Nearly twice as many New Yorkers trust the teachers union to protect students’ interests than they do Bloomberg, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. Bloomberg’s approval rating on schools has hovered around 25 percent since early 2011, according to the poll.

The poll, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 5, found that 56 percent of registered voters in New York City say they trust the union more to go to bat for students. Less than a third, 31 percent, said they trust Bloomberg more. (The poll of 1,222 registered voters had a margin of error of 2.8 percent.)

Among households containing public school students, the split was even more pronounced. Just 21 percent of those voters picked Bloomberg, and 69 percent chose the teachers union. Parents’ backed the union more often than even households with union members.

The news comes in an education-packed poll conducted after a month in which in a showdown over new teacher evaluations led Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo each to ratchet up rhetoric against teachers and their unions. The poll found that the percentage of New Yorkers with favorable opinions of teachers had fallen, from 54 percent last March to 47 percent now.

But while a different poll earlier this week found high approval for Cuomo’s school policies, a set of questions designed to assess New Yorkers’ feelings about a slate of policy initiatives Bloomberg proposed during his State of the City address last month elicited mixed results.

In that speech, Bloomberg proposed increasing the salaries of teachers who receive high ratings on new evaluations and offering loan forgiveness to top college students who become city teachers.

The poll asked New Yorkers for their opinions on those ideas and others. Here’s what they said:

Overall, according to the poll, just 26 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Bloomberg has handled the schools. That figure is statistically identical to the 25 percent low Bloomberg received last spring, during the waning days of Cathie Black’s brief tenure as chancellor. Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents said Bloomberg’s takeover of the schools had been a failure, the same as last year.

Black New Yorkers and those living in the Bronx gave Bloomberg his lowest approval ratings on schools, 21 percent and 19 percent respectively. He did best among New Yorkers making more than $100,000 a year: A full third of them said they supported his schools management.

The news for Chancellor Dennis Walcott was also not good. His approval numbers stayed the same since December, at 34 percent, but his disapproval rate has continued to inch upward and now stands at 37 percent.

Overall, just 13 percent of New Yorkers said the mayor should retain sole control of the city schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013. Two-thirds said a new mayor should share control with an independent school board. The law authorizing mayoral control of the city schools is set to expire in 2016.

Half of respondents say they want their next mayor to be someone with government, rather than business, experience. But they gave only mixed reviews to the job performance of three city officials who are plotting mayoral runs: City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu.

Bloomberg discusses school funding during today's budget briefing

The education proposals that Mayor Bloomberg announced during his State of the City speech last week made no appearance at his budget briefing today.

Nor did the policy he had pushed last year during the budget process, an end to seniority-based layoff rules.

In fact, in his budget proposal for the fiscal year that begins in July, Bloomberg said little about schools except that the Department of Education is among the only city agencies not set to experience budget cuts. The city is planning to spend $13.6 billion on schools in 2012-2013, and layoffs are not on the table.

That’s good news for principals, who said last year (as they had in the past) that they could not fathom cutting anything more in their schools.

But the budget proposal counts on some revenue that is not at all assured — increased school aid from the state.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, of course, has said the aid increase would go only to districts that have new teacher evaluations in place. So far, the city and teachers union have been unable to agree on new evaluations and do not appear on the brink of doing so.

But Bloomberg said today he was not worried about Cuomo’s threat, arguing that the aid increases were slated well before Cuomo’s recent ultimatum.

“In terms of the governor’s budget I think this coming year’s education money is locked in and not contingent on anything,” Bloomberg said.

Some cuts are slated to day care programs: About 16,000 spots will disappear under the proposed budget, a fact that has drawn swift and vocal criticism from advocates of early childhood education.

“We just can’t do everything,” Bloomberg said today.

The main constraint, and the emphasis of his budget presentation, is that the city’s pension burden is “a ticking time bomb,” he said. For the first time, the pensions and benefits to be paid out to uniformed workers (firefighters, police, sanitation, etc.) this year will exceed what the city spends on their wages, Bloomberg said.

He applauded Cuomo for proposing pension reform that would change the benefits calculation for new works.

Asked whether reducing the promised pension returns for future workers might undermine the city’s bid to get top college graduates into classrooms as teachers, a goal he outlined in his State of the City speech, Bloomberg said he didn’t anticipate a problem.

“I don’t think new teachers getting out of school are concerned about pensions,” he said. “They’re more concerned with changing the world.”

Bloomberg did say, during the question-and-answer portion of the budget briefing, that he is optimistic that the city will be able to negotiate with the teachers union for incentive pay, in the form of college loan forgiveness, to go to high-achieving college students who become city teachers. But he did not mention that plan, or the funds that would underwrite it, during his budget presentation.

One reason for the city’s additional education outlay, Bloomberg explained, is that the city is picking up the slack left by the state and federal government when stimulus funding ran out. Ten years ago, he said, the city and state shared funding for the city schools roughly evenly. But after a decade of increasing spending on schools, the city now covers two-thirds of the bill. Last year, Bloomberg blamed the post-stimulus funding cliffs for the layoffs threat last year.

Last year, the choice was to “either lay off teachers or reach into our pockets,” Bloomberg said today. “We chose to reach into our pockets.”

Department of Education officials said today that the city is exploring the option of replacing fewer teachers at the schools under an allowance included in federal guidelines for the school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.”

The turnaround process, which Bloomberg announced two weeks ago to sidestep a requirement of other school improvement strategies to negotiate new teacher evaluations with the teachers union, mandates that 50 percent of teachers be replaced. But the U.S. Department of Education makes special allowances for some teachers who have been hired in the last two years.

Now the city is looking to take advantage of that flexibility when it files formal turnaround applications with the state next month.

The catch is that not every teacher hired in the last two years is automatically eligible for the exemption.The federal guidelines make an allowance only for teachers who were selected “according to locally adopted competencies as part of a school reform effort” headed by a principal handpicked to lead it. That means, according to the guidelines, the teachers should have been screened for an ability to “be effective in a turnaround situation.”

It’s not clear how many of the roughly 3,400 teachers at the 33 schools would fall into this category. As recently as Monday, Chancellor Dennis Walcott told state legislators that there would be “possibly up to 1,500, 1,700 teachers” cut loose from the schools.

But there are some clues. Twenty-seven of the 33 schools were already receiving federal funds to undergo the “restart” or “transformation” processes, and many of them received new principals in the process. The city could make the case that the federal regulations would allow any teachers hired since those processes began to stay on, although it could be a tough sell in instances where the school was continuing its regular efforts to replace faculty members who retired, resigned, or moved to other schools.

The argument would be clearest for the dozens of “master” and “turnaround” teachers brought on at the 33 schools. Their salaries were being paid for using the federal School Improvement Grants — they are the only teachers for whom that is true — and their duties were aligned with the grant program’s requirements.

City officials could not immediately identify just how many teachers have been brought on at the schools in the last two years. But the number is unlikely to cut too far into the portion of teachers required to be replaced. That’s because most of the schools have relatively stable staffs, and budget cuts in recent years have required many schools to cut their teaching rosters, not add to them.

One challenge to the move could be how to reconcile the federal requirements for restaffing with the ones contained in the city’s contract with the teachers union. In order to invoke a clause of the contract known as 18-D to restaff the schools, the city must technically close and reopen all of the schools. Because the schools will technically be new, it would be hard for the city to argue that any of the teachers had already been on staff as part of an existing reform effort.

Plus, 18-D requires the new school to hire from the old staff in order of seniority, as long as teachers meet certain qualifications. The turnaround exemption could position some teachers to leapfrog over more senior colleagues in the rehiring process.

Walcott told legislators earlier this week that the city would submit its turnaround applications to the state within weeks. State Education Commissioner John King is responsible for assessing the applications in accordance with the federal guidelines. He has called the general contours of the city’s turnaround plan “approvable.”

Speaking at a conference of mayors, Bloomberg touted his education accomplishments, outlined his latest initiatives, and griped about the obstacles. He also explained how he sees himself fitting into the murky politics of education, where he said the right wing attacks unions and resists national reform efforts and the left eschews testing and other measures to boost accountability.

Mayors, he said, represent a “sensible center” in an education debate otherwise driven by ideologues:

The attacks on education by ideologues on the right and on the left must be met — and must be fended off — by the sensible center. And that is the people that you are here with today, the mayors. Mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers, not ideologues. They don’t have the luxury of being on both sides of an issue. They have to be explicit as to where they stand. … Mayors are where the action is. Mayors are where the rubber hits the road.

They’re expected to make hard-headed decisions based on the facts – not on special interest politics. That’s what I think the mayors have done on so many issues – from illegal guns to immigration to climate change. And that’s what we have to do on education, including accountability measures like teacher evaluations and sensible plans to either improve or find other careers for those teachers who just aren’t getting their students to move ahead and getting what the students need to participate in the Great American Dream.

