Just yesterday, the Post reported as an exclusive Duncan’s endorsement of mayoral control for New York City, which is up for renewal before the end of June. Today, in an unusual assertion of federal power in local politics, Duncan told a forum of mayors that he would have their backs in their fight to win control of their cities’ schools. From an AP article that was just filed:

“I’ll come to your cities,” Duncan said. “I’ll meet with your editorial boards. I’ll talk with your business communities. I will be there.”

Mayoral control is set to take center stage at a convention later this week sponsored by the Joel Klein-headed Education Equality Project. Duncan, who ran Chicago’s schools for more than seven years under the control of Mayor Richard Daley, is delivering the opening speech.

But union president Randi Weingarten, a supporter of the case and the groups that filed it, is taking a different point of view. In a statement she just released, she declares that the state budget “reaffirms Albany’s commitment” to the lawsuit. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, she says, “was deferred but not denied.”

The state budget erases two years of increases in funding that would have grown to more than $5 billion by 2011, postponing them until the future. Only 37.5% of the funds promised over a four-year period have been doled out so far. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s executive director, Geri Palast, has repeatedly said that state lawmakers should give the city a “down payment” of funds for next year.

Here’s her full statement:

Given the severe economic conditions facing our state, this budget in many ways has been a story of survival. Protecting children’s educational services is and always has been our top priority. That is why we fought so hard for the federal stimulus funding and the progressive income tax, both of which helped the Governor and the State Legislature deliver a budget that protects schools, health care and the most vulnerable in the wake of a $ 16 billion deficit.

The kids in New York City could have suffered terribly, but thanks to the efforts of many, we have averted the most serious anticipated damage. We will see cuts to programs, but core services should be salvaged and layoffs should be averted.

The new budget also reaffirms Albany’s commitment to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which was deferred but not denied, and it rejects a Tier V, which would have been a step in the wrong direction for working families all across the state. In addition, it restores funding for Teacher Centers, which are integral to the training and retaining of quality classroom teachers, and adds much stronger class size accountability language.

We owe a debt of gratitude to Governor Paterson, Speaker Silver and Majority Leader Smith for standing tall for our teachers and public schools. They recognize, just as President Obama does, the importance of keeping people working and keeping the economy moving.

I also want to thank Mayor Bloomberg for his advocacy on behalf of public schools, as well as the State Legislature, the City Council and, most of all, the tens of thousands of New Yorkers who attended our rallies and helped fight for their neighborhood schools.

If this were a marathon, however, we still have the hardest part of the race ahead of us. The city is still facing a deficit and schools still face cutbacks. We must work with our allies in New York City, and hopefully the Mayor and the City Council will continue the momentum and protect against direct service cuts to kids.

The budget erases two years of planned increases in funds to New York City and other needy school districts, postponing them to the future. In a letter sent to Duncan yesterday, the groups, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity and the Alliance for Quality Education, also criticize the way the budget spreads out the state’s pot of federal education stimulus dollars, a $2.5 billion total, between the state’s school districts.

The call for Duncan’s intervention hinges on language in the stimulus law passed by Congress, which urges states to prioritize “equity and adequacy adjustments” passed in state laws when doling out their stimulus dollars to schools. The groups argue that New York’s budget “appears to be in violation” of that language.

The “adjustment” in question in New York is the extra $5.4 billion the state vowed in 2007 to send needy districts by 2011, part of the settlement of a decade-long lawsuit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. So far, less than half (37.5%) of that money’s been doled out. But the current budget would erase the added funds that were planned for the next two fiscal years.

The groups are asking Duncan either to force New York lawmakers to dole out more of the stimulus funds to needy districts like New York City — or to require that the lawmakers write a plan for doing that next year. More of the details on what the groups would like to see Duncan do are in this letter, which they sent to Duncan yesterday.

The groups have some reason to think that the Obama administration will support their effort. Geri Palast, the executive director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, said that she and other supporters of court-mandated increases in funding to public schools lobbied to put the language into the stimulus law that they are now using to defend their case. Palast served as an adviser to Obama on education during his transition.

She said she and other advocates had their eye on court settlements like New York’s Campaign for Fiscal Equity case when they pushed for the language. (At least a half-dozen other states have similar cases.)

