Ceding ground to the city teachers’ union, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced changes yesterday to his plan for a new school budgeting system. The changes mean that it will be harder and take longer for the mayor to redistribute senior teachers, who tend to cluster in middle-class neighborhoods, more evenly across the school system.
The mayor also reached accords yesterday with an array of interest groups, which like the union have loudly opposed his latest plans to reorganize the school system. Among these, Mr. Bloomberg agreed to a demand by the New York Immigration Coalition for an increase in money allocated for children with limited English proficiency.
Mr. Bloomberg; Chancellor Joel I. Klein; the union president, Randi Weingarten; and many of the groups gathered at City Hall yesterday afternoon to announce the deals. The agreements with these groups, which included Acorn, New Yorkers for Smaller Class Size, and the Coalition for Educational Justice, bought the mayor some measure of political peace after weeks of complaints about his handling of the schools. The groups agreed to pull back plans for a big protest early next month.