The full text of the mayor’s speech today, as recorded in a city press release, is below.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG DETAILS NEW YORK CITY’S BOLD EDUCATION REFORM EFFORTS AT U.S. CONFERENCE OF MAYORS WINTER MEETING

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s remarks as delivered today in Washington, D.C. at the U.S. Conference of Mayors 80^th Winter Meeting follow:

“Mayor Villaraigosa, gracias, and thank you for that kind introduction. Good morning to everyone. It is a pleasure to be here. I hope all of you had a happy new year. I had a great time with my good friend Lady Gaga in Times Square. I would tell you about it Antonio, but I never kiss and tell.

“Let me start by dispelling another rumor, and that is there is no truth to the speculation that the only reason I came here was to collect on the bet I made with Green Bay Mayor Jim Schmitt, on the Packers-Giants game. But if anybody is hungry for some Wisconsin Cheddar, I’m the man to see. Go Giants.

“Now the real reason I’m here – and I want to thank Tom Cochran for the invitation – is to discuss an issue with all of you that I believe has reached a critical juncture in New York and all around the country, and that is education reform.

“It really is astonishing how little is being said about our schools on the campaign trail because I think as everyone here knows, education is a top concern for parents and it is a top concern for students. It affects them so personally. But it has to be a top concern for those of us who aren’t students or don’t have children going to school because it affects the country’s future in some very profound ways. These are the people who are going to vote, these are the people who are going to take care of us when we are older, those young people in schools. So you just can’t walk away from what’s going on in the schools.

“All of us have seen the reports on how American schools stack up against schools in other developed countries. If you don’t know the numbers, when it comes to math and science we are near the bottom of the pack. And when it comes to literacy, the best you can say is we are average.

“Now take a look at our economy and look at how many high-skilled jobs are available today that companies just can’t fill, even though there are something like 13 million unemployed Americans. The truth of the matter is those 13 million don’t have the skills required for those jobs.

“And now look at what’s happening to the middle class. Real wages have been stagnating for years, and too many young people are unable to find the career paths that lead to the American dream.

“Is there a connection between these three developments? I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. There is no doubt that if we are going to remain the world’s economic superpower, we have to stop taking our success for granted.

“As the global economy continues to move from one driven by manual labor to one driven by knowledge and ideas, we have to move with it – as a matter of fact, we have to lead that change. And the simple fact is we cannot do that without outstanding public schools.

“Now, when I was elected mayor 10 years ago, the big city public school system of New York had been failing for decades and very little was being done about it. That was true for virtually every city in this country. But over the decade, mayors and governors around the country have led the charge for reform: Overhauling dysfunctional school governance structures, increasing the number of charter schools, helping parents get more information about schools, and holding schools accountable for success.

“Mayors like A.C. Wharton in Memphis, David Bing in Detroit, Rich Daley and now Rahm Emanuel in Chicago, Kevin Johnson in Sacramento, Antonio in Los Angeles, and one of the nation’s strongest champions of charter schools, Mayor Cory Booker.

“Over the past decade, thanks to leadership of so many of these mayors and others, the number of students enrolled in charter schools has more than tripled – and I’m proud to say a good portion of that growth has come in New York City.

“We’ve opened 139 new charter schools in our city, and we’ve created more than 500 new small schools, non-charters, but ones that give parents of kids top-quality options. Parents and students both deserve that. And school choice is an important way to hold schools accountable for success because when people vote with their feet you know that it’s real and it’s pretty obvious which direction they are going.

“As much progress as cities have made, however, in turning around broken school systems, I think it’s fair to say we all know we have an enormous way still to go. The fact is also that the work is only going to get harder because in New York and all around the country the most promising and successful education reforms are under attack from ideologues on both the right and the left.

“I remember a conversation I once had with Bill Bennett – he was the former Education Secretary under the first President Bush number 41. I asked him, ‘Bill, you know, you’re a smart guy, why we don’t have standardized national testing,’ and he said, and I’ve never forgotten this, just to show you how smart he is, was, still is, he said, ‘Because the right will never accept anything with the word national in it, and the left will never accept anything with the word testing in it.’ And unfortunately, I think that’s still true.

“Ideologues on the right are blocking national standards that would allow parents in one district to see how their children are doing compared to students in another district – or another city, or another state, or compared to students in other countries who our kids are going to be competing with.

“You want accountability – that’s what accountability really is.

“I understand education is a local issue and localities should have flexibility in running their schools, but to do that we still can have national standards that holds everyone accountable for success and let us see where we stand. If you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it. We have a saying in New York, ‘In God we trust, but everyone else bring data,’ and we don’t have the data that we need to know how well our schools are doing in each place.

“Now, the good news is that we’re moving closer to that goal through something called ‘Common Core Standards’ – a common standard that nearly every state is voluntarily adopting, and that the Obama Administration, I’m happy to say, strongly supports.

“However, just as the ideologues on the right are resisting accountability through national testing, ideologues on the left are resisting accountability through any testing. But without testing, there is no accountability. And without accountability, we’re right back to where we were 10 years ago – with schools failing and no one doing anything about it. You know, people say, ‘Oh, I don’t want our kids subject to high stakes testing in school.’ Let me tell you about the high stakes testing they’re about to face – when they get out of school, that’s how you get a job, how you make a decision on who you’re going to live with, what do you. When it’s in school, you have to make some really tough decisions – do you hang out with that gang, or do you not? Do you get pregnant when you’re unwed, or not? Do you do drugs, or don’t you? Those are as high stake tests as I have ever heard of, and our kids are subject to those tests.

“They have to answer those questions every day. Unless we find out whether they can do math or read or write we can’t improve the quality of the education, we can’t help each student with the things that that particular student needs to focus on.

“Now, there are also ideologues on the left who believe that testing is ok as long as teachers can’t be removed from the classroom if the students continual to fail to make progress. That’s the biggest issue we’re facing in New York as a matter of fact.

“Two years ago, we won Race to the Top funding in part because our State Legislature passed a law requiring all teachers to be rigorously evaluated based on student achievement metrics. It was supposed to give us the ability to identify ineffective teachers so that we can help those teachers become effective, or if they can’t become effective more them out. Our school system has to be run for the kids, not for the people that work in them.

“Our Legislature did what we asked them to do. They passed that law. Unfortunately, they put in a little thing, on giant roadblock that was anything but little because it was what really in the end made the difference. It gave the local unions the authority to veto any evaluation plan. And so now, here we are two years later, and not a single district in New York State has an evaluation program. Instead, we continue to have a pass/fail system – with a 98 percent passing rate.

“Now think about it, our students don’t have the luxury of pass/fail, and neither do you or I, people in other professions who have to make a living to feed their families, and neither should our teachers. We have to raise the bar for them just as we are doing for our students. Nobody, nobody thinks that 98 percent of any group is in the top 30 or 40 percent, or the top 50 percent, or the top 70 percent by definition. We have to raise the standards. We have to help those at the bottom, and if they can’t do the job we have to replace them.

“The only way we are going to reform public education is doing exactly that. I don’t mean just tinkering around the edges, I mean really transforming it into a system of excellence, and to put the needs of the students first.

“That has been my message in New York– and I’m happy to say it is the message that our new Governor, Andrew Cuomo, is delivering as well. Andrew Cuomo has been Governor for a year, and he could not have in the last few weeks been more strongly in favor of making sure that we put an effective evaluation system in, that we help those teachers that need help, and if those teachers that can’t perform in the classroom and help our students get moved out.

“Governor Cuomo and I both strongly support the right to organize and bargain. I have come out a thousand times and said I don’t agree with Wisconsin. I think if people want to organize, they have a right to organize. But we in government, and we the citizens who pay for it have to decide what we’re willing to do and what we’re not willing to do. And I think what we should not be willing to do is to have teachers who are ineffective in the classroom because we are leaving a bunch of our kids out in the cold without the skills they’re going to need to be self supporting and without the education they need to participate in the Great American Dream.

“Our job is to do what’s right for the children. And I have yet to hear how it’s good for children to make it harder to remove ineffective teachers from the classroom.

“It is not – and when it comes to negotiating an evaluation plan, I can just promise you we will not sacrifice our children’s future by giving in on that point. The system has to be run for the people that we are here to serve.

“The attacks on education by ideologues on the right and on the left must be met – and must be fended off – by the sensible center. And that is the people that you are here with today, the mayors. Mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers, not ideologues. They don’t have the luxury of being on both sides of an issue. They have to be explicit as to where they stand. They can’t say, ‘Well I voted for it, but I didn’t vote to fund it.’ They have to go out there every day. Somebody did that. It’s like saying, ‘I’m pro-choice, but not for women.’ Mayors are where the action is. Mayors are where the rubber hits the road. Mayors do things – they pick up the garbage and they educate the kids, and they keep crime down. They make their city’s economics work and attract people and increase life expectancy, and do all the things that we would want them to do.