“Now the secretary will have to make the decision about exactly how important that language is,” said Billy Easton, the executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, the Albany-based group that is closely allied with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity.

The Journal News first reported on the letter yesterday. Here’s the full text:

The report, analyzing Mayor Bloomberg’s preliminary budget for 2010, includes a concise summary of the dizzying sequence of school budget cuts since January 2008, when Mayor Bloomberg first announced that he was planning to cut the DOE’s budget. It also provides this graph, which shows that classroom instruction has taken the biggest hit:

The city’s schools desperately need a healthy allocation of federal stimulus funds to maintain basic services, the IBO report concludes. That’s not news: The mayor said in January, when he presented the preliminary budget, that federal funds would be necessary to prevent massive teacher layoffs. And Schools Chancellor Joel Klein told the City Council last week that some teacher layoffs are still on the table unless state lawmakers pass along more than $500 million in stimulus funds.

While 16 teachers at the KIPP AMP school in Brooklyn submitted cards to the state labor board saying they want to join the United Federation of Teachers, at least one of those teachers changed her mind after submitting the card, and teachers at two other KIPP schools the union has tried to represent are resisting the push. Yoav Gonen described the union’s effort at those schools as “meddling” in today‘s New York Post.

But add at least one more person to the ranks of KIPP teachers who are actively seeking union help: A staff member on the payroll of KIPP Academy, one of the original KIPP schools, who turned to the union after the charter school network allegedly decided to move him to a new school and dock his pay.

The teacher detailed his complaint in a January letter asking KIPP Academy’s principal, Blanca Ruiz, for a meeting where he would be represented by a UFT official. The union sent me the letter but whited out the name of the teacher who filed the grievance, and the union did not make him available for an interview.

A union official told me that the teacher approached the union for help after KIPP changed its plan for him. The teacher had been hired as a fellow who would work at a KIPP high school that is scheduled to open next year. But at some point KIPP contacted him with a new plan. “They said to him, ‘We changed our mind, and by the way, we’re going to cut your pay,’” said the union official, who spoke on background. “So he came to us. He had no knowledge of what was happening at KIPP AMP.”

When I asked him about the incident, David Levin, the superintendent of KIPP’s New York City schools, said that he did not want to discuss an individual employee in the press.

The single teacher’s interest in getting help from the union does seem to be a very isolated example. While a fluke in the way KIPP is building its charter school means that teacher was technically on the KIPP Academy payroll, he is not a teacher at KIPP Academy. And KIPP Academy teachers have issued a press release saying unanimously that they had no interest in the union’s overtures on their behalf.

Their main concern was a letter written by a union official challenging the fact that KIPP Academy tells its teachers that they are “at-will” employees and can therefore be fired at any time. Hureau said that no KIPP Academy teachers supported the letter, either before it was drafted or after.

The union official said the letter was sent after conversations with the first disappointed teacher led them to discover KIPP teachers were told they are at-will employees. KIPP Academy teachers are technically classified as union members, though they say their interactions with the union have been limited to receiving benefits from a union fund. The teachers at KIPP Academy and another KIPP school in a similar arrangement are now moving to disassociate from the union.

You can read the two letters sent to KIPP Academy’s principal — one from the anonymous teacher and one from Solomon — below:

An ad in the subway urging parents to complete surveys about their children's schools. (GothamSchools)

It’s Learning Environment Survey season in the city’s schools. The Department of Education is aggressively reminding parents, teachers, and students to complete the surveys, which are meant to give schools information about how to improve, by the April 24 deadline.

The survey results also make up 10 percent of each school’s progress report grade, the letter grade that the DOE uses to evaluate schools. On her blog, teacher Miss Brave describes the survey-taking climate at her school, where administrators have picked up on the fact that positive survey results could contribute to a high progress report grade, which would exempt the school from facing a Quality Review for up to two years.

Miss Brave writes that administrators pressured teachers to respond favorably on the surveys:

Seriously, they did everything but stand over us with a #2 pencil and whisper “strongly agree!” in our ears. “Last year, some teachers claimed they didn’t have frequent contact with parents, but don’t forget, you send home a homework sheet every week!” “Last year, some teachers said we didn’t offer a wide enough variety of courses, but don’t forget, some of the third grade classes are getting a theater course!” Come on, a homework sheet? That counts as contact with parents? And that “theater course”? Is offered to an extremely limited number of classes, once a week for about six weeks. That’s supposed to count? It’s like we were scrabbling around for anything we could pat ourselves on the back for.

