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Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and his fellow Democratic lawmakers are gathering right now in a private conference to discuss the future of mayoral control of the city’s public schools, an Assembly member just told me. This marks the first time the lawmakers will meet as a group to discuss the subject since private debate and lobbying launched last year.

“I am waiting very anxiously,” Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn told me on the telephone just now, as he waited for the topic to shift to school governance. “This is a culmination of like a year and a half of a lot of talk. This needs to be done.”

When Democrats in the state Senate met on the same subject earlier this month, the meeting ended with lines clearly drawn as to which lawmakers favor which kinds of changes. Tonight’s meeting could provide the same kind of insight for the Assembly.

Maisel said that Silver has already been meeting individually with lawmakers to get their opinions, especially lawmakers from New York City. Lawmakers have also been busily entertaining a parade of advocates (including, in Maisel’s case, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein) and meeting with each other.

Maisel said that his own meetings with other lawmakers suggest there is some consensus among Assembly Democrats. One surprise: Maisel said that most Assembly Democrats favor adding at least one of two substantial checks to the mayor’s power: either taking away the power to appoint the schools chancellor or taking away control of a majority of school board members.

“They just don’t want the mayor to have this autocratic control of the schools without any kind of participation from anybody else,” he said.

We first reported that this conference had been scheduled last week.

State Senator Carl Kruger (D-Brooklyn) will introduce his plan for mayoral control this week, and one of the ideas has an unusual source. According to Leonie Haimson, executive director of the parent-advocacy group Class Size Matters and a member of the Parent Commission on School Governance, aspects of the commission’s anti-mayoral control literature have made their way into Kruger’s bill.

Haimson said the strange-bedfellows alliance makes sense and, in the mayoral control battle, is commonplace. “Some of the most progressive people and some of the most conservative people are the ones most opposed to mayoral control,” she said. “The ordinary lines of left and right disappear.”

On one side of the proverbial bed is Kruger, a conservative Democrat who is chair of the Finance Committee and who–along with a handful of Democrats– vehemently opposes Senate Majority leader Malcolm Smith’s support for mayoral control. A consistent opponent of Smith’s, in November of last year, Kruger led the Gang of Three, and nearly abandoned the party. Should Smith be forced to turn to Republicans for backing, his leadership would be severely weakened.

Specifically, Kruger’s proposal eliminates the position of schools chancellor and replaces it with a commissioner of education, who the mayor would select from a list of three candidates nominated by the Panel for Educational Policy board. (Boston uses a system like this). Kruger’s office would neither confirm nor deny that it had taken the idea from the parent commission.

More collaborations of this sort could spell trouble for the DOE’s hopes to keep mayoral control unaltered.

UPDATE: This post was updated to reflect the fact that the Parent Commission on School Governance, not Class Size Matters, drew up a proposal on mayoral control.

Overcrowding in Manhattan schools seems to be more acute than usual this year. But in the rest of the city, Manhattan’s overcrowding story isn’t news: For years, many schools in the outer boroughs haven’t been able to accommodate all of the children who live near them for years.

So writes Jeff Coplon in next week’s New York Magazine: 

The DOE perennially “caps” the enrollments of dozens of schools in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn, busing hundreds of kindergartners out of places like Elmhurst or Norwood. In the northwest corner of the Bronx, the poorest urban county in the nation, District 10 leads the city in capped schools-seven by the count of the DOE, nine by that of Marvin Shelton, the president of the district’s Community Education Council. (The crush can only worsen this fall, given the closure of kindergartens at city-run day-care centers: more than 3,000 of the city’s least-advantaged 5-year-olds, thrown into the DOE’s Mixmaster.) The children are bused miles east to west in rush-hour traffic and arrive home so exhausted they take two-hour naps. More than a dozen other schools dodge formal caps by shunting students to annexes blocks away or hauling makeshift “mini-schools” or double-wides onto their properties.

Coplon’s report jives with data made available online last week by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which show that Manhattan is far from having the most crowded schools.