“They’re expected to make hard-headed decisions based on the facts – not on special interest politics. That’s what I think the mayors have done on so many issues – from illegal guns to immigration to climate change. And that’s what we have to do on education, including accountability measures like teacher evaluations and sensible plans to either improve or find other careers for those teachers who just aren’t getting their students to move ahead and getting what the students need to participate in the Great American Dream.

“I spoke on Martin Luther King Day at a number of different places, and I said all of the battles are meaningless if our children don’t have the skills to understand and to participate and to be a part of the Great American Dream. Education is one of the basic civil rights.

“The reason that teacher evaluations are so important is that all the best research tells us that the single more important factor affecting a student’s progress is the effectiveness of the classroom teacher.

“And there was a recent study that got a lot of press by Harvard and Columbia economists who found students with effective teachers are less likely to become pregnant, more likely to go to college, and more likely to get high-paying jobs. I think all of us just knew that intuitively before, but would anyone here want their child to be in a classroom with an ineffective teacher? Of course not.

“We know how important great teachers are. We remember them from our own lives. Great teachers make an enormous difference. And if we expect the American school system to rise from the middle of the pack to the top, the only way that we are going to get there is with great teachers leading the way. And the only way that will happen is if we do more to recruit, reward, and retain great teachers – and replace ineffective ones.

“Let me just take two seconds about what we are doing in New York. Next to being a parent, teaching is probably the most important job there is today. I have enormous respect for teachers and the extraordinary personal investments they make in their students.

“Over the past ten years, we’ve worked hard to invest in them – by expanding professional development, and raising their base salaries by 43 percent. A starting teacher in New York City now makes at least $45,000, and veteran teachers can make more than $100,000. Teachers incomes have gone up 105 percent. Why? Because our teachers were underpaid, we were losing them to the suburbs, and I can’t think of any better investment we can make than to have a better teacher in front of every single child at the front.

“Many students graduating from college today have college loans that could lead them to cross teaching off their list of possible careers. We’ve look at that and said, ‘What can we do to make more teachers apply to our school system?’ We can’t let that happen that they go elsewhere simply because they’ve got college loans that they have to repay, and we can’t let our top students who want to be teachers decide they can’t afford it. So one of the programs we are in the process of instituting in New York City is we proposed an incentive to anyone who finishes college around the country in the top tier of the class: Come teach in New York City public schools, and if you commit to stay, we’ll pay off up to $25,000 of your student loans. Our teachers deserve it. And so do our children. That’s the recruitment.

“We also have to worry about retaining the best teachers by offering them a big raise. You know, teachers today have lots of options. If you’re a good teacher, you’re worth a lot of money in the private sector. Not just as a teacher, but in many careers. Here in Washington, teachers were given a chance to decide for themselves if they wanted a contract that would pay them an extra $25,000 a year if they were rated effective. Guess what they did here in Washington, DC. The teachers said yes. They wanted to be rewarded for their success – just like any other person in any other job. Why anybody’s surprised about that, I don’t know. We all want recognition and respect, and also it’d be nice if we could get some money so we can enjoy more things. And the harder we work and the better job we do, I think most people would say the better you should be rewarded.

“Teachers unions unfortunately have historically opposed merit pay, but more and more teachers today, I think, are asking why. And when they’re given a voice, like they did here in Washington, DC, they said yes.

“By all accounts, these raises have been essential to keeping effective teachers from moving out of the DC public school system. Well, if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, Mayor Gray should be very flattered – because I’m telling you that in New York City, we want to make the same type of offer to our teachers, and we’ve proposed the following deal for all of our teachers: If you are rated highly effective for two consecutive years, we will hike your salary by $20,000 a year. Once again, our teachers deserve that. And so do our children.

“It is, however, something that we have to bargain with the teachers union, and the real question is going to be, ‘Will the teachers union stand in the way of their most effective members being rewarded for all of their work?’

“I think this is an idea whose time has come – and I’m confident that if the teachers are allowed to decide the matter for themselves, they’ll support it in New York City just the way they did here in Washington, DC.

“As much as the battle for these issues have gone on, we’ve already won the most important battle of all, and that is the battle for public expectations.

“I remember ten years ago, people said: Well, you can’t fix the schools until you cure poverty. Then Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said to me, ‘You know, they all have it exactly the wrong way.’ You can’t cure poverty until you fix our schools. Too many people were resigned to the reality of bad schools – just as they once were resigned to the reality of high crime rates.

“But in New York City in the 1990s, mayors like Giuliani showed the world that high crime is not inevitable – that you could make the streets safer, if you used data-driven strategies and held people accountable for results. Mayor Giuliani dramatically cut crime in New York City – and we’ve cut it another 35 percent since we’ve taken office. Today, New Yorkers expect the streets to be the safest of any big city in the country – and voters, I think, will not elect any future mayor who isn’t 110% committed to that goal.

“Social problems like crime and failing schools are – to some extent – self-fulfilling prophecies. If you expect the worst, you get the worst. But if you expect to do better, you can do better, and we’re willing to take on the ideologues and special interests that find comfort in the status quo.

“That’s certainly been our experience in New York City. When I first came into office, the status quo in education was about as bad as it could get. Graduation rates had been stuck at or below 50 percent for decades. School crime was the norm. Social promotion was standard; kids were promoted regardless of whether they had learned anything. And hiring in the schools was often based more on political connections than merit.

“We refused to accept any of that. We refused to accept, as President Bush once called it, ‘the soft bigotry of low expectations.’ We expected more of our students – and that meant expecting more of the adults that were in charge as well. So back then, working with the State Legislature, we abolished the broken Board of Education and handed control of the schools to a Chancellor, appointed by and serving at the pleasure of the mayor.

“And by raising standards and injecting accountability into schools, we’ve raised graduation rates 40 percent, I’m happy to say, since 2005 – and if you want to know how good that is, it’s compared to just 8 percent in the rest of the State. And the reason we use that comparison is all of the kids in New York State take exactly the same test. We’ve cut the dropout rate and school crime in half. We’ve increased the number of students taking Advanced Placement classes and enrolling in college.

“I think it’s fair to say by almost any measure, students are doing better and our school system is heading in the right direction. Today, parents expect their kids’ schools to be first-rate. And more and more parents, incidentally, are staying in our city, rather than moving to the suburbs, because of those changed expectations.

“Now, I realize that many mayors don’t control your school systems, but we do have voices. We all have the ears of other elected officials. And we all have parents as our constituents who expect us to stand up for their kids.

“So let me conclude by saying we’re all in this together. Just as we have seen on many issues, when mayors stand together and speak together, when we put problem-solving over ideology, we can make an enormous difference.

“And if we stand together on school reform, we can make sure that our kids nationwide get the education they need to keep the American dream alive in this new century and beyond.

“Let’s go get it. Thank you.”

Bloomberg’s message to an 11th-grade English class was meant to inspire students for the future. But it could have just as easily been a self-esteem booster as he slogs through a battle over teacher quality that he started waging when he became mayor 10 years ago.

“Successful people,” Bloomberg told the students about adversity, “recover from that and they learn how to deal with that.”

The visit to the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science was the mayor’s latest stop on a publicity tour to promote a strategy to retain effective teachers and fire the least effective ones. It began in the Bronx last week, at the Morris High School Campus with his State of the City Speech, and continued into this week with a speech on Martin Luther King Day.

In the process, he has picked up substantial support from state officials. Yesterday, both Gov. Andrew Cuomo and State Education Commissioner John King demanded that the state teachers union, NYSUT, drop a lawsuit challenging the state’s teacher evaluation law. King also backed Bloomberg’s plan to win back suspended federal funds by removing teachers at 33 low-performing schools through a process called “turnaround.”

Implementing these plans will require overcoming the opposition of the United Federation of Teachers, which has criticized both the turnaround plan and the city’s preferences for its teacher evaluation system.

Today, both Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott reiterated their intention to plow ahead, whether they have union support or not. Bloomberg made it clear that he had the political will to get it done, too.

“Now you have the President of the United States, who has made education one of his signature issues, you have the governor and you have the mayor all working together,” Bloomberg said.

Walcott provided some preliminary details about the Department of Education’s plans to handle the turnaround school improvement process. He said a “cross-functional management team” was in place to prepare required descriptions of how the schools would be affected and notified communities in time to meet legal deadlines.

“This process will continue and move forward,” Walcott said. “We can’t just stop because these children need to have high-quality schools and high-quality teachers, plain and simple.”

