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Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew is lodging a formal complaint about the city’s plans to overhaul 33 struggling schools, a day after the head of the city’s principals union did the same thing.

When Mayor Bloomberg announced last month that the schools would undergo a federally prescribed process known as “turnaround,” which requires half of teachers to be removed, Mulgrew was immediately dismissive.

In a letter sent today to State Education Commissioner John King, Mulgrew fleshes out those objections, arguing that the plan as the city has explained it would violate state and federal regulations and the city’s contract with the UFT.

The city has leaned on that contract when touting the plan, saying that a clause known as 18-D represents union sign-off on the turnaround bid and allows for rehiring at schools that are closed and reopened, as would be the case under turnaround. But Mulgrew contends in his letter that 18-D applies only when schools are truly closed.

“What the DOE proposes is a classic sleight of hand,” he writes. “While it tells the public and the UFT it will technically ‘close’ these schools and ‘reopen’ them as new schools, what it really intends and seeks your permission for is a turnaround where the same students continue to be served in the same school with a portion of the same staff. … This is not a closure and does not trigger application of 18-D.” (more…)

A training session about the city’s favored teacher evaluation model went off as planned on Tuesday — but without the involvement of the city, which had worked with the teachers union on event.

Since the start of the school year, the union and city have been grappling over the Danielson Framework, the observation model the city hopes will be adopted when a new evaluation system is finalized. Over time, a tension has emerged about whether the model is meant first to help teachers improve — the union’s position — or whether it is a tool to help principals usher weak teachers out of the system, as the city’s rhetoric has sometimes suggested.

Since at least December, the city and teachers union had been planning joint training sessions for principals and union chapter leaders to clarify the model’s purpose and value.

But after Mayor Bloomberg lashed out at the United Federation of Teachers during his State of the City speech last week, declaring that he would remove half of the teachers at 33 low-performing schools, the union decided it would no longer work with the city on the trainings.

“The content of the State of the City has not been received very well by members,” Michael Mendel, a union secretary, told me Wednesday. “To do a joint training didn’t sit right.”

On Friday afternoon, union officials surprised the city by announcing that the collaboration was off. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew responded forcefully to Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to circumvent a collective bargaining requirement, saying union lawyers had a multi-pronged approach to push back against the city’s tactics.

First, the union said it would petition a state labor board to force the city to accept a mediator in talks over new teacher evaluations. The union suggested arbitration two weeks ago when evaluation talks broke down, but the city has rejected the request.

And regardless of what the board decides, Mulgrew indicated today in a press conference that he would sue over the gambit the city has proposed to get around the evaluation requirement. That plan would switch the status of 33 schools in a federal improvement program and require half of their teachers to be replaced.

“If the Department of Education tries to implement changing these schools from their current status, we will be taking appropriate legal action,” Mulgrew said.

The city can not move forward yet without approval from the state education department, which administers federal funding attached to the school improvement strategies. Walcott detailed the plans in a letter to Commissioner John King yesterday but King has yet to respond.

In the meantime, Mulgrew ratcheted up rhetoric against Mayor Bloomberg, who took the UFT head-on several times during his education-centered speech. (more…)

Under a proposal laid out by Mayor Bloomberg today that took education insiders by surprise, the city would retain access to threatened federal dollars for struggling schools by riffing on a familiar strategy: school closure.

The announcement in today’s State of the City address sets the stage for a showdown with the United Federation of Teachers — and maybe also with the State Education Department.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew had already dismissed the idea that schools could receive the funds without union support by this afternoon. But State Education Commissioner John King has yet to weigh in on the strategy.

Under Bloomberg’s plan, the city would swap dozens of schools from one federally mandated overhaul strategy to another in a bid to escape a requirement that the city and union come to terms on a new teacher evaluation system. An impasse over negotiations caused King last week to cut off federal funds to 33 city schools that were undergoing the “transformation” and “restart” strategies, which require new evaluations.

Under the mayor’s plan, the schools would undergo “turnaround” instead. Turnaround is more aggressive than the other strategies, requiring at least half of a school’s teachers to be replaced. But it also does not require that new teacher evaluations be in place, according to the Obama administration’s guidelines for the funds, known as School Improvement Grants.

Mulgrew immediately dismissed the plan, arguing that the union would have to sign off on turnaround. That would be true — but only if Bloomberg had been talking about the type of turnaround that the Obama administration envisioned.

What the city is actually proposing is using a second, lesser-known turnaround that state regulations allow. Essentially, the city would close 33 schools and reopen them immediately, with new names and identification numbers. Then a team of educators selected for the “new” school would hire a new staff with the union’s input, pulling half of the new teachers from the original school’s roster. (more…)

When Gov. Andrew Cuomo convenes the education reform commission he promised today, there are likely to be some new faces in the room.

Cuomo signaled that he was tired of business as usual during his State of the State address today, saying that special interest education groups, such as lobbyists for teachers, principals, and superintendents, have come to overshadow the true mission of public education.

“The purpose of public education is not to help grow the public education bureaucracy,” Cuomo said in his speech. The status quo, he said, is “driven by the business of education more than achievement in education.”

Cuomo said that the education commission would be the driving force behind his pledge to toughen teacher evaluations and make the state’s education spending more efficient. He said the commission would be bi-partisan and include joint appointments from the legislature, but was not specific about what the makeup would look like.

Two people who work closely on state and city education policies said that they expected the commission to be made up at least in part of people from outside the state.

“It will be something that’s quite national, people from outside New York,” a source said. ”It won’t be people from the usual crowd.” (more…)

Supporters of Washington Irving High School protested the school's planned closure this morning.

