Extortion At 3020-a Arbitration

Extortion At 3020-a Arbitration in New York City
Parentadvocates.org
LINK

Michael Mulgrew

Black’s dictionary, 6th edition, defines “extortion” as: “The obtaining of property from another induced by wrongful use of actual or threatened force, violence or fear, or under color of official right.”

Lately it seems that every tenured employee of the NYC Board of Education brought to 3020-a arbitration is being terminated. The arbitrators currently serving on the UFT-BOE New York City panel seem to be unwilling or unable to find a lesser penalty for any level of misconduct or incompetence.

No one is really listening to the facts of any case (and I don’t mean ‘hearing’ the facts, I mean listening), and, in my opinion as well as in my experience with the UFT Representatives, the UFT Reps. and NYSUT Attorneys really believe that anyone receiving charges is actually guilty of those charges. Oh, the UFT Rep. will help you file for your arbitration hearing – either 3020-a or “U”rating appeal - but then you will not hear from the rep. again, no matter what you do. They don’t want to get involved and put themselves into a chance encounter with SCI (Special Commission of Investigation) or an agent (notice I don’t call them “investigators”) from the Office of Special Investigations (OSI) or Office of Equal Opportunity (OEO). People from these sub-agencies of the NYC BOE have the right of way.

The teachers who have had the sentence “you are terminated” handed to them since January 2011 don’t understand what happened. Of all the cases told to me by the teachers themselves, and after reviewing many pages of transcripts from many different cases, my opinion is that very few of the fired teachers deserved this fate. The rest were brought up on absurd charges that should have been written into a counseling memo (if at all) or given to the employee with, at most, a couple of weeks’ suspension. All were targets of a vindictive principal and/or “legal” (the NYC Office of General Counsel) who, under orders of “legal” and Mayor Bloomberg, go for employee termination in every case. There have been many success stories, too, but I’m here to tell you about a person who could have been successful in her case if her NYSUT attorney and the arbitrator had not used extortion and harassment to get her to resign.

While observing the hearings as a volunteer journalist, I was asked by Randi Weingarten to work as staff at the United Federation of Teachers and help members, including the members in temporary reassignment centers or “rubber rooms”. When I started at the UFT in August 2007 there were seven locations where tenured (and some non-tenured) employees sat every day, from about 8:30AM to 3-3:30 PM, depending on their school hours. In the 2007-2008 school year I went to all of the TRCs, then in 2008-2009 and 2009-2010 I visited each of my locations (25 Chapel Street, 355 Park Place in Brooklyn, and 501 Courtlandt Ave, Bronx) every week and stayed all day because the people in these locations wanted to talk to me, or anybody (and I was the only person who visited every week). As I wrote above, I attended the 3020-a hearings as a volunteer until 2011, when I started working with private attorneys hired for 3020-a.

The 'NYC Rubber Rooms' refers to the eight locations open until July 1 2010 scattered throughout New York City where targeted tenured employees of the NYC public schools were told to sit until charged, often for 2 - 7 years. I also use the term to mean the process of putting people out of their jobs under false pretenses. While these people sat and awaited their “fate,” which was unknown and some were never charged at all, The Gotcha Squad created charges against them without their knowledge or consent. The United Federation of Teachers (UFT) the New York State United Teachers legal group (NYSUT) and the New York City Board of Education (NYC BOE) all conspired together to deny thousands of people their constitutional due process rights. Many did not go away willingly or quietly after receiving unfair decisions through mediation/arbitration, so the 3020-a process was and currently is used to force employees out of the system. The NYC BOE Gotcha Squad could be held accountable if the charges are proven completely false and/or the employee brought to 3020-a is exonerated, so arbitrators on the UFT/BOE must prove something in order to get the NYC BOE paid back for the time and money spent on trying to get charges to stick (doesn’t matter if the charges are true or not).

The Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg, started the campaign to close the Temporary Re-Assignment Centers (“TRCs”) in 2007, after the New York City newspapers began a series of articles on the “Rubber Rooms”, popularizing the nickname as well as the fact that hundreds of teachers, school counselors and other tenured personnel were being warehoused at their full salaries while they sat for months, and years.

My sources say Bloomberg realized that the setting up of warehouses for teachers and NYC BOE personnel was one of the biggest errors of his administration. The stories ripped into the minds of New Yorkers, who pay the highest taxes in the country. There was an uproar of disgust at the stories of so many highly paid public servants who would sit around and do nothing on the public dime. Actually the truth of the matter is that no one was in charge, so no data existed about why all these employees were placed in the warehouses, and no one wanted to admit that many were placed there unfairly.

I decided in 2003 that someone ought to investigate what was going on, and it might as well be me. By the way, Mike Bloomberg’s second biggest mistake was hiring Joel Klein, whose style of verbal abuse of anyone who refused to do what he wanted was the opposite of what Bloomberg wanted.

In 2008 Bloomberg, ordered Joel Klein and the UFT to expedite all the 'teacher trials' (3020-a arbitration hearings). As this arbitration is compulsory, teachers who are charged and who request a hearing have only this venue to defend their position pursuant to Education Law 3020-a. The first agreement, in June 2008 actually was never implemented. Everyone ignored the clause in there that principals should be held accountable for making false claims against any of their employees. Also, the signing of a document giving everyone a “speedy” hearing outraged almost everyone sitting in the temporary re-assignment centers or TRCs. None of the rubber roomers accused of wrong-doing or incompetency wanted an ‘expedited’ hearing that denied him or her a full and fair hearing, but no one at the helm of the UFT or BOE was listening. I and several of the temporary re-assignment centers’ liaisons were protesting all the time on our blogs and in-person to the leaders of this fraud, to no avail.

The lawyers who are assigned to handle the 3020-a arbitration seem to be unwilling or unable to be bothered to spend large amounts of time on any single case. Speed to termination or penalty was the goal, not a serious review of all the facts. Many members complained to me and anyone else who would listen about how they, after sitting in a rubber room for two-7 (or more) years, were given 1 hour to talk about the case when their NYSUT lawyer finally met with them. 

From 2007 to 2010 there were simply too many UFT members charged with incompetency and/or misconduct to spend any amount speaking to and/or defending any one client. Some NYSUT attorneys made this very clear to their client, especially if the person spoke slowly, didn’t have all the papers necessary, whose language was not English, or who simply didn’t get The Plan, which was to quickly run through the evidence and get you fined, resigned, or terminated, by force if nothing else worked. I often asked the lawyers – as did their clients – to subpoena witnesses, so that the proper testimony could be recorded, but NYSUT will not subpoena witnesses. This is a lethal error, in my opinion.

For some reason, the NYSUT Attorneys think that their clients come to the offices at 52 Broadway without a small digital tape recorder in their pockets. The lack of understanding about the 21st Century technology is astonishing, particularly when many clients have taped the investigators, the principals, assistant principals, and all other personnel for years at their respective schools. Why the NYSUT attorneys wouldn’t think that their clients are taping them as well is beyond me. Anyway, in New York State the law protects anyone taping anybody else with whom he/she is in a conversation without telling the other person. NYSUT attorneys, and you know who you are, remember that whatever insults and comments you say will be repeated, and may haunt you in the future.

