School Officials and Union Agree on Pilot Program for Teacher Evaluations

By SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: July 15, 2011

In a step toward reshaping how all teachers in New York City’s 1,700 public schools are judged, the Department of Education and the city teachers’ union agreed on Friday to a pilot teacher-evaluation system that will take effect next year in 33 struggling schools.

The deal, which ended months of disagreement, was needed for the city’s continued participation in a federal grant program that could bring up to $65 million in grants — up to $6 million for some schools — over the next three years.

City officials announced months ago that they had applied for the grants for the 33 schools. But the application was stalled by the state, which had to approve it and which said it was dissatisfied with proposals for how the money would be used and how teachers would be evaluated.

As of Friday, the city had not yet submitted its revised plans to Albany, state officials said, making it impossible to know for sure whether the schools would continue to receive the money.

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NYC budget deal averts 4,000 teacher layoffs

By SAMANTHA GROSS
The Associated Press
updated 6/25/2011 4:17:40 AM ET 2011-06-25T08:17:40


NEW YORK — New York City lawmakers reached a budget deal Friday that will avert the layoffs of about 4,000 teachers partly through union concessions, but the city won't pay to replace thousands more public school instructors who quit or retire this year, officials said.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn gathered with city lawmakers and the head of the teachers' union Friday evening to announce the roughly $66 billion deal, which ducks the worst of the cutbacks the mayor had said would be unavoidable due to economic hard times and declining state and federal budgets.

Still, city classrooms will hold 2,600 fewer teachers next year, because a larger-than-expected number of instructors are choosing to quit or retire.

Combined with the attrition of the last two years, the drop in teacher rolls represents a loss of one-out-of-12 instructors.

That will leave roughly 72,400 teachers for more than 1 million public school students — down from 79,000 teachers in the 2008-2009 school year.

A proposal to shutter 20 fire companies was averted, as were some of the planned reductions to city libraries.

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NYC faces layoffs despite having reserve cash: mayor

NEW YORK | Fri Jun 17, 2011 6:33pm EDT

(Reuters) - New York City is in the odd position of having both $500 million of cash reserve and a multibillion-dollar deficit, which Mayor Michael Bloomberg plans to close partly by laying off workers.

The cash reserve, called the Health Insurance Stabilization Fund, was set up over two decades ago to help deal with a spike in healthcare costs for city workers.

"There's $500 million sitting in the fund and there's no prospect it's ever going to be used for anything. It just sits there," Bloomberg said on his Friday WOR radio show.

New York City tapped the fund a couple of years ago partly to avoid layoffs.

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Gov. Cuomo urging tougher evaluations for teachers, increased importance on standardized tests

BY Rachel Monahan
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER

Saturday, May 14th 2011, 4:00 AM

At the urging of Gov. Cuomo, education leaders are pushing for tougher teacher evaluations - including giving more weight to students' scores on state exams.

The State Board of Regents is expected to vote Monday on the overhaul of teacher evaluations, mandated last year as part of the push for federal Race to the Top money.

"If done correctly, we will revive our education system to ensure students perform better and succeed in their future careers," Cuomo said in a letter to state Schools Chancellor Merryl Tisch.

"Now is our chance to make New York a leader in education performance."

The changes Cuomo pushed for - and which Tisch immediately endorsed - increased the importance of standardized tests in the evaluation process.

State tests can be used for up to 40% of the evaluations, and under his recommendations, teachers would be required to receive a positive rating on the test portion of the evaluation to receive a positive rating overall.

The governor is also offering financial incentives to state school districts that adopt the evaluations quickly.

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NYC Teachers Take on the Mayor and the Banks

New York City teachers and the United Federation of Teachers have initiated a militant and radical response to the latest budget cut proposals made by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. As a victim of the 1975 New York City financial crisis, and as a teacher educator, I wholeheartedly support their actions including a proposed "people's budget" and a massive protest march scheduled for Thursday afternoon, May 12. Teachers, parents, and students will rally at City Hall Park at 4:00 p.m. and then march down Broadway and through Wall Street.

In 1975, New York was on the verge of bankruptcy. Denied federal and state support, the city announced it would lay off 13,000 teachers. By September 1975, the number was paired down to 5,000, including me. I worked as a substitute teacher off and on for three years waiting to be reappointed. Many young teachers drifted into other fields never to return. Class sizes in the high schools soared to over sixty and rarely dropped below forty. Students and teachers were continually being shifted around and education suffered dramatically. It took a decade for the ship to right itself. A generation of students were sacrificed. This cannot be allowed to happen again.

