Way back in January, Mayor Bloomberg let loose a broadside on the teachers union, which was imperiling $58 million in state funding as it attempted to protect lousy teachers from ever being fired.
So the mayor dropped a bombshell in his State of the City address — promising a bold end-run around the United Federation of Teachers: At 33 “persistently failing” schools ID’d by the state, the city would engineer a “turnaround” by removing up to 50 percent of the teachers and reopening the schools under new management — without union consent.
“The UFT insisted on provisions that would make it even harder to remove ineffective teachers,” Bloomberg said. “I can tell you this . . . We’re not going to wait around while ineffective teachers remain in those schools.”
Flash forward to this week — when City Hall hoisted a giant white flag and announced that, on second thought, seven of the 33 schools aren’t so bad after all.
“After careful consideration . . . we have come to believe that these schools have strong enough foundations to improve,” said Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.
Well now, isn’t that odd?
After all the earlier painting of the unions as Public Enemy No. 1, the union doesn’t even get a mention here.
And even though Bloomberg openly declared it city policy to revamp the schools — and the DOE filed papers to do so just five days before the flameout — a city spokesman said “a decision hadn’t been made yet” on that score.
Even as the principal of one of the seven schools, Harlem Renaissance High, said he was looking forward to the turnaround.
Something doesn’t add up here.
What Walcott didn’t mention was that all seven schools earned As or Bs on their latest city-issued school report cards.
Which was a potential black eye for Bloomberg: If he shuttered schools that the DOE gave top marks, he’d be admitting that his utterly bewildering grading system doesn’t count for much.
And if he let the self-evidently struggling schools stumble on, he’d be abandoning the students who, as he put it, “can’t afford to wait” for bad teachers to be removed.
Bloomberg opted for the latter.
Now let’s be clear: The mayor has done a world of good for tens of thousands of kids over the last decade by closing hundreds of failing schools and bringing some accountability into the education system.
But he has accomplished nothing good here: He’s revealed the school-grading system itself to be mostly useless, while also going back on his word.
A lame-duck mayor, which Bloomberg has become, doesn’t have much beyond his word and his reputation. Mayor Mike did immense harm to both this week.