The deadline for submitting a teacher evaluation plan to state education officials was midnight Thursday; missing it would cost the city $250 million in education aid from Albany and possibly $200 million in grants. With just a few hours before the deadline, both Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, held news conferences to say that talks had broken down.
“The saddest part is that our students will pay the cost,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “I can’t tell you how much this pains me to see this happening.”
Each side blamed the other. But what was most clear was that the inability to reach an agreement, even with so much money as an incentive, was another sign of how frayed the relationship between the mayor and the city’s unions had become. The announcement came on the second day of a yellow-bus strike — the first in 34 years — that was called by the main bus drivers’ union and that forced more than 100,000 children, many of them with special needs, to find new ways to get to school.
In a statement, Mr. Mulgrew referred to the strike: “Thousands of parents have gotten a lesson this week, as the mayor’s ‘my way or the highway’ approach has left thousands of schoolchildren stranded at curbs across the city by the school bus strike. That same stubborn attitude on the mayor’s part now means that our schools will suffer a loss of millions of dollars in state aid.”
The teachers’ union has been working without a contract since just before Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election in 2009, a campaign in which the union declined to endorse a candidate despite its political and get-out-the-vote clout. It is clearly hoping for a more friendly administration next year, and is in turn being courted by several Democratic candidates for mayor.
In the past two weeks, the battle over the evaluations has taken on the form of a political lobbying campaign, with each side and its allies sniping at each other and the union buying a $1 million television advertising campaign that accused the mayor of “going after teachers again.”
The issue had its beginnings in 2010, when Gov. David A. Paterson signed legislation that was used to persuade the Obama administration to award the state a nearly $700 million Race to the Top grant. The law, since strengthened, required school districts to replace old evaluation systems that usually issued one of two ratings: “satisfactory” or, in rare cases, “unsatisfactory.”
The new system has a four-tiered rating structure — “highly effective,” “effective,” “developing” or “ineffective.” The goal was to make the evaluations more meaningful and to make it easier for districts to fire teachers who were repeatedly rated ineffective.
The State Legislature approved the broad outlines of the new teacher evaluation system. Twenty percent of the ratings were to be based on students’ growth on state tests. Another 20 percent were to be based on local measures, bargained with the union. Of the remaining 60 percent, classroom observations must be a majority of the criteria, but student surveys could be included.
The Legislature left each district to negotiate the details with the teachers’ union, and the state set Thursday as the deadline for submitting those plans. Besides New York City, only a few of the state’s more than 600 districts had not done so as of Thursday afternoon.
“Today is the final deadline for the handful of school districts, including New York City, that have failed to get their teacher evaluation systems in place,” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo said Thursday morning. “Please hear me — there will be no extensions or exceptions.”
Mr. Bloomberg said the deal had fallen apart in the middle of the night after the teachers’ union made last-minute demands that he said would “undercut the intent of the law.”
“There were things that they had come in at the last moment that were obviously designed to keep the deal from working,” he said.
First, the mayor said, the union demanded that a so-called sunset clause be put in place for 2015, effectively making it impossible to get rid of ineffective teachers because the dismissal process takes two years.
By the time a teacher would be dismissed, the evaluation system would no longer be in place, he said, making a “joke” of the law.
“To have such a sunset clause would be a sham,” Mr. Bloomberg added.
The union also demanded more arbitration ability for teachers facing dismissal, he said.
Shortly after the mayor held his news conference, Mr. Mulgrew went before the cameras at union headquarters and accused Mr. Bloomberg of “lying.”
Mr. Mulgrew said that the issues Mr. Bloomberg cited had not been introduced at the last minute, and that other districts had a sunset provision.
“We have example after example of this mayor not being able to work with anyone,” Mr. Mulgrew said.