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Bloomberg to Lay Off Thousands of Teachers

By DAVID W. CHEN and JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ

Published: May 5, 2011 - New York Times

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg on Friday unveiled at City Hall what he called a "budget full of difficult decisions" that includes the loss of more than 6,000 teachers.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said Friday that he intended to eliminate 4,100 teaching jobs through layoffs, and about 2,000 through attrition, the first significant layoffs of teachers since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s.

The job cuts are part of Mr. Bloomberg’s effort to slice an additional $400 million from various city agencies. He needs to plug a multibillion-dollar deficit in his $65.6 billion spending plan for the fiscal year that begins July 1. That budget is about the same size as the current one.

Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, criticized the mayor’s lack of transparency in releasing his budget. “This document is political,” he said. “This is not the way we should be running the city.”

The deep cuts to the city’s schools are similar to what the mayor proposed in February, though the number of layoffs is slightly less.

Mr. Bloomberg, during his budget presentation at City Hall, faulted the state for the necessity of layoffs among the 75,000 teachers. In 2008, he said, the state paid 45 percent of the city’s education costs; next fiscal year, he said, the state would pay 39 percent.

“I understand the frustration that parents and teachers feel; I feel it too,” he said. “We are not going to walk away from our education system.”

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End 'last in, first out' teacher layoffs

By Michelle Rhee, Special to CNN

February 23, 2011 5:47 p.m. EST

Editor's note: Michelle Rhee is the former chancellor of Washington, D.C., public schools and the CEO and founder of StudentsFirst.org, which advocates teacher evaluations and eliminating tenure and making policy decisions based on students' needs.

(CNN) -- State leaders across the country are confronting some of the toughest decisions they have ever had to make in order to balance their budgets amid a massive financial crisis. As a parent who has worked in education for almost 20 years, knowing that budget cuts will soon hit education is far from my ideal.

A wave of layoffs will likely happen this summer, and my group, StudentsFirst.org, calculates that at least 160,000 teachers are at risk of losing their jobs. What makes this even tougher on kids is that the majority of the country's states and school districts conduct layoffs using an antiquated policy referred to as "last in, first out." The policy mandates that the last teachers hired are the first teachers fired, regardless of how good they are. As it stands now, teachers' impact on students plays absolutely no role in these decisions.

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Top 10 List: Where the Jobs Are

By CECILIA CAPUZZI SIMON

Published: April 13, 2011

Looming worker shortage. That’s not a phrase one expects to hear at a time of high unemployment. But when experts look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ list of the fastest-growing occupations, that’s what they see: more than a million new jobs on the horizon by 2018, and a worker pool that may not be trained to fill them. Such a list was first compiled in 1946, just after the end of World War II, to help veterans on the G.I. Bill make smart educational choices. One need only pay attention to news reports to guess where the current shortages may be: eight of the fields in the top 10 categories are health care or wellness related; one is in financial services; and the other is in the information technology field.

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The Nation: Teachers Are Not The Enemy

Pedro Noguera and Michelle Fine

April 22, 2011

Pedro Noguera is a professor of sociology at New York University.
Michelle Fine is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at City University of New York.
Public school teachers and their unions are under a sustained assault that is still unfolding. In 2010 Michelle Rhee, former Washington, DC, schools chancellor, announced the creation of a multimillion-dollar lobbying organization for the explicit purpose of undermining teachers unions. She has charged that "bad teachers" are the primary cause of the problems that beset America's schools. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has asserted that effective teachers need no experience. Romanticizing the young, energetic, passionate (read: cheap) teacher, he has made eliminating seniority preferences in layoffs (aka, last in, first out — or LIFO) his pet cause (it has been stymied for the time being by the state legislature).
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has slashed school aid by $1.2 billion while refusing to comply with a court-mandated formula for school funding equity. He has become a right-wing hero by demonizing teachers, lambasting unions, challenging tenure rights and introducing a crude teacher-evaluation process based on student test scores. Christie is also pushing what he calls a "final solution" — $360 million in tax credits for a tuition voucher system that would permit any child in New Jersey go to any school, public or private, and would include state subsidies for some students already attending parochial schools and yeshivas.

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State Rep. Peter MacGregor: Only 'a bad teacher' would oppose his tenure reform bill - Topix

State Rep. Peter MacGregor: Only 'a bad teacher' would oppose his tenure reform bill - Topix