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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.”

DOE Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology Photeine Anagnostopoulos submitted her resignation Wednesday. Photo via Harvard College Libraries

The city’s top finance and budget official is following Chancellor Joel Klein out of the Department of Education, officials confirmed Wednesday evening.

Photeine “Photo” Anagnostopoulos, Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology, submitted her resignation Wednesday, effective immediately.

“She has served the DOE well through tough and challenging budget times and I wish her the very best in her next endeavor,” Klein wrote in an email.

“Given the transition we are about to undertake, she felt it was the right time to move on,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz. “We wish her well in her future endeavors, and are already beginning the process of identifying qualified candidates for her position.”

Anagnostopoulos’ departure signals that Klein’s resignation and the arrival of Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black as chancellor will also bring a shift in power in the top circle of the DOE.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon that he was replacing Klein with Black came as a surprise to many DOE officials, including some of Klein’s senior aides.

And while Black has indicated that she plans to rely heavily on the team of top officials that Klein brought together — especially Klein’s team of eight deputy chancellors — the willingness of some of those officials to stay on without Klein is far from certain. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg, flanked by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, defended the city's test scores at Tweed Courthouse yesterday.

Talking about the definition of academic proficiency yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg struck a relativist note.

“Everybody can have their definition of what it means,” he said. Later, he added: “The last time I checked, Lady Gaga is doing fine with just a year of college.”

He even asked reporters not to refer to students who score above a Level 3 out of 4 as “proficient.”

The request follows new revelations that the bar for “proficiency” on state tests seems to have dropped over time, so that even though more students statewide were meeting it each year, they were not actually learning more. In response, the state this year took steps to tug standards higher.

Yet even as he called the definition of “proficient” into question, Bloomberg vigorously defended the administration’s tough accountability system, which uses the Level 1 to 4 system to determine which students move on to the next grade and as one piece of schools’ report card grades.

Bloomberg has also used rising numbers of students scoring at Level 3 as a referendum on his education policies, arguing over and over again that because the rates are going up, the policies must work. Just last year, announcing that more students were “meeting or exceeding grade-level math standards,” a reference to more students scoring Level 3 or higher, Bloomberg called the results “proof” of New York City schools’ excellence. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg chose a rare day off for city students to launch a new effort to study ways to stop truancy.

A new city task force led by the mayor’s chief policy and strategy advisor, John Feinblatt, will investigate how to improve the city’s anti-truancy policies. A key goal is to track student academic and attendance data to determine which students are at risk of chronic absenteeism and notify their parents. The task force has been assigned to figure out the best way to make that goal reality.

One in ten city students is absent from school on an average day, and research shows that nearly three-quarters of students who are chronically absent in sixth grade eventually drop out of high school, city officials said.

The city is billing the mayor’s announcement as the “first-ever task force” to address chronic absenteeism and truancy, but the city has a checkered history of attention to the problem. Currently, the city runs a small “Attendance Court” program in three schools, offering around 45 chronic truants counseling and occasional tough talk from a judge. (more…)

When Mayor Bloomberg announced this morning that he will prevent teacher layoffs by freezing wages, teachers union president Michael Mulgrew shot back that the mayor can’t unilaterally make contract decisions.

Mulgrew is right that Bloomberg can’t make teachers contract decisions on his own. But in this case, he doesn’t have to. All Bloomberg has to do to freeze wages is not sign any contract that includes a raise.

The teachers union is left with a decision: it can either agree to a contract with no raises, or not. If the city and union are unable to come to an agreement, teachers can continue working under the old contract indefinitely.

But speaking to reporters today, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein also made it clear that the city is open to discussing alternate deals with the union. The city’s contract negotiation wish-list includes a slew of cost-saving measures that the city could be willing to trade for raises. These include firing excessed teachers who have not found new positions after six months or a year, or requiring that teachers work longer hours.

