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...
...Still, amid the declarations of newfound collaboration there were signs of tension. Both the administration and its critics insisted that they had conceded little.
And not all of the mayor’s critics signed on. Noticeably absent were members of elected parent groups; the leader of one such group issued a blunt statement criticizing the deals.
“This agreement provides no relief for disenfranchised parents who were once again denied a seat at the table,” said Tim Johnson, the chairman of the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, a citywide group. “Not one elected parent leader stood with the mayor today. Our fight for full empowerment for public school parents continues.”
Also absent were representatives of groups that had hoped to reach a deal to limit the growing number of standardized exams that city schoolchildren face each year.
