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The UFT has filed legal papers with the state Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) to declare impasse in the negotiations between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education (DOE) over a teacher evaluation system for schools that had been placed in the Transformation and Restart models of school improvement. We have charged the DOE with walking away from the negotiations that they were required to complete in good faith by the agreement they had signed with the UFT last June. Further, since the DOE has explicitly refused to negotiate an appeals system, with repeated statements to the UFT in negotiations that they would never overturn a supervisor's rating on an issue of substance - a stance confirmed by the 99.5% rate at which they currently turn down U rating appeals - they are in direct violation of state education law which requires a substantive appeals process. If PERB declares impasse, as we have reason to believe they will, the NYC DOE will be forced back to the negotiations table to complete the process they agreed to undertake last June.

After an Oct. 14 evening panel featuring UFT President Michael Mulgrew, celebrated educator Deborah Meier, Green Dot founder Steve Barr and parent advocate Mona Davids, the more than 100 charter school educators in attendance returned to UFT headquarters on Oct. 15 for a full day of workshops and panels on "building a progressive charter school movement."

Educators at Academy of the City Charter School in Queens announced on May 21 that they have organized a union at the school and intend to join the UFT. Teachers and staff at the school believe that unionization will help them better support their students' needs.

"When we sit down with the UFT, there are two groups in the room: the UFT and our school children," Mayor Bloomberg said, adding that the latter group is "who we work for…We have an obligation to stand up for their lives, their futures." He called for merit pay, for more a more stringent teacher evaluation system, more (union-free) charter schools. "It's a legacy thing. Remember, 'I am the education mayor.' Two years left and [test] scores have been flat the whole time. Closing schools has not really worked out. We have the warehousing of students," said Mr. Mulgrew. "Those are problematic, so I'm sure he's worried about his legacy."

"Recent days has seen a nasty tweet fight break out, as Mayor Bloomberg's proxies - Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, StudentsFirst honcho and former Bloomberg Albany lobbyist Micah Lasher, and former television anchor Campbell Brown - have used the 140 character forum to launch a vicious slander that the UFT protects sexual predators, defending their return to the classroom.  Their argument is that since arbitrators who decide dismissal hearings against tenured teachers are jointly selected by the Department of Education and the UFT, they split the difference in decisions and do not fire teachers who have engaged in sexual misconduct or sexually inappropriate behavior. The only solution, they argue, is to overturn tenure and give the DoE the power of judge, jury and executioner. The UFT has a position of zero tolerance on sexual misconduct, and we have negotiated in our contract the strongest penalties for sexual misconduct in any collective bargaining agreement in the state of New York. If an adult violates the trust that is at the heart of the educator-student relationship with an act of sexual misconduct or with sexually inappropriate behavior, dismissal is the only appropriate response."

The UFT on March 5 issued a subpoena and notices of deposition to compel the testimony of former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, along with 11 Department of Education officials, in a continuing lawsuit over the DOE's plans to close a group of city schools. The orders seek the testimony of the current and former DOE officials as part of a lawsuit filed by the UFT, NAACP, parents and elected officials in March 2011. That lawsuit charges that the DOE failed to provide the additional services it had promised to help 19 schools, 2 of which the DOE has since closed and 15 of which it voted to close last year.

Over a year ago, the UFT submitted a Freedom of Information request for emails between Joel Klein and other top DoE brass, on the one hand, and the leaders of the New York City Charter School Center, the New York Charter School Association, Democrats for Education Reform and other leading supporters of corporate education reform. As it does with FOIL requests that do not suit their purposes, the DoE stonewalled the request. (Take note of the contrast with the DoE's eagerness to release the Teacher Data Reports.) Last month, the UFT went to court, arguing that the DoE's continual delays amounted to constructive denial of the FOIL law. Facing the inevitable, last Friday the DoE began to release the emails, sending several hundred to the UFT and the news media. Another 15,000 emails are still to come, so keep your eyes peeled on this one. Here are some of the highlights of the emails just released.

