Mulgrew responds to Mayor Bloomberg’s State of the City address

Mayor Bloomberg in his State of the City address on Jan. 12 proposed merit pay for teachers, vowed to step up effects to remove ineffective teachers, blamed the union for the breakdown of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system in 33 restart and transformation schools and announced that he would open 50 new charter schools in the next two years.

Mayor Bloomberg in his State of the City address on Jan. 12 proposed merit pay for teachers, vowed to step up effects to remove ineffective teachers, blamed the union for the breakdown of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system in 33 restart and transformation schools and announced that he would open 50 new charter schools in the next two years. UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “The mayor seems to be lost in his own fantasy world of education, the one where reality doesn’t apply.”

UFT Open Letter to Parents

An open letter to New York City parents

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.

New York City is losing its teachers.

More than 66,000 have either resigned or retired since Mayor Bloomberg took control of the schools.

Teachers leave one of the toughest jobs in New York City for a variety of personal and professional reasons, but the most common single reason is a lack of support from supervisors and the Department of Education.

Teaching is a craft that is acquired over time, and teachers desperately want to improve their skills. That is why the United Federation of Teachers led the campaign to create a better teacher evaluation system, one that put a priority on helping all teachers do their job better. The UFT’s role was critical in creating the new system, and in going to Washington, D.C. to help get federal funds for it through the Race to the Top program. Starting last spring, many of our members with expertise in evaluation worked for months on the state subcommittees designing the new system.

We have been trying to work with the Bloomberg administration to iron out the final details of the new system, but the administration has refused to engage in meaningful talks about teacher and principal improvement. Instead it has focused on ensuring that administrators have unlimited power over their employees. If we agree, it will mean that supervisors’ decisions can never be properly reviewed, much less overturned. This would be true even if their negative rating of a teacher or a principal can be proven to be the result of their refusal to inappropriately change a student’s grade or to give students credit for courses they have not properly completed.

Make no mistake about it. The administration has put tremendous pressure on principals to make their schools appear to be successful. But any claims of success ring hollow in the light of national tests that show very limited student progress for the system as a whole, and state measures that show that while the high school graduation rate is increasing, the number of graduates ready for college is only about one in five.

The sad truth is that Mayor Bloomberg’s “reform” agenda — raising class size across the system; closing schools and “warehousing” the neediest students; pushing art and music out of the schools to make room for more test prep; turning a deaf ear to parents’ concerns; and appointing a completely unqualified publishing executive to be Chancellor — hasn’t made our schools better.

A real teacher evaluation system that helps all teachers improve while providing checks and balances is a critical step toward stopping the hemorrhaging of our teaching force and making our schools more effective. At the same time it would help ensure that teachers who cannot succeed in the classroom leave the profession.

We have an open offer to the administration to continue our negotiations on this issue, or even to take it to binding arbitration. It’s time the administration sat down with teachers and principals to come up with an agenda that will actually help our children learn.

Sincerely,
Michael Mulgrew
President
United Federation of Teachers

Education Leaders Spar Over Bloomberg’s Educational Record

By Jon Lentz

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s leadership of the city’s education system has been flawed in many ways, but mayoral control of the public school system has helped the city overall, a number of education advocates said at a panel discussion yesterday.

The change during Bloomberg’s first term did away with a bureaucratic quagmire and brought more attention and funding to education, said Joseph Viteritti, a public policy professor at Hunter College. But the change has been marred by a lack of a voice for parents, he added.

“There needs to be more input from other people,” Viteritti said. “Part of it is style, not structure. You have to respect the spirit of the law, and that hasn’t been there.”

Viteritti was one of eight panelists at the “On Education” panel sponsored by City Hall, Gotham Schools and Con Edison on the successes and failures of the city’s school system.

For every passionate assertion, there seemed to be an equally passionate counter-assertion.

Shael Polakow-Suransky, the chief academic officer for the city’s Education Department, said mayoral control had met its goal of creating a strong, accountable leadership with groundbreaking results. He touted rising graduation rates and city surveys showing that more than nine in 10 parents are satisfied with the schools.

“We had a graduation rate that hovered for decades right around 50 percent,” Polakow-Suransky said. “It’s now two-thirds of the kids that are now graduating, which is thousands and thousands more kids who are graduating each year.”

Merryl Tisch, the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, countered that the state looks at the data differently.

“When you have 75 percent of the youngsters graduating high schools who are going to two-year colleges needing to be remediated … or two years in community college, only 21 percent of them complete, and after six years it’s 24 percent – are you kidding me?” she asked.

