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Less than two years after pledging that he did not want to end tenure, Mayor Bloomberg struck a different chord today.

“Do I think it’s needed at the public school level? No,” he said today.

The statement came days after Bloomberg’s most recent escalation in rhetoric against tenure protections. During his weekly radio address last week, he said tenure is a vestige of the McCarthy Era of the 1950s, when teachers were persecuted for their political views.

But until today he had not said outright that he opposed tenure’s existence for public school teachers. In fact, in a Nov. 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., he declared, “Let me be clear: We are not proposing an end to tenure.” Last year, Bloomberg promised “to end teacher tenure as we know it,” but by making it tougher to achieve, not doing away with it. That vow appeared to bear fruit this year when the number of city teachers awarded tenure fell dramatically.

Bloomberg was responding to a question I asked about what protections he thinks teachers should have given that Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott made clear that people who observe cheating should report it. (more…)

For at least the sixth straight year, principals rated more teachers as unsatisfactory.

Last year, 2,118 teachers received unsatisfactory ratings, setting them along a path that could lead to termination. That number, making up 2.7 percent of all teachers, was 16 percent higher than in 2010 and more than twice the number of U-ratings handed out five years ago. In the 2005-2006 school year, just 981 teachers received unsatisfactory ratings.

About 80 percent of the teachers who received unsatisfactory ratings were tenured, according to Department of Education data. And about a quarter — 511 — received the scarlet rating last year as well.

The numbers suggest that principals are responding to the city’s sustained push to usher more weak teachers out of the system, and the city says 86 of the U-rated teachers have already resigned, including 41 who were denied tenure. But they hardly reflect a sea change in the way that principals rate teachers.

For that, the city is counting on a new teacher evaluation system that will do away with the binary satisfactory/unsatisfactory rating choice altogether. State law now requires districts to enact evaluation systems that use student test scores as a component and sort teachers into four categories from “highly effective” down to “ineffective.” (more…)

Two teachers say their experiences facing harassment after engaging in union activity are the surest sign that Mayor Michael Bloomberg is wrong about the need for tenure.

On Friday, Bloomberg said during his weekly radio appearance that tenure is a vestige of an earlier time, the McCarthy Era, when teachers and others were persecuted for their political views. In the Community section today, Peter Lamphere and Rachel Montagano argue that teachers can still face unofficial sanctions for their politics or identities, making tenure just as vital now as it was in the 1950s.

In February, Lamphere wrote in the Community section about his experience receiving unsatisfactory reviews for the first time after lobbying against an administrator at the Bronx High School for Science. Montagano is currently embroiled in a battle of her own to keep her job at MS 216 in Queens, where she faces incompetence charges leveled for the first time after she stepped up her union leadership.

Lamphere and Montagano write:

As two New York City teachers who have both been targeted with unsatisfactory ratings because of our union activity, we know from firsthand experience that tenure is one of the few protections for whistleblowers and teacher advocates. (more…)

Far from living up to its promise, the city’s tenure reform in fact amounts to a quota system for teacher evaluations, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said today.

Mulgrew was responding to comments made by Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott during Bloomberg’s weekly radio address this morning. They said they expect the number of tenure denials to rise next year.

Mulgrew questioned how they could predict more denials when evaluations for teachers up for tenure next year have not yet happened. He said that Bloomberg’s comments signal that the city has set up a quota system for teacher evaluations rather than using them as a tool to help educators improve.

“If it’s more about setting up a set of numbers for political reasons … then what they’re doing is wrong,” Mulgrew said. “If they’re already predetermining they’re setting this up with quotas, that’s absurd.”

The number of teachers who receive poor ratings could change when an evaluation system mandated under state law goes into effect. That is supposed to happen in September, but first the union and the city must agree on the system’s terms.

Mulgrew said they are nowhere near an agreement, even after reaching a deal for 33 low-performing schools two weeks ago. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg escalated his critique of teacher tenure on his weekly radio show this morning, calling tenure outdated and questioning whether it should even exist.

Bloomberg was discussing the latest tenure data, which was released Wednesday and showed an all-time high number of teachers whose probation were extended rather than receiving tenure. He said he’d continue to comply with the laws that required him to award tenure, but wouldn’t like it.

“The state law has tenure, whether you like it or not. We have to work with that,” Bloomberg said. ”It may have been necessary in the McCarthy era or maybe even today at the university level. But in public education you’re not writing papers about things that are very controversial, which was the idea of tenure: to protect your ability to do that.”

Bloomberg launched the last school year with a pledge to overhaul the way tenure is granted, and he previously has criticized tenure as being too “automatic.” But he has never called for an outright end to tenure; indeed, in a 2009 speech at the Center for American Progress, he declared, “let me be clear: We are not proposing an end to tenure.” (more…)

All indications suggest that the city is pleased with the results of its concerted effort to make tenure more difficult to receive.