Back to a short recent update on the Rubber Rooms. On April 15, 2010 the UFT President Michael Mulgrew, NYC BOE CEO Joel Klein, and Mayor Mike Bloomberg announced that there was a new agreement to end the rubber rooms forever. This agreement was negotiated, signed, sealed, and delivered in total secrecy. Not I nor anyone else knew about it outside of a select few at the UFT headquarters and district offices. On the 15th I received a call at home from Luis Crespo, the Brooklyn TRC ‘Principal’ at 25 Chapel Street and he told me to get over there ASAP, as there was a major announcement in a few hours. It was 8AM.

The April 15, 2010 agreement mandated the closure of the eight locations that, altogether, held approximately 500 people awaiting their "trial", freedom and exoneration, or termination. The rubber room process – false charges substantiated at 3020-a followed by excessive penalties - didn't end, only the large warehouses specifically designated as "re-assignment locations".  

Teachers continue today to be thrown out of their classrooms often for little or no reason and without evidence of the allegations, but now, after April 15, 2010, the effort to get the people removed and tainted by charges has taken on a new urgency, fueled by Mike Bloomberg who dictates the rules. Most of the agreement dictated new rules for 3020-a that took away the few rights tenured members had. In my opinion, this agreement was a disaster in terms of honoring procedural and substantive due process rights for any person subjected to charges pursuant to 3020-a. The UFT has continued the "hands-off" strategy, and rules in the UFT contract are being ignored without any accountability. Employees charged with anything are removed from their classrooms and told to sit in the office of the school, the suspension room, at 65 Court Street, or 131 Livingston, both in Brooklyn, and Long Island City, just to name a few locations.

By 2010 the order from Mike Mulgrew, Klein and Bloomberg was to get all 'rubber roomers' off the arbitration calendar and, hopefully off of the NYC BOE payroll. To show how this played out, I will now tell the story of "Jane" - not her real name. I have redacted all mention of her real name in the papers that she gave me that details what happened to her at the hands of NYSUT attorney Keith Gross and Arbitrator Bonnie Siber Weinstock on May 13, 2010 to show how teachers are made into victims in this New York City arbitration known as 3020-a. Something must be done to stop what happened to Jane and countless others.

Jane was in the oldest rubber room, located at 25 Chapel Street in Brooklyn, NY, not far from the Brooklyn Bridge. She took a seat at the far end of the long room where she made beautiful and colorful small paper planes. I still have mine. She was very very upset at the charges as she loved 'her' children and her job, and would never do anything that represented harm to a child. She believed that the NYC BOE targeted her wrongly and framed her with false charges. After reading her charges and listening carefully to her story, my opinion was that she should never have been removed from her classroom. She was one of the “innocent” members of the rubber room. (My assessment/opinion).

On May 13, 2010 I happened to be in the room when a little before 12 noon Jane received a call from her NYSUT lawyer whose name is Keith Gross. He had an urgent message, that Jane must come to the administrative trial office immediately, at 51 Chambers Street, because her arbitrator, Bonnie Siber Weinstock, was waiting. Jane had been up most of the night before, and she was very tired we all heard her say, and couldn't she come on monday instead? Mr. Gross told her absolutely not.

As Jane told us later, she had no money that day for the subway to Chambers Street, so she ran across the Brooklyn Bridge to get to 51 Chambers Street ASAP, as Gross had ordered her to do. Jane went immediately into her hearing room with Gross, and Bonnie Siber Weinstock sat at the head of the table. The NYC BOE Attorney, Chrystal Barrows was there, Mr. Gross was there, and a transcriptionist from Ubiqus, the company hired by the NYC BOE to transcribe the record.

Jane told us Arbitrator Weinstock told her to sit down, and constantly mispronounced Jane’s last name. Jane has a simple last name and thought that the mis-pronounciation by Weinstock was to upset her from the very start of the meeting. It did. She was. Weinstock mentioned that if Jane went to a full hearing she could be terminated, and she told Jane that this is what would probably happen if she did not agree to sign the settlement agreement that was on the table. Jane really did not want to resign. She wanted to make some sort of agreement, but she didn’t want to be terminated, and she felt harassed by Weinstock. Nonetheless, Jane was not ready to sign her resignation, so Keith Gross said to her, let me take you outside for a moment.

When Gross got outside, Jane said, he and she went into another room, where Gross said something to the effect of “What do you think this is, a circus? You better resign, or you will be terminated”.

Jane was very scared at this point, so she said ok, but felt that this wasn’t ok at all. Gross and Jane went back into the arbitration room, and Weinstock put on the record that Jane had agreed to the terms of the settlement, and the hearing was over. In Exhibit "A" you will read the name 'Martin Weinstein'. He was the former Superintendent and coincidentally I happen to know Marty. I called him up and asked him if he ever saw or heard of the specifications and/or settlement of "Jane" - I of course gave Jane's real name - and Marty told me that he had never seen or heard that name, and never saw or read any paper with Jane's real name on it.

Jane did not return that day to Chapel Street, so a few days later I returned to Chapel Street and heard that she was still extremely upset, crying on and off. I sat down with her and she told me about what happened. I suggested that she call Mr. Gross up, which she did, and ask him to send her a copy of the transcript, which she received a few days later and gave to me.

I also asked her if she would write down her feelings of that day, which she did, and here is her statement:

"On May 13, 2010, my NYSUT Attorney, Keith Gross told me that I needed to immediately report to Chambers Street or the “deal” would be taken off the table – the deal – I could remain in the TRC until June 28 and not be sent to the ATR the minute I resigned – because there would be no need to be in the TRC once there was a “deal”.

Also, I’d get to receive my summer paychecks and receive my benefits through August – Benefits Id already earned. My Attorney said this was the best he could do for me and that if I didn’t take the deal that day it would be off the table and there would be a hearing beginning the following week . If I lost the case I would lose my pay from May through June.

We both felt there was no point in going through the hearing since I had other plans and new prospects for September.

I requested that I be allowed to meet with him to go over the paperwork on the following Monday – the 17th – because I was struggling to stay awake because I already started my course (?) transition and I was working nights and surviving on an average of 2 hours or less of sleep per night during the week.

I was told to stop making excuses, that even after I still wanted out that I did not have subway fare – no never until payday. I was told that I’d have to come up with the money if I was going to attend hearings because I literally had less than 20 dollars in my checking account that day.

I received a text message from Keith Gross to report to Chambers Street ASAP. I texted him the details of my situation and that if I felt better by the PM I’d walk over the bridge to get there.

I did do this. My Attorney went over the paperwork with me and the stipulations of the “deal”. I was assured I would never have a problem getting a teaching job outside of the city because the only information sent out would be the recommendation letter included in this packet.

When the arbitrator asked me if I had been coerced into making the agreement, I tried to explain that this really was coercion since there were few choices available to me and none that were very appealing.

She snapped at me and said that if I felt I was being coerced she would listen to the evidence at a three-day hearing and render her decision in three days. That’s what I heard. What is written in the transcript is quite different.

My Attorney made me go to the room next door and told me “This isn’t a game. And you said that you were ready to sign and you agree with the terms.”

I knew then that the UFT and DOE and NYSUT lawyers really are mostly all the same.

I was crying when I signed the paperwork. The arbitrator had the nerve to congratulate me and wish me luck. She never even asked how I pronounced my name – it was like she was deliberately pronouncing it incorrectly. If half my dues go to her for pay I want my half back.

I felt like all anyone cared about that day was how many people they could get off the payroll.

I did not “take a deal”. I quit because I don’t need or want anything from the DOE. But honestly, I want the DOE erased completely from my work record."