The union has threatened to sue over the plans because they say that the city is misinterpreting a contract provision, known as 18-D, that governs rehiring at schools that have been closed. Bloomberg said today he hoped the union and its leader would come around.

“We are committed to working with the UFT, which I’ve said before is ably led by the head of the union, Michael Mulgrew,” he said.

Inside the Bathgate Educational Campus, a colorful and gleaming school building in the Claremont section of the Bronx, Bloomberg and Walcott toured two classes led by teachers that the mayor said were particularly effective. In a physics class taught by Allen Hubbard, a third-year teacher who entered the profession through the city’s Teaching Fellows program, students were building a generator made from magnets, copper spring coils, and a hair tie.

“Ever seen generators at a power plant? It’s the same thing,” said Bloomberg, who told the students he was most interested in the sciences when he attended public school in Boston.

Hubbard, a Texan in his mid-twenties who is already in his second career, said he was intrigued by Bloomberg’s proposal of $20,o00 raises for teachers who get top scores on new evaluations. But he said he didn’t need the extra money to stay in the field.

“I worked in consulting before this and made more money but I didn’t enjoy it,” Hubbard said. “And now I enjoy this. It’s absolutely worth the move.”

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Walcott speak with students at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science today.

Mayor Bloomberg took his updated education reform agenda on a promotional tour this morning, stopping by a high-performing Bronx school with a principal who has gone to bat for him in the past.

Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott traveled to the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science  to tout the education initiatives that the mayor proposed during his State of the City address last week. Those plans include closing and reopening 33 struggling schools to clear the way for $60 million in federal funding, offering pay raises for teachers who receive high ratings, and repaying student loans for new teachers who excelled in college.

The eight-year-old school opened as part of Bloomberg’s small schools initiative, and the mayor cited it today as a resounding success.

“The students and teachers we had the opportunity to meet with today are part of a broader story of achievement in our city, but there is so much more to do,” Bloomberg said in City Hall’s press release about the visit. (Geoff joined the caravan of reporters who tagged along and will report more from the visit later today.)

Principal Kenneth Baum is also a longstanding supporter of the mayor’s policy initiatives. Last year, he advocated for Bloomberg’s (ultimately unsuccessful) push to do away with “last in, first out” seniority layoff rules. Walcott also name-checked Baum in his speech about reforming middle schools, saying that the principal’s practice of sending teachers to students’ homes before the school year starts exemplifies the community bonds that successful schools develop.

In contrast with the new small schools on the Morris campus, where Bloomberg delivered his speech last week, UAS-AMS was not opened to replace a large school that the city closed because of poor performance. It opened in 2004 in the basement of a condominium building in the Bathgate section of the Bronx and moved to a brand-new building, which it shares with two other schools, in 2006.

The city’s press release about the appearance is below.

MAYOR BLOOMBERG MEETS WITH TEACHERS AND STUDENTS TO DISCUSS NEXT STEPS IN EDUCATION REFORM

At One of 500 New Schools Opened In Past Decade, Mayor Joins Chancellor Walcott to Outline Next Steps for Continued Academic Achievement

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg today met with teachers and students at the Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science to discuss next steps in the education reform plan he unveiled last week in the State of the City address. The Mayor joined a high school physics and English class to hear about their progress, and review his proposals to continue improvements in student achievement and public education. The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science opened in 2004 and the high school ranked in the 94^th percentile for overall progress for the 2010-2011 academic year. Applied Math and Science students outperform their peers for college readiness, and 95.8 percent of its first graduating high school class graduated in four years. The Mayor was joined in the Bronx by Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott and Principal Kenneth Baum.

“The students and teachers we had the opportunity to meet with today are part of a broader story of achievement in our City, but there is so much more to do,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “As I said in my State of the City speech last week, we will continue to improve our schools for our 1.1 million students by recruiting, rewarding and retaining the best educators, and providing students with the support they need to thrive. Our Administration is not going to stop until there is a great teacher in every classroom and a great school in every neighborhood.”

“The Urban Assembly School for Applied Math and Science has created incredible partnerships with their students’ families and built a school where the commitment to learning – and getting students excited about learning – is paramount,” said Chancellor Walcott. “Under the leadership of a fantastic Principal, Ken Baum, the teachers in this school work tirelessly and collaboratively to ensure their students are on track for college, and they are getting outstanding results.”

Mayor Bloomberg announced in his State of the City address a series of initiatives to build upon the successful public school reforms that have helped to increase graduation rates and improve math and reading comprehension for students across the City. The proposals commit to investments in quality teachers, take steps to remove those who are ineffective and expand opportunities for students and their families. One program will recruit top college graduates to teach in public schools by offering up to $25,000 for student loan debt, and another will reward teachers rated as highly effective with a $20,000 salary increase. The Mayor also detailed a plan to assess teachers in 33 of the City’s most struggling schools, and make the changes needed to achieve improvement in academic performance.

Mayor Bloomberg was greeted with boos as he tried to tie the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to his own education policies Monday during a speech at the city’s largest celebration for the slain civil rights hero.

A small group of parents and students gathered outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House in Fort Greene to protest what they said were school policies that King would oppose if he were alive today. Once the 26th annual Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. began inside BAM, the group joined with other activists and continued their protest inside.

The event featured live music and speeches from several elected officials, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

The protesters, who also included teachers from the Occupy the DOE group and activists from the Alliance for Quality Education, sat quietly through those speeches, but the jeers began raining down from the balcony levels as soon as Bloomberg was introduced.

Bloomberg didn’t hesitate to address his hecklers.

“For those of you who want to express yourself, there’s a time and a place for everything,” he said. “Just remember that we’re here to honor a man who valued education.”

Bloomberg then spoke about his administration’s focus on education over the past decade, telling the audience that “improving the city’s schools has been, hands down, my number one priority and it’s going to remain my number on priority every day for the next two years as well.”

“We’ve made a lot of progress in the city, no matter what some people want to say,” Bloomberg said, adding that that black and Latino students “have led the way.”

The boos continued throughout the entirety of the mayor’s five-minute speech and one particularly disparaging remark rattled the mayor.

“Thank you very much. That’s very gentle. You probably belong in … never mind,” he said in response.

The boos subsided for Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, the event’s keynote speaker. In his 15-minute speech, Walcott talked about his own experience attending city schools and said that it was small but significant gestures of support from neighbors and mentors – what he called “Dr. King moments” – that helped him stay on his path after the death of his parents as a young man.

“You can never underestimate how important it is to remind a young person what they’re capable of and the character that it takes to stay on task and achieve your dreams,” Walcott said.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott delivered the keynote address at Brooklyn's tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr.

After the speeches, the protesters gathered in the lobby to discuss the speeches.

“I didn’t agree with what he was saying,” Legacy High School senior Kayla Marte said of Bloomberg. Marte’s school is one of nearly 60 that the city is trying to close this year. “His policy of closing down failing schools just defeats and contradicts what his message is.”

Sonya Rivera, a teacher at the Academy of Business and Community Development, an all-boys secondary school that serves at risk black and Latino students, said that instead of shuttering her school, the DOE should turn it around as part of their Young Men’s Initiative.

“You say you want to help young black and Latino men?” Rivera said. “By all means, use our school as a laboratory.”

Bronx student teacher Elissa Vinnick, of Occupy the DOE, said she attended in part to protest the Panel for Educational Policy and the rubber-stamp process through which school policies are approved.

“I cannot imagine that Dr. King would approve of community members spending hours pouring their hearts out to a panel of people who fundamentally don’t care about what they have to say,” Vinnick said. 

First, the union said it would petition a state labor board to force the city to accept a mediator in talks over new teacher evaluations. The union suggested arbitration two weeks ago when evaluation talks broke down, but the city has rejected the request.

And regardless of what the board decides, Mulgrew indicated today in a press conference that he would sue over the gambit the city has proposed to get around the evaluation requirement. That plan would switch the status of 33 schools in a federal improvement program and require half of their teachers to be replaced.

“If the Department of Education tries to implement changing these schools from their current status, we will be taking appropriate legal action,” Mulgrew said.

The city can not move forward yet without approval from the state education department, which administers federal funding attached to the school improvement strategies. Walcott detailed the plans in a letter to Commissioner John King yesterday but King has yet to respond.

In the meantime, Mulgrew ratcheted up rhetoric against Mayor Bloomberg, who took the UFT head-on several times during his education-centered speech.

“What I saw yesterday inside of his state of city speech was so sad,” Mulgrew said at a press conference where he announced that the UFT officially submitted an impasse petition to the state’s Public Employee Relations Board. “What I saw was a man who is trying to set up a smoke screen about the decade of disaster that he has  put upon our city schools.”