The panelists also quarreled over a court decision this week that threw out a state teacher evaluation system.

“With the decision that was rendered yesterday, the judge said that you can be an effective teacher in New York State and get zero points out of a 100-point scale on student performance,” said Tisch, adding that the state plans to appeal. “We believe that that hurts students, that hurts teachers, and that hurts the future of our youngsters.”

But Leo Casey, a vice president with the United Federation of Teachers, said the disagreement was over whether or not state exams are a truly robust and meaningful measure of students’ academic growth, and whether those results should be used to evaluate teachers.

“As a teacher, I know that for my students to be successful in college and beyond, what’s important is not their ability to fill in bubbles on one test, one day a year,” Casey said.

Earlier this summer the teachers union and the city came to an agreement to avert teacher layoffs, but the panelists doubted whether the two parties would sign a new collective bargaining agreement before Bloomberg left office.

“I would certainly hope we could go through a year in which we took up Shael’s call to focus on teacher evaluation, and we didn’t have another year of this contrived political issue of seniority layoffs,” said Casey, referring to Bloomberg’s push to get rid of the state’s “last in, first out” rules. “We’ve lost 8,000 teachers through attrition over the last three years. This system cannot afford to lose more teachers.”

Bill Thompson, the former city comptroller and mayoral candidate, echoed Casey’s concerns.

“It has to be a larger educational vision that’s put forward by a mayor, by a chancellor, working along with the union,” Thompson said. “I think that on both sides there’s an attitude, and I think you’re seeing it with other city and municipal unions also, that we’ll wait for the next person.”

When asked if he thought a new contract could be reached in the next two years, Polakow-Suransky instead asked Thompson, who is again running to succeed Bloomberg, what the next mayor could do differently. Thompson responded that the change would be attitudinal.

“I don’t know if it changes dramatically on finances and the economics,” Thompson said. “I think attitude is a huge difference. I think the ability to sit down and work with the union would change, because I don’t think that’s the prevailing attitude out there right now. I think that teachers, in a number of ways, feel as if they’re being scapegoated.”

Polakow-Suransky also dismissed recent press reports about cheating scandals, saying the number of allegations actually proven had not gone up. He said the city’s schools had a number of protections in place, from conducting citywide standardized tests only on a single day to stronger legal protections for whistleblowers to a system-wide audit.

“I can’t say that in a system of 75,000 teachers, that there aren’t a couple cases where people make mistakes or behave inappropriately, but I also don’t think we’ve seen any evidence that there’s a system-wide problem,” he said.

Still, Tisch said it was critically important for the city to prove that its results were rock solid.

“I believe that so much of what the mayor has done in this city is really carved out around educational reform,” said Tisch, who noted that the state is going to come out with specific proposals on testing for cheating in coming weeks. “Therefore, the numbers we post of what’s transpired in the city need to in essence be shown to be bulletproof.”

Tisch added that Bloomberg’s hard work and prioritization of public education had led to a “revolution” in New York City.

“He took it on,” Tisch said. “He took it on in forceful ways. He committed resources to it as never before. But it’s not perfect, and why do we have to go from failure to perfect? Is that the only barometer by which we judge ourselves?”

Union Challenges State on Use of Tests in Teacher Evaluations

By ANNA M. PHILLIPS

The usually friendly relationship between the state teachers union and the State Department of Education fissured on Tuesday with the union’s announcement that it was taking the state to court over new teacher evaluation rules.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the State Supreme Court in Albany on Monday, accuses the Board of Regents — the state’s policy making body on education — of giving districts more power to use test scores in teacher evaluations than the law allows.

The law in question was passed last year, with the union’s support, as part of New York’s successful effort to win a $700 million federal Race to the Top grant.
Using a 100-point scale, the law dictated that 20 points of a teacher’s evaluation come from students’ progress on the state exams and that another 20 points come from local assessments that would be negotiated with the unions. The remaining 60 percent would come from subjective measures like principals’ evaluations.

In May, responding to criticism from Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, the Board of Regents voted to give school districts the option of weighing the state tests more heavily so they would count for 40 points. Proponents of this plan said that asking financially struggling districts to create their own local tests was unrealistic.

But Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers union, said that the state’s guidelines were more about evaluating teachers “quickly and cheaply, instead of doing it right.”

He said the guidelines would encourage poorer districts to save money by using the state tests, effectively diminishing the quality of their teacher evaluations.

“For a school district to opt to count a state test twice, the cost to it is close to zero,” he said. “But for a school district to provide professional development, it’s going to cost more. The wealthy school districts can provide that, but the poorer school districts will find that they have no choice.”

