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Panelists discuss a slate of new papers about school funding in New York at Teachers College Tuesday night.

Michael Rebell led the Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s landmark school finance lawsuit for 13 years, but for a long time the lawyer was conflicted about the case.

He believed what he ultimately convinced the courts: that the state had given New York City schools less than their fair share of funding. But he was also persuaded by a counter-argument that he heard during the litigation: that more money wouldn’t help schools whose biggest problem was poverty. And the lawsuit itself wasn’t helping him reconcile the tension.

“We have this adversary system for dealing with legal matters in our courts, where two warring sides take firm and opposite opinions,” he said. “The truth is sometimes more complicated than that.”

Now, months after CFE laid off its last employee and the state trimmed the equity dollars for the second time, Rebell is trying a different approach to advocate for poor students. As the director of the Campaign for Educational Equity, a think tank housed at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Rebell is setting out to win not a legal victory but the hearts and minds of policymakers.

His first step: To solicit a set of academic papers, released this week and discussed at Teachers College Tuesday night, that make the case for what he calls “comprehensive educational equity.” A main point of the papers is, as the CFE lawsuit contended and the New York Times reported earlier this week, that the state should give more to its schools — $4,750 per poor student, to be precise. But they also sketch out a policy platform that Rebell said could help close racial and class achievement gaps. (more…)

The converted gym on the bottom floor at P.S. 3 served as a evacuation shelter for hundreds of students on Sept. 11, 2001.

It was less than a week into her job as principal and Lisa Siegman was already confronted with her first major crisis.

As a first-year principal on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Siegman was just a few hours into her third day on the job when two hijacked commercial planes struck the World Trade Center less than two miles away. Siegman’s school, P.S. 3 in the West Village, was immediately converted from a place of learning into a refugee shelter.

“It just turned into survival mode,” recalled Siegman.

Within hours, hundreds of students who had evacuated from schools near ground zero were pouring into P.S. 3′s nearly century-old building on Hudson Street. Some of those schools would not reopen for months, causing their students to temporarily become P.S. 3′s.

Siegman, who is still principal at P.S. 3, one of the top-performing schools in the city, said she remembers few details from that day other than how quickly her responsibilities as a school leader had changed and how urgently her skills were needed.

Parent phone calls needed to be made, but most phone lines were down. Information had to be disseminated to staff and parents, but initial announcements from the Department of Education was unclear and conflicting.

“It was this huge logistical problem,” Siegman said. “Suddenly I had to worry about this whole new set of challenges.”

As the city prepares to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Sunday, new attention is being given to the largely unheralded success of educators across the five boroughs that day in coordinating evacuations and dismissals for more than one million students. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the mayor should not have to lay off teachers given that Wall Street rebounded this year.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the size of the rally. Thousands of people attended this afternoon’s rally, according to multiple people who attended and other press accounts. Protesters came from multiple locations and then converged near Wall Street.

Thousands of teachers joined elected officials in a symbolic march from City Hall to Wall Street this afternoon to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts.

“You took the money from us, now we’re going to where you sent the money,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped lead the march along with national teachers union president Randi Weingarten and half a dozen City Council members.

The march was designed to dramatize the argument that opponents of Bloomberg are making in response to his budget, which calls for laying off more than 4,000 teachers. In a year when Wall Street’s recovery contributed to a citywide surplus, they ask, why are teachers being laid off?

“I never expected to come home to see New York act like Wisconsin,” Weingarten told the screaming crowd.

Bloomberg has blamed the draconian budget on state cuts and pointed out that the surplus this year is not large enough to plug projected gaps next year — an assessment the Independent Budget Office seconded in a recent analysis. (more…)

New York City’s heralded $75 million experiment in teacher incentive pay — deemed “transcendent” when it was announced in 2007 — did not increase student achievement at all, a new study by the Harvard economist Roland Fryer concludes.

“If anything,” Fryer writes of schools that participated in the program, “student achievement declined.” Fryer and his team used state math and English test scores as the main indicator of academic achievement.

Schools could distribute the bonus money based on individual teachers' results, but most did not. Most teachers received the average bonus of $3,000.

The program, which was first funded by private foundations and then by taxpayer dollars, also had no impact on teacher behaviors that researchers measured. These included whether teachers stayed at their schools or in the city school district and how teachers described their job satisfaction and school quality in a survey.

The program had only a “negligible” effect on a list of other measures that includes student attendance, behavioral problems, Regents exam scores, and high school graduation rates, the study found.

The experiment targeted 200 high-need schools and 20,000 teachers between the 2007-2008 and 2009-2010 school years. The Bloomberg administration quietly discontinued it last year, turning back on the mayor’s early vow to expand the program quickly.