Jane now works at cleaning doctor's offices at night. She says that she is happy because she is out of the Department of Education.

Betsy Combier

betsy.combier@gmail.com

Editor, Advocatz.com
Editor, Parentadvocates.org
Editor, NYC Rubber Room Reporter
Editor, NYCourts - New York Court Corruption
Editor, NYC Public Voice

Need A Job? Apply To The BOE For The Position of Disciplinary Investigator

If you are a teacher and you have been subjected to an "investigation" by the Office of Special Investigation (OSI) or Special Commissioner of Investigation (SCI), you may be wondering what the heck happened, when the "investigator" substantiated the charge(s) against you on baseless 'facts'.

After many years of watching these agents of doom and after speaking with many principals whose names must remain anonymous, I have concluded the following:

1. The practice of going to a school and speaking to a principal about an incident before asking witnesses what happened violates the due process of the so-called "perpetrator", because the principal could be biased and could alter the so-called 'facts' in the case to suit the purpose of the employer, the NYC BOE, to terminate the teacher (i.e., the person has a motive to lie, make allegations and conclusions that cannot be supported, etc.).

2. an investigator should not, under rules of ethics, sit in the principal's office and wait while the principal, assistant principal, or some other administrator gathers "witnesses" and brings the students/employees to the principal's office to be interviewed. This practice ensures that the principal can bring in ONLY those alleged witnesses who have seen, supposedly, what happened, and if he/she did NOT see anything, then the statement can be discarded or altered to suit the original goal, which is to 'get' the teacher.

If you have been under investigation, and if you have had your 3020-a, look carefully at the testimony of the investigator in your case. He/she may have followed a practice as outlined above, which could lead to an action by you in violation of your rights.Unfortunately, arbitrators seldom, if ever, contradict the conclusions reached by Regina Loughran, Gerald Conroy, or other administrators at OSI, SCI or OEO, another wholly owned subsidiary of the NYC BOE. They definitely should.

Anyway, why not apply to be an investigator? Then you could help change one of the guideposts of the Gotcha Squad.

good luck,

Betsy Combier

Disciplinary Investigator (CFN)
Tracking Code
8043
Job Description
http://www.simplyhired.com/job-id/yqssy2kqm7/disciplinary-investigator-jobs/

Position Summary: The Disciplinary Investigator (CFN) supports the Senior Field Counsel and Instructional Superintendents in investigating and collecting evidence in legal and labor matters related to employee misconduct and incompetence.  This includes the preparation of documents and written reports in conjunction with administrative proceedings.  Performs related work.

Reports to: Senior Field Counsel, Office of Legal Services

Direct Reports: N/A

Key Relationships: Works collaboratively with the Senior Counsel to ensure an efficient and systematic approach to service delivery.  This entails working as a liaison to city, state and federal legal departments as well as the Office of Legal Services, the Division of School Support Services, Legal Services Staff Attorneys and Investigative Personnel.

Responsibilities 

• Examines and analyzes employee records and documents, case files and legal filings necessary to respond to requests for disciplinary hearings; makes recommendations as to course of action.
• Assists attorneys in trial preparation including drafting charges, maintenance and preparation of documents for trial, witness preparation and evidence gathering.
• Ensures timely notification of charges to employee to comply with labor agreement deadlines so hearing can proceed according to schedule.
• Coordinates disciplinary hearings; organizes trial assignments; evaluates tenure status of pedagogic employees; and responds to inquiries as a point of contact for principals.
• Coordinates and organizes trial assignments and arbitrator calendar.
• Assembles data, records, evidence and reports.
• Manages and maintains case databases and generates case reports.
• Responsible for preparing written and statistical reports for the Senior Field Counsel, and maintaining a calendar utilizing a computer to assist in investigations.
• Analyzes and evaluates records and documents, case files and legal filings in connection with various administrative proceedings involving the Department of Education such as Human Rights complaints, administrative grievances, other labor proceedings and other investigations as assigned by the Senior Field Counsel.
• Assists in the investigation, preparation and presentation of written reports and materials regarding issues of student disciplinary cases, complaints or inquiries from school staff and parents.
• Maintains case records, prepares reports, and analyzes personnel records.
• Responsible for managing and maintaining computer database of cases for the unit.
• Responds to legal and labor inquiries from administrative officials at various DOE offices and schools.

 Qualification Requirements

Minimum 

1. A four-year high school diploma or its educational equivalent and four years of satisfactory full-time experience in one or more of the fields of accounting, auditing, inspection, investigation personnel administration, and security, or in a major operational area of the employing agency; or
2. A baccalaureate degree from an accredited college; or
3. Education and/or experience equivalent to “1” or “2” above. 

Preferred 

• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
• Strong writing and organizational skills are preferred for the position.
• Efficient legal research skills.
• Strong computer skills, including word processing experience utilizing Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Outlook and Power Point), Adobe Acrobat, LexisNexis and other software.

Salary: $49,059+
(Internal candidates who are selected for this position and who currently hold comparable or less senior positions within the DOE will not make less than their current salary.)
Please submit a resume and cover letter with your application.  
Applications will be accepted through August 4, 2011.
NOTE: The filling of all positions is subject to budget availability and/or grant funding.

 AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER
It is the policy of the Department of Education of the City of New York to provide educational and employment opportunities without regard to race, color, religion, creed, ethnicity, national origin, alienage, citizenship status, age, marital status, partnership status, disability, sexual orientation, gender (sex), military status, prior record of arrest or conviction (except as permitted by law), predisposing genetic characteristics, or status as a victim of domestic violence, sexual offenses and stalking, and to maintain an environment free of harassment on any of the above-noted grounds, including sexual harassment or retaliation.  Inquiries regarding compliance with this equal opportunity policy may be directed to: Office of Equal Opportunity, 65 Court Street, Room 923, Brooklyn, New York 11201, or visit the OEO website at http://schools.nyc.gov/OEO
Job Location
65 Court St. (65 Court St.)
Position Type
Full-Time/Regular
New Posting
Yes
Readvertisement
No
Recanvass
No

Citizen Bloomberg and His Sustained Losing Streak

Mayor Bloomberg's legacy is that of an arrogant man who thought that he could pay for immunity from opposition as he put in motion the denial of federal, state, city, human, and Constitutional rights that have harmed people of all ages, races, religions and economic status. Anyone who gets in his way is targeted, and this campaign of harm transends any one group...and includes the courts.

We all have to hold him accountable for this.

Betsy Combier

Citizen Bloomberg
How our mayor has given us the business
 By Harry Siegel Wednesday, Jul 20 2011
LINK

After a charmed first decade in politics, Mayor Mike Bloomberg is mired in his first sustained losing streak.
His third term has been shaky, marked by the Snowpocalypse, the snowballing CityTime scandal, the backlash to Cathie Black and "government by cocktail party," and the rejection by Governor Andrew Cuomo of his plan to change how public-school teachers are hired and fired. With just a couple more years left in office, Bloomberg is starting to look every one of his 70 years.

Soon, he'll be just another billionaire.

The mayor's legacy is remarkably uncertain—largely because he's done his best to keep New Yorkers in the dark about what it is he's really set out to do in office.

In part, this is because the mayor has been far more effective at selling his Bloomberg brand than in getting things done. But it's also because what he has done—remaking and marketing New York as a "luxury city" and Manhattan as a big-business monoculture—he prefers to discuss with business groups rather than the voting public.