“He would rather start a fight with us so people will stop talking about how bad his legacy on the schools has been during his mayoralty,” Mulgrew added.

PERB can only be roped in on collective bargaining issues, not other conflicts between the city and union. Settling on new teacher evaluations does require collective bargaining, and that’s why the union is asking for PERB’s intervention.

But the city is arguing that its decision to switch the 33 schools to a federal improvement strategy that doesn’t require new evaluations, turnaround, makes the union’s PERB appeal moot. “PERB has no jurisdiction in this matter,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement.

In addition, the DOE is acting hastily to establish that the 33 new turnaround schools no longer require teacher evaluations to secure the federal funding. Walcott distributed parents letters explaining the current situation to each of the schools today.

The announcement in today’s State of the City address sets the stage for a showdown with the United Federation of Teachers — and maybe also with the State Education Department.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew had already dismissed the idea that schools could receive the funds without union support by this afternoon. But State Education Commissioner John King has yet to weigh in on the strategy.

Under Bloomberg’s plan, the city would swap dozens of schools from one federally mandated overhaul strategy to another in a bid to escape a requirement that the city and union come to terms on a new teacher evaluation system. An impasse over negotiations caused King last week to cut off federal funds to 33 city schools that were undergoing the “transformation” and “restart” strategies, which require new evaluations.

Under the mayor’s plan, the schools would undergo “turnaround” instead. Turnaround is more aggressive than the other strategies, requiring at least half of a school’s teachers to be replaced. But it also does not require that new teacher evaluations be in place, according to the Obama administration’s guidelines for the funds, known as School Improvement Grants.

Mulgrew immediately dismissed the plan, arguing that the union would have to sign off on turnaround. That would be true — but only if Bloomberg had been talking about the type of turnaround that the Obama administration envisioned.

What the city is actually proposing is using a second, lesser-known turnaround that state regulations allow. Essentially, the city would close 33 schools and reopen them immediately, with new names and identification numbers. Then a team of educators selected for the “new” school would hire a new staff with the union’s input, pulling half of the new teachers from the original school’s roster.

The process is based on a piece of the current union contract known as Article 18-D, which outlines a hiring process used whenever the city closes a school and replaces it with others. Article 18-D requires that at least half of the original school’s staff stays on.

The only difference between the city’s longstanding school closure policy and today’s turnaround proposal is that the students at the turnaround schools would not be displaced. This distinction is significant, given criticism from state officials and others that the city’s closure policy has turned some schools into dumping grounds for high-needs students.

It’s not clear whether the state’s close-and-reopen approach will pass muster with the Obama administration, which has a stricter standard for turnarounds and has urged states to collaborate with their teachers unions.

But it has gotten the state’s endorsement in the past. In September, King signed off on the city’s application for SIG funds to support 11 long-planned school closures, earmarking federal money 16 replacement schools.

Those schools kept receiving SIG money even after King cut off the federal funds to transformation and restart schools, a promising sign for the strategy the city announced today.

King did not respond publicly to Bloomberg’s speech today. But he has spent the last month talking tough on evaluations and is unlikely to be enthused that the city seems to have discovered a way to avoid negotiating them, at least temporarily.

The city’s solution to the evaluations impasse is stopgap at best. Settling on new evaluations is required for the city to receive other pots of federal funds or to negotiate a new contract with the United Federation of Teachers.

King could have some recourse against the city’s proposal. When he froze the city’s SIG funds, he told school officials that they had to notify the state if they wanted to seek approval to change the overhaul model they were using. It’s conceivable that he could deny the request, leaving the city stuck using strategies that require an evaluation deal to fund.

Also, because turnaround wouldn’t start until September in the schools, it’s unclear whether the city could expect this year’s federal funds to be restored, even if King does give his okay.

The city will have little wiggle room on execution if it gets a green light to move forward with the turnarounds. State education law requires the city to post “Educational Impact Statements” for proposed school closures at least six months before the first day of the school year when they would begin. That means the city has just weeks to craft the statements for 33 schools — more than it has ever proposed to close in a single year before. Any missteps would provide material for a legal challenge from the union.

Plus, the combination of the Obama administration’s requirement that no less than half of teachers be replaced and the union’s requirement that no more than half of teachers be replaced means that the reconstituted schools would have to achieve a perfect 50 percent balance between existing and new teachers.

Teachers who are not selected for the new schools would enter the Absent Teacher Reserve, the city’s pool for teachers without permanent positions. Bloomberg has blamed the reserve for costing the city millions of dollars a year.

Several principals could also be out of their jobs. Even under the second type of turnaround that Bloomberg is pursuing, the model requires that principals who have been at their schools for more than two years be replaced.

The news arrived to principals at the 33 schools today amid a tumultuous year. In recent weeks, they were left waiting to see what would come of federal grants they had been promised as teacher evaluation negotiations disintegrated.

One principal, who asked not to be identified, said she was told today that she would be able to keep her job. But, she said, “If I have to do this, I would leave on my own. I would never fire 50 percent of my staff.”

Under the city’s proposal, all of the 14 schools currently undergoing restart, which hands control to nonprofit managers, would become turnaround schools and keep their nonprofit partners. So would most of the transformation schools, 13 in all. And the city would add six schools, including several it had decided against closing this year, to the roster of those receiving SIG funds.

Six schools currently undergoing transformation would stop receiving SIG funds. The city has already announced plans to close two of the schools, and it said today that it would find new funds to finish out the year at two other schools that have not responded sufficiently to improvement efforts.

Two other schools would continue to overhaul their programs but would not receive federal funds to do so, city officials said. The two schools, Chelsea Career and Technical Education High School and Boys and Girls High School, have longtime principals who would likely have to be removed under turnaround.

Insiders say the mayor is likely to address the impasse between the city and teachers union on evaluations. That impasse has dominated the news in recent weeks, especially after state officials said cut off some federal funding to schools that were supposed to use the new evaluations this year. In the last week, blame for the standstill has flown from Gov. Cuomo and the state teachers union, but Bloomberg has been relatively quiet. The speech in which he outlines his annual policy agenda would be an opportune time to assert his position and try to move the situation forward.

Whether Bloomberg will tackle the sticky topic during his address today is not assured, and what exactly he could propose to resolve the tension is unclear. Department of Education and City Hall insiders haven’t tipped their hands about the content of today’s speech, and the only news that has leaked out has been about other topics.

In some ways, it’s hard to imagine Bloomberg making a major education policy announcement right now. Several substantial Department of Education initiatives, including ones to reform middle schools and revamp instruction and assessments, are already underway, and the mayor has scant time or money to execute much more. But an immediate solution to the teacher evaluations impasse is seen as crucial.

That Bloomberg is delivering the speech from inside the city’s oldest coeducational high school, Morris in the South Bronx, has heightened speculation about the speech’s education content.

The city’s press advisory for the speech explains that Morris is home to “four successful small high schools,” and it’s likely that the mayor will cite Morris as a success story of the city’s small schools initiative. The building was one of the first to be reconstituted during the mayor’s tenure — in fact, its closure began even before Bloomberg took control of the city schools and handpicked Joel Klein to lead them — and the four schools have higher graduation rates and less violence than the troubled school they replaced.

But the building’s recent history also epitomizes the small schools movement’s shortcomings. The schools in the building have done a miserable job of preparing students for college, according to the city’s own statistics, and their attendance and graduation rates remain stubbornly mediocre. The Coalition for Educational Justice, a group that is leading protest efforts against school closures, has called a rally for just before the speech to argue that Morris is “a poster child for what advocates and parents say is wrong with Bloomberg’s education strategy,” a spokesman told me.

Statistics do little to capture the grandeur of the mammoth building on Boston Road, whose Gothic spires are more redolent of Oxford University than a typical city public school. I will never forget the view I got through a transom — installed to make the building as light-filled as possible — when I descended a staircase in the building perhaps five years ago: A girl in a hijab and a Latino boy building a bridge together in a Bronx International High School science class. The auditorium, which seats 2,500 and made the school an obvious site for a large audience in the South Bronx, is especially impressive.

There’s also a chance, of course, that Bloomberg will focus on other topics and steer clear of education entirely. The last time he delivered his annual address at a school, in 2010 at Frank Sinatra High School of the Arts in Queens, he barely mentioned education at all. In 2009, Bloomberg used the speech to tout parent outreach plans. Last year, he renewed a push to end “last in, first out” layoffs that Gov. Cuomo later quashed. He has said that layoffs are not likely to be on the table this year.

In a statement the length of a short essay, Logan decried school closures as “a losing strategy” that traumatizes needy students, shuts out educators, and prevents scrutiny of the city’s reform efforts. Adding eight months to mayoral control’s age, he said twice that the Bloomberg administration has had a decade to fix all schools but has not.

