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.

By redirecting existing funding streams and selling state bonds, the state could offer poor children health care, prekindergarten, and extended school days, the papers argue. Another paper costs out the up-front investment and found it would  pay off multiple times over because better educated people contribute more in taxes and require fewer social services.

In an interview yesterday, AFT President Randi Weingarten, who touted “community schools” that offer wraparound services in her first speech after taking over the national union in 2008, said deploying existing resources more efficiently could go a long way toward equalizing educational opportunity.

“In places like New York where you have mayoral control, there’s no reason why the mayor cannot manage the services that are directly under the mayor’s control,” she said.

But at a time when the state and many cities are cutting school funding, not augmenting it, convincing taxpayers to pitch in for children’s services could be a tough sell, panelists said at the presentation.

That’s especially true given that increases in school funding haven’t always translated into performance gains in the past, said State Education Commissioner John King.

“We have work to do to create a culture to support some of the research that’s here. We have work to do to convince people that another dollar invested will translate into better opportunities for kids,” he said. “And unfortunately in our sector that is not always the case. Part of that culture change will also be proving to people that we can deliver that.”

Rebell said he doesn’t expect new funding to start to flow overnight. Instead, he said, the research is meant to spark a conversation that could take years to have an impact.

Tomorrow, Rebell is set to give a lecture at Harvard Law School, whose flagship journal will publish his paper arguing that students have a legal right to educational equity. Massachusetts’ education chief will be in the audience, Rebell said, and that’s exactly the goal, at least for now.

“We’re not currently thinking in terms of a lawsuit,” he said. “I do think there is a real issue in terms of a legal right, but we’d rather see if we can get a positive reaction from public officials. … These are new ideas and we have an obligation to air the ideas.”

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.

A new documentary film, produced by the United Federation of Teachers, compiles interviews from dozens of those educators to offer a glimpse into how the crisis was managed from inside the schools and celebrates their roles in shepherding more than one millon students to safety.

“Not a single child was lost. Every single child got out safely,” former UFT President Randi Weingarten said last night at a screening of the film. Other speakers included police commissioner Ray Kelly, who personally thanked teachers – before hurrying off to deal with a current terror threat – and Harold Levy, the school chancellor at the time.

A teacher in Brooklyn 10 years ago, current UFT President Michael Mulgrew recalled last night how his classroom became a makeshift news hub on Sept. 11 because it was the only one equipped for audio and video. He was in the middle of teaching a class when teachers came in to watch the news and everyone saw together the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

“Anyone who was in a school that day remembers that day,” Mulgrew told GothamSchools earlier this week. “There were no directions or anything that day.”

Even Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who is largely credited for his heady management of the crisis, didn’t know what to do, Levy and Weingarten revealed in a previously untold story last night. Giuliani’s first instinct was to allow schools to dismiss children without parental consent. But after fierce protests from a united Levy and Weingarten, Giuliani relented and allowed principals to keep children in the schools.

For the teachers and principals who lived through that day and remain in the school system, revisiting the experience in the classroom will be especially difficult. To help, earlier this month Chancellor Dennis Walcott released lesson plans and curriculum material that can be used to help children with no memory of the attacks learn about its significance during the 10th anniversary year.

But at P.S. 3, an elementary school, most students weren’t even born yet and Siegman said she had no plans to draw specific attention to the event in the coming weeks.

Standing in the converted gym on the bottom floor at P.S. 3, where 10 years earlier hundreds of evacuees had spent hours playing hula hoop and other games while they waited to be picked up by parents, Siegman rejected the notion that her role was in any way heroic. To her, being principal of a school transcends any crisis that might take place under her roof.

“This place was where my focus was,” Siegman said. “These kids were where my focus was.”

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.

At least half a dozen of the City Council’s 51 members also joined the rally, vowing not to approve Bloomberg’s budget. “We pass the budget, not Bloomberg,” Council Member Charles Barron said. Council members Margaret Chin, Melissa Mark-Viverito, Robert Jackson and Julissa Ferreras were among those who cheered him on.

Council members and the mayor must come to an agreement on a budget for the city by July 1.

The three elected officials who often oppose Bloomberg, and who are all possible mayoral hopefuls — Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu — also attended the rally.

Sharpton’s appearance alongside Weingarten was notable in demonstrating how far the activist reverend has come from the days, not so long ago, when he supported the mayor’s education policies. Lately, Sharpton and Weingarten have been speaking together, revising the “odd couple” duo Sharpton once formed with former schools chancellor Joel Klein.

“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%.

The deal was seen as a landmark in 2007 when Mayor Bloomberg announced it with then-United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten by his side. “I am a capitalist, and I am in favor of incentives for individual people,” Bloomberg said then, while Weingarten emphasized that schools could decide to distribute bonuses evenly among educators. She called the program “transcendent.”

In his study, published as a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Fryer writes that researchers were surprised to see that schools that won bonuses overwhelmingly decided to distribute the cash fairly evenly among teachers. More than 80 percent of schools that won bonuses gave the same dollar amount to almost all of the eligible educators.

Researchers were also surprised to find that middle school students actually seemed to be worse off. After three years attending schools involved in the project, middle school students’ math and English test scores declined by a statistically significant amount compared to students attending similar schools that were not part of the project.

The study adds to a research literature on teacher incentive pay that is decidedly more lukewarm than much of the popular conversation about teacher pay. Fryer, himself a strong early advocate of experimenting with financial incentives to improve student achievement, calls the literature “ambivalent.” While programs in developing countries such as India and Kenya have had positive effects, few teacher incentive pay efforts in the United States have been deemed effective.

Almost all schools gave nearly all of their teachers the same sized bonus.

Nevertheless, a person’s position on teacher merit pay has become a litmus test for her reform credentials in many education circles. During his campaign, President Obama used his support for merit pay — traditionally scorned by teachers unions — as evidence that he was willing to challenge traditional Democratic Party thinking. Now, the Obama administration has boosted support for the Teacher Incentive Fund, a program that funds local experiments in incentive pay.