• Mayor Bloomberg says closing more schools won’t protect kids from swine flu. (Times)
• Even at schools that didn’t close because of swine flu, the disease brought changes. (Times)
• The soon-to-depart city health chief explains the city’s swine flu school closing strategy. (Daily News)
• The swine flu closures could cost the city funding, if the state follows seat-time rules. (Post)

BLOOMBERG’S SCHOOL CONTROL:

• Under Mayor Bloomberg, principals have grown younger, more accountable, and tired. (Times)
• Parents say yes, the schools are better, but they still want limits to mayoral control. (Daily News)
• Mayor Bloomberg says parents don’t know best when it comes to educating their kids. (Post)
• The sophistication of school data use has grown under in the last eight years. (Post)
• The principal of Bronx Lab School says mayoral control saved his (5-year-old) school. (Daily News)
• A Queens high school teacher says mayoral control hasn’t made his school much better. (Daily News)
• Chancellor Klein speaks about his school leadership philosophy. (Washington Post)
• At PS 14 in Queens, teachers use data analysis to figure out how to help their students. (Post)
• Wayne Barrett’s journalism students weren’t able to get the now-audited no-bid numbers. (Village Voice)

AND EVERYTHING ELSE:

• The city created the conditions for Manhattan school overcrowding but didn’t plan for it. (NY Mag)
• The city secured overflow space for the pre-K classes at two crowded Greenwich Village schools. (Post)
• Parents are upset about overcrowding in the outer boroughs, too. (Daily News)
• The charter schools run by the teachers union aren’t doing as well as some other charters. (Post)
• The Post lambastes the politician who says her sponsorship on a charter school bill was a mistake.
• A mom with experience in both Indian and NYC schools compares the systems. (Wall Street Journal)
• Jay Mathews calls for compromise in the Broader, Bolder vs. Ed Equality debate. (Washington Post)
• As school budgets shrink, schools apply for more grants. (Newark Star-Ledger)

With the Bloomberg administration’s proposed capital-spending budget for schools up for the City Council’s consideration, lawmakers are taking a novel approach: Rather than vote yes or no, they are asking for a change in state law that would give them more power to revise it.

The change could not actually be marshaled through Albany in time for this year’s capital budget, but it does send a signal that city lawmakers are interested in conducting more oversight over the public schools.

Council Speaker Christine Quinn said that the council aims to have the same kind of input into the city’s school capital budget as it has in the Department of Education’s operating budget. Each spring, the council negotiates changes in that budget. Sometimes, those changes are substantial, such as last year, when the council won the restoration of $129 million in school funds.

But on school construction, the council must vote simply yes or no on a plan that contains hundreds of individual projects. The plan has been a popular target for advocates who have said it doesn’t come close to meeting the city’s need for more school buildings. It has also made an attractive target for elected officials, especially in Manhattan, where parents have been strenuously protesting school crowding. (more…)

The state Senate ground to a standstill on the question of who should control the city’s public schools this week, but a consensus among members of the Assembly looks like it will be easier to come by — and it could come soon.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told New York City members this week that he will hold the Assembly Democrats’ first conference on the issue next week, according to a member who was there, Mark Weprin of Queens. The conference will kick off formal talks within the Democratic conference about whether to reauthorize, revise, or scrap the 2002 law that granted control of the city’s public schools to the mayor.

Several Assembly members are already putting together legislation on the subject, much of it influenced by the constellation of advocacy groups that are bombarding Albany this week. A slew of Assembly members are standing behind recommendations put out by the Campaign for Better Schools, while bills in line with the recommendations of Betsy Gotbaum’s commission on school governance and the Parent Commission on School Governance are said to be on the way. Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn today introduced a bill, backed by the city principals’ union, that would beef up the power of superintendents.

