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Today’s City Council vote all but assures that Mayor Bloomberg will run for a third term as mayor. If he does, and especially if he wins, the city schools will feel a strong impact.

The three consequences I went over this morning remain true. We can still expect an outcry from opponents of his school efforts, maybe even from the state level. (Or the text message level: Kelly just got one from a teacher friend, Ira, that read simply: “That sucks.”) We can still expect charter school leaders to be happy (and perhaps for there to be more charter schools in public school buildings). We can still expect for the debate on mayoral control to become a referendum on the mayor, which could hurt his argument for keeping the current governance structure fully intact, since many legislators are unhappy with his school record.

Another thing that is slowly dawning on the educators I talk to is that all the proposals Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein talk about for the future might actually happen.

Here’s an example of a realization already kicking in: I heard from two sources today that schools this week are starting to think about how the full implementation of Fair Student Funding would affect their budgets. The new form of budgeting was supposed to redistribute school funds to schools with more students in poverty, and it would have taken away a lot of money — hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases — from schools with more affluent students.

But before it could take effect, the city and the teachers union negotiated a “hold harmless” provision that preserved budgets for two years. That provision is set to expire next year, something everyone knew all along, but which for a while didn’t feel too real. Assuming that without Bloomberg in office Fair Student Funding would quietly disappear, opponents were unworried, while proponents, who felt the city had given in on an important equity question, were frustrated.

Now, of course, things look different.

The City Council just passed an extension of term limits, 29-22, opening the door for a historic third term for Mayor Bloomberg — which of course could pave the way for another four years of Chancellor Joel Klein’s school programs.

Update: Proportionally, the Council’s Education Committee supported the mayor more strongly than the council as a whole. Of the whole council, 43 percent of members voted against extending term limits. Only 30 percent of Education Committee members voted against the mayor’s bill.

Here’s how members of the Education Committee voted:

Check back here for more on the education implications.

To relieve the tension of waiting for the City Council’s term limits vote, I’m reading Urban Baby, the sometimes sensational chat site popular among New York City parents. Here’s one of today’s hot topics:

Want to weigh in? Read the whole thread.

At City Hall, City Council members just voted down an amendment to the mayor’s term limits bill that would have required a public referendum before extending term limits, the New York Times’ City Room blog reports. The amendment was voted down 28 to 22 with one council member abstaining.

One of the amendment’s three sponsors was David Yassky, who currently sits on the council’s Education Committee. But most other members of the committee voted against the amendment. Here’s a rundown:

The council has now moved on to discussion of the term limits bill itself. Yassky, who had withheld his opinion on the mayor’s term limits grab for weeks, has announced that he will support the bill.

The East Side of Manhattan is getting two new school buildings — and the city won’t have to spend a cent on them.

As part of a complicated deal with a private developer, the World-Wide Group, the Department of Education will open a massive, multi-use private development at 57th Street and 2nd Avenue that will include two schools, a Whole Foods, shops, and 320 residential units. Two schools will occupy the space, PS 59 and the High School for Art and Design, which is 1 million square feet and will open in 2012.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein unveiled the designs for the development this morning at PS 59′s temporary home, a gleaming East Side building that was also renovated by the World-Wide Group last year.

The arrangement will certainly be cheered in the community, since it means 830 new elementary school seats in the overcrowded District 2 region.

It could also become a model for how to build school buildings at little cost to the city. The Department of Education negotiated the deal through the Educational Construction Fund, a finance mechanism that gives private developers access to tax-exempt bonds and city air rights if they commit to including schools in their developments. A Greenwich Village school planned for 2012 will follow a similar model. And also in District 2, another public-private partnership is paying for a new space for East Side Middle School in a 118-unit residential tower on East 91st Street. A crane at that site collapsed this spring, killing a construction worker.

A sketch of the new development and a rendering of its facade, all designed by architecture firm Skidmore Owings and Merrill LLP, are below the jump. (more…)

Tests can be made more accessible for English Language Learners and students with special needs, say researchers at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody School of Education.

They’ve created a checklist, the Test Accessibility and Modification Inventory, to help educators and test-designers evaluate whether a test is likely to trip up students who know the content but are struggling readers or are easily distracted.

The inventory penalizes tests with unnecessary diagrams, excessive answer choices, and answer choices that aren’t plausible. Educators might be surprised to learn that three choices are considered optimal for multiple choice questions.

Other sections of the inventory address readability of test questions, spacing and layout on the page, and fairness to students of different ethnicities. There’s also a checklist for assessing computer-based exams.

See EdWeek for an example of a question modified to meet the guidelines.