What explains the discrepancy between programs in the U.S. and elsewhere? Fryer rejects several explanations. He argues that the $3,000 bonus (just 4 percent of the average annual teacher salary in the program) was not too small to make a difference, citing examples of effective programs in India and Kenya that gave out bonuses that were an even smaller proportion of teachers’ salaries. He also rejects the possibility that schools’ decisions to use group, rather than individual, incentives was the problem, citing a 2002 study of a program in Israel that used group incentives.

Instead, he says the challenge is that American plans aren’t clear about what teachers can do to receive the reward. In New York City, the bonuses didn’t come simply if students’ test scores rose; the test scores had to rise in comparison to a group of similar schools. So did other measures considered by the city report card, including the surveys that ask students, teachers, and parents for subjective opinions about schools.

Fryer argues that the complexity made it “difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to know how much effort they should exert or how that effort influences student achievement.”

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.

To:    Members of the Media

From: Randi Weingarten, AFT President

Date:  September 8, 2010

Re:     Response to “Waiting for Superman”

Is America ready to settle for a good education-for the few? That’s the unfortunate takeaway from a soon-to-be released documentary film, “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” The film, by Davis Guggenheim, shows how tragically far we are from the great American ideal of providing all children with the excellent education they need and deserve. Yet, despite Guggenheim’s unquestionably good intentions, “Waiting for ‘Superman’” is inaccurate, inconsistent and incomplete-and misses what could have been a unique opportunity to portray the full and accurate story of our public schools.
“Waiting for ‘Superman’” has been screened by private audiences throughout the country and will be released for the general public on Sept. 24. In the event that you write about the film, I wanted to share my thoughts directly with you about it.

One can’t help but be moved by the stories of the five children and their families Guggenheim follows as they encounter a lottery system for admission to the schools upon which they are pinning their hopes for a good education. Their stories, in a very real and emotional way, drive home the point that the opportunity for a great public education should come not by chance, but by right.

But the filmmaker’s storytelling falters in other key areas. The film casts several outliers in starring roles-for example, “bad” teachers and teachers unions as the villains, and charter schools as heroes ready to save the day. The problem is that these caricatures are more fictional than factual.

There are more than 3 million teachers working in our 130,000 public schools. Are there bad teachers? Of course there are, just as there are bad accountants, and lawyers, and actors. I wish there were none. There also are countless good, great and exceptional teachers working in our public schools every day in neighborhoods across the country-although for this film, they apparently ended up on the cutting room floor. It is shameful to suggest, as the film does, that the deplorable behavior of one or two teachers (including an example more than two decades old) is representative of all public school teachers.

Guggenheim has found ways to make facts and data interesting, even entertaining. But, when certain facts don’t advance his story line, he makes them disappear. The treatment of charter schools is one of the most glaring inconsistencies in “Waiting for ‘Superman.’” Guggenheim makes only glancing reference to the poor achievement of most charter schools, despite the abundance of independent research showing that most charter schools perform worse than or only about as well as comparable regular public schools. Nevertheless, he illogically holds them up as the ticket to a good education for disadvantaged students.

I wish all schools had the wealth of resources enjoyed by the charter schools featured in the film, which are part of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ). The charter schools in the HCZ have what we should be fighting to have in every public school-services that help eradicate the barriers to academic success, and funding to ensure that students and teachers have the tools they need to succeed. HCZ schools receive two-thirds of their funding from private sources and one-third from the government. This private money funds staff and curriculum, as well as extensive medical, dental and tutorial services. We know kids’ needs are met when these wraparound services are combined with high-quality instructional programs. In the end, funding these programs will make a fundamental difference for all children.

“Waiting for ‘Superman’” misses two crucial points. First, we have to be committed to supporting a public school system that provides all our children with access to a great education. And second, we must focus our efforts on the most promising and proven approaches-those great neighborhood public schools that work. I’ve seen such success stories across the country in schools that reduce barriers to academic success, as is done in the HCZ schools; schools that offer great curriculum, extra help for students who start or fall behind, and supports for teachers. Where the system has failed is to not take these proven models and scale them up. The solutions aren’t the stuff of action flicks, but they work.

Films like “Waiting for ‘Superman’” are gripping for a reason: They connect us to real life struggles. They may even call much-needed attention to the challenges confronting many students and schools. But the attention will be misplaced, if it centers on off-base solutions and denigrating good teachers rather than on what works to improve our schools.

Imagine a sequel to “Waiting for ‘Superman’” released a few years from now. Would we rather stick to the cinematic model of providing an escape hatch-sometimes superior, most often inferior-to a handful of students? Or would we offer a model in which we had summoned the will to do the hard but effective and far-reaching work required to make meaningful changes to entire school systems, providing all children with the best possible choice-a highly effective neighborhood school?

The most effective solutions didn’t make it into the film. In other words, Guggenheim ignored what works: developing and supporting great teachers; implementing valid and comprehensive evaluation systems that inform teaching and learning; creating great curriculum and the conditions that promote learning for all kids; and insisting on shared responsibility and mutual accountability that hold everyone, not just teachers, responsible for ensuring that all our children receive a great education.

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!”)

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.”

Yet, most UFT members will tell you the election is not much of a competition.

Since the union’s creation on March 16, 1960, one caucus, the Unity caucus, has dominated union politics. What tends to interest union observers (and the candidates themselves) is not whether the Unity candidate — current UFT president Michael Mulgrew — will win, but by how much. Bloomberg staffers used to laugh when they talked to former UFT president Randi Weingarten about her own elections, which she saw as close calls even if she could expect at least 80 percent of the vote.

Like Weingarten, Mulgrew was hand-picked for the job and voted in by the union’s Unity-dominated governing board. Now, for the first time, the entire UFT membership has the chance to decide whether Mulgrew stays in power for the next three years.

