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Joanne Weiss

The Obama administration official in charge of an educational innovation fund yesterday issued a warning to a New York audience: Unless the state legislature revises a law now on the books about teacher tenure, the state could lose out on the $4.35 billion fund she controls.

Joanne Weiss said the Obama administration aims to reward states that use student achievement as a “predominant” part of teacher evaluations with the extra stimulus funds — and pass over those that don’t. New York state law currently bans using student data as a factor in tenure decisions.

Test scores aren’t everything, Weiss said. “But it seems illogical and indefensible to assume that those aren’t part of the solution at all,” she said, echoing nearly word-for-word Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s remarks last week to the National Education Association.

The pessimism about New York’s policies is a departure from Duncan’s tone during a visit to New York City in February, when he was cheery about the state’s chances in the competition. Duncan also briefly mentioned New York as one of several states whose firewalls around student and teacher data need to come down in a recent speech, and he indicated that New York’s cap on charter schools may also hurt the state’s chances at a slice of the stimulus pie.

Weiss, who worked at the New Schools Venture Fund before heading to Washington, said the “disadvantage” of the tenure law to New York could be counterbalanced by efforts here that the Obama administration admires. She praised a New York City program that is evaluating individual teachers based on their students’ test scores.  One strength of the program, Weiss said, is that city teachers generally accept the evaluations as an accurate and fair assessment of their performance. (more…)

There’s another round of federal stimulus dollars that local school districts can hope for, but it may be out of reach for New York schools. That’s because the state has a law Secretary of Education Arne Duncan says could jeopardize applications for the funds: a cap on the number of charter schools educators are allowed to create.

Duncan told Congress last week that, in awarding a new pot of stimulus funds meant to encourage innovation, he will give preference to states without charter school caps. He said he would also give preference to states with caps that agree to lift them.

The pot includes $5 billion to be given through a competitive grant process known as the “Race to The Top.” Chancellor Joel Klein has indicated that he wants to apply for Race to the Top funds to expand innovations such as the citywide data system and the bonus program for schools whose students show improvement on test scores. (more…)

The special pot of federal stimulus dollars for schools known as the “Race to the Top” money should go toward extra services outside of education, like health clinics, child care, and immigration advice, teachers union president Randi Weingarten suggests in her latest paid New York Times column (PDF).

The idea is to infuse the federal stimulus effort with Weingarten’s favored “community schools” concept, in which schools function not just to teach children but also as service centers for the wider neighborhood around them. Weingarten calls the idea “a model for the best use of mayoral control.”

She also discloses that she has asked Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to join the United Federation of Teachers in supporting the “broader, bolder mission” of what she is calling Active Communities Enabling Success, or ACES.

From the column:

The network of schools, open evenings and weekends, would be a locus for health and mental health services, either through the co-location of clinics, mobile clinics or partnerships with local providers and hospitals. After-school tutoring and enrichment programs would be closely aligned with the instructional day, but the schools would also include opportunities for exercise, sports, arts and culture, and community service. For families and members of the community, childcare, pre-school, ESL, GED and vocational classes would be available. Finally, referrals could be made for housing issues, employment opportunities, immigration issues and legal problems. …

And for those who say this approach tries to do everything but teach, that is far from the truth. There is no conflict between emphasizing academics and tending to children’s broader needs. For our most disadvantaged kids, our schools can and must do both.

The proposal is consistent with what Weingarten told me the day after the stimulus bill was announced in February. It’s also a part of broader efforts to tie better social services to mayoral control: A representative of one of the city’s oldest social service agencies told me she thought improved social services are the promise of mayoral control.

School principals and reporters will be briefed on the Department of Education’s financial situation tomorrow — and the outlook is likely to include “huge, gigantic cuts,” according to a City Council source. The briefing will come one day before Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to release his 2010 budget proposal.

An April 8 memo from the city’s budget director asked the DOE to cut 1.5 percent from its proposed operating budget through layoffs or attrition. The cuts will come on top of $251 million that the mayor proposed slashing from the DOE when he first released a 2010 budget plan, in January. The DOE has already revised its budget down $1.9 billion in the last year, down over 10 percent. This new 1.5 percent cut would chop off about $260 million more.

The city cuts will be much more manageable thanks to an influx of federal stimulus dollars to the city schools. But a City Council source said that, as currently proposed, they will still be dramatic.

“There’s huge, gigantic cuts proposed in the city’s school budget, and unless there’s some miraculous turnaround in the economic forecast, I don’t think anyone expects an increase in city funds going to schools,” the source said. (more…)

Some advocates are saying that the state budget betrays the hard-won Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement, which declared the city schools need more money.

