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New York City Talks on Teacher Evaluations
Jan 17th 2013, 19:47

The New York City teachers' union said Thursday that it had failed to reach agreement with the Bloomberg administration on a new system for evaluating the city's 75,000 public school teachers, throwing the city into immediate danger of losing out on up to $450 million in state money and raising the possibility of cuts to staffs and programs.

The deadline for submission of a teacher evaluation plan to state education officials is midnight, and the statement by the union, the United Federation of Teachers, implied the deadline would be missed. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday morning that he would not extend the deadline; missing it would cost the city $250 million in education aid from Albany and possibly $200 million in grants.

In a statement issued at 1:50 p.m., Michael Mulgrew, the president of the union, laid the blame for the failure at the feet of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. Mr. Mulgrew said that he had notified Mr. Cuomo and other state officials that, "despite long nights of negotiation and a willingness on the part of teachers" to meet the city's Department of Education halfway in any deal, the Bloomberg administration's intransigence on prime issues got in the way.

"It is particularly painful to make this announcement because last night our negotiators had reached agreement – but Mayor Bloomberg blew the deal up in the early hours today, and despite the involvement of state officials we could not put it back together," Mr. Mulgrew said in his statement.

It went on, referring to the school bus strike that began Wednesday: "Thousands of parents have gotten a lesson this week, as the mayor's `my way or the highway' approach has left thousands of schoolchildren stranded at curbs across the city by the school bus strike. That same stubborn attitude on the mayor's part now means that our schools will suffer a loss of millions of dollars in state aid."

The mayor had scheduled a 2:30 p.m. news conference to discuss the negotiations. A spokesman for the office of John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, declined to immediately comment.

Whether the union's move was a final threat to try to eke out a more favorable deal, or was truly the end of negotiations, remained unclear.

The events come after years of legislative maneuvers, negotiations that seemed to start and stall and, in recent weeks, an increasingly nasty round of acrimonious exchanges between those in the union and Mayor Bloomberg.

Both sides claimed that a solution was too important to let slip through their grasp. Yet, New York City in recent days remained one of only a small number of the 700 school districts in the state not to have submitted their plans to Mr. King's office.

The issue had its beginnings in 2010, when Gov. David A. Paterson signed legislation that was used to persuade the Obama administration to award the state a nearly $700 million Race to the Top grant. The law, since strengthened, required school districts to replace old evaluation systems that were criticized as reflecting too little on teacher performance by issuing marks of "satisfactory" or "unsatisfactory."

"Unsatisfactory" marks were rarely given and the new system had at its heart a goal of helping school systems identify meaningful teaching while more easily stripping out and firing inefficient teachers.

Though the Legislature approved the broad outlines of the new teacher evaluation system, it left each district to negotiate the details with the teachers' unions. Thursday is the deadline for submitting those negotiated plans to the state.

"Today is the final deadline for the handful of school districts, including New York City, that have failed to get their teacher evaluation systems in place," Mr. Cuomo said Thursday. "Please hear me — there will be no extensions or exceptions."

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