The program handed out bonuses based on the schools’ results on the city’s progress report cards. The report cards grade schools based primarily on how much progress they make in improving students’ state test scores. A so-called “compensation team” at each school decided how to distribute the money — a maximum of $3,000 per teachers union member, if the school completely met its target, and $1,500 per union member if the school improved its report card score by 75%. (more…)

Davis Guggenheim’s education documentary “Waiting for Superman” doesn’t come out for another two weeks, but teachers union president Randi Weingarten has already assumed a fighting stance.

In an email sent to reporters yesterday — most likely in response to this NY Magazine review — Weingarten describes the movie as a moving, perhaps even emotionally manipulative, inaccurate portrayal of the public school system.

She criticizes Guggenheim for his flattering portrayal of charter schools and goes so far as to say that most charter schools perform worse than district schools. They are “an escape hatch-sometimes superior, most often inferior,” she writes.

New York City’s United Federation of Teachers runs a charter school in Brooklyn, which has recently received mixed performance reviews. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein and city teachers union president Michael Mulgrew have been careful not to say too much in public about contract negotiations, which started almost exactly a year ago and have been stalled for months.

But in New York magazine this week, Klein wished out loud for a New York City teachers contract that looks like the one hammered out this year in Washington, D.C.

That contract includes, for the first time, a voluntary performance-pay plan and allows principals to use a student test scores, rather than teacher seniority, to decide who to cut during budget reductions. It also limits the amount of time that excessed teachers can remain on payroll while they search for new positions (in New York, teachers can remain salaried indefinitely after they lose their position in a school).

Those changes are some (though by no means all) of the provisions that Klein is seeking in New York and which the United Federation of Teachers has fiercely resisted. But American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten insisted to the magazine’s reporter that the D.C. contract does not bring radical change:

Over breakfast in Washington, she was at pains to argue that, all appearances to the contrary, the union had made no large concessions, that “tenure was preserved intact,” that the contract “isn’t the breakthrough that New Yorkers and others think it is.” (When I put these claims to Klein, he fairly snorted: “If there are no concessions in there, give it to me! I’ll take that concession-free contract tomorrow!”)

Tonight, as members of New York City’s teachers union celebrate the union’s 50th anniversary with a line up of political and labor celebrities, some of their members will be sitting at home or in schools filling out ballots.

That’s because the United Federation of Teachers is in the midst of an election for its president and governing executive board, as well as hundreds of other positions. To outsiders and even some teachers, UFT elections are a little puzzling. This year, there have been no stump speeches, no public debates, and the only tangible evidence that candidates are campaigning is the fliers distributed in teachers’ school mailboxes and ads printed in the union’s newspaper.

The thousands of ballots counted on April 7 will decide the future leaders of America’s largest union local, and one of the most influential in the state. The UFT’s power to set education policy and craft pension deals  in the city and statewide is so formidable, its former leader was once called “governor” in a newspaper editorial. And no matter how much the city detests the union’s policies, even Mayor Bloomberg admitted today that “they are part of the solution.” (more…)

Joel Klein and Eva Moskowitz at the Harlem Success lottery in April 2009. (GothamSchools)

There’s a lot more than school siting and closures in the 77 pages of e-mails between Chancellor Joel Klein and charter school operator Eva Moskowitz.

The e-mails, obtained by the Daily News, include a little bit of news — such as that Bill Clinton considered weighing in on the charter schools fight — and a lot of insight into the way Klein and Moskowitz think about the politics of education. We’ve read every word of the 150+ e-mails and have collected the highlights below. 

A PERSONAL CHALLENGE: Moskowitz puts her expansion goal in personal terms, in an April 2007 e-mail to Klein: “I plan to be educating 8,000 of your children by 2013.”

SHE DIDN’T LIKE THE TWEED WORKFORCE, EITHER. We know that district school leaders and parents often clashed with Garth Harries, the Tweed official who for years led efforts to insert small schools and charters into their buildings. Now we learn that Moskowitz fumed at him, too. On May 16, 2007, she praised a new Department of Education official, Tom Taratko, to Klein. “He got done in 2hrs what garth could not accomplish in 9 months,” she declared, adding, “look out for him and hire more!!!!!” The more typical Tweed worker she describes this way: “maddening sluggishness and people afraid of their own shadows.”

POLITICKING FOR EXPANSION: In July 2007 Moskowitz described to Klein how she and her main financiers, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, shored up support for her application to open three copies of the original Harlem Success Academy. They courted New York State Republican Committee chairman Ed Cox, who was at the time chairman of SUNY’s charter board. (more…)

Local teachers union president Michael Mulgrew appears to be at odds with his old boss, national union president Randi Weingarten, over the question of whether to link students’ test scores to teacher evaluations.

In a speech delivered last month, Weingarten announced her newfound support for using test scores as a factor in deciding whether or not a teacher gets tenure. Following the speech, Mulgrew sent an email to United Federation of Teachers chapter leaders distancing himself from Weingarten’s position.

“Her proposals would require a climate of collaboration and trust that simply does not exist here,” he wrote. (more…)