In bad faith

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from the Department of Education’s last-minute walkout from negotiations over a teacher evaluation system for 33 schools placed in the transformation and restart models: It was always Tweed’s intention to refuse to enter into an agreement.

Throughout December, the UFT made intensive efforts to bring negotiations to a successful conclusion before the Dec. 31 deadline. Yet while UFT officers and staff canceled vacation plans to work on a potential agreement, key actors on the DOE side, such as the lawyer who writes up contractual agreements, were outside of New York City on vacation as the clock ticked down. 

To move the negotiations forward, two different UFT-DOE working committees were established. The first committee met often, established joint working groups to prepare local assessments and reached agreement in principle on every important issue before it. The second committee, which included two deputy chancellors, was an entirely different story. The DOE group would come strolling into every meeting of the committee at least 30 minutes late. Shortly after the first committee completed its work, the two deputy chancellors announced in the second committee that they would not agree with any real system of appeals and walked out, declaring the negotiations over. 

President Mulgrew asked Chancellor Walcott to submit this issue to binding arbitration, but Walcott immediately turned him down. Within a matter of minutes of the walkout, Tweed release a prepared statement blasting the UFT.

Equally telling was the issue over which Tweed broke up the negotiations: whether or not teachers rated ineffective would have a meaningful appeal. The DOE wanted to maintain the current U-rating appeals system, where appeals are heard by DOE-employed hearing officers. The DOE has stonewalled UFT requests to provide numbers of appeals filed and sustained under the current U-rating appeals system, forcing us to file a Freedom of Information request. The data that we do possess, coming from members who come to us to contest their ratings, suggests a reason why Tweed treats these numbers as state secrets: Of the last 2,000 appeals on the UFT’s books, the DOE has sustained the teacher a measly 10 times — a 99.5 percent rate of turning down appeals.

Appearing on his weekly radio show with John Gambling, Mayor Bloomberg explained why he opposed the UFT’s position that teachers should have the right to appeal ineffective ratings to an independent hearing officer. “The principals’ job is to decide who’s good, who’s bad,” the mayor said. “It’s their judgment, that’s their job.”

Before we take the mayor at his word, it is worth recalling his very different view of principal judgment when it came to tenure decisions. Nine months ago, the mayor argued that the 90 percent rate at which principals were recommending tenure was unacceptably high. In school after school, principals were ordered by superintendents to change positive recommendations for awarding tenure into deferrals. Clutching as a trophy the decline of awards of tenure to 58 percent, Bloomberg crowed that “we’ve turned what had been a joke interpretation of the state law, to make it something that you have to work hard, earn and show that you are better than the average bear” to get.

So why is a 90 percent rate of principals recommending tenure at the end of probation a joke but a 99.5 percent rate of turning down U-rating appeals perfectly acceptable? Because the first is a positive evaluation of teachers and the second is not. So long as principals are putting notches in Mayor Mike’s belt for fired teachers, their judgment should be treated as next to infallible. But when they offer positive evaluations, they will be overruled in a second. Nowhere was this bias clearer than in a U-rating appeal decision the UFT recently had overturned in an Article 78 proceeding in state court. On the record, the principal had explicitly said, again and again, that she was not contesting the teacher’s appeal, but the DOE still upheld the U-rating. It took a court to set things right.

The bottom line here is that Tweed’s vision of a good teacher evaluation process is not one in which decisions are made on the basis of sound educational judgment but one that delivers a requisite quota of dismissed teacher scalps. 

At the end of the day, one conclusion is inescapable: Mayor Bloomberg decided that he had no intention of negotiating in good faith with the UFT on a teacher evaluation system. The plan was always to blow up the negotiations required by law, with a strategy of then trying to pressure Albany to change the teacher evaluation law to eliminate meaningful appeals. From the beginning of this process, Bloomberg and Tweed were acting in bad faith.