Nine of the 15 schools whose closures or truncations were announced today have opened since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools; one replaced a failing elementary school just three years ago. Logan suggested that at least two additional Bloomberg-started schools would show up on the second installment of the closure roster when it comes out tomorrow.

“The fact is that closure is an admission of failure by City Hall, whose weak or non-existent interventions amount to either a cynical statement of indifference to children of poverty or an inferiority complex about their own ability to come up with solutions,” Logan said.

The statement elicited a rebuttal from Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who called Logan’s statement “embarrassing” for the union.

“Real leadership is standing up and saying that we’re not going to leave students in failing schools,” Walcott said. “It’s embarrassing that the union representing the leaders of our schools — our principals — is more focused on making excuses and pointing fingers than on doing what is best for students. We hold all of our schools, new or old, to the same high standards.”

The policy got backup from Joe Williams, head of the nonprofit Democrats for Education Reform, which generally supports Bloomberg’s education policies. Williams called the practice of closing struggling schools and opening new ones to take their place is the mayor’s “crowning achievement.”

“These are schools that simply aren’t worthy of Gotham’s schoolchildren,” Williams said in a statement. “We applaud the mayor for resisting intense pressure to not rock the boat and make things as comfortable as possible for adults in the system, as our children are cast adrift.”

But in his statement, Williams did tread some common ground with Logan and other critics of the closures, including UFT President Michael Mulgrew and the nonprofit Coalition for Educational Justice.

“The mayor’s education legacy hangs in the balance here,” Williams said.

Here’s Logan’s statement in full:

Yesterday evening, Deputy Chancellor of Portfolio Planning Marc Sternberg announced to the press the pending closure of 25 more struggling schools. This is in addition to the 117 the DOE has already closed since Mayor Bloomberg took over the school system more than ten years ago.

Those opened under Bloomberg have been touted by Sternberg ‘as better than those they replaced.’  Tweed’s own failed schools number in the double digits, although the DOE sheepishly avoids making public an exact number. But in today’s and tomorrow’s round of closings alone, 11 schools were opened during the Bloomberg administration.

The NYC public school system is not a place for whimsical experiment where we open and close schools for students who have already been traumatized by previous school closings. Then, there is the tragedy of all the young people who have not been saved even briefly by the city’s new-school safety net, but have been turned away from new schools for reasons of poor academic achievement and sent to be warehoused in other low-performing schools slated for the scrapheap.

Bloomberg’s DOE has come up with a losing strategy for turning around low- performing schools, which are invariably attended by children of color from economically disadvantaged communities. That strategy includes rejecting most offers of collaboration from experienced educators and relying instead on theories hatched in ivy halls. The endgame of the strategy is to eliminate schools that the administration has had at least a decade to fix and to improve its data by creating new schools that won’t have data for as long as four years. The fact is that closure is an admission of failure by City Hall, whose weak or non-existent interventions amount to either a cynical statement of indifference to children of poverty or an inferiority complex about their own ability to come up with solutions.

The Bloomberg administration needs to take more responsibility, not less, for schools that are not doing well, rather than turning them over to private entities like EPOs or closing them and washing their hands of a deep-rooted problem that it has been unsuccessful in remedying.

CSA is mindful of Tweed’s lack of support for Principals and APs, how little it cares about the opinions of educators in the front lines and how the entire system of local superintendent support has been eviscerated so that control can be consolidated centrally.”

That’s what he said during a wide-ranging speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday in which he argued that weak training, social change, and the teachers union have conspired to fill New York City’s schools with less-than-ideal teachers.

“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers, and double class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” Bloomberg said.

Listen to the portion of the speech where Bloomberg talks schools (starting at about 5:00): 11-29-11 MIT Speech – Part 2

The comments have drawn fire from UFT President Michael Mulgrew, elected officials, and many others. But while they were provocative and unusually specific, the speech tread familiar territory for the mayor.

Bloomberg has long said that he doesn’t see class size as a pressing issue and would opt for better teachers over more teachers. The portion of his speech that dealt with education recycled some of his favored rhetorical flourishes, such as comparing the importance of teacher quality to the value of “location, location, location” in real estate. You can see him make the same analogy in this 2008 video, in which he says about class size, “I don’t even know why the issue comes up anymore.”

And especially under ex-Chancellor Joel Klein, Bloomberg’s Department of Education has pushed the idea that many city teachers are not up to par, launching a sustained push in 2007 to usher more weak teachers out of the system and last year battling against “last in, first out” seniority layoff rules.

Still, Bloomberg’s suggestion of how many city teachers should be sloughed off far outstripped the city’s own estimates. When a new teacher evaluation system was piloted in 20 schools last year, 18 percent of teachers were rated “ineffective” — far higher than the 3 percent given unsatisfactory ratings under the current system, but nowhere near 50 percent.

Less provocative, but perhaps more surprising, was a comment in the speech that signaled a point of disagreement between Bloomberg and Klein, who now heads News Corporation’s digital education unit.

“It may be heresy in this day and age to say so, but there’s not a lot of evidence that when you introduce a lot more technology in the classroom the results are better,” the mayor said, according to DNAInfo. Under Klein’s leadership, the DOE invested heavily in digital learning.

“I’ve always been intrigued by everybody wants to put a computer in every classroom and in front of every kid,” he said, adding that cell phones and iPads are prohibited in city schools over concerns about “the lawsuits over the pornography that the kids would be watching.”

School buses at Coney Island in 2008.

For Simon Jean-Baptiste, a veteran school bus driver who belongs to Local 1181, the city’s announcement Friday that his union could go on strike at any moment was news to him.

“It’s the city that we heard that from,” Jean-Baptiste said today.

Jean-Baptiste, a former vice president in the union, said he had no idea there was any kind of citywide strike threat until he first heard about it from media reports prompted by a last-minute press conference called by Mayor Bloomberg on Friday. Bloomberg warned that Local 1181′s leadership opposed the city’s plans for a new contract for pre-kindergarten bus drivers because the city would not guarantee job security for experienced drivers. As a result, he said, an “immediate” strike was possible.

At the same time, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott sent a comprehensive plan to principals for how they should handle a strike should it occur.

Hours later, Local 1181 President Michael Cordiello said in a statement that a strike over seniority rights was “likely” but not imminent. Today, Cordiello said in a statement that the union was beginning to weigh its options.

“We do not want to strike, but we have been forced to keep our options open by cost-cutting proposals by Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

As buses rolled up to schools on time this morning, and with no strike imminent, some are questioning the urgency with with Bloomberg and Walcott presented the threat.

The prospect of a school bus strike didn’t even register at a Panel for Educational Policy meeting Thursday evening, even though the group is responsible for voting on all busing contracts.

A PEP member, Patrick Sullivan, said he suspected that the Friday hype was meant to “demonize” the bus drivers union in order to turn public opinion against its demands.

“I think it’s appalling, really,” said Sullivan, a frequent critic of DOE policies. “[City officials] clearly had a whole plan of action planned and the next day they went out to the press and all of a sudden a strike was imminent. It seems the goal of it was to make parents afraid.”

Jean-Baptiste said union members would likely discuss the contract issue for the first time at a delegates meeting Tuesday evening.

“What is striking to me is that the city is panicking about whether there will be a strike, but the union never mentioned anything like that,” he said. “I think the city is spreading fear.”

That’s a view that Sam Pirozzolo, a parent leader on Staten Island, home to many of the bus contractors that do business with the city, expressed in an op-ed on Saturday. After speaking to union officials and quickly realizing that the threats were not as urgent as the city said, Pirozzolo wrote that he saw the press attention as meant “to instill fear throughout the city that a school bus strike was imminent.”

It isn’t the first time the bus drivers’ union has threatened to strike. It happened in 2006 and again when members authorized a strike last year (an actual strike hasn’t taken place in New York City since 1979). But this appears to be the first time in recent years that the city has worked to defuse a strike threat before union leaders even issued it publicly.

Education officials said the press conference was a direct response to what the bus drivers union had told them directly: that the drivers would strike systemwide.

“The purpose of the press conference was to inform parents about contingency plans and how they can prepare,” a DOE spokeswoman said.

Principals we contacted about the bus strike warnings offered a muted response, with one saying that the warnings were intense but not a distraction.

“It came amidst so much other business that it was hard to get too excited about,” emailed the principal, who works at a neighborhood school where few students ride school buses. She said her school had received Walcott’s letter and additional information about the threat three times.

“It did seem like a large reaction, but I guess I’d rather that they had a plan in place ahead of time than be left improvising after the fact, particularly in instances where there actually is advance knowledge.”

Jean Robinson, a senior at the High School for Teaching and the Professions, speaks at a press conference Wednesday about truancy reduction.

