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Big-city mayors and U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan during a panel discussion today in Washington, D.C.

Last week, Chancellor Dennis Walcott spent Friday morning cautioning reporters not to take the city’s Teacher Data Reports too seriously. The city was releasing the information only because news organizations had won a legal battle for it, he said.

This morning, after a week in which Mayor Bloomberg defended the release, Walcott revised his message.

“It’s all about accountability,” he said, appearing on a panel in Washington, D.C., with Bloomberg and the mayors and schools chiefs of Chicago and Los Angeles.

“It’s all about accountability,” Walcott added. “And as the mayor indicated, parents have a right to have this information. What I’ve been trying to do is making sure that the entire New York City community understands that this is a limited piece of information and they have to view the teachers in their full context.”

Bloomberg jumped in to rebut philanthropist Bill Gates’ argument, made in a New York Times column just before the release, that no other industries release the results of employee evaluations.

“Incidentally Gates does give information at Microsoft to the people that need it, namely the managers to the people being evaluated,” Bloomberg said. “In our case it’s the principals and the parents who need that information. So we’re not doing anything differently from what Microsoft does.” (more…)

A frequent critique of the city’s release of value-added ratings for thousands of teachers last week has been that the city has never rated other workers in similar ways.

On Tuesday, Mayor Bloomberg explained the discrepancy, according to Capital New York. In short, Bloomberg said, teachers are not widgets, but other city workers are:

This is not like police and fire. You think about it. Police and fire, we assign a cop or a firefighter to a station, to a post, to a firehouse, to a piece of equipment. And all of the firefighers and all of the cops are changed. Not only are they interchangeable, we deliberately move them around, because that helps their careers and they learn more things and they’re better able to perform their jobs.

Education is different, Bloomberg added. His comments channeled the 2009 “Widget Effect” report by The New Teacher Project, which became fuel for reformers to push tougher teacher evaluations.

“The Widget Effect describes the tendency of school districts to assume classroom effectiveness is the same from teacher to teacher,” the study’s executive summary says. “This decades-old fallacy fosters an environment in which teachers cease to be understood as individual professionals, but rather as interchangeable parts.”

Today’s evaluations announcement would appear to eliminate the main reason for the city’s controversial plan to “turn around” 33 struggling schools. But Mayor Bloomberg said the city would move forward with the plans anyway.

Bloomberg proposed turnaround, which would require the schools to close and reopen with new names and many new teachers, last month as a way to circumvent a requirement that the city negotiate an evaluation deal for teachers in those schools. Now, having resolved a sticking point in those negotiations resolved — the appeals process for teachers who receive low ratings — the city could conceivably appeal to the state to let it continue receiving federal funds to implement improvement strategies that had been underway there until the evaluations negotiations broke down in December.

But Bloomberg — who did not join state and union officials announcing the evaluations deal in Albany today — said during a press conference at City Hall that he would not be backing down from the turnaround plans.

“Nothing in the deal prevents us from moving forward with our plan to replace the lowest performing teachers in 33 of our most troubling schools,” he said.

Bloomberg said the aggressive overhaul strategy was necessary because no teachers would be removed from schools because of low scores on the new evaluations for at least a year and a half. (more…)

New York City residents won’t be appointing Mayor Bloomberg as students’ chief lobbyist any time soon.

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Two weeks after Mayor Bloomberg announced a plan to to replace half of all teachers at 33 struggling schools, efforts are underway to soften the threat.

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. (more…)

After promoting his latest education policies around the city for the last week, Mayor Bloomberg took his renewed focus on schools to Washington, D.C., today.

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. (more…)

“Everything you ever do, there’s going to be days where it just doesn’t work,” Mayor Bloomberg told a group of high school students today. “There’s going to be days where somebody says something you don’t like or something goes the wrong way.”

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.” (more…)

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. (more…)

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.” (more…)