Miss Brave writes that she answered her survey truthfully, not out of integrity but because she is “fed up” by her school’s efforts to ace the city’s accountability metrics at the expense of educating students.

The lawsuit is also part of the larger debate on who should rule the city’s public schools. For proof, view this video, taken by the union activist Norm Scott, of a Brooklyn rally at one of the public schools targeted in the lawsuit, PS 150 in Oceanhill-Brownsville. In it, City Councilman Charles Barron leads a crowd of students in a cheer that simultaneously opposes the plan to shut down PS 150 and replace it with three charter schools — and criticizes mayoral control. (“End mayoral control now!” the crowd ends up chanting at the end.)

Now, Barron is often far on the fringes of New York City politics. (He has praised Robert Mugabe.) But he’s not the only one making the connection between the controversy over charter school siting and the mayoral control fight. A source last week suggested to me that the lawsuit offers a window into the union’s thinking on the issue. The union, the source said, will probably push to prevent the mayor alone from making decisions to give space to charter schools. It will also likely challenge the mayor’s ability to give the chancellor the sole authority to shut down schools he deems struggling.

The renewal news is important because it highlights a major way that charter schools are different from traditional public schools. In exchange for being free of Department of Education bureaucracy, they must prove every five years that they should continue to exist — or face extinction from one of the three “authorizers,” of which SUNY is the most respected.

Even more exciting, the renewal news is a reminder of the renewal reports, which SUNY publishes in full on its website — and which are worth a look, particularly as the debate over charter schools heats up. Each one includes not only a detailed description of a school’s plans, but also almost endless charts chronicling its test scores, demographics, enrollment patterns, and how much money it spent per student.

There are tons of miscellaneous tidbits, too, which I hope everyone posts in the comments. Here’s my contribution: According to the most recent report on KIPP STAR, KIPP New York’s plans to build a high school that their middle school graduates can attend are moving along — and slated to cost an initial $188,000 in private donations that initial per-pupil funding won’t cover.

Rather than re-thinking the citywide education board, as other advocates have done, Stringer’s proposal targets the elected parent councils that already exist. His idea is to inject gravity and authority into the councils, which are now beset by pitifully low participation rates and a reputation for powerlessness, by taking a hint from the real-estate and development world.

In that world, groups of citizen volunteers called community boards work together to develop responses to proposals from developers and policy makers on everything from whether to tear down a building to concerns about dog excrement. City Hall can’t make a decision without at least collecting a board’s formal response.

The idea is gaining some headway; Assemblyman Jeffrey Dinowitz of Brooklyn intends to introduce a bill that would formally propose the idea to the legislature in the next few days.

Making community education councils, or CEC’s, more like community boards would require the groups to get their support (adminstrative staff, office space, training) not from the Department of Education, but from the five borough presidents. Stringer’s report argues that the change would be an obvious way to separate powers:

Even assuming the best of intentions, it is unreasonable to expect a City agency to be sufficiently motivated to effectively promote independent criticism of its own proposals. … To be effective, review and input processes require institutional checks and balances by autonomous entities.

The CEC’s of the future that the report envisions would also be boosted by formal procedures for exactly how to operate. Right now, though state law seems to suggest that the Department of Education has to “consult” with the councils before making decisions like closing schools, the law is hazy, and there’s no single prescribed way for consulting to happen.

Stringer lays out a detailed process that the DOE and CEC’s would have to follow, including certain windows of time during which the department must wait for a response from the CEC before moving forward. In order for the Panel for Educational Policy to sign off on any change, for instance, it would first have to wait for a formal reaction from new borough-wide CEC’s. Only after reading and collecting the reports could the Panel for Educational Policy make a decision.

Read Stringer’s full report below the jump.

But there are always hidden gems that still have spots open: either new schools led by educators with a strong track record or excellent programs inside middling high schools. In an article that it unfortunately must reprise every year, Insideschools runs down the options for the nearly 7,500 students who didn’t get a high school match this week. The site is also asking its users to recommend schools on the Department of Education’s three-page list of available spots.

