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Tensions between the city and teachers over their t0-the-wire teacher evaluation talks bubbled over in 140 characters early this morning, sending both sides into their respective corners for most of the day.

But state education officials said the city Department of Education and the UFT had been laying the groundwork for a successful submission before the end of the day on Thursday, the deadline for districts to adopt new evaluations or lose state funding.

After a negotiations-packed weekend in which both city and union officials acknowledged that progress had been made, talks went late into the night on Monday at the union’s headquarters. But a little after 1:30 a.m., Leo Casey, a former vice president for the union who has stayed on to finish the evaluations deal, suggested in a Twitter message that negotiations had fizzled out.

“At UFT. Negotiating team prepared to do round the clock negotiating, with full team present,” Casey wrote. “But DOE leaves.” (more…)

United Federation of Teachers Vice President Leo Casey at a public hearing about Opportunity Charter School's charter renewal in November.

A top United Federation of Teachers official who has been the union’s leading intellectual voice in recent years is heading south.

But he won’t be going as far as Florida, a common destination for union members who retire. Instead, Leo Casey, the vice president of academic high schools since 2007, said today that is taking a new position this fall as the director of the Albert Shanker Institute in Washington, D.C. The institute is a research arm of the American Federation of Teachers, the national union to which the UFT belongs.

In his role at the UFT, Casey has been both an intellectual and a seasoned activist. He has represented the union on various panels, forums, and debates on education policy and blogged prolifically for the union’s news and opinion site, Edwize. But he has been just as comfortable protesting at public hearings, where he was known to deliver fiery speeches against school closures, co-locations, and other policies that the union opposed.

In moving to the Albert Shanker Institute, a progressive think tank focused on education and labor policies, he will focus on research. Casey, a city teacher for 27 years, said that he hoped his legacy at the UFT would be of pushing against school reform that is driven by non-educators.

“I think one of the most important things that has driven my time at the UFT is to provide a voice for classroom teachers and that far too much of education policy making today is in the hands of folks who don’t understand what it’s like to teach,” Casey said.

The city and teachers union aren’t anywhere close to settling on new teacher evaluations. But if and when they do strike a deal, they might have to revisit a point of agreement.

Leo Casey, a teachers union official, told me recently that before negotiations broke down in December, the city and UFT had agreed that only students with a minimum attendance rate should be counted in teachers’ scores. Exactly what that rate would be was still up for discussion, Casey said, but everyone agreed on the basic principle that if students aren’t in class to learn, it’s not fair to hold teachers responsible for their learning.

It’s an outlook that teachers at schools under threat of closure have shared over and over. At Washington Irving High School, teachers protesting the city’s ultimately successful closure proposal argued that the school would have much stronger performance data if  the city excluded the school’s many “long-term absences” from its progress report calculations.

It’s also a point that united Buffalo and its teachers union as they negotiated a new teacher evaluation system earlier this year for schools eligible for School Improvement Grants. In February, they settled on a system that would exclude chronically absent students from the student growth portion of evaluations.

But the State Education Department rejected that portion of their compromise. In the rejection letter, Education Commissioner John King explained that Buffalo’s evaluation system would have applied the attendance provision to the 20 percent of evaluations that the state controls, and that’s not allowed. But another problem, he wrote, was that the provision could be abused. (more…)

Barry Fried, the longtime principal of John Dewey High School, was removed from the Brooklyn school suddenly this morning, according to several teachers at the school.

It was not immediately clear whether Fried’s removal was related to “turnaround,” the federally prescribed reform process that the city has proposed for Dewey and 32 other struggling schools. Turnaround requires principals who have been in place for more than a few years to be replaced, and the city has started informing principals at some of the schools that they would be removed at the end of the year.

But Fried’s departure happened abruptly, suggesting that the city might have had more immediate concerns. Department of Education officials did not respond to requests for details about Fried’s departure today.

At a faculty meeting this afternoon, Kathleen Elvin was introduced as the school’s interim acting principal. Elvin was the founding principal of a successful small high school, Williamsburg Prep, and most recently trained teachers assigned to schools undergoing less agressive overhaul strategies. She is likely to help engineer staffing and programming changes at the school through the turnaround process.

The change, according to people familiar with the school, was sorely needed — but comes after too long with subpar leadership.

“Principal Fried sits in his office all day and can’t control the students,” City Councilman Dominic Recchia, a 1977 Dewey graduate, said at a public meeting earlier this year, according to the Brooklyn Daily. “This principal should have been gone years ago. The school could prosper but it needs new leadership.” (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…)

A disagreement over how to protest last night’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting spilled onto the sidewalk less than two hours before the event started.

In the video above, Brian Jones, a teacher activist affiliated with the Grassroots Education Movement makes a last-ditch effort to form a unified front with the teachers union against the city’s policy of closing schools. He confronted Leo Casey, a vice president in the United Federation of Teachers and asked him why the union had refused to join his group.

