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Randi Weingarten’s participation in a press conference today beside two groups who’d like to see changes in Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s mayoral control bill doesn’t mean that she’s going to fight for those changes, too. Weingarten is being overall “very positive” about the bill, a union lobbyist in Albany told me.

“It would be very unlikely that we would oppose, because we think there’s so much good in here,” the lobbyist in Albany told me. “It would only be whether or not to issue a memo in support.”

Weingarten is still hoping that a parent initiative will get added into the law, and she met with lawmakers today to promote the idea, the lobbyist said. She and the other two groups are asking the state to fund a separate organization or initiative that would give parents a voice in the policy discussion. The idea is similar to one Weingarten endorsed in a speech last year, when she urged a community coalition that had fought budget cuts to become a permanent organization.

The clarification of her participation follows confusion among lawmakers about exactly where Weingarten stands on mayoral control, a state legislator told me today. (more…)

Photo of Tammany Hall taken from Flickr

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…)

Above: Harlem Link Charter School third-graders read a Dr. Seuss book with members of the school’s board earlier this spring, from GothamSchools’ Flickr pool.

After our call for photos last week, some readers asked about the rules about posting pictures taken inside schools. We checked with the Department of Education and found out that photos that show students’ faces can’t be published, unless the students’ parents have signed release forms or the kids are over 18. (The parents of the children in the picture above have release forms on file, according to Harlem Link.)

After infuriating activists pushing for checks to the mayor’s control of the public schools, teachers union president Randi Weingarten today stood next to them at a press conference in Albany, joining a declaration that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s proposed bill does not give enough voice to parents.

Teachers and principals have unions, but parents do not, Weingarten said, according to someone who attended the press conference. That’s why she said she is calling on lawmakers to write additional voice for parents into a revised mayoral control law.

In making the statement, Weingarten stood beside representatives of the Campaign for Better Schools and the Parent Commission on School Governance, two groups that have called for stronger checks to the mayor’s power than the union ultimately demanded. Members of the Parent Commission on School Governance have criticized Weingarten for giving in to the wishes of Mayor Bloomberg, who has endorsed Silver’s bill.

It was not clear exactly how much of those groups’ positions Weingarten endorsed. At least five Democratic Assembly members also joined the press conference.

UPDATE: A spokesman for Weingarten, Ron Davis, just called to say she is concerned about this story. The spokesman said that Weingarten had “nothing but praise” for Silver’s bill at the press conference, though she did say that she thinks it should be revised to “ensure a greater parental role.” (more…)

After months of discussion, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver finally introduced a bill to extend mayoral control last night. The full text of the bill is below.

The bill, which was discussed last Wednesday but was only printed last night, calls for minimal changes and has  already met with Mayor Bloomberg’s approval. Amendments include having the schools chancellor become a non-voting, ex-officio member of citywide school board, mandating that two of the mayor’s appointees be parents of children in the public school system, and authorizing the Panel for Educational Policy to approve no-bid contracts and any that exceed $1 million.

While the bill proposes that the Independent Budget Office and Comptroller’s office audit the DOE, it does not establish the department as a city agency, subject to all of the restrictions and oversight that other agencies are.

According to the Times, assembly members expect to pass the bill by this Wednesday. (Explaining the importance of the discussions, the Times story cites our story from last week, reporting on the personal role U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is playing in the debate.)

The bill’s sponsors include Catherine Nolan, Herman Farrell, Jr., Darryl Towns, Vito Lopez, Audrey Pheffer, Michael Benedetto, Janele Hyer-Spencer, Jonathan Bing, Michael Benjamin, Ann Margaret Carrozza, Barbara Clark, Vivian Cook, Steven Cymbrowitz, Adriano Espaillat, Michael Giaranis, Micah Kellner, Rory Lancman, Margaret Markey, Nettie Mayersohn, Grace Meng, Felix Ortiz, Jose Peralta, Peter Rivera.