I see a handful of schools on the list that look like they might be solid choices for students still looking for a high school spot. One, The Cinema School, is the selective school in the Bronx that will be run in partnership with the Ghetto Film School. I was also impressed by Brooklyn’s School for International Studies when I visited several years ago, and I’ve heard good things from students who have since attended. And the progressive Queens School of Inquiry, which is adding a ninth grade in the fall, was one of the more memorable schools I’ve visited; it was at QSI where I first encountered competitive speed-stacking.

Do you see other schools you’d recommend on the list (which you can read in full below the jump)? If so, for what kind of student?

This spring, GothamSchools’ colleagues at Livable Streets Education (like us, an initiative of The Open Planning Project) are teaching students at 15 elementary and middle schools about urban planning and street safety. In this video, Livable Streets Education Director Kim Wiley-Schwartz describes the curriculum, which is tied to state standards, and children from PS 87 on the Upper West Side show off what they’ve learned.

And in case you’re wondering, that’s a speed gun in Wiley-Schwartz’s hand.

A play-based kindergarten class. Via Flickr

Kindergarten used to be a time when children dressed up in costumes, built cities out of blocks, and pretended to cook feasts in play kitchens. But now 5-year-olds are more likely to spend their school days practicing basic literacy and math skills.

In fact, kindergartners in New York City spend less than 30 minutes a day on creative play, several recent studies have found.

The shift toward academic kindergarten might boost children’s test scores in the short term but is not likely to make them successful in the long term, according to “Kindergarten in Crisis,” a report released this week by the Alliance for Childhood, a coalition of child development researchers. From the report: 

The power of play as the engine of learning in early childhood and as a vital force for young children’s physical, social, and emotional development is beyond question. Children in play-based kindergartens have a double advantage over those who are denied play: they end up equally good or better at reading and other intellectual skills, and they are more likely to become well-adjusted healthy people.

The trend toward academic kindergarten isn’t news for anyone who’s been paying attention to the city’s public schools for very long. Back in 2006, my former colleague Clara Hemphill tackled the subject in a column in the New York Times. After visiting a kindergarten class at one of the city’s Achievement First charter schools, she wrote: 

The classroom has no blocks, dress-up corners or play kitchens. There is no time for show and tell, naps or recess. There is homework every night. For much of the day, the children are asked to sit quietly with their hands folded as their teachers drill them in phonics, punctuation and arithmetic.

I visited a different Achievement First elementary school in 2008 and saw firsthand that the network had adapted its kindergarten program in response to criticism such as Hemphill’s. But they were still nothing like the play-dominated classrooms advocated for by the Alliance for Childhood.

A figure from Bill De Blasio's report showing how many teachers' salaries could be supported by each assessment expenditure.

The Department of Education could foot the salaries of more than a thousand teachers with the money it spends measuring and promoting student performance, according to a report released today by City Council member Bill De Blasio.

By reducing spending on developing, administering, and grading tests, and by cutting the department’s media relations office, the DOE could save more than $57 million a year, De Blasio’s office found. That would be enough to support the salaries of 1,038 teachers who earn an average of $50,000 a year.

At today’s City Council hearing about the DOE’s budget, De Blasio, who is running for public advocate, told Schools Chancellor Joel Klein that he is ”perplexed by the notion that assessment is somehow more valuable than front-line” school staff. The department’s preliminary budget for the upcoming fiscal year includes potential teacher layoffs, but it does not call for substantial cuts to the DOE’s accountability office.

Klein defended spending on assessment even when budgets are tight, saying that teachers cannot do their jobs without good student performance data. He also noted, as he has before, that President Obama has told states to build systems to manage accountability data. “I expect we will get additional federal dollars to actually enhance those systems,” he said.

But he indicated that he would consider cuts to accountability if absolutely necessary. ”Let me be clear: There are no sacred cows,” Klein said in response to prodding from De Blasio.

According to a report released in November by the current public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, the DOE will have spent more than $300 million on accountability by the end of this school year. Gotbaum’s figure did not include the cost of periodic assessments, regular tests that all schools must administer but which are not used to evaluate schools or students. 

De Blasio’s report advocates eliminating the periodic assessments. The report also notes that in 2008 the DOE spent an average of $10,000 per school day on couriers to transport the assessments between schools and the department’s central accountability office. In the past, Klein has defended the cost of transporting tests by courier.