Mayor Bloomberg waved a white flag at the teachers union Wednesday and admitted that his attempt to transform 24 failing schools has, well . . . failed.
After an arbitrator reinstated 3,600 pink-slipped school staffers last month — and a state judge refused to intervene immediately last week — Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said he’ll make sure all the failed schools open on schedule “with minimal disruption” in the fall.
The United Federation of Teachers is whooping, but there’s nothing to cheer — unless you think letting two dozen “persistently lowest-achieving schools” run on autopilot is a good thing.
The city has appealed the decision and has a court date scheduled for July 24.
But time is short. As the mayor said Friday, “Those kids are, if we lose in court, are going to go another year without getting an education. And unfortunately . . . as we all know, they never, ever catch up.”
So now the UFT is back to business — the business of depriving 30,000 kids in these schools of a chance at a decent education.
It’s worth recalling how the city got here.
Bloomberg made an end-run around the UFT after a dispute with the union cost the city millions in federal funding for the schools. He sought federal “turnaround” grants — which required firing all 3,600 teachers and administrators at the schools. They’d close and be renamed, and only half the staff could return when the schools reopened, many with new leadership.
Only the best teachers would get rehired.
But the plan hit a roadblock. “We have to operate under the principle that the staff who were at the school will be coming back,” Walcott now says. Which means new teachers hired for next year are in limbo, as are the bad ones on the way out.
It’s all a neat trick by the UFT.
This winter it attacked Bloomberg for trying to close these awful schools — which is legal under union contracts.
But now (in a legal ploy) it says the move violates their contracts because the schools aren’t really closing. “It’s the same students in the same buildings doing the same things,” and only the names on the red brick are changing, said a top UFT lawyer.
But that’s precisely wrong.
The schools would be wholly remade.
The turnaround would free kids from bottom-rung teachers who are otherwise almost impossible to dismiss.
Which is why the unions are angry — and why they filed a grievance that sent things over to a labor arbitrator, whose $1,800-a-day job depends on keeping the unions happy so he doesn’t get blackballed from future work.
The city can’t even get a fair hearing from arbitrators when it tries to fire teachers who are caught molesting students. What chance did it have of getting approval to fire thousands of teachers for the humdrum crime of being mediocre?
Never mind that state Education Commissioner John King approved the closings and the firings as fully legit.
The mayor’s plan was an inspired move to cut through the UFT’s morass, but the city was betting against the house.
Now that July 24 court date beckons, and it’s up to a state judge to decide whether to fix the mess created by the unions and furthered by the arbitrator.
Or students will suffer the consequences.