Metro

City blows $250 million for schools due to impasse with UFT

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The city lost $250 million in state education aid at the stroke of midnight this morning as Mayor Bloomberg and the teachers union were reduced to trading insults after failing to reach a deal on teacher evaluations.

Negotiators for the city and the United Federation of Teachers threw up their hands prior to the midnight deadline set by Gov. Cuomo.

Without a deal in place, the city lost critically needed school aid.

“This is a deeply regrettable,” Bloomberg said at an afternoon press conference. “There was an agreement to be had here. We were actually very close. But unfortunately, every time we approached a deal in recent days, the UFT moved the finish line back.”

Just moments later, UFT President Michael Mulgrew disputed Bloomberg’s characterization of the negotiations and repeatedly called the mayor a liar.

Mulgrew insisted that the union had an agreement with the city but that the mayor scuttled it.

State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch blamed both sides for failing to secure a deal.

“Unfortunately, the adults couldn’t or wouldn’t come together for the sake of New York’s 1.1 million schoolchildren” she said in a statement released just after midnight.

The dispute even drew the attention of the White House. US Education Secretary Arne Duncan called Bloomberg and Mulgrew early yesterday to prod them to resolve the stalemate, sources said.

But Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott accused the union of proposing three deal breakers:

* Having the teacher-evaluation agreement expire in June 2015 — just two years after its implementation. It takes two years for officials to remove an ineffective teacher who holds tenure.

* Changing the scoring method in a way that would reduce the number of teachers deemed ineffective.

* Doubling the number of arbitration hearings for teachers challenging their ratings, which would make it more difficult to weed out bad apples.

Bloomberg said that letting the agreement lapse after two years “would essentially render [it] meaningless.”

Mulgrew confirmed that the union had proposed a two-year sunset for the evaluation system, but insisted it hadn’t been submitted at the last minute.

He said other school districts put time limits on evaluation programs to determine how they were working and to be able to make fixes.

Mulgrew also rebutted the mayor’s claim that the union proposed changes to the rating system so that fewer teachers would be rated poorly.

The new evaluation system for the first time would have rated teachers in part by how their students perform on standardized tests.