Following this post, I’ll put up a rough guide to UFT elections. Below is a video the union produced about its origin story and put on YouTube in November of last year. There’s some great footage of the November 1960 strike — the union’s first strike — when about 5,000 teachers didn’t come to work and more than 100 schools closed.

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. By January 2008, SUNY sent the charters to the Board of Regents, which approved charters for Harlem Success II, III, and IV in May 2008.

GHOST-WRITING IN KLEIN’S NAME: In August 2007, still marshaling support for the expansion plan, Moskowitz asked Klein to write a “letter of commitment” on her application’s behalf. “To save time,” she wrote to him, “I drafted a quick letter.” There’s nothing unusual about ghost-writing a recommendation letter, but it’s funny to see Moskowitz impersonate Klein.

JOEL KLEIN’S BIRTHDAY IS OCTOBER 25. Put it on your calendars.

SHE CONSULTED ON THE MAYORAL CONTROL CAMPAIGN. And it was war! But Moskowitz was humble about what she had to offer. “Though I have grit and courage,” she wrote to Klein on Jan. 23, 2008, “am not always as good at chess moves when up against the uft.”

THE “HOLY GRAIL”: “BOTTOM UP” SUPPORT: By Feb. 4, 2008, after meetings with “chris” (presumably Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf), Moskowitz has gotten excited about the campaign to renew the mayor’s control over the public schools. Agreeing with an observation by “chris” that their “holy grail” is “bottom up” support (presumably this refers to grassroots support from non-white parents), she sounds an optimistic note. “[W]e will have armies,” she says.

THE COST OF SPACE-SHARING: On March 21, 2008, Moskowitz tells Klein that she was forced to re-wire her Harlem school building at a cost of $150,000.

THE REV. MAKES HIS FIRST APPEARANCE: Moskowitz fills Klein on her latest activities on March 25, 2008. ”As you know, i met with Sharpton,” she writes. “Had a great meeting.”

THEY PLAY FOR THE SAME TEAM. “[W]eird as it may seem,” Klein wrote to Moskowitz on April 12, 2008, “I see us on the same team.” In the same chain, Moskowitz wrote about her small team of aides as if they were bodyguards. “i trust w my life,” she said.

BILL CLINTON MULLS TAKING ON THE UNION: April 16, 2009, was my birthday and a hectic e-mailing day for the odd couple. First, Klein offers his frank thoughts on his new buddy Al Sharpton, after Moskowitz asks whether she should invite Sharpton to visit her school. He’s good on charters, but not on mayoral control, Klein says. But he is “working” on Sharpton. The same day, Klein lets Moskowitz know that Bill Clinton called him to say he’s upset about the teachers union attack on charter schools — “keep confi,” Klein instructs. Clinton apparently “wants to do an op ed.” Pretty sure this never materialized, though Moskowitz offered some talking points.

PENN RESEARCHERS MIGHT BE STUDYING HSA: The e-mails oddly get a little out of order here and we fly back to 2008 for a while. On May 16, 2008, Moskowitz indicates that she’s getting researchers at the University to Pennsylvania to study her school. An academic study is something her funder Greenblatt really wants, apparently — and which, as far as I know, no New York City charter school has ever had done.

SPARRING OVER THE SIZE OF HER FOOTPRINT: In June 2008, Moskowitz and John White, who took over for Harries in moderating the messy space battles, sparred over how much city school space she should have. Moskowitz then complained to Klein. “Really could use your intervention,” she said, forwarding her exchange with White.

OUR FRIEND ELI: Juan Gonzalez has chronicled how Klein helped Moskowitz get $1 million from the Broad Foundation. You can read the details in emails from October 3, 2008; October 8, 2008, and November 11, 2008. The grant was made public in April 2009.

WHAT RANDI SAID: In an Oct. 8, 2008, e-mail, Moskowitz claims that former city teachers union president Randi Weingarten, and her personal enemy, suggested that the duo write a thin contract together. Presumably that would mean that Harlem Success schools would become unionized, and the resulting work contract would have very few restrictions. Moskowitz said she would but only if Weingarten also agreed to a thin contract at half of all city schools. The union’s first thin contract, with the Green Dot charter school in the Bronx, landed in June 2009.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, JOEL: November 19 is Klein’s anniversary with his wife Nicole Seligman, and in 2008 he spent part of it speaking at a Harlem Success event. “[W]e will have a new generation of warriors,” Moskowitz said, thanking him.

PRINCIPAL MOSKOWITZ: Feb. 12, 2009, Moskowitz fills Klein in on how she had to lay off a principal — and become principal herself.

KLEIN AND GATES: STILL FRENEMIES: On Feb. 15, 2009, Klein admits that he doesn’t “get” the strategy of the Gates Foundation, which has been avoiding New York City K-12 school investments lately.

PONTIFICATING ON PATERSON AND OTHER POLITICIANS: In March 2009, Moskowitz breaks down the mayoral control fight by the politicians taking part in it. “Malcolm [Smith] is yours if floyd flake cmes through (though of course don’t trust Malcolm),” she writes. “Shelluy [Silver] wants patronage and keeping randi happy.” And presciently, she adds about the year-old governor, “Paterson (we are sending him 10,000 postcards – friendly but reminding him that he said he was oufriend) is just about re-election. He will go with the path of least resistance.”

PUTTING THE POLITICS ASIDE: After the Harlem Success lottery on April 23, 2009, Klein wrote to Moskowitz, ”Meant what I said: put the politics aside and enjoy what you’ve done for people. Truly extraordinary and I don’t say that casually. Bravo!”

Moskowitz responded in minutes with a thank-you note of her own: “You were terrific too tonight. You sounded like an evangelist. Donors loved. And parents did.”

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.

In the message, Mulgrew wrote that the UFT supports “fair and objective standards” for teacher evaluations. But he argued that the New York State tests are not a reliable measure on which to base evaluations, and that in any case test scores should be only one part of how teachers are judged.

