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Members of the Campaign for Better Schools at today's press conference. Photo courtesy of the Campaign for Better Schools.

One final installment in today’s all-mayoral-control-all-the-time report: Before the Assembly hearing began this morning, a coalition of community groups that promised to evaluate mayoral control by its results issued its its school governance recommendations.

Citing “reckless budget cuts” and a continued gap between black and white students in obtaining Regents diplomas, The Campaign for Better Schools recommended reconfiguring the city school board so that the mayor no longer appoints a majority of members.

The campaign’s platform, posted in full after the jump, addresses several of the chief critiques leveled against the Department of Education in recent years. One is that communities don’t have adequate input in making decisions about opening, closing and locating schools; the campaign recommends requiring community consultation. And the platform responds to a recent decision by the state education commissioner that principals have the right to determine school budgets by requiring that budgets be developed in consultation with parent leaders.

The coalition’s member organizations include Advocates for Children and the Alliance for Quality Education, among others. It is funded by a grant from the Donor’s Education Collaborative, a consortium that supports projects to enhance public engagement in education. (more…)

The City Council members charged with coming up with a school governance proposal say the council should have more oversight of the Department of Education. But they weren’t able to agree on a question that has so far divided critics of New York City’s brand of mayoral control, according to a summary of their forthcoming recommendations passed out at today’s Assembly hearing.

The recommendations generated by the council’s Working Group on School Governance reflect the City Council’s repeated sparring with DOE officials over access to information and the complaints about inclusion that council members have said their constituents frequently make. The group recommends that the legislature give the council more legislative and oversight powers, designate the city’s Independent Budget Office to analyze DOE data, and strengthen the role of community superintendents and parent governance structures.

Like many others weighing in on mayoral control, the group also urges more independence for the city school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy.

But it doesn’t appear to have been able to come to a consensus on a central question: Whether the mayor should control the board. Instead of answering the question, the council puts forth three options for reforming the PEP: Reducing the number of members, but preserving a mayoral majority; increasing the number of members by adding two City Council appointees, meaning that the mayor would no longer control a majority of seats; or replacing the PEP with a new advisory board altogether.

Robert Jackson, the council’s education committee head who was one of the working group’s three chairs, has said he holds the extreme position that mayoral control should be abolished completely.

Also of note: The working group’s proposal is the first one I’ve seen that includes a specific expiration date for the new law: six years, which would put the city in the middle of a mayor’s term.

Below the jump, a summary of the report’s summary, from the council’s press release. Get the entire six-page summary here. (more…)

Some not-quite-mayoral control news from the mayoral control hearing: Overcrowding in the city’s schools might be worse than anyone has estimated, according to the organization responsible for the promise of billions of new dollars for the city’s schools.

Helaine Doran, deputy director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, just said that CFE would release a report next week saying that 501,632 students in the city attend school in an overcrowded building.

CFE’s numbers would mean that about 46 percent of the city’s approximately 1.1 million students attend overcrowded schools — far more than the 38 percent that the advocacy organization Class Size Matters calculated last year. Class Size Matters used the Department of Education’s school capacity and enrollment data to come up with its figure; Doran didn’t say today how CFE arrived at its calculation.

Doran said the overcrowding developed over a long period of time. “I’ve been in this school system a long time and the number even startled me,” Doran said. “We just didn’t get there.”

Norm Scott warned this morning that historian Diane Ravitch, who has emerged as one of the Department of Education’s most vocal critics, would be delivering blistering testimony at today’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control.

Indeed, that’s what Assembly members just heard. “Never before in the history of NYC have the mayor and the chancellor exercised total, unlimited, unrestricted power over the daily life of the schools,” Ravitch said in her testimony. “No other school district in the United States is operated in this authoritarian fashion.”

Ravitch recommended that legislators mandate an independent school board that would publicly review proposed policies and budgets. The board, and not the mayor, should appoint the chancellor, Ravitch said. “If the chancellor is appointed by the mayor, his first obligation is to the mayor, not the children,” she said.

Ravitch also joined a large contingent of people who are calling for an independent agency to monitor and evaluate Department of Education data. She offered evidence for why city students are doing no better than before the mayor took over the schools.

Assembly members said they appreciated Ravitch’s testimony, Elizabeth reports from the hearing. Said Assemblyman James Brennan to Ravitch: “I can see now see why you have a PhD.”

