GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that teacher layoffs are still on the table in New York City, after Governor Andrew Cuomo’s budget deal lessened the cuts to education only slightly.

Public school teachers could probably be forgiven for rolling their eyes. For the past two years, city officials have responded to cuts in education funding with threats of teacher layoffs and for two years, the layoffs haven’t materialized.

Well aware of the city’s history of layoff threats, Bloomberg and Chancellor Cathie Black have described the budget crisis as more serious than in the past and the threats more real. They’ve lobbied Albany to change the current seniority-based layoff process and they’ve released a list of how many teachers each city school could lose.

So with that in mind, it makes sense to look back to last year, when we published a guide to how layoffs work when and if they ever happen. Some of the information is outdated — we no longer have a Governor David Paterson and the city has confirmed that a majority of the laid-off teachers would come from elementary schools — but most of it is still relevant. For example:

When will I know if I’m being laid off?
Department of Education officials hope to give principals their budgets for next year by June 1, so you could find out shortly afterward that your position has been eliminated at your school. But that doesn’t mean you’ve been laid off. (more…)

It’s the last day of 2010 and we’re flipping back our calendars to the very beginning for a look at the education goings-on of this past year and what they bode for the future. That is, tomorrow.

January

The year began with a 20-day race through public hearings on the city’s plans to close 19 schools. At Beach Channel High School, Jamaica and Columbus high schools, in front of Mayor Bloomberg’s house, Metropolitan Corporate Academy, and other schools (but not Kappa II), teachers, parents, and students rallied against the closure plans. Yet the mayoral appointees on the citywide Panel for Educational Policy, at a meeting that lasted until 4 a.m., voted to approve closing all of the schools.

Meanwhile, in Albany, legislators were negotiating changes to state law that would improve the state’s chances in the Race to the Top competition, which offered millions of federal dollars in exchange for education reforms. Gov. Paterson proposed eliminating the charter school cap altogether, in accordance with the Obama Administration’s preferences, and lawmakers spent the day of Race to the Top’s deadline trying — and ultimately failing — to reach an agreement. The state submitted its bid anyway, initially refusing to release it and ultimately revealing a host of long-shot promises and bizarre furniture requests. (more…)

Possibly taking a cue from today’s New York Times editorial, Chancellor Joel Klein took to the airwaves today to try and explain the drop in scores.

On WNYC, host Brian Lehrer asked Klein when he knew that the state math and reading tests had become too easy and why he continued to trumpet the yearly score increases. Klein defended the way the city discussed test scores, saying the mayor began calling for tougher standards in 2006. He added that whenever the city called press conferences to announce the test scores, “we always put it in context.”

Anyone who sat through those announcements likely remembers that over time, Klein began to emphasize comparisons of the city’s scores to the rest of the state’s scores, rather than focus on the proficiency rates alone. But unlike state officials, he did not caution parents that their children’s scores were inflated. (more…)