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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…)

In advance of an event tonight about the future of teacher evaluations, an organization of young teachers has outlined how its members would ideally be measured.

The proposal from Educators 4 Excellence signals a departure for the group, which formed last year to lobby against seniority-based layoffs that would put many of its 2,500 members at risk of losing their jobs. E4E enters the teacher evaluation debate as the city and teachers union are locked in negotiations to hammer out evaluation rules. Their standoff could cost the city millions of dollars in funds for low-performing schools.

E4E’s proposal builds off the state’s new teacher evaluation law, which requires districts to evaluate teachers using 20 percent state test scores, 20 percent local assessment results, and 60 percent subjective measures such as observations and surveys. The proposal recommends that administrators, colleagues, and “outside master observers” all assess teachers, using formal rubrics that E4E sketches out, and that results of student surveys and “support of the school community” be factored in to teacher evaluations. (more…)

KIPP New York City's logo, from its web site.

Middle school teachers at a KIPP charter school in Brooklyn asked the state this week to let them split from the city teachers union, more than a year after teachers at the same school voted to unionize. The union plans to fight the decision, saying that a group of teachers remain committed to becoming United Federation of Teachers members.

Sixteen staff members signed the petition to break from the UFT. The petition was spearheaded by a guidance counselor named Dameon Clay, his attorney said. Staff who signed the petition include classroom teachers as well as social workers, the dean of teaching and learning, an operations manager, and the office manager.

I couldn’t reach any of the teachers for comment, but Lyle Zuckerman, the attorney representing Clay, said the decision was a judgment about how the teachers could best help themselves and their students. “I think they’ve come to the conclusion that their goals and the educational mission of the school is just going to best be served by them having a direct relationship with the school’s administration,” Zuckerman said.

When they first voted to unionize, teachers at KIPP AMP said they wanted to “create a more sustainable culture so that we can better serve our students and reduce teacher turnover.” At least three teachers who had formed the initial organizing committee at the school are now signing the petition to break from the union. One is Kashi Nelson, a classroom teacher who also sends her daughter to KIPP AMP and who explained her reversal to Alexander Russo last year. (more…)

Council Member Simcha Felder displays one of the cue cards a teachers union representative handed him.

At today’s education committee hearing, City Council members took turns questioning Department of Education officials on the rise of charters schools. Their questions were passionate, specific, and universally accusatory. They may have also been scripted.

Just before the hearing began, a representative of the city teachers union, which describes itself as in favor of charter schools, discreetly passed out a set of index cards to Council members, each printed with a pre-written question.

One batch of cards offered questions for the Department of Education, all of them challenging the proliferation of charter schools. “Doesn’t the Department have a clear legal and moral responsibility to provide every family in the city guaranteed seats for their children in a neighborhood elementary school?” one card suggested members ask school officials. “Isn’t the fundamental problem here the Department’s abdication of its most important responsibility to provide quality district public schools in all parts of the city?” another card said. (View more of the cards in a slideshow here.)

Several council members picked up on the line of thought. “Shouldn’t we aspire to have every school in the city good enough for parents to feel comfortable sending their children?” Melinda Katz, a Council member from Queens, said in questioning school officials. “I remember when Joel Klein became the chancellor,” the committee chair, Robert Jackson, said. “Back then, he used to talk about making every neighborhood school a good school where every parent would want to send their children. I don’t hear him talk about that anymore.”

Asked about the cards, union president Randi Weingarten provided a statement saying that she regretted the tactic. “We are often asked by the council for information and ideas about various issues. Additionally, when I am available, I often respond to what others testify to. In this instance, I was in Washington and couldn’t be at City Hall,” she said in the statement. “I am proud of the testimony we gave today, but I regret the manner in which our other concerns were shared.” (more…)

Congressman George Miller

As the Education Secretary fight nears an end, everyone is trying to figure out how to describe the two sides of the battle for Barack Obama’s affection. But I don’t think any of the recent descriptions — from the Associated Press (“reform advocates”) to Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter (“bomb throwers”) to The New Republic (“Reform School”) — live up to the standards of my New York Sun editor, Ira Stoll, who declared that the word “reform” is hopelessly imprecise and banned it from my writing.

All the more reason to turn our name-those-reformers contest into its final bend. The newest entry is from George Miller, the chairman of the House’s education committee. Jonathan Alter reports:

Rep. George Miller, the leading voice on education in Congress, told me recently that “the debate is between incrementalists and disrupters, and I’m with the disrupters.” So is Bill Gates. The father of disruptive software is ready for another revolution.

The disrupters may not be a real word (or at least a word entered in my computer’s dictionary), but it is a neat proposal. It’s the same distinction Randi Weingarten makes between herself and Joel Klein. As she told the Times, her vision is “sustainable and incremental change.” Klein wants “radical reform.”

But I still have some concerns. (more…)

Dozens of educators, policymakers, and advocates gathered at United Federation of Teachers headquarters this morning for the first in a series of public forums to discuss proposed changes to New York State’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) accountability system. The Board of Regents is seeking feedback on a new growth model, which is designed to provide “differentiated accountability” for schools, before they submit it for approval by the federal department of education in mid-October.

Ira Schwartz of the New York State Education Department presented the proposal, stressing that a growth model allows the state to more carefully assess the work of schools by looking both at the number of students meeting absolute proficiency standards and the rate of growth of students who have not yet reached proficiency.

Adapted from NYSED presentation. Statements in quotes are from Ira Schwartz about each type of school.

By combining these measures, he said, the state could differentiate between schools with low absolute scores where students made significant growth, and schools with both low scores and low growth. The same distinction could be made for schools with high absolute scores, separating schools that continued to push students to higher levels from those where individual students do not make much progress.

The state hopes to use a growth model both to “make more refined… decisions” about whether schools have made Annual Yearly Progress (AYP), and to go beyond AYP to measure the growth of students who have already reached proficiency. Schwartz noted that while the use of a growth model for determining AYP status must be approved by the U.S. Department of Education, the second part of the proposal, going beyond NCLB to look at the growth of proficient students, does not require federal approval.

Schwartz’s presentation mentioned New York City’s Progress Reports as an example of a locally-developed initiative that takes student growth into account, which sparked criticism by some educators in the room.  “I hope they’re not using New York City as a model of success for this,” one principal said during the question-and-answer period.

And Leo Casey, who spoke for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), emphasized that any accountability model must be fair and complete, accurate, and transparent — no “statistical hieroglyphs,” in order to be meaningful to teachers and families. “If grades and accountability careen all over the place, from F to A and A to F, educators will experience them like the weather,” he said. Casey concluded that although there are still areas needing work, the state’s proposal is an improvement over the current system.

Upcoming posts will detail the state’s proposals for elementary and middle schools, high schools, and for measuring the growth of already proficient students.