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ALBANY, NY — Legislators in the Assembly have roughly 24 hours to amend Silver’s mayoral control bill before it’s voted on, but at this stage, change is practically impossible.

Assemblyman Alan Maisel, one of five education committee members to vote against the bill, said those who oppose Silver’s plan were making no efforts to convert its supporters. “I’m not recruiting anybody,” Maisel said, adding that the bill would surely pass the Assembly tomorrow.

Half of the 10 lawmakers from New York City who sit on the Assembly education committee voted against Silver’s bill.

Joan Millman, who sponsored a bill that would enact the Commission on School Governance’s recommendations, said she voted voted no for three reasons. “The sunset is too long. I would have liked it to be a shorter period of time, so if we need to fix it, it’s easier to correct,” she said, adding that she “would have wanted the chancellor to be an educator,” and the Panel for Educational Policy members to have fixed terms. (more…)

School overcrowding isn’t just a comfort issue. It’s an academic one, writes Arthur Goldstein in the GothamSchools community section. Goldstein is a teacher (and newly elected union chapter leader) at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, which has more than 4,400 students this year, up from about 3,800 in the 2001-2002 school year.

He writes:

Our school is one of the very best regular high schools in the city, quite possibly the best. It’s a miracle we’ve held up as well as we have. But if we are to survive, we can’t count on miracles. We need a break and we need a cap. I was heartened to hear projections we’d have 200 fewer students next year. I was disappointed when that projection was reduced to 100, and then, considering over-the-counter admissions, zero.

Now they’re talking additional students.

We cannot sustain unlimited overcrowding. No one can. It will reach the point, as it has in many schools, where our quality declines and our students suffer.

Read Goldstein’s entire commentary here. And e-mail us if you have a perspective to share.

Others have said that she’s caved on mayoral control, or suggested that she never actually intended to challenge the mayor’s power as she promised.

I just stumbled on teachers union president Randi Weingarten’s own interpretation, buried in her latest column for the teachers union newspaper. She declares that she has not changed her position on mayoral control, saying contrary characterizations fail to see the nuance of her position.

Weingarten also unveils a new opportunity for teachers to act as “your own check and balance”: A new membership poll the union is conducting to evaluate the Department of Education and Chancellor Joel Klein. (A poll last year found widespread disapproval of Klein, and Weingarten purchased a New York Times advertisement to publish the results.)

The details on the new poll: (more…)

The rise of small high schools has decimated programs for students whose native language is not English, making the students more likely to drop out.

That’s the conclusion of a report released today by two watchdog groups that look out for immigrant students, Advocates for Children of New York and the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund. The groups studied two large, low-performing high schools that the city decided to replace with small, themed schools and found that students who are classified as English language learners enrolled in smaller numbers in the new schools. Students who did enroll often did not receive the services they needed, the groups found.

What’s more, according to the report, most of the new schools are too small to offer a range of language services:

State law mandates that schools create bilingual programs if they enroll more than 20 students in the same grade who speak the same native language. The DOE has interpreted this mandate to mean that parents of 20 students in the same grade who speak the same language must “opt-in” to select a bilingual program – and that merely meeting the numerical enrollment threshold is insufficient. (more…)

We just heard from a source with connections in Albany: The Assembly’s education committee has passed Speaker Sheldon Silver’s mayoral control bill. Five of the committee’s 29 members voted against the bill, which some critics have said includes too few checks on the mayor’s authority, our source reports.

The committee’s approval means that the bill can now be voted on by the Assembly as a whole. After Silver formally proposed the bill on Sunday night, lawmakers told the New York Times that they thought the Assembly would pass the bill by Wednesday. So far, they appear to be on pace to meet that deadline.

More on this story as it develops.

UPDATE: According to committee chair Catherine Nolan’s office, the five committee members voting against the bill were James Brennan, Alan Maisel, and Joan Millman of Brooklyn; Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan; and Mark Weprin of Queens. The bill passed the education committee last night and is headed to the Ways and Means Committee today, with debate on the Assembly floor likely tomorrow, Nolan’s office confirmed.

UPDATE 2: A reader points out that this means only half, or five of 10, of the Assembly education committee members from New York City voted for the bill. They are committee chairwoman Catherine Nolan of Queens, Carmen Arroyo and Michael Benedetto of the Bronx, and Karim Camara and Barbara Clark of Brooklyn. (Clark is one of Mayor Bloomberg’s strongest mayoral control allies in the Assembly).

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post suggested that the mayoral control bill would become law upon its passage by the full Assembly. In fact, a bill becomes law only after the State Senate passes a similar bill and the discrepancies between the two bills are negotiated away in a conference committee consisting of members of both legislative bodies. The governor then has to sign the reconciled bill to make it law. The State Senate has not tackled legislative business in the nine days since its dramatic leadership coup.

A parent reader who’s not usually on the same side as the Bloomberg administration e-mailed me his take on the Assembly mayoral control bill the mayor endorsed. To his surprise, he liked a lot of it! This is the same bill that the two main parent groups and even the teachers union are saying needs additions.

