GothamSchools

Breaking a stalemate that hadn’t budged for months, the teachers union and the Department of Education have reached an agreement on how to drain a pool of teachers that has has been costing the city tens of millions of dollars — even though the teachers do not hold actual jobs. (I reported earlier that a tentative agreement was on the way; now, after the union’s executive board voted approvingly, it’s official.)

The group of teachers, known as the Absent Teacher Reserve, includes teachers who have been removed from their positions, but have not found new ones and cannot be fired because the union contract prevents that.

To deplete the pool, the agreement calls for offering monetary incentives to lure principals into hiring ATR members; they would not only have to pay less than the ATR members’ full salary levels, but they would also receive a lump sum of cash to sweeten the incentive. (more…)

Brooklyn House of Detention (via Flickr)

Comptroller William Thompson Jr. is tying a longstanding argument with the Bloomberg administration over whether to expand a downtown Brooklyn jail, a project that is slated to cost about $430 million, into a debate about … schools!

From a letter Thompson sent to the mayor today:

In these challenging fiscal times, the City would be better served to redirect this nearly half a billion dollars to school construction, an already proven under-funded need. Why threaten the successful economic revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn when the money could be better spent building nearly ten new schools?

Thompson first entered the push to build more schools, and to criticize the mayor for not building enough of them, this spring with a report arguing that public schools are now bursting at their seams. Here’s the full letter as a PDF.

Geoffrey Canada (via Flickr)

Harlem Children’s Zone founder Geoffrey Canada has been a big supporter of Joel Klein and Mayor Bloomberg’s education initiatives. So I was surprised yesterday to hear Canada criticize the kind of focused attention on test scores that has characterized their leadership.

The education world’s focus on basic academic results could put valuable programs at risk as the economy sours, Canada warned yesterday during a conference hosted by TC’s Campaign for Educational Equity.

He said he worries that the recession will hit poor communities such as Harlem the hardest, as government and private funders slash budgets for education and other services.

Canada said that distress could be compounded by the education world’s fixation with math and reading performance because other subjects could get short shrift when funds are scarce.

“Unfortunately, so much of the discussion is around academic outcomes that people are going to make some false choices,” Canada said. “We are going to create a hole that we are not going to be able to dig ourselves out of.” (more…)

The group that proposed eliminating zone lines to combat segregation in District 3 elementary schools isn’t happy with a parent council’s resolution about rezoning the district.

The Community Education Council for District 3 decided last week to take a simple approach to rezoning, recommending that two schools move to new buildings and that zone lines around two others be tweaked. Some in the community had opposed the plan on the grounds that the changes would make school buildings more segregated. But the CEC said it wasn’t permitted to consider diversity in the rezoning discussion.

In a public letter, the Center for Immigrant Families, which has long pushed for more integrated schools in the district, says it is “beyond comprehension” that the CEC’s resolution lacks “even a mention of what is equitable or fair.” (more…)

The United Federation of Teachers and the city Department of Education have reached a tentative agreement on how to treat teachers who have lost their official classroom jobs but are still on the city payroll, sources tell us. Leadership at the UFT will vote on whether to approve the agreement shortly.

I have no idea what is in this agreement. The Department of Education has supported a proposal to pull unplaced teachers off the payroll, while the union has dug in its heels against that, saying its priority is to maintain job security for its members. The union’s alternative proposal has included luring teachers into chosen retirement, rather than fire them, by offering buyout packages. (more…)

Stanford professor and lightning-rod Linda Darling-Hammond this morning did not confirm a report that she is chairing an education policy group to advise Barack Obama’s transition team. Instead, speaking at an event in D.C., she told the audience that Obama is forming an advisory group on education — and named one member of the group: Roy Romer, the former Colorado governor and Los Angeles superintendent who led the Ed in 08 campaign over the last year.

I wasn’t at the event, which was titled “Education Policy In Transition,” but a reliable person who was there filled me in.

The transition team matters because it hints at a bigger question: What kind of education policy will Obama build? Placing Darling-Hammond in a top position could be a signal that her policy tastes will rule the day. Some people would love this, since she has been a stringent critic of things like high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind and alternative teacher certification programs, like Teach For America. Others would hate it, like Teach For America.

The fact that she is not officially in charge of a policy team does not mean she never will be. But the real news is still the actual appointments made to the actual Obama Education Department, and those have yet to come.

Layoffs have started at the Department of Education’s central offices, beginning the round of 475 personnel cuts ordered by the mayor earlier this month, DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte confirmed for me today.

Forte said she couldn’t tell me how many employees have already gotten pink slips. But she said that some people who work at the department’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters in lower Manhattan have already been let go. So have some people who have administrative jobs that are not based at Tweed, a category that could include human resources staff, who are housed in downtown Brooklyn, and staff at the Integrated Service Centers that are sprinkled throughout the five boroughs.

Forte said that more employees will be laid off “in the next couple of weeks.”

Our understanding is that all of the DOE’s department heads were told how much of their budgets they needed to cut, and then it was up to them to decide how.

Have you heard of anyone who’s been told to pack up his or her desk? Let us know.

A principal e-mailed me this idea for what to call the nameless reformers:

Idealocrats
(Idealistic Bureaucrats)

Idealistic:

• All schools, all children, all communities are salvagable by me (and my organization)
• I (we) can change the world

Bureaucrats:

• There needs to have a large, politically connected organization that I run
• Expansion and replication forever!

I’m still trying to make sense of Randi Weingarten’s hyped speech yesterday. (Help? Here’s the Times writeup, the press release, and the full speech (PDF), for your reference.)

But I can say I enjoyed Mayor Bloomberg’s introduction, as transcribed by Edwize, the local union blog:

I’m delighted to see such a big turnout. Usually, Randi is a proponent of no more than 20 listeners to every speaker. She even tries to write that into our contracts. But now that she is here in Washington, she’s adopted the policy of our senior Senator from New York — ‘Leave no microphone behind.’

Sad Franklin graduated? CIS 339 Principal Jason Levy just wrote to let me know about this year’s cafeteria critic, Kevasha. From one of her recent posts:

I have A LOT to say about the lunchroom
1. The only thing that is actually sort of good are the chicken, plantains, rice, mozzarella sticks.
2. Let’s not talk about the dry sandwiches and the nasty pizzas and that nasty dirty brown meat that they think is a Salisbury steak. Also, they are supposed to give us nutrition stuff but they think greasy chicken and plantains are healthy.
3. The only thing that I can consider healthy is their fruit.

There’s more, including an educational comment from Dean of Instruction David Prinstein.

Also, quick correction: Franklin is 14 and wrote his blog when he was 13, so he is not technically a pre-teen.