GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

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…)

I got my first phone call from Dick Riley very soon after I started covering education at U.S. News & World Report. “Elizabeth, Dick Riley. I’m going to win you a Pulitzer Prize some day,” he said in his gravelly between-you-and-me voice, before adding that he worked for Kaplan, the test prep company.

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. (more…)

State senators have finally set a date for their return to Albany to renew mayoral control.

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.

The fact that New York prohibits the use of student test scores in teacher tenure decisions would seem to axe the state from the race for Race to the Top dollars. But there are growing suggestions that the state could take home a share after all.

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. (more…)

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. (more…)

Bloomberg administration officials are ending a sleepless week in Albany today with no idea whatsoever of how to get mayoral control renewed, along with the unsettling realization that the stalemate could go on for the rest of the summer.

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.” (more…)