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Plans for a new teacher rating system for New York City schools that would include measures of student performance-a hallmark of national education reform efforts-were dealt a setback on Friday after negotiations broke down between the city and the teachers union.

Negotiations between New York City's Education Department and union officials over a new evaluation system for teachers and principals broke down on Friday, jeopardizing roughly $60 million in federal grants designated to help 33 struggling schools across the city.

Aim: How can the ability to identify and understand basic propaganda techniques empower you to make better informed decisions?

SKDKnickerbocker (SKD) is one of the top firms providing outside assistance to labor coalitions while raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars for work to undermine organized labor, particularly teachers unions. Led by Anita Dunn, a former White House communications director and current Democratic Party advisor, SKD has spearheaded state-based campaigns for Students First, the anti-teacher's union charter and school privatization group founded by former Chancellor of DC Public Schools Michelle Rhee.

What educators have known for years is now obvious for all to see-this mayor has no regard for students, teachers or public education as an institution.  He has had a large-scale plan, which started at the beginning of his tenure and has now reached its apex. Here's how he did it

Nine takeaways from last night's raucous Panel for Educational Policy meeting, for those who don't have time for 5,000-plus words and minute-to-minute updates

In the days leading up to the release of ratings for thousands of New York City public-school teachers on Friday, hundreds of e-mails poured into the in-box of Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers.

"We have unreliable reports, we have bad data inside of them, we have absolutely discredited state tests, yet the mayor chose to say it's O.K. to release these reports," he said. "I want to be very clear on this point of the story: The mayor and the city chose to go to court and not to fight the FOIL," Mr. Mulgrew continued, referring to the Freedom of Information Law. "It was their responsibility to fight it and they said, 'No, we would not do it.' So they've done a great disservice to the school community, to the teachers, the parents, and everybody else."

New York City voters strongly disapprove of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's handling of the public schools, and are much more likely to trust the teachers' union than the mayor to advocate for students, according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Wednesday morning. But voters also support many of Mr. Bloomberg's most recent education proposals, even though they have been opposed or questioned by the United Federation of Teachers. The poll found, for example, that voters support the mayor's desire to use teacher performance, not seniority, as the key factor when layoffs are required. They also favor his proposals to increase salaries for the highest-performing teachers and to make it easier to remove teachers who are chronically underperforming.

"In this post on reclaiming the conversation on education I offer strong views on the need to reorganize and redirect the American Federation of Teachers and the National Educational Association if these unions are to survive as a meaningful force for and ally of public education. I believe teachers and their unions have the potential to be agents for progressive educational and social change, but I am not sure that they will. It means taking risks that the organizations so far do not appear willing to make."

The original Shanker conception of a public "charter school" was not ideological and political, but educational. In recent years, however, political ideologues opposed to public education and to teacher unions have sought to turn the charter school concept into its opposite, using it as a vehicle to privatize public education and undermine teacher voice and professionalism. To this end, these political ideologues divisively pit school against school, parent against parent, charter against district, using the politics of conflict. That we will always oppose, as educators and as citizens. Our democracy depends upon public schools, both district and charter, which unite us as Americans.