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Within hours of the publication of the Teacher Data Reports (TDRs) last Friday, the UFT began to hear stories of teachers and their families being hounded by news reporters from the New York Post. On Friday evening, New York Post reporters appeared at the door of the father of Pascale Mauclair, a sixth grade teacher at P.S. 11, the Kathryn Phelan School, which is located in the Woodside section of Queens. They told Mauclair's father that his daughter was one of the worst teachers in New York City, based solely on the TDR reports, and that they were looking to  interview her. They then made their way to Mauclair's home, where she told them that she did not want to comment on the matter. The Post reporters rang Mauclair's bell and knocked on her window all Saturday morning. She finally called the police, who told the reporters that since they were inside her private housing development, they were on private property and had to leave. The reporters rang the bell again, leading to a second visit from the police and a final warning to leave. Later, Mauclair's neighbors told her that that the Post reporters had been asking them questions about her.

Here's something you won't read too often in RHSU: "UFT president Michael Mulgrew is right." But he is. Just today, a New York state appellate court ruled that New York City must release reports that show value-added data on a teacher-by-teacher basis, with teachers' names attached. I agree with Mulgrew that this is an unfortunate decision.

It's been a busy week.  On Wednesday there was a spirited rally on the steps of Tweed to protest the continued cuts to school budgets, the loss of art, music & afterschool program, and the sharp increases in class sizes; a good summary of the event is on the  Ed Vox blog.  There were great speeches by parents and elected officials, and I met a large contingent from PS  217 in Roosevelt Island, protesting Kindergarten classes of 28 and 5th grade classes of 34, even though there are empty rooms in the building.   On Thursday, I joined a UFT press conference at Murry Bergtraum HS, where Michael Mulgrew  reported  on the 7,000 classes that violate the union limits, with more than 250,000 students sitting (or standing) in these oversized classes during the first ten days of school.  (Contractual class size limits - already far too large - are 25 students in Kindergarten; 32 students in grades 1-6:  33 students in non-title I MS; 30 in Title I MS; 34 students in HS; and 50 students in gym.)

After three years of budget cuts, the city's schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.

Will the bigger classes affect achievement? Results from just a single year suggest they will. The UFT Research Dept. looked at fourth grade, where class sizes rose an average of about one-half a child (0.47) last year. Then we divided the fourth grade into schools where class size rose more than the average, and schools where it rose less, and looked at their achievement in math. The difference was pronounced. While the majority of schools improved in math last year, schools where 4th grade class sizes rose by less than the average improved two percentage points more than schools that had larger-than-average class size increases.

Check out this letter sent Wednesday to NY State Education Commissioner King, from the UFT, Class Size Matters,  NAACP & AQE, pointing out the numerous legal flaws as regards this year's Contracts for Excellence (C4E) process.

Over the last few weeks, a small team of New York City building inspectors descended upon UFT headquarters, responding to a mysterious 311 call. Our building has been placed under police surveillance, and at times police have been posted as guards at our doors. The One Percent appears to be a tad bit irritated by the UFT's support for the Occupy Wall Street movement.

"But to apply a letter grade or a numerical ranking to a professional is to radically misunderstand the complex set of qualities that make someone good at what they do. It is an effort by economists and statisticians to quantify activities that are at heart matters of judgment, not productivity. Professionals must be judged by other professionals, by their peers. Nowhere is this more true than among educators, whose success at teaching character, wisdom, and judgment cannot be measured by standardized tests. "

What teachers have been saying for years about the content on state ELA tests has finally resonated with journalists, professors and even the state education commissioner. After 8th-graders voiced their bewilderment over the questions on this year's infamous "Hare and the Pineapple" passage, Commissioner John King struck it from the test.

The United Federation of Teachers lost what appears to be its final chance to block the release of thousands of teachers' ratings, and school officials said Tuesday they will make the reports public within the next couple of weeks.

The honeymoon's over. Not even 24 hours after officials toasted the deal on a statewide framework for new teacher evaluations, Mayor Bloomberg and teachers' union president Michael Mulgrew made it clear the city has anything but smooth sailing ahead.

The New York City teachers' union has long called the process used by the city's Education Department for reviewing and dismissing struggling teachers partisan and unfair. But now, as part of an agreement reached Thursday, the Education Department and the United Federation of Teachers will put into effect an evaluation system that will bring independent observers into the city's classrooms to monitor the weakest teachers.

Teachers at the New York French American Charter School in Harlem will be allowed to unionize, a state agency decided on Wednesday, overriding objections from the school's administration. The United Federation of Teachers had filed a petition with the state's Public Employment Relations Board in December to represent teachers and other staff members at French American, a Harlem charter school with bilingual instruction that opened in 2010. But the school challenged the petition, arguing that three teachers had been coerced into joining the union.

Opponents of Success Academy Cobble Hill recently created perhaps the most apropos hashtag in the brief history of Twitter: "#nosuccess." Some might find it rather odd that, in a city suffering from so much educational failure, those claiming to speak for children would promote "no success." While the intended meaning of the hashtag was obvious, let's be clear: While our opponents don't want our schools to exist, they also block much-needed reforms that could bring about far-reaching success. But what else would we expect from the United Federation of Teachers, which has stopped at nothing to prevent great new public charters from opening and to shut down high-performing charters? (It sued to do just that this spring; thankfully, it lost.)

Last week, New York State's education commissioner, John B. King Jr., used perhaps the only leverage he has to compel school districts and their unions to agree on the parameters of an evaluation system for teachers and principals assigned to struggling schools: He shut off the federal grants that were meant to improve them. On Monday, as Dr. King sat on a Board of Regents meeting inside the Education Department offices here, just across from the state's Capitol, protesters convened on the steps outside to decry his decision. The gathering was noticeable not because of its size - there were perhaps 20 people attending - but because it brought together two sides whose disagreements presumably were to blame for the grants' suspension: school officials and teachers' union representatives.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, directly confronting leaders of the teachers' union, proposed on Thursday a merit-pay system that would award top performers with $20,000 raises and threatened to remove as many as half of those working in dozens of struggling schools.

The education proposals in Bloomberg's State of the City address are being described as "ambitious" in the New York Times and GothamSchools. I see it differently.

Minutes after Mayor Bloomberg finished delivering his State of the City address today, reactions started flying about his aggressive slate of education proposals. The reactions ranged from withering (in the case of UFT President Michael Mulgrew) to bewildered (Ernest Logan, principals union president) to supportive (charter school operator Eva Moskowitz and others whose organizations would benefit from the proposals). Below, I've compiled the complete set of education-related reactions that dropped into my inbox. I'll add to the list as more reactions roll in.

There is but one conclusion that can be drawn from the NYC Department of Education's last minute walk out of negotiations over a teacher evaluation system for 33 schools placed in the Transformation and Restart models: it was always Tweed's intention to refuse to enter into an agreement for teacher evaluations.

When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg delivered his first State of the City address in 2002, to a wounded city still shaken by the death and destruction of a terrorist attack, he vowed to rebuild Lower Manhattan, but he also trained his focus on the city's much-maligned school system. "We must strengthen teacher evaluation and training," Mr. Bloomberg said. "We must improve teacher retention by focusing compensation on those educators just starting their careers." Ten years later, having wrested control of the sprawling system and transformed it into a national laboratory for reform, Mr. Bloomberg devoted most of his penultimate State of the City speech on Thursday to education, which he hopes will form the cornerstone of his legacy.