During the year that Weingarten led both the New York City and the national union, she also occasionally exempted New York City from her reform proposals.

Last year, she told Elizabeth that she pushed the New York State legislature to ban linking test scores to tenure decisions because she couldn’t trust the city’s schools chancellor, Joel Klein.

“No one trusted Joel Klein to use that tool judiciously,” she said.

But Weingarten would also extend olive branches to the city, especially via Mayor Bloomberg, whom she always distinguished as more cooperative and understanding than Klein. Mulgrew’s assault so far is equal-opportunity.

During an interview on NY1′s political news show Inside City Hall last night, Mulgrew said the UFT and city couldn’t even manage a “respectful working relationship” right now.

“We’re constantly being accused, we’re constantly being scape goated, and these are things that are inappropriate,” he said.

Under a proposed “mutual consent” provision, principals would have more power to pick and choose teachers. Teachers who failed to find new assignments would have three options. They could remain on the payroll for a year, accepting at least two spot assignments as substitutes or tutors or in some other support role. If they can’t find a permanent job after a year, they would be fired. Teachers could also choose to take a $25,000 buyout or, if they have at least 20 years’ service to the city school system, retire with full benefits.

If Weingarten’s willing to make these job security concessions for excessed teachers in D.C., maybe she’d also nudge the UFT to give ground on ATR’s in New York.

Maybe he’ll finally come through in his new role: press secretary to new teachers union president Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew made the announcement today, marking his first public decision since taking over for Randi Weingarten. (Though he did outline his priorities this summer — save the schools budget! get a contract!) The appointment undoes a decision Weingarten made several months ago, to appoint longtime deputy press secretary Ron Davis to the top press spot.

But Mulgrew is not straying too far from his predecessor; Riley also served as Weingarten’s press secretary when she first became UFT president 10 years ago. Appointing him is a smart choice if Mulgrew wants to build his own version of Weingarten’s tight relationships with reporters — and get his name in the papers as much as she did. Riley returns phone calls in seconds and loves to have friendly chat with reporters. Other jobs he’s held include working for Mayor Ed Koch’s press shop, running press at the old Board of Education, and (until today) serving as press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

Davis, a former newspaperman who joined the union’s press shop many years ago and remained deputy press secretary for many years as person after person was appointed press secretary over his head, will stay inside the union, Mulgrew told me on the phone today. “Ron is a valued employee. He’s still here. I need to talk to him before I say exactly what it is, but it’s something very good,” Mulgrew said. “We’re fine.”

Next question: What other staffing changes has Mulgrew made without fanfare? In several conversations today, sources pointed out the delicate position he’s in: He has to prove himself as a boss, so he’s got to build a staff that’s his. But he’s also a union boss, and so kicking out people who aren’t his is tricky. We’ll be watching.

Rupert Murdoch and Arne Duncan. (Images via Creative Commons)

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”

New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.

“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.

The news series the Post ran extolling mayoral control

Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Duncan’s quote does illustrate a strange alliance that fought hard for mayoral control’s renewal, Murdoch and the secretary of education among them. In addition to running a series of news articles highlighting victories of mayoral control in the past seven years, Murdoch’s Post also published an aggressive slew of editorials mocking anyone who stood in the path of a full-throttled renewal of the mayor’s power. (Remember Randi Weingarten, puppet master?)

Murdoch also played a behind-the-scenes role in his position as co-chairman of the Partnership for New York City, a lobbying group that represents business interests. (The other co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs.) The group kept a low profile during the mayoral control fight, but worked behind the scenes to broker a compromise between groups fighting over the law, including the city teachers union and the Bloomberg administration.

Duncan fought for mayoral control, too, and he often did so in the pages of the Post. It was in that newspaper that he first entered the local fight, offering an exclusive interview previewing remarks he made the next day at the Sheraton, where the National Action Network was holding a conference on education. Duncan then sat down with the paper’s editorial board, where he criticized a cut to charter schools by the state. Later, he penned a letter to a civic group that got into the nitty-gritty policy question of whether or not to give school board members fixed terms. (Like the Bloomberg administration and the Post, Duncan opposed them.)

While the efforts of the newspaper and the secretary probably did play a role in renewing mayoral control, the accuracy of the stories that the Post ran is arguable. The paper called the city’s racial achievement gap “the incredible shrinking race gap,” yet a recent New York Times story, a story I wrote in the New York Sun, and analysis by academic researchers suggests much more modest language is in order. The paper also wrote story after story about turnaround schools — without once profiling the schools that have remained failures despite mayoral control.

Not to be a Grinch, or even to argue that “balance” could have solved the problem. But is a little editorial independence so much to ask for?

Liz Benjamin of the Daily News is reporting that senators will interrupt their summer recess to vote next Thursday on the school governance bill passed last month by the Assembly. The early-August vote adheres to the timeline set out by Mayor Bloomberg and the UFT when the mayoral control deal was brokered late last week, after the Senate had already decamped for the summer.

But the school governance saga won’t end once the Senate passes the Assembly bill, which adds some checks to mayoral control. Benjamin reports:

The Senate is moving ahead with its votes on chapter amendments despite the fact that the Assembly, which passed its mayoral control reauthorization bill in June, has not yet agreed to do the same.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this morning reiterated that the only commitment he has given is to discuss the amendments with his majority members in when they return to Albany.

Outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who played a major role in the Senate negotiations, told GothamSchools last week that conversations with Silver led her to believe that the Assembly will pass the chapter amendments. “You know the Assembly will in good faith look at the chapter amendments,” she said.

Race to the Top is a special $5 billion federal stimulus fund meant to spur innovation in public schools. It is available only to states and districts that meet certain requirements. One of those requirements is that they allow teacher evaluations to be tied to student performance.

New York State’s tenure law, passed last year under pressure from teachers unions, says student test score data can’t be the sole determinant of whether a teacher gets tenure. But three top officials — teachers union president Randi Weingarten, Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and incoming State Education Commissioner David Steiner — are arguing that the law will not disqualify New York from the fund.