But the conference would be the first chance for Democrats to try to work out a consensus on the issue. The bills currently in circulation clash with each other on several points. More importantly, they also clash with the position of the powerful speaker, Silver, who supports giving the mayor a majority of appointees on the citywide school board. (more…)

I’ve been skeptical of New York City’s Teacher Data Initiative for some time.  As I’ve commented previously here and here, I see few ways in which the Teacher Data Reports produced via a value-added assessment of student performance on state math and ELA tests could actually lead to better teaching.  What the Teacher Data Reports do is rank teachers, and they’re not even very good at that, given the unreliability of student performance. 

Lurking in the background is the fear that the Teacher Data Reports will be used to evaluate teachers.  “Absolutely not,” is the steady refrain from Chancellor Joel Klein. “The Teacher Data Reports are not to be used for evaluation purposes.  That is, they won’t be used in tenure determinations or the annual rating process,” wrote Chancellor Klein and UFT President Randi Weingarten, in a joint letter last October.  I think  that this is the primary purpose of the Teacher Data Reports, but they are being cloaked in rhetoric that describes them as a professional development tool. 

It turns out that there’s a smoking gun.  Today’s New York Times feature story on Chancellor Joel Klein makes mention of a recently-published book by Terry Moe and John Chubb for which he wrote a book-jacket blurb, entitled “Liberating Learning:  Technology, Politics and the Future of Education.”  The book has a brief section on New York City, drawn, a footnote tells us, from the public record and an interview with Deputy Chancellor Chris Cerf.  Here’s what Moe and Chubb write:    (more…)

• In Joel Klein’s dream world, there would be 30 percent fewer teachers (hired, not by firing). (Times)
• The UFT is urging the city to shut down all schools where 1.5 percent of kids have fevers. (Daily News)
• WNYC offers both optimistic and cynical interpretations of Randi Weingarten’s school board about-face.
• The principal of Brooklyn’s PS 20 was arrested for hitting a teacher. (Brooklyn Paper, Post, Daily News)
• A City Council hearing probed ties between the city and developers in school planning. (Brooklyn Paper)
• What if every math class included video games? A video game maker is trying to find out. (NY1)
• New Jersey is training laid-off Wall Street traders to become math teachers. (Reuters)
• Schools all over Queens are reporting absentee rates of 30 percent and more. (Queens Chronicle)
• Jay Mathews considers a post-No Child Left Behind plan for improving schools. (Washington Post)
• Greenwich Village parents looked at shuttered stores for potential pre-K sites. (The Villager)

• Why a state senator is supporting a mayoral control bill that she doesn’t really support.
• The controversial principal of Clinton Hill’s PS 20 was arrested for assaulting a teacher.
• Nine more schools in six buildings have been closed because of swine flu fears.
• A bipartisan coalition may end up reaching a “moderate middle” on mayoral control.
• There are not many open seats at citywide G&T programs for 1st and 2nd graders.
• Sherman Dorn lists some “middle-ground” possibilities on mayoral control.
• The state teachers union is supporting an Albany newspaper union’s fight against reporter layoffs.
• California schools could lose 7 days and see tens of thousands of teachers laid off.
• Deborah Meier says the closure of a school near her home shows segregation is rising.
• Testifying before Congress yesterday, Duncan said his job is to urge states to “do the right thing.”
• Richard Whitmire highlights an argument that education gaps make men the new second sex.
• Bill Gates was one of several rich people at a secret-ish meeting about charitable giving.

This screenshot from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity's overcrowding Web site shows the distribution of city schools that are over 150% capacity.

A long-awaited report about the extent of overcrowding in the city schools was released today, showing that more than half a million city children attend school in buildings that crowded beyond capacity.

The group that put together the report, The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, also launched an interactive Web site aimed at spurring action to reduce the overcrowding. The Web site, OvercrowdedNYCschools.org, includes a searchable map of overcrowded school buildings, instructions for how to urge the city to improve its school building plan, and links to the report, titled “Maxed Out,” and the data used to compile it.

I used the site’s map tool to plot school buildings that are at 150 percent capacity or higher and found 117 schools that fell into that category. As the picture to the right shows, the most overcrowded school buildings are located on Staten Island and in Queens. (more…)