The UFT on April 3 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to force the Department of Education to hand over copies of official emails, including exchanges about school closings and charter schools, that the union has been requesting since May 2010. The union cited a statement by Mayor Bloomberg that "to say that the parents shouldn't get what information is available is just an outrage," in arguing that the city's nearly two-year delay in providing the emails represents a "constructive denial" of the requests under the state's Freedom of Information law.

Let's face it. The past few contracts have seen a major erosion of core rights for teachers, and not just here in NYC.  I am a chapter leader, so I have little time to write these missives in the blogoshphere, as I engage in daily combat for my members trying to protect what rights they have left. So, I think alarmist reactions are in order, especially given anything of complexity negotiated by our union.  I have been around long enough to remember a document called Teaching for the 21st Century. Most UFT members of unaware of its existence. Yet, it was the primary driver of their Article 8 rights, which include how teachers are to be observed and assessed as professionals. It came out in the late 90s and was heralded with much fanfare as a great collaboration between the Board of Education and the UFT.

In their original conception, charter schools were to be innovative public schools, freed from the stifling bureaucracy of school districts, professionally led and directed by their teachers and organically connected to the communities they served. Charter schools would be laboratories of educational experimentation, expanding our repertoire of best educational practices. This was the vision put forward by the late UFT and AFT President Al Shanker, when he became one of the very first advocates for charter schools, and it is the vision we relied upon when we started our own UFT Charter School in East New York and partnered with Green Dot to establish a charter school in the South Bronx.

The teachers union is threatening to curb its efforts toward new teacher evaluations if the Department of Education doesn't remind principals again that the old evaluation system is still in place. The threat comes at the end of an angry letter sent by UFT Secretary Michael Mendel sent to the DOE yesterday. In the letter, Mendel says that UFT members report some principals are preparing to use the Danielson Framework, an evaluation model that the DOE favors, to rate teachers - even though the union hasn't agreed to the change.

In another victory for the UFT's effort to organize New York City charter schools, educators at Fahari Academy Charter School in Brooklyn announced on Oct. 4 that they have organized a union at the school and intend to join the UFT.

The UFT and the Council of School Supervisors & Administrators on May 7 filed suit in New York State Supreme Court to prevent the "sham" closing and restaffing of 24 schools that would be reopened almost immediately in the same buildings and with the same students. The lawsuit seeks a temporary restraining order and injunction that would be in effect until the issue can be resolved through arbitration.

Capping a yearlong political battle by the UFT and its labor and community allies for economic equity, the New York State Legislature on Dec. 6 passed legislation that brought a measure of fairness to the state tax code while providing a much-needed boost in education funding for next year.

Mulgrew expressed hope that Governor Cuomo's call to school districts to adopt new evaluation systems for teachers or risk losing a portion of their state funding would put pressure on the mayor and the DOE to return to the bargaining table and negotiate an evaluation system for 33 restart and transformation schools.

Just days after negotiations broke down between the city and the teachers' union, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, gave his side of what happened and why it's costing the city nearly $60 million in federal grants, in an interview with Inside City Hall's Errol Louis.

The following open letter from UFT President Michael Mulgrew to New York City parents ran as a full-page ad in the New York Daily News on Jan. 9.

The UFT released a television ad the week of Jan. 23 that is bluntly critical of Mayor Bloomberg's management of our schools. As I travel around the city and visit schools, educators and parents who have seen the ad have thanked me for taking on the mayor and sounding an alarm about the state of our schools. But people who aren't in schools - and who don't get to see every day the consequences of the mayor's policies - have asked me why I decided to run such a "negative" ad. We created this ad to help people understand that Mayor Bloomberg is running our school system into the ground.

Before union leaders blasted off an angry letter to the Department of Education to complain about teacher evaluation abuse last month, they had to confirm that their complaints were warranted. To do that, they went straight to the woman who designed the evaluation model the city favors: Charlotte Danielson. Danielson's "Framework for Teaching" has been adopted for evaluation purposes at 33 struggling schools. But the union was receiving reports from chapter leaders that principals in at least one other network of schools were using a checklist based on the model to evaluate teachers. When the UFT obtained a copy of one of the checklists, it shared it with Danielson herself to get her thoughts.

"As charter school proponents go to Albany this week to plead their case, let's examine the realities behind their claims of stretched resources, unique student demand and stellar academic results."