Mayor Bloomberg is laying down the gauntlet on the city’s under-performing teachers – promising to get rid of many of them in a bombshell announcement sure to cause a stir with their union.
In his 11th annual State of the City Speech in the Bronx today, hizzoner is announcing that he could boot up to half the teachers in dozens of struggling schools whose federal grant funding was pulled earlier this month because of a fight with the United Federation of Teachers over evaluations.
Bloomberg said he is going to circumvent the UFT and reapply for the $58 million in lost federal funds for these schools.
But he is selecting a different strategy to turn the schools around as he applies for this money: He wants to set up a committee in each of the schools receiving money to rate and boot the worst teachers from their classrooms.
“We need to be able to identify those ineffective teachers and give them the support they need to grow,” he said. “And if that doesn’t work, we need to be able to move them out.”
It is hard to imagine the UFT, which is often at odds with the mayor over teacher tenure and evaluations, supporting this initiative but he doesn’t need their support.
He also offered incentives for successful teachers in his speech.
The mayor wants to pay up to $25,000 of the student loans for teachers who graduated college with high marks and commit to working in the city for a certain time period.
He also wants to give merit pay – something the UFT has traditionally opposed – in the form of a $20,000 salary bump for teachers who receive the highest ratings for two consecutive years.
It is unclear whether the union has a say in these changes.
The city also will seek to open three more extended-length high schools that serve as employee pipelines for high-tech companies and grant students associate degrees. The first such school, Pathways in Technology early College HS, opened in Brooklyn this year.