GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Students at the High School of Graphic Communication Arts work on web-design projects Jan. 9.

When the city unveiled its school closure proposals last month, the High School of Graphic Communication Arts was not on the list. So students and staff there were surprised to learn last week that their school might well be closed in June after all.

Many students walking to the Manhattan school’s Hell’s Kitchen building this morning said they were primed for a typical school day, despite the news that Graphics, which received an F on its most recent progress report, would be one of 33 schools to undergo the “turnaround” process this year. Under that plan, which Mayor Bloomberg announced in his State of the City speech last week, the school would reopen in September with a new name and at least 50 percent of the current teachers gone.

Brendan Lyons, the school’s first-year principal, said the news was “definitely a surprise for our organization and our community,” but said he would wait for more details from the city before commenting on potential changes in store for the school.

If the turnaround plan is approved by the State Department of Education, Lyons would be eligible to stay on. But along with a team of educators and union officials, he would be responsible for selecting a new staff, drawing on current teachers for exactly half of the slots.

“Every crisis is an opportunity,” Lyons said. “I’d like to show how our school is a model turnaround that other schools can learn from.” (more…)

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.” (more…)

One of the largest pots of money in the city’s new initiative to aid black and Latino young men is going to the Department of Education.

Of the initiative’s $127 million price tag, $24 million will be used to study and develop the best practices of city high schools that have best prepared male minority students for college and work. Billionaire philanthropist George Soros will foot the bill for the three-year program, called the Expanded Success Initiative.

The funding will allow the Department of Education to hire a team of research consultants to study 40 high schools with a track record of bridging the achievement gap for black and Latino male students. Josh Thomases, the DOE’s deputy chief academic officer charged with coordinating the program, said the city had not yet identified the schools that would be studied.

“We’re looking for schools with a high concentration of black and Latino boys, with high poverty and Title I funding, but with an evidence of success,” Thomases said.

“We’re agnostic to what kind of school it is,” he added. “We’re looking at the schools that have had success graduating black and Latino boys at a high school level and expanding it to other schools.”

Thomases, citing a study published by Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation (MDRC) last year, said that he would look particularly close at small high schools in New York City, which have shown higher rates of graduation and credit accumulation. (more…)

Less than two years after pledging that he did not want to end tenure, Mayor Bloomberg struck a different chord today.

“Do I think it’s needed at the public school level? No,” he said today.

The statement came days after Bloomberg’s most recent escalation in rhetoric against tenure protections. During his weekly radio address last week, he said tenure is a vestige of the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, when teachers were persecuted for their political views.

But until today he had not said outright that he opposed tenure’s existence for public school teachers. In fact, in a Nov. 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., he declared, “Let me be clear: We are not proposing an end to tenure.” Last year, Bloomberg promised “to end teacher tenure as we know it,” but by making it tougher to achieve, not doing away with it. That vow appeared to bear fruit this year when the number of city teachers awarded tenure fell dramatically.

Bloomberg was responding to a question I asked about what protections he thinks teachers should have given that Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott made clear that people who observe cheating should report it. (more…)

Being able to move forward with plans to close and co-locate schools isn’t enough for Mayor Michael Bloomberg — he said this morning that the UFT and NAACP should feel ashamed for trying to stop the changes.

Bloomberg used his weekly appearance on “The John Gambling Show” to celebrate yesterday’s late-night decision by Judge Paul Feinman to allow the city to move ahead with 22 school closures and 15 charter school co-locations. The UFT and NAACP sued in May to stop the closure and co-locations.

“There are thousands of families whose children have been in limbo because of this lawsuit, and now we can give them a clear direction. This is a big victory for the kids, and I think those that brought the suit should be ashamed of themselves. There’s no other way to phrase it,” Bloomberg said.

UFT officials bristled at the suggestion, saying that the lawsuit — which will now move into a new phase — was meant to address inequities introduced by Bloomberg’s school policies.

“If there is any shame in this matter, it belongs to the mayor and the administration that sat back and made no attempt to help schools and students that were struggling, an administration that favored charter schools while it ignored the needs of public school students,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement.

The radio show’s segment on education began this way: (more…)

If Governor Andrew Cuomo angered Mayor Bloomberg by batting off his calls to end seniority-based layoffs, perhaps the governor redeemed himself in the mayor’s eyes today. Cuomo sent the chancellor of New York’s Board of Regents, Merryl Tisch, a letter saying he believes that student test scores should count for a larger portion of teachers’ annual evaluations.

His comments are a critique of a set of regulations put out by the Board of Regents that they will vote on next week. The regulations are to be used by New York City and other districts as a guide to implementing the state’s new teacher evaluation system.

In a statement today, Tisch vowed to support Cuomo’s recommendations at the meeting next week, saying that they “will lead to an even stronger teacher and principal evaluation system for New York.” It’s not clear if the other members of the board will agree with Tisch. A recent appointee to the board, the former city school official Kathleen Cashin, is a quiet critic of Bloomberg’s.

Another hurdle involves getting the teacher evaluations implemented in school districts. The new state law revising the evaluation system granted final power to local collective bargaining talks between districts and unions. That means that no evaluation system will become final without local unions’ approval.

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew responded to Cuomo’s letter obliquely, saying only: “We look forward to discussing the Governor’s recommendations with the Regents.”

