Outlining the City's Education Cuts

Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for the city’s department of education, testified for two and half hours earlier today at a City Council budget hearing in City Hall.

The highlight was Grimm specifying where 476 proposed job cuts this year would come from.

The list:
-43 vacant positions in the pre-kindergarten program won’t be filled (they’re not teachers);
-54 from the Integrated Service Centers which help principals do things like figure out how to budget money for their schools;
-95 from the facilities department, which includes 71 plumbers and electricians and 24 other non-skilled staffers;
-284 from the central offices (like Tweed), most of which have not been identified. But 51 positions slated to be eliminated have been. They’re from offices within the department of education that deal with technology, communications, family engagement and portfolio development (new small schools and charter schools).

Grimm also said that the city will pick up the $20 million price tag for merit pay for teachers, which had been in place for one year and funded privately.

And as Gotham School’s Elizabeth Green pointed out to me, since they’re only starting the second year of the program, they haven’t released results of a planned study showing the program has made a difference in secondary schools.

Green has more details (and my profound admiration for live-blogging the hearing).