Withholding information while preaching transparency is a Bloomberg trademark. He aggressively keeps his private life private—meaning not just his weekends outside the city at "undisclosed" locations, but also his spending, his charitable giving, and his privately held business.

New Yorkers who have received city, campaign, or Bloomberg bucks in one form or another and who expect to do business again in the future agreed to speak anonymously with the Voice about the mayor's personality, the intersection of his political and private interests, and the goals he aims to achieve.

Several sources agreed to speak only after hearing what others had said. "It's Julius Caesar time," said one source. "There's lots of knives, but no one wants to be first." Others refused to be quoted, but encouraged me to give voice to their complaints—which sometimes diverged but often built into a sort of Greek chorus, an indictment of Bloomberg's mayoralty from those who have seen it in practice, and are vested in it.

"Hanging out with a billionaire does bad things to your brain," a source said. "It makes you think you're right."

The candidate who first ran in 2001 on his private-sector résumé and a deluge of advertising never did bother telling voters much about his agenda.

He pledged in that first run not to raise taxes and to step away from the daily running of his private company if elected to public office, but he brushed aside both vows after the election. In the case of his business, he claimed to have kept his word until his own testimony in a lawsuit unsealed in 2007 showed that he'd been far more active than he'd previously acknowledged.

The vast redevelopment schemes he unveiled in office were never mentioned on the stump.

New Yorkers have no trouble picturing Giuliani's New York, or Dinkins's "gorgeous mosaic," or Koch's "How'm-I-doing?" New York, or Beame's bankruptcy, or Lindsay's "Fun City."

After two full terms and change, what do you call Bloomberg's New York? In many ways, the mayor has been merely a caretaker.

While Bloomberg has called himself the "education mayor," his claimed success with the public schools has been exposed as largely accounting tricks.

When asked to describe the boss's vision for the city, aides and allies tack post-partisanship on to a checklist of Bloomberg LP buzzwords: transparency, data-driven results, and a CEO fixed on the bottom line. Pressed for actual accomplishments, the city's post-9/11 resurgence usually is mentioned first.

The attack and its economic fallout played key roles in all three of Bloomberg's runs, though the story has less to do with strong leadership than with good timing and salesmanship.

The attack itself, along with his opponent Mark Green's fumbled response to it, helped put Bloomberg over the top in 2001. The ensuing Fed-sponsored low-interest-rate bubble inflated New York's markets just in time to help rescue the mayor from record-low approval ratings and ensure his re-election in 2005. When that bubble finally burst in 2008, the Wall Street meltdown became the public rationale for the "emergency" third term.

"Post-partisanship" has always meant the party of Bloomberg, a convenient handle for a lifelong Democrat who left the party to avoid a contested primary in New York. After the presidential plotting that occupied most of his second term fell short (the big hit that began his losing streak), Bloomberg aimed for a soft landing with a nakedly undemocratic "emergency" bill to allow himself a third term. Instead, it alienated New Yorkers and wrecked his expensively built reputation as a "post-political" leader in the process.

Bloomberg LP's headquarters, the Bloomberg Tower. Nicknamed "the Death Star" by fans and foes alike, the huge screens displaying data, the glass walls, and the open floor space in place of private offices or even cubicles are all meant to symbolize "transparency"—one of the many buzzwords from his business that Citizen Bloomberg brought with him to City Hall.

Transparency has always been something Bloomberg has preferred to pitch rather than practice. In his 1997 business memoir, Bloomberg on Bloomberg—a sometimes valuable guide to the mayor's approach—he notes that "if public companies change what they're doing midstream, everyone panics. In a private company like Bloomberg, the analysts don't ask, and as to the fact that we don't know where we're going—so what? Neither did Columbus." It's a philosophy Bloomberg brought with him to City Hall.

Data-driven"? It's hard to credit that when crime numbers are artificially deflated by re-classifying rapes as misdemeanors, NYC-reported public school gains disappear when compared to outside measures, and when the city's 65 percent graduation rate is undercut by state tests showing only 21.4 percent of city students are ready for college.

Bloomberg's data-driven shtick," said one source voicing a sentiment repeated by several others, "means no one will tell him anything's failed."

As the city's "CEO," Bloomberg has managed only to track the ups and downs of Wall Street and the national economy. It's a strictly replacement-level performance.

New York went through its rainy-day reserves this year and, with the federal stimulus money spent, now faces $5 billion budget holes in each of the next three fiscal years. The coming budget crunch, says Manhattan Institute fellow Sol Stern, stems in large part from the mayor's penchant for awarding generous contracts to teachers and other public-sector workers that also add to the pension bills the mayor has at times written off as "fixed costs."

Pushing the idea that the city, like a corporation, has a bottom line, Bloomberg diverts attention from the fundamental issue every mayor faces: what the city ought to be doing.

So what kind of New York has Bloomberg tried to produce?

The "buck-a-year mayor" offered his business success and vast wealth as his main credentials for running New York. In office, he has envisioned a big-business-friendly city supporting a New Deal welfare state.

To make that work, he's promoted "knowledge workers" as New York's distinguishing resource, the way that waterways, rail lines, and manufacturing facilities were for industrial cities.

The mayor has often described that group (which, not coincidentally, matches the profile of Bloomberg terminal subscribers) as "the best and brightest," with no irony intended. The city now acts as its own advertisement to draw in members of the so-called "creative class" who are as likely to work in ICE (Ideas, Culture, Entertainment) as in the city's traditional FIRE (Finance, Real Estate, Insurance) base. In his typical salesman's formulation, Bloomberg often suggests that the only alternative to courting that crowd and their wealthy employers would be a cost-cutting race to the bottom.

How else to pay for the array of services the city provides if not by building a safe and beckoning environment for elites and their Ivy-educated service class to live and work in, unmolested by an untidy big city?

That promised environment is the vastly expanded and uninterrupted Midtown Central Business District, a coveted goal of the business and real estate communities for nearly a century—if one viewed with suspicion farther south on Wall Street, where Bloomberg effectively ceded control of Ground Zero to a succession of bumbling governors, a major reason that it's taken a decade for the Trade Center site to even begin rising back up.

Bloomberg has used a series of mega-plans including his Olympics bid, historic citywide rezoning changes, and pushing the sale of Stuyvesant Town to cut down what remained of working- and middle-class Manhattan. Gone, going, or forcibly shrinking are the Flower District, the Fur District, the Garment District, the Meatpacking District, and the Fulton Fish Market. Even the Diamond District is being nudged out of its 47th Street storefronts and into a city-subsidized new office tower.

"If New York is a business," the mayor said in 2003, "it isn't Walmart—it isn't trying to be the lowest-priced product in the market. It's a high-end product, maybe even a luxury product. New York offers tremendous value, but only for those companies able to capitalize on it."

(Perhaps oddly, the mayor is a big booster of Walmart's push to open stores in the city. Earlier this month, he defended the big-box store's $4 million donation to a city summer job program, snapping at a Times reporter, "You're telling me that your company's philanthropy doesn't look to see what is good for your company?" Asked how Walmart fits into the mayor's vision, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson told me on Twitter that it "fits into the strategy of creating jobs and capturing tax $$ here that are currently going to NJ and LI.")

But even as Wall Street has revived, ordinary New Yorkers haven't benefited from the promised trickle-down.