Bloomberg’s reaction was more effusive:

“The thoughtful recommendations made today by Governor Cuomo will greatly improve the rigor of these new evaluations, and I am heartened that the Regents agreed to adopt them. But it will take the sustained commitment of all invested parties – and perhaps most importantly, the cooperation of the teachers union – if we are to make this evaluation system a reality.”

Here’s Cuomo’s complete letter: (more…)

A frequent critic of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and friend to the teachers union is backing the mayor’s much-debated layoff estimates.

City Council Education Committee Chairman Robert Jackson said today that he believes Bloomberg’s estimates are probably an accurate reflection of the impact of the governor’s current proposed cuts.

Some critics of Bloomberg have accused the mayor of exaggerating the city’s financial straits in order to press the legislature to end the state’s seniority-based teacher layoff system. Governor Andrew Cuomo has said repeatedly that his proposed cuts to education spending should not necessitate layoffs in local districts.

“I believe Mayor Bloomberg and not Governor Cuomo,” Jackson said, saying that he has heard from local elected officials in other New York cities who have said that their communities are also facing teacher layoffs in spite of Cuomo’s insistence that none are necessary.

“The mayor has a better handle on New York City’s budget,” he said.  ”The local executives and the local representatives have a better handle on their municipalities.”

That’s not to say that he won’t have any objections to the mayor’s budget, Jackson cautioned, saying that he wanted to focus on preventing cuts to the state budget first. “And then I’ll turn my energies to Mayor Bloomberg,” he said.

Jackson’s comments came after a press conference in which he gathered with public school parents to urge both the governor and the mayor not to slash state education spending. Parents argued that the governor should seek out other revenues to avoid education cuts. And they said the mayor should be fighting the cuts harder, rather than focusing his energies on changing the current layoff system. (more…)

The argument that heated up today between city officials, Governor Andrew Cuomo and members of the state legislature over abolishing the state’s seniority-based layoff system for teachers essentially boils down to one thing: timing.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Education officials want to do away with the “last-in, first-out” system immediately so that they can use new criteria to lay off teachers at the end of this school year. Cuomo and other state officials — several of whom support changing the layoff system generally — counter that abandoning seniority-based layoffs must wait until the state has a better system it can use instead.

Yesterday, Cuomo introduced a bill that would speed implementation of the teacher evaluation bill that Albany passed last May up by a year but did not propose any changes to the layoff system. City officials immediately blasted the bill as “a sham” and a distraction, and Bloomberg said today the governor’s proposal “simply kicks the can down the road.”

Part of the disagreement lies in whether or not the city and the state have time to kick that can. City officials speak of the need to change the layoff system with a sense of urgency, arguing that a budget crisis necessitates laying off more than 4,000 teachers this year. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said today that his threats to cut more than 6,100 teaching positions — including over 4,600 through layoffs — should be taken more seriously than ever before, and the city will have to fight to avoid even more cuts across city agencies.

Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed state budget reduces state aid to New York City schools by $1.4 billion, and the city schools system is also facing the end of $850 million in federal stimulus funds. To negate those cuts, the city has moved $1.86 billion in city funds to the Department of Education since June, Bloomberg said today.

But overall city expenses are still rising enough to necessitate the cuts in teaching positions, which were originally projected in the city’s preliminary budget outlined in November, the mayor argued.

Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew said that the mayor’s layoff proposal was “more and more bizarre,” given the increase in city revenue going to fill in gaps in DOE funding and the Cuomo administration’s claims that state cuts should not mean local layoffs.

“We’ve already lost nearly 5,000 teachers to attrition in the last two years, and class sizes are skyrocketing across the city,” Mulgrew said. “It’s time the Mayor joined us in fighting for the children of our city by supporting the extension of the state millionaire’s tax, rather than continuing to focus, as he and Chancellor Black did in Albany this week, on a bogus strategy to lay teachers off.” (more…)

The Department of Education isn’t granting any interviews with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s chancellor appointee Cathie Black until she assumes office next month. But Black has given one short interview — to New York Post gossip columnist Cindy Adams.

Black told Adams that Bloomberg called a “couple of weeks ago” and wanted to meet the next morning. When Black arrived at the mayor’s foundation offices the next day, she said, Bloomberg offered her the chancellor job on the spot:

The offer came out of left field, and my stomach did a flip-flop.

That Bloomberg offered Black the job without any sort of screening process seems to give credence to the theory that Black was the only candidate he considered seriously.

Although the mayor said on Tuesday that he “considered many different people,” thus far it’s not clear that he talked to anyone else about the job, or who he consulted besides Chancellor Joel Klein as he was making up his mind. The Times has decided to crowd-source the question, asking its readers to contact them if anyone at City Hall spoke to them about the position. (Note to our readers: if you were contacted, don’t e-mail the Times. E-mail us.)

Black also gives a hint to her motivations for taking the position. After having been replaced as president of Hearst Magazines in June, Black told Adams that she appreciated the opportunity to advance:

It’s a great thing when, at a certain stage in life, you can be able to deal up . . . not down.

Adams’ brief interview also reveals Black’s mindset as she prepares to take what she acknowledges will be a tremendously challenging new gig. Black told Adams that she is “not nervous at all” and that she believes that with the help of Klein’s eight (now seven) deputy chancellors she will “get up to speed quickly.”