Merryl Tisch, chancellor of the Board of Regents, said that the state teachers union had made no secret of its plans to sue once the regulations were passed. The union’s suit has little basis, she said, because districts still have to reach a deal with their unions on whether to create local assessments or use the state exams.

“I am hoping the court will make a quick decision to allow the implementation of the teacher evaluation system to move forward,” she said.

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SUNY 2020 passes in Senate

by Rick Karlin

Here are the details, according to Senate Republicans:

The New York State Senate today passed legislation to establish the NY-SUNY 2020 Challenge Grant program that includes capital funds for investments in economic expansion and job creation at the four SUNY University Centers, as well as a predictable and rational plan for SUNY tuition that will allow students and families to plan for tuition costs.

The bill (S.5855) represents a three-way agreement among the Governor, Senate and Assembly.

“This program will create new investments by the state, by students and by SUNY campuses so they will continue to be economic and job creation engines within their respective regions of the state,” Senator Kenneth LaValle (R-C-I, Port Jefferson), Chairman of the Senate Higher Education Committee, said. “This bill will also ensure a continued level of state funding and will maintain access to SUNY for students pursuing their higher education at SUNY schools.”

“SUNY’s University Centers are at the heart of economic development efforts in Western New York, the Southern Tier, the Capital Region and Long Island,” Senate Majority Leader Dean G. Skelos said. “This plan will help provide much-needed economic and capital investments in the SUNY centers to help them expand and create new jobs. It also has the additional benefit of providing a stable and predictable tuition so students won’t see unpredictable spikes in SUNY tuition and can plan appropriately for their education.”

CHALLENGE GRANT PROGRAM FOR EXPANSION AND
ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

The four University Centers (Buffalo, Stony Brook, Binghamton & Albany) are eligible to apply to the Governor and the SUNY Chancellor for access to $140 million in capital funds. Of that total, $60 million comes from the current SUNY capital appropriation authority and $80 million comes from bonding through ESDC. The Centers will submit their NY-SUNY 2020 plan for approval to the Governor and Chancellor. The plan shall include an economic and academic component. Each University Center shall receive an equal amount of $35 million.

RATIONAL TUITION POLICY

The bill authorizes SUNY trustees to increase tuition by up to $300 per year for five years. The five year plan expires at the end of the 2015-16 academic year. In addition, SUNY trustees could also increase out of state undergraduate tuition up to 10 percent as well as additional fees at the four University Centers after the approval of their NY-SUNY 2020 Challenge grant plan. CUNY is also authorized to increase tuition by up to $300 per year for five years.

The bill provides a tuition credit in an amount equal to a percentage of their TAP award multiplied by any increase in tuition over $5,000. In addition, the four University Centers are required to use a portion of their tuition revenue for financial aid to receive NY-SUNY 2020 Challenge Grant plan approval. Those students, whose net taxable income is $80,000 or more will also be eligible for financial aid at the Centers pursuant to each Centers’ plan.

The bill also requires the State to maintain financial support to SUNY from year to year.

The bill was sent to the Assembly.

Cuomo Likely to Veto Bill on School Borrowing

by Danny Hakim

ALBANY — State lawmakers on Friday approved a bill that would allow school districts to borrow as much as $1 billion without voter approval, but a spokesman for Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said the measure would most likely be vetoed.

Without advance notice and with little debate, the bill won Senate approval late Thursday night, several days after the legislative session had been scheduled to end. The Assembly passed the measure Friday afternoon, and the governor’s office then took the unusual step of publicly opposing the legislation moments after its passage, effectively dooming it.

Elizabeth Lynam, deputy research director at the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-backed group that generally favors lower spending, described the bill as one of the worst things the Legislature had done this session.

But supporters said it would give school districts breathing room as pension costs soar. The measure would allow school districts to borrow as much as $1 billion to pay pension and operating costs over the next two years, in the process circumventing existing requirements for public approval of new debt.

The bill would weaken one of the governor’s central proposals, to cap property tax increases at 2 percent, by allowing schools to raise money through a debt offering.

The money school districts borrowed would not count against the tax cap, but would have to be paid back by taxpayers in up to 15 years.

The legislation would also change the rules for taking on new debt. Currently, school districts outside of New York City vote on their budgets, including any planned borrowing. The legislation would allow that requirement to be circumvented.

Assemblyman Peter J. Abbate Jr., a Brooklyn Democrat, said in an interview that he sponsored the bill on behalf of urban school districts. The measure was also strongly backed by the New York State United Teachers union.