The City Council’s government operations committee just voted unanimously to pass on a bill that would allow Mayor Bloomberg and other elected officials to run for a third term. Before the afternoon vote of all Council members that will determine whether term limits are actually extended, I thought it would be useful to review what’s at stake for the city schools.

Here’s a list of three things that will be affected by the vote:

1. If term limits are extended, opening the door for a third Bloomberg term, expect a strong outcry from the wide group of people who have vehemently opposed Mayor Bloomberg’s changes to the city schools. Many members of this group had been looking happily forward to a new mayor and, they hoped, a new schools chancellor. But now they are looking at this afternoon’s vote with dread. An incomplete list of this group: those who oppose the Bloomberg administration’s reliance on standardized tests; advocates who have accused the administration of not attending to English language learners; special education experts who have said the overhaul of the schools has left out children with special needs; the arts education community, led by the Center for Arts Education, which has criticized accountability measures for pushing arts programming to the side; and teachers concerned about the administration’s efforts to evaluate them based on test scores and cut into tenure protections.
2. On the other hand, if Mayor Bloomberg stays on, charter school leaders will cheer. Mayor Bloomberg has strongly supported efforts to expand charter schools, giving the schools space in public school buildings, even though that is not required by state law. A group of charter school leaders were among those mobilized by City Hall to testify in favor of extending term limits last week. The founder of Democracy Prep Charter School in Harlem, Seth Andrew, testified along with several students.
3. The debate over whether to reauthorize mayoral control is going to intensify as its sunset date — July 2009 — approaches no matter what. But how legislators vote on mayoral control will be strongly influenced by which mayor they imagine they are handing power to. Many state legislators have raised concerns about the Bloomberg schools agenda, with one, Ruben Diaz Sr. of the Bronx calling on Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to resign. If lawmakers imagine themselves writing a mayoral control law that will be handed to Bloomberg, they might be persuaded to be more aggressive in limiting mayoral powers.

Have a Gneiss Day was in a for a welcome surprise when she returned to her classroom after leaving her classes to the sub from heaven for a day:

The room was immaculate. There were detailed diagrams on the board that related to the work I left. She left me a lovely note thanking me for leaving straightforward activities for the children (and that they missed me). And wait- this is the best one of all- are you ready? ARE YOU SITTING? SHE GRADED THE WORK I LEFT!

No, I am not kidding.

On a more serious note- I wonder if this woman is an ATR. She clearly knew what she was doing. I am certain that if there were no assignments, she would have figured out something they could do, rather than let the kids run wild.

I met a substitute teacher exactly once in my 8 years of teaching, and he’d wound up at the wrong building by mistake. Instead, we were assigned to cover absent teachers’ classes during our prep periods. Sometimes the lesson plans left or emailed in got done, sometimes they didn’t. And sometimes I found myself covering a class with a detailed lesson plan to follow, sometimes nothing to go on at all. But I will tell you this: I never came back to school to find all the work graded for me!

At CityRoom, Jonathan Hicks reports that labor groups are vowing to “take aim at” City Council members who support the term limits revision in today’s vote. At the center of Hicks’ post is the Working Families Party, the political party that is backed mainly by labor unions. He quotes the party’s executive director:

“Voting against democracy by extending term limits without a public referendum will weigh pretty heavily when the Working Families Party makes Council endorsements next year,” said Dan Cantor, the executive director of the party. “There’s every indication it will weigh just as heavy with voters when they go to the polls.”

Hicks also includes the United Federation of Teachers in the list of labor groups.

Will the UFT really do that? We know the teachers union is against the mayor’s plan, but president Randi Weingarten was clear that she is not making fighting it a priority. The idea is to save up political capital for a likely budget fight.

But we also know that the UFT sends substantial financial support to the Working Families Party, the group leading the crusade against the mayor’s term limits plan. The union sent more than $100,000 to the Working Families between January and July of this year, far more than it gave to any other group, according to a financial disclosure report filed in July and available here. The gifts came in four installments that can be easily located on that PDF — just scan for the highest dollar amounts in the column, and you have it.

• A new study says admission to the specialized high schools is basically random. (Daily News, Post)
• A student was assigned twice to high schools that couldn’t meet her special needs. (Daily News)
• A 72-year-old “counter-recruiter” teaches students about opting out of military recruitment. (Times)
• The ultra-selective Hunter College High School has seen a drop in applications. (West Side Spirit)
• The maker of the SAT has designed a new test for 8th graders. (Times)
• Urban students in America fell short on the latest international math exam. (Post)
• Education officials in Australia are under fire for not focusing on equity. (The Australian)
• Scholars Lance Izumi and Bruce Fuller debate presidential candidates’ education policies. (Times)
• More and more school districts are hiring teachers from overseas. (USA Today)