. (more…)

City officials released a list Sunday showing how many teachers each of New York City’s public schools could lose to layoffs this year if the state’s current seniority law does not change.

The release comes at the same time that the state legislature is considering a bill that would end the current “last in, first out” layoff policy, which requires districts to dismiss teachers based on seniority. The list shows how Mayor Bloomberg’s planned-for 4,675 potential layoffs would be distributed across its nearly 1,600 schools and the city’s different neighborhoods. The list was first reported by the New York Times.

No teachers who work in special education, bilingual special education, English as a second language, or speech improvement would be laid off. Math and science teachers would also be less affected than their colleagues who teach other subjects. About 3 percent of math teachers would be laid off, whereas 9 percent of social studies teachers would lose their jobs.

More than half of the school employees who would be laid off under this plan are elementary school teachers. The layoffs carried out under this plan would also disproportionately affect newer schools. Of the 20 schools that would lose the greatest percentage of their teachers, all of them were opened between 2007 and 2010. (more…)

The vast majority of city principals say they’re happy with the support they get from the Department of Education, according to the latest results of the city’s survey of school leaders. But the number of contented principals has slipped.

Nearly three-quarters of principals reported feeling satisfied or very satisfied with how the city helps them do their jobs on the most recent survey, which was given in November. That’s a six percentage point drop from last April, the last time the survey was administered, and it’s the lowest level since the city began surveying school leaders in 2007.

The survey also shows a dip in principals’ satisfaction with former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein during his last year in office. The number of principals happy with Klein’s leadership in boosting student achievement fell by 10 percentage points between November 2009 and 2010, with smaller numbers reporting satisfaction with his record with regards to school resources, oversight and curriculum as well.

Principals answered the questionnaire in November and December 2010, just after Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced Klein’s surprise resignation from the DOE and the appointment of new Chancellor Cathie Black. (more…)

A teacher advocacy group supported by prominent opponents of the law requiring seniority-based teacher layoffs has unveiled one of the first detailed proposed alternatives to that law.

A task force of 11 members of Educators 4 Excellence, the group of teachers critical of many union work rules, presented their recommendations to Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this month. The group is financially backed by the Gates Foundation and is linked to the advocacy group Education Reform Now.

Much of their proposal is composed of recommendations that are already being pushed by Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black. In speeches and editorials, the Bloomberg administration has strongly advocated scrapping seniority-based layoffs. Instead they propose laying off teachers whose principals have rated them as unsatisfactory or who currently lack full-time teaching positions in schools.

E4E’s proposal goes one step further, arguing that teachers who have racked up high numbers of unexcused absences during the school year should also be among the first to lose their jobs. Under the plan, teachers who were absent more than 22 days last school year and this one without a doctor’s note would be laid off first.

Still, the city could be forced to lay off far more teachers than who might be covered in E4E’s proposal. The most conservative recent estimates indicate that the city may be forced to lay off more than 6,000 teachers if severe state budget cuts go through. (more…)

For parents of students in the “average” city teacher’s class, learning the teacher’s rating may not tell them very much, Chancellor Joel Klein wrote in a letter to principals today.

In his email, Klein explained the city’s decision to release teachers’ effectiveness ratings and the teachers union’s move to block this from happening. He noted that the ratings, which measure teachers against estimations of how much their students’ test scores ought to rise, would be most useful in identifying very high and low performing teachers. He wrote:

One indication will never tell the whole story, and sometimes it is hard to discern definitive evidence from data alone — such as with a teacher who is “average” according to these numbers, for example. But where teachers have performed consistently toward the top or the bottom, year after year, these data surely tell us something very important. Namely, we need to retain and reward the great teachers, and we need to develop the low-performing teachers. And those who don’t improve quickly need to be replaced with better-performing teachers.

Klein’s full letter: (more…)