But union president Randi Weingarten, a supporter of the case and the groups that filed it, is taking a different point of view. In a statement she just released, she declares that the state budget “reaffirms Albany’s commitment” to the lawsuit. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, she says, “was deferred but not denied.”

The state budget erases two years of increases in funding that would have grown to more than $5 billion by 2011, postponing them until the future. Only 37.5% of the funds promised over a four-year period have been doled out so far. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s executive director, Geri Palast, has repeatedly said that state lawmakers should give the city a “down payment” of funds for next year.

Here’s her full statement: (more…)

The Department of Education’s proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins in July is down 10 percent in the last year, and classroom instruction has taken the brunt of the cuts, according to a report released today by the city’s Independent Budget Office. 

The report, analyzing Mayor Bloomberg’s preliminary budget for 2010, includes a concise summary of the dizzying sequence of school budget cuts since January 2008, when Mayor Bloomberg first announced that he was planning to cut the DOE’s budget. It also provides this graph, which shows that classroom instruction has taken the biggest hit:

The city’s schools desperately need a healthy allocation of federal stimulus funds to maintain basic services, the IBO report concludes. That’s not news: The mayor said in January, when he presented the preliminary budget, that federal funds would be necessary to prevent massive teacher layoffs. And Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told the City Council last week that some teacher layoffs are still on the table unless state lawmakers pass along more than $500 million in stimulus funds.

President Obama might have spoken too soon when he said the federal stimulus could prevent teacher layoffs in New York City. Depending on how state legislators choose to disburse the stimulus funds, the city could still be looking at a loss of 2,000 teachers, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told members of the City Council’s education committee this morning.

The city Department of Education believes it is entitled to 41 percent of the state’s $2.4 billion in education stimulus funds because it receives 41 percent of state funds overall, Klein said today at the council’s hearing on the DOE’s preliminary budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1. This formula would give the DOE more than $500 million in stabilization funds, allowing it to avoid teacher layoffs.

But he said some lawmakers “are taking a different view,” instead suggesting that the city should receive a third of the state’s stimulus money for schools because it serves a third of the state’s public school students. Under this scenario, the DOE would receive just $360 million in stabilization funds, and about 2,000 teachers would have to be laid off. Klein, who was in Albany yesterday to lobby for the city schools, declined to identify the lawmakers to reporters after his testimony, saying that the negotiations are internal and ongoing.

Either way, cuts to schools’ non-teaching staff would be severe, Klein said, with a minimum of about 2,500 positions being lost in the first scenario and as many as 25 percent of school-based non-teaching staff positions being eliminated in the second. These positions include school aides, family workers, and other school personnel. (more…)

A flyer advertising the rally

In just a couple of hours, at 4 p.m., the steps of City Hall will be swarmed with what labor leaders hope will be thousands of New Yorkers who fear that budget cuts could threaten important programs and services.

The rally, which the city teachers union is co-sponsoring, is one of several being held across the state today to lobby against the severe cuts included in Governor Paterson’s budget proposal, released in December. Legislators are working now to negotiate the state’s budget, which must be approved by the end of this month.

Some of the state cuts, particularly in education, appear likely to be reduced or even eliminated by funds allocated in the federal stimulus bill. But the groups sponsoring today’s rally think more could be done to insulate New Yorkers from the effects of economic recession. In particular, they are lobbying for what they call “Fair Share Tax Reform,” which would increase taxes on the state’s highest earners. Some have called this the “millionaire’s tax.” 

Last month, I asked United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten whether the stimulus funds would solve the city’s school budget woes. She reminded me that the federal government is just one of the Department of Education’s funding streams, along with the state and the city:

The stimulus package is a pretty big piece of solving this puzzle, of solving this problem, but it’s not enough. … We still have to go up to Albany, and we still have to figure out if there are cuts that are left, how to do alternatives that do not hurt classrooms and direct services to kids. …

We still have to drive the message through Albany, we still have to drive the message through the City Council, that we have to deal with all of the cuts, and that we need to keep education alive for kids in the city.

See Weingarten’s statement on video.

City and union officials now say teacher layoffs are unlikely, thanks to an expected infusion of cash from the federal stimulus package’s state stabilization fund. But at least one New York City teacher says the threat of losing her job has already distracted her from doing it as well as she would like to.

The teacher, who blogs at They Call Me Teacher, in her first year in the city, writes:

[Teachers union president Randi] Weingarten is right. Teachers start hearing they’ll be losing their jobs, and we all start thinking about what to do, where to go, etc. etc… which means, we are Not putting all of our energy into teaching our students who desperately need all the teaching time they can get (at least mine do!). …

Teaching in this city is 100 times more stressful than I ever wish upon anyone.