It was still dark this morning when Steve Morris rolled up in front of Washington Irving High School on his bike.

Morris had been the school’s librarian until last summer, when the struggling school cut him from its staff roster and shuttered the library. Now he was on his way to the Brandeis High School building as a member of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of position-less teachers who are shuffled to a different school each week.

But first he wanted to offer silent support to his former students and colleagues who, along with parents and union officials, had filled Irving’s front steps to protest the Department of Education’s plan to close the school.

“I’ll be the last librarian this school ever has,” Morris told me wistfully before pedaling north on Irving Place.

Irving is one of 25 schools the city has proposed closing or shrinking this year. The century-old high school near Union Square got an F on its most recent progress report, down from C’s in the previous two years.

In a series of spirited chats and statements, the protesters argued that the deck had long been stacked against the school. (more…)

The city won’t strike a deal on new teacher evaluations just to get millions of dollars in federal funding, Chancellor Dennis Walcott said last week.

The city and teachers union are supposed to settle on new teacher evaluations by the end of the school year. An agreement would bring the city into compliance with state law and also enable it to receive millions of federal dollars that have policy strings attached to them.

Earlier this month, a New York Daily News editorial said Walcott “has committed to surrender $60 million in federal school improvement grants unless he and the teachers union have agreed by the end of the year on a pilot system for evaluating teacher performance.” The newspaper, which praised Walcott’s tough-on-unions sentiment, did not report the chancellor’s exact words in its news or editorial pages.

Last week, Walcott told me that the editorial accurately paraphrased a comment he made. Coming to an agreement that satisfies both parties is so important, he said, that he does not want the federal funds to force his hand prematurely.

“I’m not going to be hampered by money being the sole force of what a decision will be,” Walcott said. “So at the end of the day if we have to return money, I will be willing to do that. I’m not going to be beholden to money as determining a decision.”

Last summer, as a federal deadline loomed, the city and UFT struck a last-minute, limited agreement on teacher evaluations at 33 low-performing schools, enabling the schools to receive millions of dollars to fund “restart” or “transformation” improvement processes. (more…)

An ad for today's Occupy movement protests

The city stepped in this afternoon to stop Occupy Wall Street protests from derailing the school day.

Fueled by a message posted on the protest movement’s website, rumors spread earlier today that the schools would be dismissing students early. “National Day of Action” protests in Lower Manhattan, which have grown increasingly tense over the course of the day are timed to the movement’s two-month anniversary and come soon after a city crackdown. The protests are set to spread to subway stations across the city at 3 p.m. and to the steps of the Department of Education’s headquarters at 4:30 p.m.

City officials quickly acted to quash the early-dismissal rumors. On Twitter, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and the DOE’s official account both sent messages assuring followers that the school day would proceed as planned. Wolfson said early dismissal was “never discussed.” And Chancellor Dennis Walcott emailed principals to tell them not to dismiss students early “as a result of any protests.”

“Rumors indicating that school will be closed early are false,” Walcott wrote in an email with the subject line “Today is a full school day.”

Middle schools, which have long been scheduled to dismiss students early because of parent-teacher conferences, did end classes early as planned.

Later this afternoon, two Occupy-affiliated protests are scheduled to converge at the DOE’s Tweed Headquarters, where a protest 10 days ago attracted a large crowd. (more…)

Today’s biggest news story — the city’s crackdown on “Occupy” protesters occupying Zuccotti Park — got some of its legs from inside United Federation of Teachers headquarters.

The UFT has been hosting support for the protesters for some time in its Lower Manhattan offices, just blocks from the epicenter of the Occupy Wall Street movement. That won’t stop, according to UFT President Michael Mulgrew.

Here’s what Mulgrew said in a statement just now:

Occupy Wall Street isn’t a place – it’s an idea, a movement that has brought national and international focus to the danger to our economy and our nation that we face because of growing income inequality.

The UFT is happy to continue providing logistical support for the Occupy Wall Street in our building, and we will be joining the OWS protestors in their continuing efforts around New York City to bring economic fairness and opportunity.

UFT officials told me earlier this week that the union had been planning to participate in a series of rallies on Thursday at Zuccotti Park. The future of those actions is not yet clear.

Today’s crackdown on the protesters had another education angle: NY1 education reporter Lindsey Christ was on the scene in the middle of the night — and then throughout the day, indefatigably, even as police officers warned her away — sending Twitter updates. (more…)

The UFT is going to plan B in its latest legal appeal to keep Teacher Data Reports under wraps.

The fight over a Freedom of Information Law request by several city news organizations to release the reports, which calculated “value-added” scores for some teachers, is still making its way through the courts, even though the city has said it will not produce new reports.

The union sued to stop the city from releasing the scores, with teachers’ names, to the news organizations. But in August, confirming a lower-court judge’s ruling, the state’s second-highest court ruled that the scores are a matter of public interest and should be released. To appeal that ruling, the union had to follow a complicated set of legal procedures.

Here’s how we described the steps at the time:

Because the four judges on the Appellate Court ruled unanimously against the union, there’s no guarantee that the Court of Appeals will hear the case. Instead, the Appellate Court has to give permission. Within days, the union will ask the appellate court for permission to have the case heard in the Court of Appeals. If permission isn’t granted, the union can also ask the Court of Appeals itself.

The second scenario — that the Appellate Court would not refer the case to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court — played out today. Now the union must convince the Court of Appeals to hear the potentially precedent-setting case, which UFT President Michael Mulgrew said it would try to do quickly. (more…)