“It is our firm belief that the language of Race to the Top funding does not preclude New York,” Steiner said today. “New York has a law on the books that relates strictly to tenure.”

Weingarten noted that a second section of the same law explicitly requires teachers’ annual evaluations, which take place even after they receive tenure, to be based in part on how they use test score data to improve their instruction.

“The way in which teachers use data in their classroom instruction is specifically included in the definition of what confers tenure onto a classroom teacher,” she said. ”How teachers use data is one of the criteria for getting tenure. Just not the data in and of itself.”

A spokesman for the federal Department of Education would not say whether or not the draft regulations would disqualify New York.

“Just in the same way that we’re not going to pre-judge who’s going to win, we’re not going to pre-judge who isn’t,” Justin Hamilton, a USDOE spokesman said.

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has continued to emphasize the teacher evaluation requirement as a non-negotiable element of the Race to the Top requirements, saying that states that need time to change their laws can apply for a second round of funding. The make-or-break stipulation was personally approved by President Obama himself, Education Week reported.

The responsibility of determining whether a state meets the eligibility requirements will fall to its attorney general, who must sign off on the application, according to the draft regulations. 

Here’s the relevant section of the state education law, found in Section 3012-B: 

The regents shall, prescribe rules for the manner in which the process for evaluation of a candidate for tenure is to be conducted. Such rules shall include a combination of the following minimum standards: 

a. evaluation of the extent to which the teacher successfully utilized analysis of available student performance data and other relevant information when providing instruction but the teacher shall not be granted or denied tenure based on student performance data; 

The second half of clause a, beginning with the word “but,” is set to expire on July 1, 2010, two years after going into effect.

City principals rated more teachers unsatisfactory this year than they have since at least 2005, suggesting that the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to escort more struggling teachers out of the system may be bearing some fruit.

Principals gave the scarlet-letter rating to 1,554 teachers this year, up from 981 in the 2005-2006 school year, data provided by the city Department of Education show. Both the number and percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory rose during that period, and the rise occurred for both tenured and non-tenured teachers, city figures show.

Even with the rise, the percentage of teachers rated unsatisfactory remains low. About 2% of teachers, both tenured and without tenure, received what teachers call “U” ratings this year.

Ann Forte, a schools spokeswoman, sent us the figures this afternoon.

The rise follows a concerted effort by school officials to make it easier for principals to terminate poorly performing teachers, including a new group of lawyers assigned to targeting struggling teachers, called the Teacher Performance Unit. Rating a teacher unsatisfactory is often the first step toward removing him from the school system.

A recent bout of research argues that poor teaching is partly to blame for poorly performing schools, and a report by The New Teacher Project singled out poor teacher evaluation systems as part of the problem. The report specifically criticized evaluation systems that offer principals binary choices, either satisfactory or unsatisfactory, rather than encouraging more nuanced feedback. U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan endorsed the report, and his staff has urged school districts to improve their teacher evaluation systems.

New York City teachers receive either an “S” or “U” rating from their principals once a year.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the city teachers union and of the national American Federation of Teachers, has criticized the city’s efforts to target struggling teachers, decrying the Teacher Performance Unit as a “gotcha squad.”

Below is a chart showing the raw numbers of teachers receiving “U” ratings, and we’ve uploaded data from last year here.

In the end, it wasn’t that the mayor’s office couldn’t strike a deal with the largest group criticizing mayoral control, the Campaign for Better Schools, or with the city teachers’ union, which had pushed for checks early on. All three parties signed onto a deal together earlier this week, writing down a Memorandum of Understanding that would have put in place parent-training centers that senators said they wanted to add.

But Senate Democrats ultimately did not go along with the deal.

“It’s not like we couldn’t agree on terms. It’s like they couldn’t agree on terms amongst themselves,” an exhausted and depressed city official, speaking on background, said in an interview today.

“They clearly were saying one thing to us yesterday and doing something different,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “That was very frustrating.”

Union, campaign, and city officials began their discussions Tuesday after senators walked away from a deal that would have brought to a vote a version of the bill passed by the Assembly preserving mayoral control with some tweaks. Sens. John Sampson and Malcolm Smith, two of the Senate Democrats’ four leaders, and Sen. Daniel Squadron, a Bloomberg ally who had to split early due to a prior engagement, his wedding, made the deal, but once Squadron left for his honeymoon, the Democrats declined to bring the bill to a vote.

At a loss, City Hall officials decided to meet with Easton and the main lobbyist for the state teachers’ union, Stephen Allinger. Easton had been pushing for a separate bill that would have taken more power away from the mayor. But he recently had pivoted to pushing for a compromise that would have guaranteed funding for parent training centers across the boroughs.

In the Senate’s library, a group including Micah Lasher, the Department of Education’s lobbyist; Allinger, and Easton crafted a deal that would have provided the parent training centers, as Easton and the union wanted — but would have done so through a written Memorandum of Understanding, rather than an amendment to the law, in keeping with Bloomberg’s desire, and with the reality that the Assembly, which would have to agree to amendments to make them law, has already adjourned for summer.

The memo’s language was nearly identical to that in an amendment introduced by Smith, the city official said. The only major change was that instead of having New York University run the initiative, that responsibility would go to CUNY, along with the $1.6 million a year to fund it. The city thought that arrangement would prevent abuse, and legislators liked that the funding wouldn’t stay in Manhattan, the source said.

Democratic senators told the group that they would go along with the agreement, Weingarten said. But when Sampson emerged from session last night at 10:30, he infuriated city officials by declaring, “This is not one-tenth of what I need,” according to the city source.

Democratic Sen. Shirley Huntley told Beth Fertig at WNYC why she refused to cooperate:

Queens Democrat Shirley Huntley told WNYC they wanted to send a message.

