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In a dramatic turn-around, the city now has a key supporter in its corner as it moves forward with a controversial plan to reorganize the city school system.Mayor Michael Bloomberg and United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten announced Thursday evening that they've reached a deal on a plan.
"We are here to announce a renewed commitment to work together to improve the quality of public education for our city's 1.1 million students," said the mayor.
“As we stopped yelling at each other a lot, publicly, and started talking to each other, you saw that there was more areas of agreement than disagreement," said Weingarten. "We’ve spent a whole bunch of time in the last several days really talking about those kind of things."
Weingarten and the mayor also said they plan to form a task force to bring parents on board with the plan.
“We have to bring people together. We have to have people all sign on,” said Bloomberg.
Over the past several months, parents and teachers have vocally protested the city's reorganization plan, saying their concerns weren't being adequately addressed in the plan and that the plan itself remained obscure.
Opponents of the plan spoke out about class size reduction, teacher tenure, improving middle schools, and greater parent involvement.
"People wanted to explicitly use student test scores [to determine if a teacher gets tenured],” said Weingarten. “We said no, and the new state law doesn't allow it."
Under the agreement announced Thursday, more money will be spent on bilingual education and both sides will work on a plan to reduce class size.
"We're determined to, without hurting those who've been lucky enough to be on the high end of the funding, help those on the low end catch up," said Bloomberg.
The overall plan includes the reorganization of the school system's ten citywide regions into 32 smaller districts, and a revamping of the school's funding formula.
The issue of reorganizing the districts continues to face some resistance.
"We're not there,” said ACORN Executive Director Bertha Lewis. “Because we lived under the 32 school districts and understood how dysfunctional they were."
Former critics were more optimistic about the announcements that came during the press conference.
"I feel like it’s the first time that the mayor and chancellor are admitting to the fact that there are a huge number of stakeholders out there who want real changes in our schools, and different changes from the ones they're trying to impose," said Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters.
With the yelling apparently over, now the hard work starts of hammering out the details on these school issues.
-Michael Meenan - NY1