As the new kid at the High School of Teaching and The Professions in the Bronx two years ago, Jean Robinson awoke each morning filled with dread and anxiety about going to school.

“You know, everybody has their own different cliques and I wasn’t really fitting in with any of them,” Robinson said.

A sophomore transfer, Robinson missed her old friends and began skipping school. Over the course of the 2009-2010 school year, she missed more than a month of school and, with each passing day, knew a high school diploma was further and further out of reach.

“I thought about it every day, but I just felt like I needed that extra push,” Robinson said. “I didn’t have that at the time.”

Robinson’s paltry attendance rate caught the eyes of city officials, who at the same time were launching a citywide push to raise attendance rates among students who were absent most often. They paired Robinson with a mentor who monitored her attendance and made sure she was showing up to school.

With the help from her mentor, a school guidance counselor, Robinson last year reduced her absence rate by more than 50 percent, missing just 10 days of school.

Robinson’s turnaround was touted by Mayor Bloomberg as a success story of the year-old attendance initiative called “Every Student, Every Day,” which, in addition to mentors, included letters home to parents and celebrity wake-up calls. As a result of the first year’s success, Bloomberg announced Wednesday that the city was more than doubling the initiative’s scope, from 25 schools to 50 schools with more than 4,000 students.“The gains that our mentors have made within just one year prove that we’re certainly on the right track and show that this is a problem that can be overcome or at least ameliorated,” Bloomberg said at a press conference at High School of Teaching and The Professions to announce the program’s expansion.

Robinson was one of 450 students – out of 1,450 targeted – to improve their attendance rate by an average of 16 days, according to results of a study conducted by a multiagency task force formed in conjunction with the “Every Student, Every Day” program. The study compared attendance rates of students who missed at least one month of school — and were chronically absent — or at least two months of school, putting them into the “severely absent” category.

Overall data from the study showed that students who were paired with mentors were generally more likely to go to school than those without, with high schoolers being the most likely to improve attendance with a mentor’s help.

Attendance rates for middle school students were least responsive. Once paired with mentors, students who had missed more than two months of school in the past actually showed up to school about 6 percent less often than those who did not have a mentor, a result that officials said they would study further.

A new coalition of 300 volunteer mentors from non-profit agencies, such as City Year, the Children’s Aid Society, and Citizen Schools, will enter schools to work with the chronically absent students. At other schools, trained school staff, such as school aides and guidance counselors, will also mentor students.

The program’s cost, an estimated $250,000, will come mostly from private donations from Macy’s, officials said.

The task force and program was created in response to a 2009 report that found that one in five students in the city’s school system missed at least 30 days of school per year, a statistic that is correlated with increased likeliness of dropping out.

“Truancy is often the first step in the wrong direction, because the more school a child misses during the early grades, the more unlikely it will be for him or her to succeed in the higher grades,” Bloomberg said.

The expanded initiative will also target students who are most likely to miss school, even if they have not already been chronically absent. Students returning from long suspensions or time spent in a juvenile justice facility and students in foster care will get special attention, as will students in “high-risk transition grades” – first, sixth and ninth grades.

Robinson, who is now a senior, said that before she started working with her mentor, no one had ever bothered to tell her had to go to school.

“I just feel like I needed that extra push, somebody to get me out the door and say, ‘Hey, you’re going to school,’” Robinson said.

Speaking with reporters in the Bronx today, Mayor Michael Bloomberg took aim at Tisch’s characterization that the Department of Education had “warehoused thousands of kids” in failing schools. Tisch made the comments to the editorial board of the New York Daily News after visiting Brooklyn’s Automotive High School, which started undergoing federally funded “restart” this year.

“She’s totally wrong on the facts,” Bloomberg said. “I don’t know where she got that from. … She’s obviously been misinformed.”

But Tisch had backed up her statement not with hard facts but with anecdotal evidence about what she saw in Automotive’s classrooms and hallways. “No one’s in the class and kids are wandering around the hallway. I couldn’t tell me for the life of me what the instruction was,” Tisch told the Daily News.

Bloomberg, whose administration has relied on data to drive school improvement, said today that Tisch’s approach to identifying and solving problems in schools is misguided:

You can’t run a school system on anecdotal evidence. We have a 1.1 million students to take care of and you can’t run it on … you have to have numbers. You have to have reality and take a look and see. You’re not going to help every kid but we have made enormous progress. I dont think there’s any school system in the country that has taken a school like the one she talked about and made as many improvements as we have have. Are they all going to be ready for Harvard, Yale or Princeton? No. And, incidentally, neither was I when I graduated school.

In a follow-up phone call, Tisch said her visit to Automotive was meant to tally how the city is using federal School Improvement Grants for struggling schools — and that she didn’t like what she saw.

“We stand by what we saw in the schools,” Tisch said of the visits. “We wanted to have a sense of what was going on with the schools that were targeted with the SIG grants. … The bottom line is we can’t spend money on creating effective schools unless the conditions are right to receive that money.”

The press conference where Joel Klein's resignation was announced

When Chancellor Joel Klein suddenly announced his resignation a year ago tomorrow, speculation immediately mountedthat he had been pushed out.

But Klein insisted that he had chosen to leave the Department of Education and said Mayor Bloomberg had asked him to stay on.

Now, new details tucked into a New York Magazine profile of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth seem to confirm that Bloomberg set the timeline for Klein’s departure — and suggest that Klein’s decision to head to Murdoch’s News Corporation was hastily made.

From the article:

On Sunday morning, November 7, 2010, Michael Bloomberg called Klein and told him that he would be announcing that Klein was resigning that week. Klein and the mayor had been discussing Klein’s departure from Tweed Courthouse for months—but Klein was still taken aback at the timing of the decision. He had been in informal talks with several Wall Street firms, but nothing had materialized. Without a job lined up, he “panicked,” according to a person familiar with the matter. So Klein called Rupert. The two had been meeting on and off, and Rupert agreed to appoint him to News Corp.’s board of directors and put him in charge of an education division that News Corp. would launch. “We all found out [about Klein] that Monday,” says another senior executive. “Some of us had to scramble; you just can’t put someone on the board like that.”

UPDATE: DOE press secretary Natalie Ravitz said New York Magazine’s account mischaracterized Klein’s departure.

“Joel had already told the mayor he planned to leave — the mayor asked him to wait until he found a successor, which Joel did,” Ravitz said. “Any notion that he was pushed out is absolutely untrue.”

The magazine story also suggests that Klein has been a divisive figure at News Corp, where this summer he headed an internal investigation into the company’s phone-hacking scandal.

With [NewsCorp general counsel Lon] Jacobs being squeezed out of the picture, Rupert increasingly turned to former New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein for legal advice. When Klein was hired last November, Rupert’s seniormost executives were caught unawares—it was an impetuous act by Rupert Murdoch. …

While Jacobs and others advocated for an outside investigation of the scandal, Klein instead pushed for News Corp. to hire the powerful D.C. law firm Williams and Connolly—where his wife once worked—to conduct an inquiry. Brendan Sullivan, a senior partner at the firm, headed up the inquiry. Sullivan conducted interviews with James and Brooks and executives in London, but didn’t push for a more probing review that might have alerted senior News Corp. executives to the extent of the scandal, according to executives with knowledge of the report. In June, Sullivan delivered his report at a News Corp. board meeting and declared that both James and Brooks were “clean,” according to another executive familiar with its contents.

The tensions between Jacobs and Klein came to a head that same month. Jacobs walked into president and COO Chase Carey’s office and told him News Corp. was in breach of his contract because Rupert was using Klein like a general counsel. News Corp. agreed to let Jacobs go with four years left on his multimillion-dollar contract.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew joined Mayor Bloomberg and other union leaders to announce new pension reforms

Management of the teachers’ retirement fund is being merged with other public pensions systems under a proposal unveiled today by city officials and union leaders.

In an effort to chip away at the rising costs of the city’s $120 billion pension fund, Mayor Bloomberg and Comptroller John Liu announced a proposal to overhaul city unions’ scattered pension systems. Until now, each of the five different funds – for teachers, police, fire, school employees and other public sector — had been managed by a handful of trustees under the comptroller’s office.

Under the proposal, the pools of money from each union will be kept separate but the same professional investors will manage all of the funds. Those investors will not be part of the comptroller’s office and will not change when a new comptroller is elected, as they have in the past.

Bloomberg, Liu, and union leaders said today that the fund’s underperformance had resulted in part from its management structure.

But the proposal does not address other issues underlying the city’s growing pension costs, which have soared in the last 10 years. Last year, the city contributed $8.4 billion in payouts to retired city workers, up from just $1.2 billion a decade ago, when the pension funds do not generate enough earnings to match promised returns.