… Senator Huntley said she didn’t appreciate how the teachers union and other parties got involved.  “When I’m pressured I do nothing, ” she said, calling the phone calls “obnoxious” and adding, “There was no need for the pressure.”

That same offer is no longer on the table after last night’s blow-up, the city official said today, adding that the situation in Albany is the most chaotic he has ever seen.

Weingarten said the lack of an agreement made for a “very dangerous” period in time:

“Are there going to be riots on the street? No, of course not. But you have a situation where you have a bill that’s ready to roll in terms of changes to governance; at the same time you have a governance system that was used last 7 or 8 years ago, and is very outdated or outmoded, doesn’t answer the question of what happens to community boards or CEC’s — so it’s a very chaotic period of time.”

Her recommendation? “We need to take a big time out, and take a big sigh, and start again on Monday,” she said.

But senators have left Albany and do not intend to return until the end of the summer. They will return only if Gov. Paterson calls them back. On his weekly radio show today, Bloomberg said Paterson should use state troopers to retrieve the legislators.

CLARIFICATION: Billy Easton, the director of the Campaign for Better Schools, disputed part of this story today. “I did not and never have lobbied against the Better Schools Act,” he said. We have deleted the sentence containing that information.

I hope you’re as outraged as I am when our critics say that unions are part of the problem, not the solution; that we are only in it for ourselves; that we represent adults against kids; and that we are a selfish special interest set against the public interest.

We won’t let them take away our jobs. We won’t let them cut our pay. We won’t let them plunder our pensions. And I will be damned if I let them define who we are.

Because nobody-nobody-goes into teaching to feather his or her own nest. And this union, which proudly works on its members’ behalf, has always been about something bigger. That is why we fight-24/7/365-for the social and economic conditions that will help our students do better in school.

Apparently pins being handed out to members say “with us, not to us.” The conference, called QuEST, focuses on best practices for teaching and learning. Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and her term as president of the New York City union expires at the end of the month.

Her full prepared remarks are below:

Weingarten said that her resignation from the United Federation of Teachers presidency will be effective on July 31st.

For roughly one year, Weingarten has been president of both the United Federation of Teachers local union and the national American Federation of Teachers — “even though each job is more than full-time, deserving 24/7 attention,” she said. Citing the need for each union to have its own full-time president, she said she was stepping aside “to ensure a smooth transition for the UFT.”

Weingarten has said that she favors handing the reins of the New York City union to Michael Mulgrew, who now serves as chief operating officer. The union’s executive board will decide who to name interim president in the next month.

In a speech that celebrated the highlights of her presidency, Weingarten emphasized her role as a reformer. “We have not been defensive when so-called reformers wanted to see our profession change,” she said. “Rather than resist change, we have led it.”

Taking the liberties inherent in any grand exit — and one open to reporters — Weingarten took a final swipe at The New York Post, saying the paper’s reporters needed reading comprehension help in order to understand the UFT’s contract with the Green Dot charter school operator. (She said the contract absolutely protects members’ due process rights.)

Toward the end of her speech, as she thanked the delegates for their “fierce debates” and “fidelity to democratic principles,” the audience rose for a standing ovation and cheered for their now-former president.

A few minutes later, she was in tears as she assured her audience that New York “will always be my home.”

Randi Weingarten testifying at a mayoral control hearing in February. (GothamSchools)

Ending what might have been one of the city’s worst-kept secrets, Randi Weingarten this afternoon is announcing her plan to resign as president of the city teachers union at the end of next month.

Weingarten is making the announcement to members of the United Federation of Teachers right now at the union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters. Before today, she had not confirmed her intention to step down, even after news of her impending departure leaked to the media. Beginning in August, Weingarten will be devoting herself full-time to the presidency of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, which she assumed last summer.

A union press release (posted in full after the jump) contains praise for Weingarten’s 23-year tenure at the UFT from a host of prominent figures, including Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

One name that doesn’t make an appearance in the press release is that of Michael Mulgrew, the union vice president who is widely assumed to be next in line for the presidency. Anna just posted a profile of Mulgrew in which she calls him “the new power broker you probably don’t know.” From the profile:

Mulgrew also couldn’t be more different from Weingarten. Tall and apple-cheeked, he has the physical presence of Mr. Clean (both shave their heads) and a quiet charm. “Women seem to like him,” noted one union member.

Still, he’s often bullish and he gained renown in the union for being one of a small number of people to stand up to Weingarten.

Read the complete profile. Below the jump, read the union’s press release announcing Weingarten’s resignation:

WEINGARTEN TO ANNOUNCE RESIGNATION AS UFT PRESIDENT

UNION’S EXECUTIVE BOARD TO ELECT INTERIM PRESIDENT

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten is announcing today that she will step down from her role as the union’s president effective July 31st, in order to devote full time to her role as the president of the 1.4 million-member American Federation of Teachers. Weingarten will make the announcement in a speech at the union’s June Delegate Assembly meeting this afternoon. She has been serving as president of both the UFT and the AFT since July of 2008.

Randi, who was elected UFT President in 1998, came to the union full-time in February, 1986 from the law firm of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan LLP. During her time as UFT president, Randi has made unprecedented progress in promoting teacher professionalism, improving teacher quality and attracting and retaining teachers through a series of landmark accomplishments. She also navigated the union into a position of growth and strength when the labor movement has been struggling.

“Randi Weingarten has been a tireless advocate for public education in New York,” said Governor David A. Paterson. “She is an innovative leader, a no-nonsense reformer, a tough negotiator and someone I am proud to call my friend. During her tenure at the United Federation of Teachers, she has led the effort to forge strong ties between parents, communities and teachers, and she has broken new ground on major reforms. While this is certainly a loss for the UFT, Randi will continue to fight for excellence in education on behalf of New Yorkers and educators across the nation as she now focuses on her role as head of the American Federation of Teachers. I applaud Randi’s advocacy and tenacity, and I look forward to continuing to work with her to help give all of our children a better education.”