“Some of the localities, and the schools boards, are looking for a way, for some help,” Mr. Abbate said. “I see nothing wrong.”

And Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of New York State United Teachers, said, “Obviously, when you take into consideration the cuts in school aid and what seems likely to be a pretty onerous property tax cap, the ability for school districts to deal with expenses in some kind of rational way is important.”

“By smoothing out pension costs, you don’t have to deal with the tremendous spikes up and down in the rates that they have to pay,” he added.

But Assemblyman Michael J. Fitzpatrick, a Long Island Republican, said during the Assembly debate, “This bill is being passed because the teachers’ unions does not want to contribute to the economic well-being of this state.”

“This is an organization that wants unfettered access to every wallet and pocketbook of every taxpayer in this state,” he added.

Support for the bill was not purely partisan. It was sponsored in the Senate by Martin J. Golden, a Brooklyn Republican, and it was the Republican-led Senate that first approved the bill, demonstrating the influence on both parties that is wielded by the teachers’ union in Albany.

The bill had much in common with legislation signed last year by Gov. David A. Paterson that allowed the state and municipalities to borrow billions of dollars to help make required annual payments to the state pension fund.

Judge asked to rule on ‘gross inequality’

At a rally before the June 21 court hearing on the lawsuit filed by the UFT and other plaintiffs on closing schools and inequitable co-locations, community activist William Hargraves asked, “Why is the DOE elbowing its way into schools in all boroughs of this city?

by Maisie McAdoo

Scores of parents spoke out on behalf of the lawsuit filed by the UFT, the NAACP and other plaintiffs against closing schools and co-locating charters at a rally outside a Manhattan courthouse on June 21. The rally came minutes before a state judge agreed to extend an order in the case that forbids the DOE from destroying information necessary for keeping the schools open and from making certain physical changes to buildings with co-locations, while the court considers whether to grant the plaintiffs request for an injunction in the case.

Demanding educational equality for all children, the rally participants said the Department of Education should give schools the support they need rather than close them down; they also called for equal treatment of charter and district students in co-located schools.

“Why should other children gain from what my children lose?” said Miriam Holmes, whose three children attend PS 149 in Harlem, which is co-located with a Harlem Success Charter School.

”The DOE acted like we weren’t there,” said PS 149 PTA President Sonya Hampton. “Where could we go? We called the NAACP.”

After hearing arguments by lawyers for the plaintiffs, the Department of Education and the charter schools, State Supreme Court Justice Paul Feinman extended the temporary order until he decides on the injunction.

“The court has got a final decision before it,” said Charles Moerdler of Stroock and Stroock and Lavan, the Plaintiffs’ counsel. “The DOE has been doing stuff illegally for months. If we prevail, these schools will not be closed.”

Moerdler told Justice Feinman that no matter what the DOE’s co-location plan documents said, the reality is that district students have had to give up space to service students of charter schools.

“This is no way to set an example for schoolchildren,” he said. “This is no way to run a school system. There is gross inequality here. ”

CUNY Staff Congress: Thanks for the dough, please no tuition boosts

Here’s the statement from Dr. Barbara Bowen, president of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, on the framework agreement’s tuition provisions, which includes tuition increases that the group would like to see replaced by the continuation of the “millionaire’s tax”:

While all the details of Albany’s emerging “framework” for funding CUNY and SUNY are not yet available, we commend the legislative leaders and the governor for recognizing the need to stabilize funding for CUNY and SUNY. Such stability is long overdue. As the agreement is finalized, we call on Albany to ensure full protection of annual funding and necessary cost increases.

We object, however, to the annual tuition increases on which the framework is reportedly built. Five years of tuition increases is not the way to protect opportunity for CUNY students, nor is it the way to ensure long-term public investment in public higher education. Tuition increases are a tax in disguise—a tax that disproportionately hurts the poor.

The framework takes an important step toward protecting the lowest-income students from the sting of the proposed increases by providing credits for tuition in excess of the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) ceiling, and makes an important statement by ruling out differential tuition. Significant as these protections are, they do not go far enough. Thousands of students already fall through the cracks in TAP, and many others may be discouraged from entering college by the escalating cost. In addition, CUNY should not have to absorb the cost of offsetting tuition above the TAP ceiling.

There is another way—a better way—to fund CUNY. Instead of turning low- and middle-income students into cash machines, New York should continue the “millionaires’ tax.” It is unconscionable to ask the poorest people in the state to pay more for the chance of a college education when the wealthiest New Yorkers are not asked to contribute their fair share.

The Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, affiliated with NYSUT and the AFT, represents more than 22,000 faculty and professional staff at The City University of New York and the CUNY Research Foundation.

NYSUT BEGINS AD BLITZ AGAINST DESTRUCTIVE PROPERTY TAX CAP

ALBANY, N.Y. – Deeply concerned that a property tax cap “deal” hammered out by Albany leaders would destroy the ability of public schools to meet student needs — while also failing to provide the real tax relief that New Yorkers want — New York State United Teachers today launched a new television ad campaign opposing the ill-conceived plan the New York Times called “nothing more than a political crutch.”

The $1.3 million statewide ad, which can be found at www.nysut.org and on NYSUT’s YouTube channel, quotes a scathing May 26 Times editorial that declared the proposed tax cap would “do huge damage to already struggling schools and the state’s long-term economic competitiveness” at a time when public education is already reeling from more than $3 billion in state education cuts since 2008-09.

The proposed cap, which is also strongly opposed by the New York State AFL-CIO and the state NAACP, would lock in inequities stemming from three years of painful education cuts and exacerbate the achievement gap, which schools have been working diligently to close.

“Make no mistake, educators are taxpayers, too, and support real, meaningful tax relief,” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. “The agreement reached by the governor and Legislature fails to provide that relief. Instead, it would lead to the elimination of needed programs, even more overcrowded classrooms and thousands and thousands of additional layoffs. The impact on municipalities would cripple community colleges and prevent local governments from providing the essential public services that middle-class New Yorkers need.”

NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta added, “The only thing this ‘deal’ caps is the ability of educators and their schools to help students meet high standards. If enacted, it would destroy our schools by undemocratically allowing 40 percent of the voters to decide how much money local communities could spend to fund valuable education programs.”

The 30-second ad, which is running on network and cable stations statewide for at least 10 days, notes the Times’ editorial also called the proposed tax cap deal “disastrous,” hurting students, schools and families.

The ad urges viewers to call the Legislature and governor at 877-255-9417 and tell them, “This tax cap won’t work for anyone.”

NYSUT, the state’s largest union, represents more than 600,000 teachers, school-related professionals, academic and professional faculty in higher education, professionals in education and health care and retirees. NYSUT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.

Assembly tax cap bill would devastate schools, working families

ALBANY, N.Y. May 24, 2011 – New York State United Teachers said property tax cap legislation proposed today by the Assembly would hurt students and fracture communities, by allowing undemocratic minority rule to overpower the will of the majority of voters who want to invest in their local schools.

“New York would be devastated by the toughest cap in the nation at a time when its public schools have suffered three years of the toughest cuts to education,” said NYSUT President Richard C. Iannuzzi. “There’s no question this strikes at the heart of the educational needs of the most vulnerable students, especially children of color and children who live in poverty.

In fact, Iannuzzi said, “Two-thirds of the school budgets that would have failed under the undemocratic and unreasonable ‘super-majority’ vote proposed in this bill are in New York’s neediest school districts. That’s why this is wrong. That’s why this is inequitable. That’s why this is unfair.”

NYSUT Executive Vice President Andrew Pallotta noted the state NAACP, in a May 9 letter to Gov. Andrew Cuomo, strongly opposed the proposed 2 percent tax cap, saying it would “exacerbate the achievement gap” and “cause irreparable harm toward the education of students in this state.”

In addition to locking in inequities in budget cuts suffered by poor and rural school districts, Pallotta said the Assembly tax cap proposal makes no exemption for spiraling health insurance costs and skyrocketing transportation costs in a year in which the price of diesel fuel rose 30 percent. Both, he said, are beyond the ability of school districts and municipalities to control and would lead to even deeper cuts to education programs.

“The most glaring inequity is the undemocratic way this bad bill sets up a ‘protected class’ – the 40 percent of voters who would be able to block the will of the majority when they want to invest more in their children, their schools and their property values by providing the best education possible to students,” Pallotta said.

NYSUT President Iannuzzi said pending tax cap legislation is another blow to working New Yorkers.

“A terrible tax cap; three years of deep cuts to education; the state’s failure to meet its constitutional obligations to equalize funding to poor and rural school districts – coupled with billions of dollars in tax breaks for the wealthy – lead to the question: How much more can New York’s working families and low-wealth communities bear?”

NYSUT, the state’s largest union, represents more than 600,000 teachers, school-related professionals, academic and professional faculty in higher education, professionals in education and health care and retirees. NYSUT is affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers, National Education Association and the AFL-CIO.