The bill is after the jump. (more…)

FROM NEW YORK CITY:

• Mayor Bloomberg is supporting Sheldon Silver’s laissez faire mayoral control bill. (Daily News)
• The Assembly is expected to pass the bill, perhaps as soon as Wednesday. (Times)
• Silver’s bill is good for kids and was the best part of one of Albany’s weirdest weeks, the Daily News says.
• The Daily News urges donors to save a city institution, Insideschools.org. (We agree.)
• Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to turn Catholic schools into charters isn’t happening this year. (Daily News)
• Arne Duncan pushed a city group not to push for mayoral control changes. (Post, GothamSchools)
• Brooklyn students visited Manhattan’s criminal court to see justice working firsthand. (Daily News)
• The city’s proposed budget would eliminate vouchers that help Orthodox Jews with child care. (Times)
• A Bronx charter school principal was investigated 10 years ago for helping kids cheat. (Post)
• Transfer schools have given struggling high school students second chances at graduating. (Post)
• The Post profiles a 9-months-pregnant woman who is graduating from a transfer high school.
• A charter school that promised to leave another school’s building now wants to stay. (Daily News)
• Kindergartners at Brooklyn’s PS 17 were accidentally shown 45 seconds of pornography. (Post)
• The Arizona Daily Star profiles a hometown teacher who is starting as an NYC charter school teacher.
• The Post says William Thompson’s recent DOE audits don’t make him worthy of being mayor.
• A graduating senior from Harlem’s Wadleigh High School is a serious businessman. (Times)

AND BEYOND:

• The federal government has designated $350 million to develop national curriculum and tests. (AP)
• The Daily News says the state should give in to Arne Duncan’s demands and lift the charter cap.
• The Washington Post takes a look at Michelle Rhee’s first two years as D.C.’s schools chief.
• People from across the country have suggestions for Harold Levy’s school improvement list. (Times)
• Teens in China cram for years to pass a one-shot-only college entrance exam. (Times)
• The charter school market in Albany is poised to open up. (Albany Times Union)
• Teacher layoffs in Los Angeles are affecting the neediest schools most. (L.A. Times)
• Teachers are figuring out novel ways to stop kids from losing skills over the summer. (Washington Post)
• Girls sports often get the short shrift, and they face special challenges in city schools. (Times 1, Times 2)
• NYC transplant Andres Alonso is getting fire for his ask-questions-later leadership style. (Baltimore Sun)
• Jay Mathews takes a look back at the first year of his Washington Post column, “Class Struggle.”
• Gov. Paterson said at a Midtown conference that education is just as important as the economy. (Post)
• A Connecticut school system is doing away with academic tracking. (Times)

• Jennifer Jennings (née Eduwonkette) challenges Michelle Rhee’s test score gains.
• Bill de Blasio is criticizing Bloomberg for not putting enough hand sanitizer in schools.
• People in Houston are worrying that New York City-style school reform will creep there.
• A second state asked permission to drop K-12 funding below 2006 levels, despite stimulus.
• David Whitman is getting scooped up by the USDOE communications office.
• A Brooklyn company is behind the Palm Pilot software discussed in today’s WSJ article.
• An Oakland mom finds principals candidates at her daughter’s school “discouragingly inadequate.”
• Rotherham endorses opening up bargaining talks between unions and school districts.
• An anti-union research group rises in Indiana.
• And a very special happy birthday and congratulations to Philissa!

In a two-page letter sent to the Citizens Union Monday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan offered a stern warning that placing restrictions on mayoral control could “turn back the clock and halt progress” and have “profoundly negative consequences for New York City’s students.”

We reported yesterday that Duncan had sent such a letter, but at the time U.S. Department of Education officials wouldn’t confirm that the letter existed. That changed a few minutes ago when an official e-mailed it over.

The full text of the letter is after the jump. (more…)

A Daily News report this week cast doubt on the validity of the state’s math scores. A major problem the News pointed to is that the math tests seem to repeat themselves, broken-record style, making it easy for teachers to coach their students on how to give correct answers — without necessarily understanding the underlying math. A second problem is that the tests may be getting easier over time, the story said.

Here’s a graphical portrait of what this means in practice, courtesy of Jennifer Jennings, the doctoral student at Columbia University whose analysis informed the News’s story.

A math question seventh-graders answered in 2009:

A math question for seventh-graders in 2008:

And finally a question from the same test’s 2007 version, assessing the same concept, but in a much more difficult way: (more…)

The executive director of the Citizens Union confirmed today that the group changed its mayoral control position after Education Secretary Arne Duncan personally asked members to reconsider.

At issue was whether to insulate school board members from being fired at will by the mayor by giving them fixed terms. The Citizens Union had supported fixed terms, but Duncan “made it known very clear that he did not support fixed terms and would like the organization to take a look at this position and we did,” CU’s executive director Dick Dadey.

At a press conference today in front of Tweed, the group announced its support for extending mayoral control without fixed terms.

The announcement came after the group received a letter from Duncan and a phone call from Mayor Bloomberg asking them not to endorse fixed terms. According to Dadey, after a year of discussing mayoral control, the group’s board members had reached a consensus to support fixed terms, but that was before the phone call and letters, at which point the board decided to reexamine the issue. (more…)