The parent’s take:

To my amazement, there seem to be considerable advancements (at least at first glance), in the powers and functioning of school leadership teams (“SLTs”) compared to the present state of the law.  For example, reaffirming the requirement that ALL members of an SLT be consulted IN ADVANCE of an appointment of a new Principal is refreshing.  Moreover, parental participation in the formulation of school based budgets, is now substantively recognized.  Further, there is some sort of appeal process to the District Superintendent put into place (albeit rather inadequately)  for SLT’s to appeal a Principal’s version of a school based budget at odds with the SLT’s Comprehensive Education Plan.

Want to share your opinion? Send an e-mail to tips@gothamschools.org.

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein are experts at wall-building. At A-rated Francis Lewis High School, we have 4450 kids in a building designed for 1800. Whenever anyone complains about overcrowding, more walls appear.

Most walls go up in the middle of classrooms. They magically transform one room into two. Unfortunately, with 34 kids in such a room, you get a haphazard pile of desks you have to climb over to sit in, and the only real beneficiaries are kids who’d otherwise have trouble copying their neighbors’ test papers. While this may improve test results, you also hear every word on the other side of the wall, which makes concentration quite a challenge. Some of these rooms have no ventilation, while others have windows that open directly to fragrant dumpsters.

Rugged individuals who hate walls can move out back to the full sized trailers. Sometimes they have heat, and sometimes they even have AC (but not always). Sometimes their bathrooms have soap, working faucets, functional water fountains, toilet paper, or paper towels (you can never predict which). In fact, some kids claim, wretched though our bathrooms are, they’re not as bad as student bathrooms in the main building. I find that hard to believe, though I’m a little afraid to go in and check. If it’s true,though, maybe we’re not so bad off as I thought. And there’s no denying they don’t build extra walls in the trailers.

This notwithstanding, there are some downsides to trailer life. (more…)

• The new Democratic head of the State Senate, John Sampson, is a serious mayoral control critic. (Post)
• A budget deal between the mayor and City Council doesn’t prevent cuts to schools. (Times, Post)
• The New York Times says Sheldon Silver’s mayoral control bill deserves “quick passage.”
• The Post calls the mayoral control bill “a ray of hope” in Albany.
• Community members want a new school in the Highbridge section of the Bronx to be green. (Daily News)
• An Upper West Side mom with a vendetta against snacks is making everyone else at PS 9 angry. (Times)
• At a press event with parents, Randi Weingarten praised mayoral control. (GothamSchools, Daily News)
• The Board of Education’s 1950s Communist witch hunt cost 378 teachers their jobs. (Times)
• Some PS 20 parents are standing up for the principal who allegedly attacked a teacher. (Brooklyn Paper)
• A new mini-golf course in Queens is meant to teach kids about astrophysics. (Times)
• Schools are exposing kids to art less, a new study finds. (Times, USA Today, Christian Science Monitor)
• New York State got a B in a national report that graded states’ charter school laws. (Post)
• Physical education requirements aren’t enough to cut down on obesity in schools. (AP)

• In other states, charter schools usually don’t outperform district-run schools, a new report (pdf) concludes.
• A different report (pdf), by a group that boosts charter schools, gives New York’s state charter law a B.
• States with charter school caps (like this one) have a year to lift the caps to get federal money.
• A teacher lets her students know how she really feels on her last day working in the school.
• An NYC teacher says he is pulling his child from public school after getting this year’s teacher again.
• A teacher secretly wished that she would get a reason to leave her school next year. She didn’t get one.
• Pissed Off Teacher has an authentic-sounding letter from a union rep to a teacher in the reserve pool.
• After an appeal in the Daily News, Insideschools advised its supporters about how to send donations.
• Is the Department of Education monitoring ARIS’s “clicks per school”? If so, is it happy about the results?
• Kids these days! An upstate teen was arrested for preventing his teachers from grading his work.
• Letters about admission to gifted programs are going out late, for the second year in a row.
• On the origins of Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Obamicon.
• A siting fight in the Bronx turned into an existential battle for Co-op City’s new charter school.
• A Florida teacher who was suspended after letting students vote an autistic child out was reinstated.

My story this afternoon:

A city government regulator is poised to become the Department of Education’s new watchdog, but as the Assembly moves to extend mayoral control, details of how this will work are scarce.

In New York City and Albany, momentum has been building behind the idea for an independent body to check the DOE’s math. Currently, three proposed bills, including Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s bill, introduced last night, call for the Independent Budget Office and the comptroller to monitor the department.

A challenge in implementing the proposals is the IBO’s relative inexperience.

Created during the Giuliani administration to function as a publicly funded, neutral check on the mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, the IBO regularly issues reports on the mayor’s proposed budget and city taxes. Should Silver’s bill become law, the organization would be forced to grow a new arm devoted solely to scrutinizing the city’s education data.

“While we have statistical expertise we don’t necessarily have expertise around issues around test scores and how to sort them and weigh them,” a spokesman for the IBO, Doug Turetsky, said, adding that the organization has studied things like class size and school construction. “We doubled our number of education analysts last week when we hired a second one,” he said. (more…)