With over 200,000 members, the teachers’ $42 billion retirement fund, called the Teacher Retirement System (TRS), is also one of the city’s largest and costliest. As we reported last year, the fund took a hit from the 2008 financial crisis, which was compounded by a series of pension perks that were approved in the years before it:

The sweeteners reduced the retirement contributions for teachers and principals, putting more of the burden to pay for pensions onto the city. They also allowed per diem salary — money teachers make for taking on extra tasks like running after-school clubs and sports — to be counted in the overall final salary number. And, in 2008, a provision allowed teachers to retire early without being dinged in their pension earnings.

Together, the rising salaries and pension sweeteners have created a perfect storm: increasing costs just as the plan’s performance has plummeted in the down market. Although the TRS has not performed significantly worse than the market according to the new report, the annual rate of return it assumes — 8 percent — is high by most private standards. (To be fair, most public pension plans also use a number around 8 percent. Similar private sector plans assume a rate of around 4 percent.)

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew downplayed concerns about specifics in the UFT’s pension plan today and lauded the reforms, saying the agreement shows that unions could collaborative with the city.

“Today what you see here is an announcement about the labor leaders of this city getting together with elected officials to say we can do things better on behalf of our city,” Mulgrew said at a press conference today where he was joined by leaders from each of the unions affected by the proposal.

But fiscal watchdogs said the proposal would not create lasting improvements in the city’s pension situation.

“This is a drop in the bucket and doesn’t begin to address the real problems the city has on its hands,” said Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute who studies urban economics. “The only way to solve this problem is to reduce the benefits of workers, which are extravagant.”

Mayor Bloomberg said he would travel to Albany to lobby the reforms with state legislators, who ultimately have to approve the proposed changes.

Tisch speaking at a GothamSchools panel earlier in August.

Talk is swirling that an unexpected contender from the education world is being drafted to run for mayor of New York City: Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents.

Education, political, government insiders, and Tisch herself say Tisch has been courted by political consultants as a potential candidate to succeed Mayor Bloomberg. The election is still two years out, but so far no clear favorite has emerged from the crowded field of Democratic hopefuls. Even more room is open in the thin slate of independent and Republican candidates. And so far no candidate fits the mold that Bloomberg has established: nonpartisan, well-connected, and wealthy enough to fund a campaign without making many promises.

Some believe the charismatic Tisch, a registered Democrat from the billionaire Tisch family, could emerge as someone to fill that void. More than a half dozen government and education officials, most of whom only spoke anonymously because they didn’t want to speculate, confirmed her name has been surfacing since last year.

“I wouldn’t be surprised so you can’t count her out yet,” said a source.

Longtime New York City political consultant George Artz said he had also heard the chatter but doubted that Tisch would actually run. At this point, he said, a lot of names are being thrown around, including that of Tisch’s own brother-in-law, Jonathan Tisch, Chairman and CEO of Loews Hotels. Still, Artz said, Merryl Tisch had the pedigree to be a solid candidate.

“I wouldn’t be stunned by it,” Artz said. “Merryl’s been around and she obviously has substance, contacts and money – all the ingredients you need to run for political office.”

This week, Tisch acknowledged the speculation, but characterized any notion that she’s actively considering it as “gossip.”

“I am aware that people are talking about it,” Tisch said. “I am not an idiot.”

“Have people mentioned it to me? Yes. Have I considered it? I am so busy with my work right now, it’s ridiculous.”

Tisch, a former teacher who has served on the Board of Regents since 1996, was elected chancellor in 2009, just in time to oversee the procurement and implementation of New York State’s $700 million Race To The Top grant. In her short time as chancellor, she’s earned a reputation as a knowledgeable and hard-working consensus builder who played a key role in negotiations between the teachers unions and education reformers during the grant’s application process.

In 2004, Tisch mulled a run at an open City Council seat, but ultimately decided not to, she said, because she enjoyed her work too much on the Board. Over the years, however, she’s remained active politically, donating more than $50,000 to a variety of candidates, mostly Democratic candidates, according to campaign finance filings.

This time around, Tisch said she isn’t even pondering the prospect of a political run. “I am absolutely, positively not going to run,” she said.

A lifelong Democrat, Tisch said she would “never enter a Democratic primary” and even offered explicit approval for a leading – if tentative – Republican candidate.

“If Ray Kelly gets the nomination on the GOP ticket, I think he would be a great candidate.”

A rally against the planned layoffs of school aides who belong to DC-37

Using new strategies, City Council members are mounting a final push to stave off the school aide layoffs that are scheduled to take place at the end of the week.

Speaker Christine Quinn spoke to Mayor Bloomberg today about the layoffs, according to a Quinn spokesman, who said she plans to schedule a joint public hearing with the Finance and Education Committees to find out more about the scale of the proposed cuts. The DOE has maintained that the layoffs would save at least $38 million, but union officials dispute that total.

“By our calculations, it should be closer to $22 and $25 million,” said District Council 37′s Local 372 president Santos Crespo at a press conference today. The event brought dozens of union and elected officials out in support of Crespo’s union workers. It was then followed by a larger rally this evening that attracted Occupy Wall Street protesters.

Quinn’s announcement comes just days after the Black, Latino and Asian caucus discussed the option following a meeting with Chancellor Dennis Walcott in which little progress was made. Quinn has kept the issue at arms length up to this point, but inveighed against any future teacher layoffs last month on the first day of school.

Crespo, who has offered three concession proposals to Walcott, said the council’s intervention is the union’s best option at this point.

“What’s going to make [the DOE] respond is going to be the City Council. If that happens, then we’ll get to the bottom of this and see where the money is really going.”

A date has not been set for the hearing and would require at least two weeks’ notice, which would fall well after the Oct. 7 deadline when more than 700 pink slips take effect for school aides, parent coordinators and the other non-pedagogical staff members who were cut from school budgets this summer. Still, Crespo said, the jobs could be reinstated after the hearings.

Having failed to break through with Walcott last week, City Council members are now going above his head and straight to City Hall to appeal to Bloomberg. Seventeen council members signed a letter to the mayor that criticizes Walcott and the DOE’s “lack of communication with the Council, and limited efforts to secure additional funds to avoid these cuts.”

“These actions continue to imply that the Department of Education has no intentional of negotiating in good faith to allow hard-working people to keep their jobs servicing the public system,” the letter continues.

A spokesman for the mayor declined to comment on the overtures and said Walcott was “speaking for the administration at this point.”

I’m waiting for a comment from the DOE and will update if it comes.

The full letter from City Council members is below.

For many years, it was easy to predict that the annual test score announcement would be an occasion for state and city officials to point to gains. That pattern ended last year when state officials declared that the tests had been too easy and that the grading would change to raise the score needed for a student to be considered “proficient” in math or reading. For weeks before the city’s average proficiency rate fell 26 percentage points in reading and 24 points in math, the public knew that a dropoff was coming.

We have little warning about what today’s news will bring.

Last week, the New York Post reported that insiders at the State Education Department said the newest scores would show a small jump, about 2 percentage points in reading and 4 points in math. That would bring the percentage of city students rated “proficient” to about 44 percent in reading and 65 percent in math, far below the rates reached two years ago under the old scoring system.

But comments made to Crain’s New York by Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz suggested that not every school saw its scores increase. Comparing this year’s scores to last year’s, Moskowitz told Crain’s, “I think you are going to be looking at a similar or potentially even worse situation.”

Schools have had their students’ scores results since Thursday but were not allowed to share them publicly.

Four things to note when the new scores are discussed today, first by state officials at 11 a.m. and later by Mayor Bloomberg at a press conference at city Department of Education headquarters:

• What happened to students’ raw scores. The scoring change last year affected only the cutoff score at which students were called proficient, so that students with the same raw scores in 2009 and 2010 were assigned different proficiency ratings. But in New York City, the raw scores themselves remained flat, too.
• How city students fared compared to students across the state, and in particular to students in four other large cities that are often lumped in with New York City. As good news has become scarcer, Bloomberg has increasingly turned to comparisons to show that city students’ gains outpace students in the rest of the state — or, in last year’s case, that their test score drops were smaller than in other cities.
• How Bloomberg fits today’s test scores into his school reform story. Bloomberg painted last year’s score dropoff as a chance to “raise the bar” for city students. If raw scores remain flat or close to it, it will be difficult for him to argue that city students have improved under the new scoring system.
• How individual students are affected. Each score factored into the state and city averages announced today belongs to an individual student whose next steps in school could hinge on the new data. Last year, 10,000 city students were wrongly told they had passed or failed state tests, and nearly 2,000 were told they could skip the last week of summer school because they hadn’t had to attend in the first place. With scores being released nearly two weeks later this year, most schools have already completed their summer sessions.