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Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew is lodging a formal complaint about the city’s plans to overhaul 33 struggling schools, a day after the head of the city’s principals union did the same thing.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced last month that the schools would undergo a federally prescribed process known as “turnaround,” which requires half of teachers to be removed, Mulgrew was immediately dismissive.

In a letter sent today to State Education Commissioner John King, Mulgrew fleshes out those objections, arguing that the plan as the city has explained it would violate state and federal regulations and the city’s contract with the UFT.

The city has leaned on that contract when touting the plan, saying that a clause known as 18-D represents union sign-off on the turnaround bid and allows for rehiring at schools that are closed and reopened, as would be the case under turnaround. But Mulgrew contends in his letter that 18-D applies only when schools are truly closed.

“What the DOE proposes is a classic sleight of hand,” he writes. “While it tells the public and the UFT it will technically ‘close’ these schools and ‘reopen’ them as new schools, what it really intends and seeks your permission for is a turnaround where the same students continue to be served in the same school with a portion of the same staff. … This is not a closure and does not trigger application of 18-D.” (more…)

A policy change up for approval by teachers union leaders today would increase the weight of retired teachers in union elections.

The proposal, which the union leadership’s say is meant to make voting more democratic, has roiled critics who say it represents a bid to consolidate power by a leadership that fears dissent.

At issue are the union’s complex rules about how to count votes from its different constituencies during leadership elections. Under the bylaws, active teachers and members of other UFT chapters, including paraprofessionals and nurses, get one vote each. If 25,000 current teachers cast votes, 25,000 votes are counted.

But the votes of retired teachers are capped, a provision that union leaders have said was aimed to limit retirees’ influence. Since 1989, if 25,000 retired teachers vote, only 18,000 of those votes would count. In 2010, when the union elected Michael Mulgrew president, retired teachers’ ballots counted only for seven-tenths of a vote.

Under the proposed policy, that cap would be raised but not eliminated: 23,500 votes from retired teachers would be counted.

UFT officials say they are taking advantage of the addition of more than 20,000 members this month to amend the union’s constitution to reflect membership changes, including growth in the influential retirees chapter. Also up for approval is a move to give the new members, home day care workers, representation on the executive board.

But the proposed change has its critics — and is making strange bedfellows out of people who are often viscerally opposed to each other. Members of Educators 4 Excellence, a group aimed at boosting teachers’ influence on education policy, and Norm Scott, a union activist who has criticized E4E, both said they thought the move would diminish the voices of active teachers. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew responded forcefully to Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to circumvent a collective bargaining requirement, saying union lawyers had a multi-pronged approach to push back against the city’s tactics.

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. (more…)

Under a proposal laid out by Mayor Bloomberg today that took education insiders by surprise, the city would retain access to threatened federal dollars for struggling schools by riffing on a familiar strategy: school closure.

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. (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew wants parents to know that he doesn’t mind if new teacher evaluations cause some teachers to leave their jobs.

Ever since negotiations over teacher evaluations fell apart during winter break, Mulgrew has taken fire for costing the city federal funding and opposing changes that could make teachers easier to fire.

But in a full-page advertisement that appears in today’s New York Daily News, titled “An Open Letter to New York City Parents,” Mulgrew argues that evaluations that are conceived and executed according to the union’s specifications would indeed usher teachers “who cannot succeed” out of the profession.

More than that, he argues, better evaluations would help struggling teachers get the support they need to stay in the classroom. An exodus of teachers from city schools stands at 66,000 teachers in the last decade, he said — equivalent to more than three quarters of the city’s teaching corps.

(more…)

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo convenes the education reform commission he promised today, there are likely to be some new faces in the room.

Cuomo signaled that he was tired of business as usual during his State of the State address today, saying that special interest education groups, such as lobbyists for teachers, principals, and superintendents, have come to overshadow the true mission of public education.

“The purpose of public education is not to help grow the public education bureaucracy,” Cuomo said in his speech. The status quo, he said, is “driven by the business of education more than achievement in education.”

Cuomo said that the education commission would be the driving force behind his pledge to toughen teacher evaluations and make the state’s education spending more efficient. He said the commission would be bi-partisan and include joint appointments from the legislature, but was not specific about what the makeup would look like.

Two people who work closely on state and city education policies said that they expected the commission to be made up at least in part of people from outside the state.

“It will be something that’s quite national, people from outside New York,” a source said. ”It won’t be people from the usual crowd.” (more…)

UFT President Michael Mulgrew appears on Inside City Hall on NY1

On the first workday after negotiations with the city over new teacher evaluations broke down shortly before a deadline to maintain federal funding, UFT President Michael Mulgrew is defending his call for a third-party negotiator to broker a compromise.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott laid out a case against the union’s request in a New York Post op/ed today. Mulgrew, in contrast, has taken to the airwaves, appearing Monday night on NY1′s Inside City Hall and this morning on John Gambling’s radio show.

Whether third-party arbitrators would rule on appeals for teachers who get low ratings was a key sticking point in negotiations between the city and the union. Now, a secondary impasse has opened over arbitration about the arbitration — that is, whether a third-party negotiator should figure out final teacher evaluation details for the city and union.

Both Inside City Hall host Errol Louis and Gambling, whose show airs daily on WOR 710, pushed Mulgrew to explain how third-party arbitration would close the ideological divide separating the city and union.

“Tens of thousands of teachers elect you, millions of New Yorkers elect the mayor, and yet some third unelected person now has to decide one of the most important questions?” Louis asked. (more…)

It’s not the millionaire’s tax that some parents have pushed for, but it’s something.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced today that he would overhaul the state’s tax code to reduce the tax rate on middle-income earners and increase taxes on the highest earners. Cuomo estimates that the changes will add $2 billion a year to the state’s coffers — funds that can go to schools and other public services.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew was among the chorus of people who quickly signaled their support for the proposal. He called the plan “a wide-ranging solution to the state’s budget problems” and said it would “help ensure that children in our public schools will begin to see restorations from the devastating education cuts of recent years.”

But a separate tax on high earners known as the millionaire’s tax, which Cuomo has vowed not to renew when it expires at the end of the month, has generated significantly more, about $4 billion a year. That means the state is still facing a funding shortfall of as much as $1.5 billion, and schools are likely to feel continued budget pressure. (more…)

If Mayor Bloomberg had his druthers, he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay the remaining half more to supervise twice-as-large classes.

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): 

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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. (more…)

Today’s biggest news story — the city’s crackdown on “Occupy” protesters occupying Zuccotti Park — got some of its legs from inside United Federation of Teachers headquarters.

The UFT has been hosting support for the protesters for some time in its Lower Manhattan offices, just blocks from the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. That won’t stop, according to UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

Here’s what Mulgrew said in a statement just now:

Occupy Wall Street isn’t a place – it’s an idea, a movement that has brought national and international focus to the danger to our economy and our nation that we face because of growing income inequality.

The UFT is happy to continue providing logistical support for the Occupy Wall Street in our building, and we will be joining the OWS protestors in their continuing efforts around New York City to bring economic fairness and opportunity.

UFT officials told me earlier this week that the union had been planning to participate in a series of rallies on Thursday at Zuccotti Park. The future of those actions is not yet clear.

Today’s crackdown on the protesters had another education angle: NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ was on the scene in the middle of the night — and then throughout the day, indefatigably, even as police officers warned her away — sending Twitter updates. (more…)