Middle-class incomes in New York have been stagnant for a decade, while prices have soared, with purchasing power dropping dramatically. Never mind Manhattan—Queens taken as its own city would be the fifth most expensive one in America. While unemployment in the city has dropped below 9 percent, through June the city had replaced only about half of the 146,000 jobs lost during the recession—and the new jobs have mostly been in low-paying retail, hospitality, and food services positions, according to the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy. Poorly paid health care and social-service jobs, often subsidized by the city, make up 17.4 percent of all private-sector jobs as of 2007, a nearly one-third increase since 1990. Only 3 percent of the private-sector jobs in New York are in relatively high-paying manufacturing positions as of 2007, a figure that's in the low double digits in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston. And the jobs expected to appear over the next decade are also clustered at the bottom of the pay scale.

A Marist Poll this year showed a striking 36 percent of New Yorkers under 35 intending to leave in the next five years, with 61 percent of that group citing the high cost of living. New York State already leads the nation in domestic out-migration—and New York City has had more than twice the exit rate of struggling upstate locations like Buffalo and Ithaca. More New Yorkers left the city in every year between 2002 and 2006 than in 1993, when the city was in far worse shape, with sky-high crime rates and an economy on the verge of collapse.

Despite the mayor's recruiting efforts, people with bachelor's degrees continue to leave the city in greater numbers than they arrive here, with Brooklyn alone declining by 12,933 such citizens in 2006, according to the Center for an Urban Future, with many of those leaving discouraged by New York's high costs, and the low quality of the public education available to their children.

Mike Bloomberg thinks everyone's dream is to come to the city with an MBA and find an inefficiency to exploit and become a billionaire, or at least get a good job with one, argued three unrelated sources who have worked with the mayor, all of whom asked not to be quoted directly on the mayor's view of himself. His idea that everyone's dream is to be on Park Avenue, say those sources, has alienated and insulted outer-borough "Koch Democrats." Their dream is a house, and Mike Bloomberg diminishes that dream because he thinks everyone wants to be him.

As Bloomberg memorably put it while floating his candidacy in early 2001: "What's a billionaire got to do with it? I mean, would you rather elect a poor person who didn't succeed? Look, I'm a great American dream."

Without an impressive public-school system, Bloomberg's vision for New York falls apart. But the public-school "miracle" the mayor touted for years has proven all pitch and no payoff.

Despite a massive 40 percent hike in per-pupil spending during Bloomberg's first two terms, along with a 43 percent boost in teacher pay, the "historic" gains the mayor trumpets failed to register at all on the gold-standard national tests taken by the same students. When new state leaders put an end to the state's easily gamed tests, what was left of the city's years of paper gains disappeared.

The ever-rising test scores Bloomberg had relentlessly promoted fell almost all the way back to the mundane levels that had prevailed when the mayor took control of the system in 2002. The incredible success he's claimed in closing the achievement gap between black and Hispanic students and their white and Asian peers that's vexed generations of educators disappeared entirely by some measures.

Without high-quality schools to produce a cadre of well-educated citizens attractive to employers, Bloomberg's implicit social contract with New Yorkers—that courting big businesses will help the little guy—breaks down, and the city's appeal to those businesses is seriously tarnished, along with its long-term appeal to employees with children.

"Bloomberg yoked his education agenda to his ambitions for higher office," said Stern, who had initially backed both mayoral control of the schools and Bloomberg's education agenda. "He recognized that the way he was going to prove [to voters nationwide] that he'd given more bang for the buck was through test scores, while at the same time he was also introducing cash incentives to principals and teachers for getting the scores up." (That program was quietly shuttered this month after a city-commissioned study found the payments had no impact on student performance.)

"They invited the corruption," Stern said, adding that he expects a numbers-juicing scandal to hit before Bloomberg leaves office. New Chancellor Dennis Walcott, responding to reports of grade-tampering in the city and a nationwide wave of such scandals, announced his own investigation this month, but it remains to be seen if the school system can fairly probe itself, and with the mayor's reputation hanging in the balance.

Asked in 2007 how New Yorkers could register their discontent with the schools now that he was presumably term-limited out of office, Bloomberg cracked, "Boo me at parades."

Some New Yorkers have taken him up on that, but more significantly they've also stopped caring enough to vote.

The mayor has indeed governed as the city CEO he promised to be in 2001, redefining public life so that businesses are "clients," citizens "customers," and Bloomberg the boss entrusted with the city's well-being, with no need to consult with the board before acting.

After 1.9 million New Yorkers took to the polls in the 1989 and 1993 contests between Dinkins and Giuliani, less than 1.5 million voted in 2001's nail-biter, and just 1.3 million turned out in 2005, when the outcome was never in doubt. Bloomberg nonetheless spent $84.6 million running up the score in a 19-point win intended to make him look "presidential." In 2009, the mayor, responding to internal polls showing most New Yorkers wanted him out, broke the $100 million mark to project inevitability and discourage voters from showing up at all. Despite perfect weather on election day, three out of every four voters didn't bother to participate. Just 1.2 million New Yorkers voted in an election that Bloomberg won by only 50,000 votes—collecting the fewest winning votes of any mayor since 1919, when there were 3 million fewer New Yorkers and women didn't have the franchise. For the first time, Bloomberg's spending failed to translate into popular support.

As the city's electorate shrank around him—even as its population grew by more than a million people between 1990 and 2010, Bloomberg's political stature swelled. The voters who just stayed home allowed the mayor to hold on to power despite an outnumbered base of the city's social and financial elites and the technocratic planners they often bankroll, a political and governing coalition last seen 40 years ago under fellow party-switcher John Lindsay.

"My neighbors [in Manhattan] don't vote in city primaries," said a source. "They vote in presidential elections where their vote is useless. They've privatized their lives. Private schools, country houses, Kindles instead of libraries, cars instead of trains."

In exchange for Citizen Bloomberg's benighted leadership, we've accepted a staggering array of conflicts of interest. The mayor's fortune renders obsolete the "traditional" model of interest groups buying off politicians. He not only does the reverse, buying off interest groups to advance his political agenda but also uses his fortune to staff and support his business. At the same time, he builds the Bloomberg brand that supports it all: Bloomberg LP, the Bloomberg Family Foundation, Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg News, Bloomberg View, Bloomberg Government, Bloomberg Law, Bloomberg Markets—not to mention Mayor Bloomberg.

The mayor wrote his own rules in a remarkably deferential 2002 agreement with the city's toothless Conflict of Interest Board, and then ignored them when it was convenient, continuing to be regularly involved in his company's affairs and acting in city matters where Bloomberg LP or Merrill Lynch (which until recently owned 20 percent of Bloomberg LP) had a stake.

Top-level City Hall workers, favored legislators, and others have moved freely between City Hall and the mayor's private interests, keeping it in the "Bloomberg Family." Bloomberg LP is now run by former Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, while the Bloomberg Family Foundation's approximately $2 billion endowment is controlled, on a "volunteer" basis, by Deputy Mayor Patti Harris. The prospect of a private Bloomberg jackpot job is on a lot of minds around City Hall and throughout New York.

Craig Johnson, the former state senator who lost a re-election bid after bucking his party to back the mayor in supporting charter schools, was hired this month by Bloomberg Law. "I wasn't about to let him go to some other company," Bloomberg said, all but winking. "I was thrilled to see my company hired him. I didn't have anything to do with that."