Mayor Bloomberg is announcing details about how many teachers received — or didn’t receive — tenure this year during a midday press conference today at Tweed Courthouse, the Department of Education’s headquarters. In the past, the city has released tenure details by email. The fanfare comes on top of reports from teachers and principals that tenure was awarded far less readily last year after Bloomberg vowed to make the protection tougher to receive.

For many years, receiving tenure has been an almost automatic step that happens at the end of a teacher’s third year in the system. But as part of a sweeping bid to toughen teacher evaluations, the city unveiled a new tenure evaluation rubric last year. The rubric separates teachers into four categories and the city told principals to recommend tenure only for those falling into the top two.

At the end of the year, principals said the new evaluations had made it difficult for them to recommend tenure for some teachers they felt deserved it, particularly if a teacher’s value-added Teacher Data Report, based on student test scores, said he was below average. (more…)

Sometimes the simplest explanation might well be the most accurate.

That’s the conclusion that Ruben Brosbe, GothamSchools’ longtime Community section contributor, drew after finding out whether he would be given tenure last year.

Brosbe was at the front edge of a trend last year when he had his probationary period extended. This year, he joined a large number of new teachers when his probation was extended again. But while some teachers who did not receive tenure said they could see no justification, Brosbe concludes that he didn’t get tenure because he hadn’t yet earned it.

In the Community section today, Brosbe writes:

For a while I looked for something to blame it on, other than myself. I hadn’t taken criticism well in a meeting late the previous year. Had I poisoned my relationship with my principal? Was something written on my blog misconstrued as critical or unprofessional? Was I still red-flagged by the DOE? I thought and I thought, until I came to an important realization: I wasn’t ready for tenure.

While I know I made significant improvement in certain areas of my practice, and took some exciting risks this year as a teacher, I knew that I still had room to grow.

Under pressure from the Bloomberg administration to make tenure tougher to receive, principals and superintendents are withholding job protections from some young teachers.

Instead of simply granting or denying tenure at the end of a teacher’s third year, they are extending the probationary period for some teachers by another year.

In 2006, just 30 teachers had their probation extended. As the city has moved to toughen all teacher evaluations, that number has risen steadily, to 465 last year. Reports from teachers and principals suggest the trend is likely to continue when official numbers about the past year’s tenure decisions is released in the near future.

The reports suggest that many superintendents, who make final tenure decisions based on principals’ recommendations, are responding to a directive that teachers who score low on a new rubric not get tenure. The city urged that teachers who scored in the “ineffective” range be denied tenure and teachers who fell in the “developing” range have their probations extended.

A low score on the city’s Teacher Data Report was particularly influential, even if other information, such as classroom observations, contradicted it, principals said. The reports, which only some teachers receive, use value-added formulas to estimate teachers’ effectiveness at increasing students’ test scores, and teachers with low scores are “red-flagged” in the city’s tenure system.

Of the nine teachers Principal Joe Lisa had up for tenure this year at IS 61 in Queens, six taught in subjects without data reports and received tenure. Three math teachers had their probationary periods extended. One in particular seemed to be a shoo-in, Lisa said. But his superintendent rejected the idea of giving her tenure this year. (more…)

As schools enter the peak season for teacher tenure decisions, teachers who are up for tenure are reporting increased scrutiny from principals and superintendents.

A teacher contacted GothamSchools last week to report that her principal had surprised teachers up for tenure at her school with a request for a portfolio.

“The superintendent just informed my principal that each person up for tenure had to have an extensive portfolio demonstrating all the work they do that benefits the school,” said the teacher, who herself is up for tenure this year.

“There’s been stress, to say the least,” she said.

The portfolios are one of several ways district superintendents are soliciting evidence to back up their tenure decisions. The superintendents have always had the final say on tenure decisions, but they rarely challenged principals’ recommendations in the past. Now they’re under pressure to toughen the tenure process and deny tenure or extend probation more often. So they’re asking principals to justify all of the recommendations they make. Superintendents can ask for whatever documentation they like, including portfolios. Some superintendents are also observing classes themselves or sitting down with principals to analyze teachers’ performance.

“Superintendents have been told that nothing is a given,” said a high school principal. (more…)

Although principals won’t get their first look at the city’s new tenure rules until tomorrow, one principal I spoke to today has high hopes for the new system.

For years, tenure has been treated as a formality, the principal said, so some school leaders put little effort into thinking about whether it should be granted. The new rules may prompt them to take the process of granting tenure more seriously, she said.

“I think the new system is probably not such a bad thing,” she said, telling a story about how her school had been hurt by what’s known as “tenure by estoppel.”

Tenure by estoppel, which is part of state law, means that a teacher can get tenure after a certain period of time if her principal never makes a decision.

In this person’s school, there was a teacher who had been given an extra year of probation and was up for tenure, which the former-principal knew she hadn’t earned. (more…)