The honeymoon’s over.
Not even 24 hours after officials toasted the deal on a statewide framework for new teacher evaluations, Mayor Bloomberg and teachers’ union president Michael Mulgrew made it clear the city has anything but smooth sailing ahead.
Bloomberg indicated this morning he not only intends to shutter 33 schools already on the chopping block as a way to remove ineffective teachers, but he also threatened to close more schools in coming years until the union signs off on a local rating system.
The state-level deal left 80 percent of the fine print up for local negotiation.
Gov. Cuomo also set January 2013 as a deadline for a local deal — after which the state would revoke more than $200 million in increased aid to city schools.
“Let’s use the process that was negotiated and agreed to yesterday rather than stretching it out,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show this morning. “If you stretch it out another year, the Department of Education…has the ability to change out a lot of poorly performing teachers [by closing schools].”
In his State of the City speech last month, Bloomberg said he was invoking an obscure provision in the teachers’ contract to overhaul 33 schools that the state had identified as low-performing in 2010.
The contract allows him to close the schools, remove half the staff and reopen the schools under new leadership.
“We can do the same thing next year with a whole bunch more schools,” he threatened. “That gives an impetus to everybody to come together.”
But Mulgrew is similarly using the planned closures as a bargaining chip — suggesting he could hold up a local deal on the evaluations if the mayor doesn’t back off.
Of the 33 targeted schools, 7 were recently rated with A or B grades by city, and a number of other schools have been moving in the right direction.
“If he wants to continue down this path of destruction, closing schools, upsetting school communities, attacking teachers, trying to figure out how to fire them — then we will not work well over what’s left of his tenure,” Mulgrew said on WNYC radio this morning. “If he wants to work with us, we want to work with him.”
Additional reporting by David Seifman