Beyond the $267 million he spent in three mayoral runs, he documented nearly $200 million more in "anonymous" charitable contributions. And that cool half-billion is just the spending Bloomberg has chosen to disclose.

Harris, now City Hall's highest-paid official, came to the administration from Bloomberg LP. Through her control of Bloomberg's ostensibly anonymous donations passed through the Carnegie Foundation to local institutions, she's served as the Medici Mayor's chief courtier—working for the city while using his private fortune to rent the silence, and occasionally the active assent, of its cultural groups on his behalf. That city giving dropped precipitously when Carnegie was replaced by the new Bloomberg Family Foundation, also run by Harris, which is now spreading cash to potential Bloomberg constituencies nationwide.

As Bloomberg explained in 1997, when Harris worked for Bloomberg LP: "Her sole job is to decide which philanthropic activities are appropriate for our company and to ensure we get our money's worth when we donate time, money, and jobs. One of Patti's questions is, 'When does helping others help us?'... Not only does Patti commit our dollars, she also follows, influences, and directs how our gifts are used, ensuring our objectives are met."

Elsewhere in his memoir, he adds: "Peer pressure: Its impact in the philanthropic world is hard to overstate."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News, supported by income from his sophisticated "Bloomberg terminals," has grown to employ about 2,500 journalists, and at some of the best rates in the industry.

After offering up vague statements about avoiding conflicts of interests—no easy task when the boss is a potential presidential candidate, mayor of the nation's biggest city, and one of that city's wealthiest men—Bloomberg View debuted in May with a remarkable opening editorial. The editors conceded that they didn't know yet what their principles would be—"We hope that over time a general philosophy will emerge"—but they were confident they would end up aligned with the "values embodied by Mike Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg LP."

In June, brand-name Bloomberg pundit Jonathan Alter launched into an exceptionally vitriolic attack on charter school detractor and former Bloomberg education adviser-turned-foe Diane Ravitch. The piece ran with no acknowledgment of the evident conflict of interest in taking shots at perhaps the most prominent critic of Citizen Bloomberg's education policies, under the Bloomberg View banner.

Bloomberg seems to view himself as congenitally above such conflicts, explaining in Bloomberg on Bloomberg, "Our reporters periodically go before our sales force and justify their journalistic coverage to the people getting feedback from the news story readers.... In return, the reporters get the opportunity to press the salespeople to provide more access, get news stories better distribution and credibility, bring in more businesspeople, politicians, sports figures and entertainers to be interviewed.... Most news organizations never connect reporters and commerce. At Bloomberg, they're as close to seamless as it can get."

Speaking of seamless, in 2000 Bloomberg rolled out a new city section, just in time for the boss's run. Jonathan Capehart, brought in from Newsday, ended up doing double duty as candidate Bloomberg's policy tutor and his host in different corners of the city, according to former Times reporter Joyce Purnick's biography of the mayor, Mike Bloomberg: Money, Power, Politics. When the mayor-elect reached out to Al Sharpton on election night to tell him "things will be different with me as mayor," it was Bloomberg News employee Capehart who placed the call.

Much as City Hall staffers dream of a Bloomberg job as the big payoff for their loyal labors, few reporters will go out of their way to tweak a potential employer, let alone one who frequently lunches with their current boss. And especially one whose long-rumored ambition is to buy the Times one of these days—a buzz that the mayor's camp hasn't discouraged, Berlusconi comparisons be damned. (The Italian prime minister and Ross Perot are two of Bloomberg's neighbors when he weekends in Bermuda).

Along with Berlusconi, other comparisons heard in various conversations about Bloomberg included his Trump-like leveraging of his name ("It would be me and my name at risk. I would become the Colonel Sanders of financial information services.... I was Bloomberg—Bloomberg was money—and money talked"), his Hearst-like seduction of legislators with private jet rides and self-serving party-jumping, and his Rockefeller-like use of his private fortune on behalf of the state GOP, though for very different reasons.

The lifelong Democrat who became a Republican to dodge the mayoral primary has also given millions to the state GOP (as well as $250,000 to the Republican National Committee in 2002, and $7 million in support of the 2004 Republican convention in Manhattan). The cash shipments continued even after the mayor left the party in 2007 to hitch his star to the misleadingly named "Independence Party"—run in the city by crackpot cultist Lenora Fulani.

While Bloomberg's support for the GOP dwarfed the money he channeled to the Independence Party, both received just a drop from his enormous bucket of cash—which still made Bloomberg easily the state Republicans' biggest patron, his table scraps their feast. The party repaid that support in part with their ballot line in 2009, two years after he'd left the party, to go along with his "Independence" line, which proved crucial to his 2001 and 2009 wins, and would have been key had his presidential plans moved forward.

His Albany cash, though, has often failed to pay off. Perhaps that's because Bloomberg hasn't been willing or able to salt the state's interest groups and leadership class as thoroughly as he has the city's—his political persuasiveness and popularity have always been coterminous with his cash. In each of his terms, major aims—Far West Side development, congestion pricing, and teacher hiring—have been simply abandoned in the capitol without so much as a vote. Those losses came despite dealing with three weak governors before Cuomo, whose dramatic ascent has left the mayor further diminished. (One of Bloomberg's rare wins in the state capitol, mayoral control of the city schools, was actually given to him by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, the mayor's most frequent Albany foil—who had withheld the same gift from Mayor Giuliani.)

Given Citizen Bloomberg's success in buying off the city's opinion makers, cultural institutions, community groups, and organized protesters, it's no wonder the mayoralty began to feel too small for him, and he spent the bulk of his second term trying to leverage it into the presidency. While his signature congestion-pricing plan failed in the city, it succeeded in landing him on the cover of Time. He followed up by a nationwide victory tour with then-Chancellor Joel Klein and well-compensated occasional sidekick Sharpton to tout the school system's "amazing results."

The master salesman, who talked of transparency while keeping his own cards down, used his fortune to establish at City Hall the "benevolent dictatorship" he saw at Salomon and then employed in his private business: "Nor did so-called corporate democracy get in the way. 'Empowerment' wasn't a concept back then, nor was 'self-improvement' or 'consensus,' " Bloomberg writes in his business memoir. "The managing partner in those days made all the important decisions. I suspect that many times, he didn't even tell the executive committee after he'd decided something, much less consult them before. I'd bet they never had a committee vote. I know they never polled the rest of us on anything. This was a dictatorship, pure and simple. But a benevolent one."

But dictatorships never last. "Once Bloomberg leaves a room, it doesn't exist to him," said one source, skeptical that the mayor would care about maintaining his influence after he exits office. But given the value of his name, he is taking care to be sure that it isn't damaged in the exit process.

Campaign filings released last Friday show the lame duck nonetheless spent $5.6 million on TV and direct mail spots promoting himself in March and April. And after failing to groom a successor, the mayor has belatedly been trying to institutionalize parts of the Bloomberg way.

"The administration is finally trying to do systematic reform, that's what [Stephen] Goldsmith is here for," a source said, referring to the former Indianapolis mayor who emerged as a star of the 1990s "reinventing government" movement, and signed on for Bloomberg's third term as a deputy mayor. "I think he's really frustrated. He complains a lot about lawyers."