The UFT planned to hold their own policy meeting at a school down the road and said they would not even attend the PEP. GEM, on the other hand, was joining a larger protest that included Occupy DOE factions and students organized by the Coalition for Educational Justice. The plan was to remain in the Brooklyn Tech auditorium for the event’s entirety and disrupt it through the ‘people’s mic.’

“All of your allies are coming to our plan, so what’s the point sticking to [your plan]?” Jones asked Casey, as dozens of protesters behind him began chanting that they would not walk out. “The NAACP is going to be inside with us. Why are you going to be outside?” (more…)

United Federation of Teachers Vice President Leo Casey at a public hearing about Opportunity Charter School's charter renewal

For months, Opportunity Charter School CEO Leonard Goldberg fought to keep the teachers union out of his school. On Monday, he welcomed them into his auditorium with open arms.

At a public hearing to discuss the school’s future Monday evening, United Federation of Teachers Vice President Leo Casey and other UFT officials joined Goldberg and his newly unionized staff to push back against the possibility that Opportunity could be closed. The school’s charter is up for renewal this year and the city has cited it as one of six charter schools whose performance is so weak that they could lose their right to operate.

The partnership between the school’s leadership and the union would have seemed inconceivable just a couple of months ago when the two sides were locked in a legal battle over whether the school’s teachers should be able to join the UFT.

Union officials and teachers accused Goldberg of retaliation after he fired more than a dozen teachers shortly after they voted to unionize at the school in March. Goldberg refused to acknowledge the teachers’ union vote, prompting a hearing with the state’s Public Employee Relations Board, which eventually ruled that the teachers could use the UFT as their bargaining agent. The union has also filed a grievance over the firings.

All of that was apparently water under the bridge during Monday night’s meeting, which two officials from the DOE’s charter schools office attended. Goldberg said he was happy to have the union’s support and UFT officials said the school should stay open. (more…)

Teachers at Green Dot New York Charter School are getting a raise, a bonus, and a little less job security.

These are some of the modifications that are set to appear in a two-year renewal of Green Dot’s landmark contract with the United Federation of Teachers. Green Dot offered its teachers a 28-page “thin contract” a year after the school opened in 2008, leaving out many of the work rules and policies – including tenure and seniority-based layoffs – that are found in the bulky union deal with the Department of Education.

That contract expired in August and Green Dot and union officials have spent the last few months hammering out a new version. It was tentatively approved by board members on Sept. 26, but details of the contract had not been shared with teachers until this week.

In a statement issued today, the chief negotiators, Leo Casey, a UFT vice president, and Gideon Stein, who serves on the school’s Board of Trustees, shared details of the contract.

Under the new terms, the staff will receive a 3 percent raise each of the next two years, amounting to what will be 20 percent above the current salaries in the Department of Education. Last year’s teachers will also receive a $2000 bonus because of the school’s high performance. The school’s first students are now seniors so graduation data isn’t available, but 95 percent of students have passed the Regents exams they have taken, according to the Green Dot web site.

“The teachers and other staff are being paid more in recognition of being part of a very successful school,” Stein said.

In one concession, teachers will no longer be able to use an independent grievance process in their first year. Instead, they can be fired any time during their first year for any reason. Once the first year is complete, any grievance would return to being handled by an independent arbiter. (more…)

Watch the full episode. See more Metrofocus.

We’ve written about two interesting exchanges during Thursday’s “On Education” panel discussion, but there were many more over the course of the discussion’s 102 minutes. Now you can watch them all — at least until Hurricane Irene cuts your power out.

Of particular note: Prospective mayoral candidate William Thompson’s prognosis on teachers contract negotiations (starting at 27:40); Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz on her efforts to deal with “the burnout factor,” which include giving teachers 11 weeks of paid vacation (36:55); Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch decrying exaggeration in the city’s claims of improvement (1:09:00); and UFT Vice-President Leo Casey and Moskowitz debating whether schools should be run like businesses (1:12:00).

Manhattan Media organized the discussion, and City Hall News and GothamSchools moderated it. The video is provided by Metrofocus, a new project of WNET.

A panel discussion that featured officials on each side of the teacher evaluation stand-off was halted abruptly last night after a disagreement escalated. The disruption did not stem from the teachers union and Department of Education official on the panel, but from a small group of audience members protesting the event itself.

“Okay, I’m going to cut it off,” said moderator Evan Stone, following a crescendo of interruptions that built up for nearly five minutes. Stone is a founder of Educators 4 Excellence, which hosted the event. “Clearly, we’ve broken a lot of norms of respectability.”

The interruptions came from at least three people in an audience of more than 100, most of them teachers. They began in response to Stone’s handling of the panel and then escalated into an airing of grievances that targeted Educators 4 Excellence and its teacher evaluation recommendations, released yesterday, which the protesters said did not reflect their views.

“I am a teacher and I have never been asked what I thought,” yelled out Stuart Kramer Kaplan, one of the protesters.

(Click here for video of the exchange.)
(more…)