“Randi has been a big part of many of the reforms we have implemented over the past seven years – and a big part of the incredible turnaround our schools have made,” said Mayor Bloomberg. “She’s a tireless champion of her members, and her leadership has benefited not only our schools, but our entire City. I look forward to continuing to work with her as she partners with the Obama Administration to replicate our reforms all over the country.”

“Randi is a progressive leader and a dynamic figure and a symbol for what is possible,” said Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch. She will be missed but she will be remembered in New York for the leadership that she provided during a critical reform era.”

“When it comes to labor leaders, Randi is the gold standard,” said Denis Hughes, President of the 2.5 million member New York State AFL-CIO. “She has an innate ability to lead. She knows how to bring people together, forge consensus and most importantly, get things done. Randi’s contributions to her members, the labor movement and all working men and women throughout this city and state go beyond words. We’re sad to see her go, but so very proud of the indelible mark of leadership, caring and commitment that she leaves behind.”

City Comptroller William Thompson said, “During her tenure over the last decade, Randi Weingarten has exemplified the true meaning of ‘fighter.’ She has fought for smaller class sizes, for higher standards, and for safer schools. Randi has been a fierce – and downright tireless – advocate for our city’s educators, for parents, and for students. She has stood up to City Hall and the Department of Education when classrooms have swollen with too many students, when day care workers have not been paid properly, and when spending has spun out of control. Through it all, she has always viewed her role as a partner with a vested interest in improving our schools. We need more leaders like Randi Weingarten, who focus their energies on yielding better transparency and greater accountability in our system. I wish Randi the best of luck; our loss is the nation’s gain.”

Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum said, “Randi Weingarten is a great, progressive labor leader, very much like my husband Victor. Over the course of her tenure, she has tirelessly stood up for the interests of teachers and has been a leader on education reform. I am grateful for her tremendous commitment to making our school system the best it can be and giving teachers a stronger voice in the decision-making process. I know her work will have a lasting impact on New York City public schools and I look forward to her continued strong and visionary leadership at her new post.”

“For the last decade, Randi Weingarten has been the leading voice for 80,000 New York City public school teachers,” said Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn. “While we her departure from the United Teachers Federation is a huge loss for New Yorkers, the 1.4 million members of the American Teachers Federation will benefit from the vast experience and numerous achievements she has made here at home. Randi has been a true friend to this City Council and a true friend to me. We wish her the best of luck as she continues on in the fight to keep our country’s teachers strong and our schools even stronger.”

“Randi is without question one of the greatest human beings I have had the privilege to know,” said George Anthony, a UFT representative at Susan E. Wagner High School. “A lot of what she does is subtle and behind the scenes, and I’m not sure people fully appreciate that. Earlier this school year, my attempts to get permission for a class of students to speak at the United Nations were stuck in bureaucratic limbo. We had literally tried for months, and I was just about to give up when I sent her an email asking if there was any way the UFT could help. She got right back to me, made a few calls, and the very next day, the trip was scheduled. My students will never forget that trip, and I have Randi to thank. I have met some extraordinary individuals in my life, but Randi’s fearlessness and relentlessness on behalf of teachers and students only makes you try that much harder in your own job. She has devoted her life to this work, and I admire her for that.”

“Ms. Weingarten was always focused on making us better individuals,” said Chris Cassagnol, a former student of Randi’s at Clara Barton High School and now a SAPIS Counselor (Substance Abuse Prevention & Intervention Specialist) at Brooklyn’s PS 109. “She was very generous with her time and really took an interest in our lives and our dreams. She pushed us to try harder and think bigger, and I owe her a lot for that.”

“During the winter months of 1991-1992, a team of Clara Barton High School students from my AP Political Science class and I spent long evenings at the Grand Army Plaza library and in a Congressman’s local office in Brooklyn, perusing Supreme Court cases, preparing for the City and later State-wide Championship Rounds of the Fifth Annual Bicentennial Competitions on the Constitution and Bill of Rights,” said Tamika Edwards, former student and now Director of Legal Education of Legal Outreach. “Ms. Weingarten was a phenomenal teacher and fine example of a legal advocate. Not only was she the first female attorney I had ever met, her passion for the law and young people coupled with her teaching prowess inspired me to pursue a career in law and serve New York City youth as well.”

Randi is the fourth president of the UFT in its storied 49-year history, following Charles Cogan (1960 to 1964), Albert Shanker (1964 to 1986) and Sandra Feldman (1986 to 1998).

Weingarten holds degrees from Cornell University and the Cardozo School of Law. As a teacher of history at Clara Barton High School in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, from 1991 to 1997, she helped her students win several state and national awards. Randi is a vice president of the national AFL-CIO, and served ten years as head of the city’s Municipal Labor Committee, an umbrella organization for some 365,000 city employees in 100 city employee unions. She also served as a vice-president of the New York City Central Labor Council of the AFL-CIO, chairperson of the Health Insurance Plan (HIP) of Greater New York and as a board member of the N.Y.C. Independent Budget Office.

Today’s announcement means the union’s executive board will meet in the coming weeks to nominate and vote on candidates to fill the vacancy. The person elected by the executive board will serve out the remainder of Weingarten’s term, which ends in the spring of 2010, at which time the union is scheduled to hold an election for its entire slate of officers.

The United Federation of Teachers represents more than 200,000 active and retired members, including teachers, classroom paraprofessionals, school secretaries, attendance teachers, guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers, education evaluators, nurses, laboratory technicians, adult education teachers and home child-care providers. The UFT also runs more than 300 teacher centers around the five boroughs as well as two charter schools.

The union’s delegate assembly meets monthly during the school year, and is made up of more than 2,500 elected chapter leaders, executive board members and other representatives.

 

Mulgrew trying to save a teacher stipend used to purchase school supplies in May of this year. Full NY1 report here.

The man who is on the brink of becoming one of the city’s top power brokers nearly got lost in a crowd earlier this week.

