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Here are some key pieces of back-to-back interviews Randi Weingarten and Joel Klein gave to Diana Williams at Channel 7 yesterday.

Weingarten said that, rather than laying off teachers, the city should offer buyouts to teachers on the brink of retirement and should put a freeze on hiring young teachers from Teach For America and The New Teacher Project.

She said:

“Take all those signs down – the great beautiful signs…Just stop that stuff. If we’re serious that there’s a $1.5 billion deficit, there’s a hiring freeze.”

Klein’s response, when he came on later in the program:

“We have almost $100m of teachers who could not find a job, and those are teachers we ought to prioritize if there are in fact going to be layoffs. But, no, let’s not use great, talented, excited young new people to come into the system. Those are the people that our kids want, those are the people we need to go find.”

UPDATE: Edwize has video of the interviews here.

Dan Weisberg, the Department of Education’s chief labor negotiator, will leave the job this month, opening up a hole for who will lead contract talks this August.

Weisberg is heading to The New Teacher Project, the nonprofit founded by Michelle Rhee that works with school districts to help them recruit new teachers (they manage the Teaching Fellows here). TNPT is also a kind of think tank, studying teacher job markets around the country and recommending ways to improve them (think their work on the Absent Teacher Reserve). The latter will be Weisberg’s focus. His position is vice president for research and policy.

At DOE, Weisberg led efforts to raise the quality of teachers by making the process of getting tenure more strict. He also negotiated the latest contracts with the teachers and principals unions, which dramatically changed the way teachers are hired by creating a more open-market system, and he worked to strike deals to bring performance pay to both principals and teachers. One of my favorite Weisberg interviews was his defense of the “rubber rooms” on This American Life, the radio show.

Weisberg said on the telephone just now that his departure is purely personal; it has nothing to do with Chancellor Joel Klein’s reorganization of his senior staff. He said he’s working with top aides to Klein to help pick his successor.

It will take “creative thinking and smart choices” to protect the schools from the mounting economic crisis, UFT President Randi Weingarten told Chancellor Klein in a letter today outlining three suggestions of how the DOE could cut costs and deploy its resources more efficiently.

All three recommendations, if implemented, would reduce the number of “excessed” teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve, who are currently under fire from The New Teacher Project for costing the system millions of dollars even though they aren’t working. The UFT says most ATRs have tried for months to find jobs but that principals aren’t given incentives to hire the often highly paid teachers.

Weingarten’s suggestions to Klein:

1. An immediate hiring freeze at the central Department of Education, and at the school and district level for any license areas where there are people in excess and available for placement.

2. A redeployment of teachers and other excessed personnel in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATR) into vacancies as they arise.

3. Develop a program to recertify excessed personnel in additional license areas, so they are available to fill vacancies as they arise.

Read Weingarten’s full letter after the jump. (more…)