As always, you’ll find Ravitch’s complete testimony after the jump. (more…)

Were you somehow unable not to make today’s mayoral control hearing? Don’t worry! You can still read Chancellor Joel Klein’s testimony in its entirety right here on GothamSchools, courtesy of the Department of Education: (more…)

In its review of mayoral control, lawmakers should force the city Department of Education to follow the same financial transparency rules as other city agencies, Comptroller William Thompson said today at Manhattan’s Assembly school governance hearing.

But on the all-important question of whether the mayor should control a majority of the seats on the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, Thompson said nothing. According to Elizabeth, when reporters pressed him on the point after his testimony, Thompson declined to provide a straight answer. This separates Thompson from Rep. Anthony Weiner, currently his main rival in the mayoral race. Weiner believes that the city schools should remain firmly in the mayor’s control.

Thompson urged lawmakers to clarify whether the DOE is officially a city agency and to require independent analysis of DOE data and measures to help parents to get involved in school leadership.

Thompson also described how, as president of the city’s old Board of Education, he helped build a foundation for the constrained form of mayoral control he now supports. “In short, we laid the groundwork for a more centralized management of our public school system that helped clear a path towards mayoral control,” he said. “But in doing so we prioritized two things that are currently missing from the current administration’s approach — transparency and parental involvement.”

Below the jump, Thompson’s entire testimony as it was prepared. (more…)

At the Manhattan mayoral control hearing, Assembly members are seizing an opportunity they say they haven’t had in four years: the chance to interrogate Chancellor Joel Klein directly.

The chair of the education committee, Cathy Nolan, is leading the interrogations with personal examples of her own difficulties as a parent. She said she has been hung up on by a school official she called trying to get information about her son. “Not everybody is having an ideal experience, chancellor,” she said.

Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal complained about a lack of transparency, saying that she had resorted to using a Freedom of Information Law request to find information on class size data that state law requires the city to provide — and then finally got a CD with the wrong data on it.

Nolan then piped up saying she had the same experience.

“That’s unacceptable,” said Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, shaking his head. (more…)

Ending mayoral control, or even changing it substantially, would be a “cataclysm,” Schools Chancellor Joel Klein just told members of the Assembly Education Committee at a hearing in Manhattan.

I just got a dispatch from Elizabeth, who is crammed into the hearing room where people are sitting in the aisles. She reports that James Brennan, an assembly member from Brooklyn, asked Klein if it would be a “cataclysm” if mayoral control were revised.

“I think it would be,” Klein said.

As an example of one possible revision, Brennan referred to changing the makeup of the city’s school board so that the mayor would no longer appoint a majority of members. The teachers union included this change in its school governance proposal, released earlier this week.*

Klein rejected the prospect of such an arrangement. “If we all try to do things by plebiscite and hearings, then we’re going to stymie the process,” he said. “It’s a little hard to say you’re accountable but your core initiatives can be overruled by an 8 to 7 vote.”

Moments later, Klein said about the prospect of shared decision-making:

It didn’t work in the past. It won’t work in the future. No matter how or what it is labeled, dividing decision-making is not going to be improving or tweaking mayoral control. It will end it. And that line is one we should not cross.

*Originally I wrote that Brennan referred specifically to the teachers union’s proposal. He did not.

Elizabeth is doing the first shift at today’s Assembly Education Committee mayoral control hearing in Manhattan, so I don’t know what Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is testifying right now. But if he’s echoing what Mayor Bloomberg said this morning during his weekly radio show, Klein is suggesting that New Yorkers will take to the streets if state lawmakers allow mayoral control to expire at the end of June.

From Bloomberg’s mayoral control jeremiad, according to a report posted on the Daily Politics blog:

“My assumption is there will be a bill called mayoral control passed by the Legislature,” the mayor continued. “I think that the, if they didn’t do that, I think that there’d be riots in the streets, given what’s the improvement. I mean, parents have choices. For the first time we’re funding all the schools equally.”

… “So I think they will pass a bill. The question is, does it have mayoral control? Mayoral control is control. Control is you decide. …”

Nearly 60 percent of New Yorkers support continuing mayoral control, according to a recent poll.

• No more private school kids applied to specialized high schools than in the past. (Post)
• The application process for two new schools in Tweed has many parents confused. (Downtown Express)
• The Daily News says the city’s AP scores show that New York City needs mayoral control.
• The stimulus bill would double federal spending on schools. (Christian Science Monitor)
• A top-ranked suburban district is giving more opportunities to average students. (Times)
• A lone New Hampshire town doesn’t provide public kindergarten. (USA Today)
• The Los Angeles teachers union has organized a top charter school there. (L.A. Times)
• Jay Mathews: New research shows rap music isn’t to blame for low reading scores. (Washington Post)