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With the clock ticking down toward probable layoffs, school officials say the fiscal picture hasn’t grown clearer in the last month.

Department of Education officials are still aiming to give principals their preliminary school budgets on June 1, Chancellor Joel Klein told City Council today. “That said, things in Albany are changing each day and our situation remains fluid,” said DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte.

As they decide exactly when to release school budgets, officials are seeking to strike a delicate balance. Principals need enough time to plan how to work large cuts into their budgets. But officials are also hesitant to pull the trigger on announcing exact cuts and layoffs too early, for fear of having to retrace their steps if a state budget follows soon thereafter.

City officials are currently anticipating that, unless Albany passes a less austere budget than the governor’s current proposal, the city schools will lose as many as 6,400 teacher positions — 4,400 of them through layoffs — and schools will face cuts that are much larger than the 4.9 percent reductions they saw this year.

Layoff decisions could begin “within days” of when schools receive their preliminary budgets, the DOE’s Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern said today. Earlier this month, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that if the state passed a more generous budget after teachers are already laid off, the funds might not be used to hire teachers back. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to expand a social promotion ban will likely be the first item on the school board’s agenda when they reconvene. But board members will have to vote on the proposal before the results of the only research on the effects of holding back failing students in the city have been released.

The results of a study that the city commissioned from the research institute the RAND Corporation in 2004 are scheduled to be released this fall, according to Department of Education spokesman Andy Jacob. But that will almost certainly come after the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the proposed expansion of Bloomberg’s new promotional standards to include fourth and sixth graders.

(The Panel for Educational Policy was dissolved after mayoral control expired June 30 but will reconvene now that the Senate has re-authorized the law.)

Less than two percent of third, fifth and seventh graders were held back last year under Mayor Bloomberg's tougher promotion standards. Data provided by the New York City Department of Education.

Preliminary results of the RAND study, which looks at the performance of third and fifth graders affected by the Mayor’s promotion policy over time and will include data from the 2008-2009 school year, were delivered to the Department of Education last year, Jacob said. The study was designed to follow students for five years, Jacob said, and so final results of the study will not be available until the research is completed.

The RAND Corporation did release a working paper in 2006 that surveyed promotion and retention policies around the United States and placed New York City’s practices in context.

Even without research findings on the end of social promotion in New York City, Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein insist that holding back failing schoolchildren benefits them unquestionably. (more…)