GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Jan. 1, 2012, dawned just as 2013 will tomorrow: with the city at odds with the UFT over teacher evaluations, under the threat of a bus strike, and in the process of closing down dozens of schools. But just because the city’s education news sometimes seems like it’s on a loop doesn’t mean we can’t learn from it.

Here are a dozen of the lessons we took away from the city’s schools this year:

1. The Department of Education can’t always get what it wants.

When the year opened, everyone expected the city and UFT to continue negotiating new teacher evaluations and unfreeze federal funds. But Mayor Bloomberg shocked New Yorkers by announcing that he would circumvent the requirement for new evaluations by closing and reopening the 33 schools using a federally prescribed overhaul process called “turnaround,” which would require many teachers to be replaced. The union’s opposition began immediately.

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo brokered an evaluations deal between the state teachers union, he also brokered a deal for New York City that resolved the appeals issue that torpedoed negotiations in the past. The city’s plan, which borrowed heavily from a program in New Haven, Conn., seemed to set the stage for Bloomberg to withdraw his divisive turnaround proposal. But he doubled down on it instead. (more…)