While Police Commissioner Ray Kelly reportedly mulls a Republican run, buzz has been building that Bloomberg will support City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, his Democratic partner in changing the term-limits law, as his successor. A slush-fund scandal left her damaged, but a third term she and the mayor pushed through bought her time to recover, along with a chip to cash with him. Mayor Koch last month outright said that Bloomberg had told him he was backing Quinn, before Koch dialed back his words later the same day.

But some of the Bloomberg-for-Quinn hype has come from operatives with reason to find a new patron once the billionaire exits office. The mayor, meanwhile, has reason to want a pliant speaker in his final years.

"Even if he does back her," a source noted, "he's not giving her $100 million for a campaign, or to wield as mayor. Once he's gone, it's done."

hsiegel@villagevoice.com

Mike Mulgrew Loses In NYS Supreme Court His Request To Stop The Closing of 19 Schools

Mike Mulgrew and the NAACP have lost in the New York State Supreme Court their request for an injunction against the closing of 19 public schools.

New York State Supreme Court Judge Paul Feinman

See here (Scribd) or here
Wikipedia has a rather extensive listing for the prior lawsuit in 2010.

City may proceed with school closings: court
LINK

NEW YORK, July 22 (Reuters) - New York City may go ahead with a plan to shutter 22 low-performing schools, a Manhattan judge ruled on Thursday, dealing a blow to the city's biggest teacher's union.

The United Federation of Teachers and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People had accused the New York City Department of Education of failing to honor a 2010 agreement that the union claimed would enable the struggling schools to survive.

In denying the UFT and NAACP a preliminary injunction, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Paul Feinman said the union had not presented clear and convincing evidence that the schools could be "easily turned around."

"To adopt plaintiff's position would require the court to engage in speculation as to what might or might not have come to pass had the Letter Agreement been strictly followed," Feinman wrote.

Feinman also ruled that the city could move 15 charter schools into buildings occupied by public schools, a move that the union contended would lead to overcrowding and strain existing facilities.

But he stressed that his decision was only temporary and said the ruling did not address "the ultimate questions" posed by the suit.

Peter Kadushian, a spokesman for the union, said in a statement that while the injunction was denied, the holding "does not affect the underlying issues of fairness and due process in the school co-locations and closings that are part of this lawsuit."

PLANS TO IMPROVE SCHOOLS

The tug of war between the union and the city began last year after the union tried to block the DOE from closing 19 struggling schools.

After a judge held that the city's closure plan violated the state education law, the city said in a letter agreement it would take certain steps aimed at improving the schools. These included offering online programs designed to help over-age students graduate and deploying social workers and psychologists in the embattled schools.

In December 2010, the Department of Education announced that it planned to shut down 27 schools.

The UFT, joined by the NAACP and the Alliance for Quality Education, sued the DOE, claiming breach of contract and seeking to stop the city from closing most of the underperforming schools. They also maintained the city had presented inadequate justification for its plan to have charter schools and public schools share space in the same building.

Feinman acknowledged that closing the struggling schools could harm students by exposing them to "substandard education environmental environments."

But he said forcing the DOE to comply with the letter agreement "may or may not benefit students, depending upon one's faith in the Education Plan there embodied to remedy all or most of a failing school's problems."

"The equities do not tip in either direction," Feinman concluded.

For the plaintiffs: Charles Moerdler, Alan Klinger and Ernst Rosenberger of Stroock & Stroock & Lavan. Carol Gerstl and Adam Ross of United Federation of Teachers.

For the DOE: Chlarens Orsland and Emily Sweet of the New York City Law Department.

The case is Mulgrew v. The Board of Education, New York State Supreme court, New York County, 105855/11.
(Reporting by Noeleen Walder)

July 21, 2011
Judge Rules Against Union on City Plan to Close Schools
By SHARON OTTERMAN, NY TIMES

In a defeat for the city’s teachers’ union, a judge ruled on Thursday that the Education Department could proceed with plans to close 22 schools because of poor performance and place 15 charter schools in the buildings of traditional schools in September.

In his ruling in a lawsuit brought by the union, the United Federation of Teachers, Justice Paul G. Feinman of State Supreme Court wrote that the suit had not met the standard that would be required for the court to immediately stop the city from moving forward. The union failed to clearly prove that the city had acted improperly in its treatment of the closing schools, the judge said, and the city’s plans to locate the charter schools had enough detail to challenge claims that the planning was deficient.

“Because plaintiffs have failed to show a likelihood of success on the merits of their claims,” the judge ruled, “their motion must be denied.”

But Justice Feinman did not dismiss the case entirely, and the union said on Thursday that it planned to move forward with other aspects of the lawsuit. Practically speaking, that means that all the schools will open and close as scheduled in September, even as the court battle continues.

“While Judge Feinman has declined our request for an injunction, his decision does not affect the underlying issues of fairness and due process” that are part of the lawsuit, said Dick Riley, a spokesman for the teachers’ union.

The lawsuit, filed in May, had threatened to alter arrangements for thousands of students at the opening of the school year and to set the stage for a logistical nightmare.

The N.A.A.C.P. had joined with the union in the suit, which among its other claims, said that the city had discriminated against traditional district schools by giving charter schools more time in common spaces like auditoriums and gymnasiums than the traditional schools whose buildings they will share.

Last year, the union and the N.A.A.C.P. prevailed in a similar lawsuit that focused only on school closings, and those schools remained open. The city was then ordered to take steps to improve the process by which it closed schools, and the union argued that those steps had not been taken.

The lawsuit rose to national attention over the last two months, largely because of the N.A.A.C.P.’s involvement. Critics charged that the civil rights organization was on the wrong side of the charter school issue because in New York City, many high-performing charter schools serve mostly black students.

But Hazel N. Dukes, the leader of the New York branch of the N.A.A.C.P., stood her ground, even after she was criticized for accusing a charter school mother of “doing the business of slave masters” by defending the school her daughter attended.

While the lawsuit will continue, the charter school operators and the schools chancellor, Dennis M. Walcott, hailed the decision as a victory. The judge’s reasoning, they said, largely favored the city.

“I am incredibly heartened by the court’s decision tonight,” Mr. Walcott said. “I know this decision will come as great comfort and relief to the thousands of children who have been in limbo, wondering what the outcome of this case would be.”

Anthony Harmon (at left), the UFT’s director of parent and community outreach, and Nicholas Cruz, the parent and community liaison for the Bronx UFT office, pass out coffee and tea.

Coffee? Tea? Muffin?
by Ron Isaac and Maisie McAdoo , published June 27, 2011
LINK

UFT members greeted charter school demonstrators in front of 52 Broadway on June 27 with offers of breakfast treats and conversation as the charter advocates called on the union to drop its lawsuit against 18 co-locations.

Their chants yielded to dialogue as UFTers engaged them in constructive conversation. “Parents of our children need not and should not be pitted against each other. The situation is a byproduct of DOE policy,” UFT Director of Staff LeRoy Barr told one of the parents.

“All children should have a good education,” said charter parent Myrna Prince. “I couldn’t agree more,” a UFT staffer replied to her.

The lawsuit, filed jointly with the NAACP and other plaintiffs, asks that the city and the Department of Education halt the closings of 21 schools and to ensure that students in district buildings where the 18 charters wish to co-locate or expand have the same access to facilities as the charters do.

A state judge on June 21 extended an order 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 the request for an injunction. The judge is expected to issue a ruling in the coming weeks.

The charter parents were organized by Success Charter Networks founder Eva Moskowitz, who stood at the back of the small demonstration. They carried signs saying, “Your Lawsuit Hurts My Child” and denounced the UFT.