Michael Mulgrew is the designated successor to teachers union president Randi Weingarten, who will announce her departure from the union today. If union leaders select him to fill her shoes, as is expected, he will become the president of America’s largest union local and one of the most influential labor unions in the state.

On Monday afternoon, at a press conference where Mayor Bloomberg announced the city’s rising graduation rates with a pack of advocates, the mayor ticked off every one of their names in gratitude but one.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein leaned in to Bloomberg’s ear. “And Michael Mulgrew,” he reminded the mayor.

The tall, bald man with a bouncer’s build hardly registered the oversight.

Bloomberg can be forgiven for not remembering Mulgrew’s name. Unlike other top brass at the teachers union, Mulgrew is a relative newcomer. Just four years ago he was teaching English and filmmaking to high school students in Staten Island. He was not seen as a possible successor to Weingarten inside the union until she abruptly vaulted him into the limelight last year, making him one of three candidates in a dramatic internal run-off race.

Even now that he’s on good terms with deputy mayors and had his photograph pasted across the pages of the union’s most recent newspapers, Mulgrew remains obscure. He would be the first non-Jewish president of a union that over the years has been stereotyped as a Jewish haven. A trained electrician and carpenter who ran a contracting business on the side for several years, he would also be the first vocational teacher to become interim president of the UFT. (Vocational teachers represent just a small fraction of the union.)

All this makes him a far cry from the stature of the woman whose shoes he’ll fill.

“Anybody who thinks that they can just walk into New York City and become the next Randi Weingarten is smoking something,” Weingarten warned last year, amid speculation about her successor.

Mulgrew, 44, also couldn’t be more different from Weingarten. Tall and apple-cheeked, he has the physical presence of Mr. Clean (both shave their heads) and a quiet charm. “Women seem to like him,” noted one union member.

Still, he’s often bullish and he gained renown in the union for being one of a small number of people to stand up to Weingarten. At a City Council hearing on mayoral control in early June, Mulgrew barked his testimony. Weingarten’s critics, who sometimes criticize her for favoring the middle ground, like Mulgrew’s puggishness.

“He comes across as a non-waffler,” said union activist Norm Scott. “For people who despise Weingarten, there’s already a sense of, ‘Oh, maybe Mulgrew will be better.’ But while this change in style will work for him for a while, it is a change in style not substance.”

Mulgrew grew up on Staten Island and still lives there, a fact he can hold responsible for his heavy New York accent. He graduated from St. Peters High School, an all-boys Catholic school, and then went to the College of Staten Island, the borough’s CUNY school.

In 1990, while doing construction work as a member of the carpenter’s union, he began working as a substitute teacher at the William E. Grady Career and Technical Education High School in Brooklyn. After several years, he began working full time, teaching English and then an audio-visual class for at-risk students. He taught how to use recording equipment and computers to write, produce, and edit films.

Colleagues from his teaching years describe Mulgrew as a natural leader who has found himself  reluctantly thrust into power by virtue of being in the right place at the right time.

Tom Dorso, a social studies teacher and the current UFT chapter leader at Grady High School, shared a classroom with Mulgrew. They became such close friends that Mulgrew built Dorso’s kitchen cabinets for him.

According to Dorso, Mulgrew was hesitant to run for chapter leader, a position he won in 1999. “He went in kicking and screaming,” Dorso said. “He took the chapter leader’s position because no one was really running. We had a principal at the time who was trying to get away with some stuff and Michael said, ‘I just won’t allow it.’”

From then on, Mulgrew was “relentless,” Dorso said. He took a “divide and conquer” approach to the school’s new principal and the assistant principals, playing them off each other to his benefit.

“Whenever one of the suits was coming into the building, Michael would always make sure he was well dressed, and would barge into the meeting and introduce himself. He was very proactive,” Dorso said.

“When Mr. Mulgrew ran for chapter leader and won, the staff embraced him,” said Christopher Manos, a shop teacher at Grady High School who took over as chapter leader when Mulgrew became a vice president in 2005. “Everybody knew that he was very smart, he was articulate, and very personable.”

While serving as chapter leader, Mulgrew established himself as one of the more vocal members of the delegate assembly. “He made himself noticed,” Dorso said, and he soon attracted the attention of Frank Carucci, then vice president for vocational and technical high schools. Mulgrew began working for Carucci after school, stuffing envelopes, answering phone calls, and running errands. Following the UFT tradition of naming a successor before the members vote, when Carucci decided to retire, he endorsed Mulgrew as interim vice president.

Once again, Mulgrew wasn’t certain he wanted the job, but he ran after others egged him on, and he “won big,” Dorso said.

As vice president, Mulgrew also quickly crashed meetings with men in suits. When Klein seemed uninterested in his passion for “career and technical education” — next-generation vocational schools that emphasize academic rigor — Mulgrew took his case directly to then-Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff. Soon, Mayor Bloomberg was announcing a new initiative to expand career and technical education.

A question Mulgrew and those watching his ascent face is whether he’ll be able to hold his own against Weingarten.

Supporters have characterized Mulgrew as having an independent mind and a forceful personality, but critics suggest that he rose through the ranks by being a loyal foot soldier to the party that supports Weingarten, the UNITY caucus. They say he will not stray from party line.

“He’s demonstrated his total loyalty to her and that’s what you get when you’re loyal,” said Jeff Kaufman, a member of ICE’s steering committee. “He’s going to sit there and give a couple of sound bites and the heavy lifting is still going to be done by Randi.”

Some of Mulgrew’s colleagues from his early days in the union saw him as an obvious choice for the UFT’s top job.

“I was calling him Mr. President about a year ago,” Dorso said. “I teach social studies, I know how politics works, he’s the fair-haired boy even though he shaves his head.”

Mulgrew declined to comment for this story.

“I think he’s a great person. I think he has a lot of guts,” Weingarten said. “He’s a great teacher, came up through the ranks. … He’s willing to break a lot of glass.”