In an interview today, Mulgrew refused to say whether he was considering agreeing to a contract without raises. “In terms of our negotiation process, nothing has changed,” he said. (more…)

A first-grader at Brooklyn's P.S. 214 told U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan about the story of Rumplestiltskin today.

City, federal and union officials clash on the best way to lift the state’s charter school cap. They dispute the fairest way to lay off teachers. And they could barely agree on what school U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan should visit today.

But brought together for that visit, Duncan, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and teachers union president Michael Mulgrew could agree on one thing — the city needs federal dollars and it needs them soon. (more…)

Mayor Michael Bloomberg proposed cutting 6,400 city teaching jobs today — but he said without action from Albany, the exact number of layoffs is still anybody’s guess.

The mayor’s annual budget proposal would leave 2,000 teaching jobs unfilled and lay off another 4,400 teachers. And Chancellor Joel Klein urged principals to begin preparing for massive reductions that could cause classes to grow by nearly 20 percent.

But Bloomberg and Klein emphasized that all of the numbers could change depending on what happens in Albany, where legislators are now a month overdue in setting a budget for the state.

The city based its budget proposal on the governor’s proposed state budget, which cuts nearly $500 million from school aid to New York City and is more severe than the State Assembly’s proposed plan.

“If we don’t have any specificity in Albany, we have to act on what is a conservative best guess,” Bloomberg said. (more…)

When he announced that he would close the city’s infamous rubber rooms yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared, “To say that this is a big deal is an understatement.”

The agreement will shutter the reassignment centers where teachers accused of misconduct or incompetence wait idly for their cases to be heard, a process both the city and union have accused each other of dragging on interminably. But the deal, which was struck outside of formal contract negotiations, does little to resolve the most contentious issues the city and union have long fought over.

Yesterday’s rubber room agreement traded one largely-ignored time-line for hearing cases for a speedier one. Union and city officials pledged to strictly adhere to the faster schedule and clear out the backlog of cases by the end of the year.

“We want a faster, fairer process,” United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said. “That’s the way this process should work and that’s what this agreement does.”

The deal does little to make it easier to fire teachers for incompetence, a major goal of the Bloomberg administration that the union bitterly opposes.  Nor does it address a costlier problem: the pool of teachers who remain on the city’s payroll after losing their positions to school budget cuts or school closings. (more…)

New York’s education officials and politicians reacted with shock to news today that their dark-horse state was named a finalist in the competition for Race to the Top funds.

But the unexpected good news did little to instill confidence among lawmakers, who cautioned that the state is still a long-shot for a win.

Many officials and advocates said the state legislature’s failure to act on several key elements of the application — namely, its cap on charter schools and teacher tenure laws — could hobble the state’s chances at the badly-needed funds. And they urged Albany to enact those changes immediately, before the state makes its final pitch to the grant program’s judges in two weeks. The winners of the competition will be announced in April.

Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said she was “thrilled” that the state’s application, which centered on proposals to build a new data tracking system and to overhaul how teachers are trained and certified, was judged strong enough to make the finals. But she added a note of caution.

“Now we need to make sure that the possibility doesn’t slip away,” Tisch said. (more…)

The city teachers union declared this afternoon that its contract talks with the city are deadlocked and asked a state employment panel to intervene.

The move takes the negotiations one step closer to fact-finding and arbitration, a complex process that observers say could mean nearly a year before a new contract is reached.

“Despite weeks of meetings and discussions, we have not been able to make real progress in our efforts to reach a new contract with the Department of Education,” United Federation of Teachers president Michael Mulgrew said in a statement.

“The UFT has no choice but to reach out to a neutral third party to help resolve the differences that are preventing us from a new agreement that is fair to our members and to the parents and children who rely on the New York City public schools,” he said.

A spokesman for the city, Jason Post, would not comment on the UFT’s move.

The declaration of impasse comes at a sensitive time for the relationship between the teachers union and the city. The city is currently pushing for legislative changes that would change how teachers are evaluated and make it easier for them to be fired. (more…)