But as conversations broke out, the protesters accepted the coffee, and the children they brought with them smiled shyly as they munched on UFT bagels and jelly.

Ed In The Apple Gets It all Wrong

Many bloggers out there right now believe that the UFT has decidedly abandoned members. The blog "Ed In The Apple" sometimes has some interesting stuff, but in the latest article, gets it all wrong, in my opinion, of course.

First, Mike Bloomberg's legacy has already been created, and this is the widely recognized failure to improve education in New York City for any child, and the failure to hire a competent steward at the helm of the Board of Education who could guide reform in the right direction.

Second, The Peer Intervention Plus program violates the contract in that the PIP+ observer works for the Principal, and does not do pre-observations - or post- observations - and most UFT reps. are advising their members not to sign up.

Betsy Combier

Now That the “No Layoff” Plan Is In Place Can a Teacher Contract Be Far Behind? Bloomberg Must Extinguish Failed Klein Policies and Begin To Create His Own Legacy.

Posted on July 14, 2011 1 Comment

LINK

“Except as expressly provided herein, this Agreement shall not in any way constitute a modification of, limitation on or a waiver of any provision of any collective bargaining agreement between the parties or past practices”

“No UFT-represented employee shall be laid off from the date of this Agreement through the last day of work day of the 2011-2012 school year …” After months of threatening 4166 teacher layoffs the Mayor folded and agreed to a one-year “no layoff” agreement, a one-year suspension of study sabbaticals for 2012-2013, and a rather dense description regarding the assignment and possible absorption of ATRs.

With the layoff issue off the table, at least for a year, can the Union and the Mayor move forward and negotiate a successor agreement to the contract which ended November, 2009?

Quietly, the Department is moving toward changing classroom practice through implementation of the Common Core Standards and creating space within the school day for teachers to meet in facilitated common planning time.

If meaningful change on the school level, in is to take place the Mayor must willing to discard Klein policies and by doing so create a new legacy as his third term inexorably moves toward a conclusion. Klein abjured the classroom, he posited that personnel and structural changes would impact classroom practice, and used the bully pulpit and the power of the media, aka spin, to both advocate and claim success.

The Mayor trumpets continuing increases in graduation rates,

The four-year graduation rate in New York City rose to a record 65% in 2010, Mayor Bloomberg announced … touting the numbers as a sign his administration’s reforms have boosted student success.

The pro-Bloomberg Wall Street Journal  casts a cloud on the Mayor’s plaudits,

The enthusiasm was damped somewhat by the state Department
of Education, which pointed out that most of the graduates weren’t ready for college. In New York City, only 35% of those who graduated were deemed prepared for college.

Statewide, the graduation rate increased to 73.4% from 71.8%. But the state said that of those who started high school statewide in 2006, only 36.7% who graduated were ready for college four years later. In New York City, 22% were ready for college after four years of high school.

With deeply flawed, unconstrained credit recovery, easier exams and questions about the grading of Regents exams the bloom is off the Klein rose.

Perhaps the most deeply flawed of all the Klein faux “innovations” is the policy which requires that excessed teachers are not placed in other schools but placed in a pool that replaces absent teachers on a day-to-day basis, at a cost to the system of over $100 million a
year.

The theory: every single teacher entering a school must be chosen by the principal, with strong suggestions that new teachers will be more malleable and effective than senior teachers. There is no evidence that this policy has improved student achievement, there is evidence that the policy has eroded student achievement.

1. The number of new teachers who have been discontinued, aka, fired, or have had their probation extended has increased sharply. Principals have been making poor new hire choices.

2. Teacher attrition remains high. About half of all teachers continue to leave within five years, and, the rate is much higher in lower achieving schools. A February, 2011 report from the Alliance for NYC Schools Research shows, This study reveals that 55% of the teachers who entered middle schools between 2002 and 2009 left these schools within three years. Further, nearly 60% of departing middle school teachers left the New York City public school system altogether and another 23% either moved to schools that did not include the middle grades (Grades 6-8) or took on non-teaching positions.

3. In addition to the appalling attrition rate under the Klein created Open Market; over 3,000 teachers a year move from school to school. A recent analysis,  Who Leaves: Teacher Attrition and Student Achievement is enlightening,

Almost a quarter of entering public-school teachers leave teaching within the first three years (U.S. Department of Education, 2007). The rates are higher in schools with low academic achievement, leading many to conclude that policies to reduce teacher attrition are needed in order to improve student achievement.

High attrition would be particularly problematic if those leaving were the more able teachers. While teachers who have stronger academic backgrounds, measured by test scores and the competitiveness of their undergraduate institutions, are more likely to leave teaching. Teacher retention may affect student learning in several ways. First, in high-turnover schools, students may be more likely to have inexperienced teachers who we know are less effective on average.

Second, high turnover creates instability in schools, making it more difficult to have coherent instruction. This instability may be particularly problematic in schools trying to implement reforms, as new teachers coming in each year are likely to repeat mistakes, rather than improve upon reform implementation.

Third, high turnover can be costly in that time and effort is needed to continuously recruit teachers.

In addition to all these factors, turnover can reduce student learning if more effective teachers are the ones more likely to leave.

Teachers are more likely to stay in schools having higher student achievement, and teachers – especially white teachers – are more likely to stay in schools with higher proportions of white students.

Teachers who score higher on tests of academic achievement are more likely to leave, as are teachers whose home town is farther from the school in which they teach.

Attributes of teachers and the students they teach appear to interact in important ways. In particular, teachers having stronger qualifications (as measured by general-knowledge certification-exam scores) are more likely to quit or transfer than are less-qualified teachers, especially if they teach in low-achieving schools

The ATR pool concept is a failure, it not only does not improve student achievement there is an excellent argument that it reduces student achievement, at an enormous financial cost. The ending of the policy would place more experienced teachers in the classroom, and, free up more than $100 millions a year.

I hear teachers saying, “why negotiate with the current mayor, wait him out, in 2 1/2 years we’ll have a new mayor.”

There is absolutely no guarantee that the “next mayor” will be willing to negotiate away contract clauses or policies that teachers don’t want, or, negotiate a decent raise. The more time that goes by the more difficult it will be to change what are becoming “long established” policies.

Seize every opportunity is a rule of bargaining.

Getting to a resolution to the ATR mess is difficult, however, we have a guide. The District 79 Reorganization Plan  provides a framework.

A few suggestions:

1. Teachers with both age and service time can be offered non-pensionable one-time cash buyouts (see UFT Contract Article 17 F).

2. Teachers with, perhaps, five years of consecutive satisfactory ratings can be assigned to vacancies within their district.

3. Teachers who received an unsatisfactory rating can have their service assessed by a joint labor-management team. If placed in a “not qualified” category, see #4,

4. Teacher identified as “not qualified” in #3 above must participate in Peer Intervention Plus Program.

Both the Union and the Department will have “problems” with the recommendations supra, however these or other ideas can provide a basis to move beyond the ATR pool debacle.

The ATR process is poor policy that not only does not fulfill it’s goal, staffing schools with more effective teachers, it has achieved the opposite.

Eliminating the ATR pool, simply placing excess teachers into vacancies in their district and the implementation of the new teacher-principal evaluation law would remove a roadblock to moving forward with a new contract and a more collaborative relationship between management and labor.

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