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As early as this Monday, Mayor Bloomberg refused to countenance the possibility that mayoral control could expire June 30, spiraling the system back to a power-share with 32 community school boards and superintendents, plus a citywide Board of Education.

But with the state Senate still deadlocked, the mayor is agreeing to meet with the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, and discuss contingency plans, Stringer said this morning.

Department of Education officials are also burrowing into education law — and what they’re describing is a school system that would become almost anarchical if the 2002 mayoral control law expires.

School officials explain a chain of events that would lead to the power vacuum in a memo that is circulating inside Tweed Courthouse and City Hall. The first problem is that if the system abruptly reverts to pre-2002 status, there would be no community school boards. The pre-2002 law prevents board elections from happening until May 2010, and no one has the authority to appoint temporary members:

“Therefore, community school boards will exist, but they will have no members — and will thus be incapable of taking any action,” the memo says.

No community school boards means no acting community superintendents, which means several crucial school matters would be left without anyone to OK them. According to the memo, the matters include filling teaching vacancies, firing school employees who commit crimes, and deciding whether to promote students to the next grade after summer school.

Classroom decisions could also be affected, the memo says:

“While principals have the authority to make curricular decisions, those decisions will require the superintendent’s approval, and without a superintendent, it is not clear how schools can make needed instructional decisions at all.”

It’s important to remember that these predictions are based not just on conversations with lawyers, but also probably political calculations. The department has been pushing strongly for mayoral control to be renewed, and so threatening doomsday if the Senate doesn’t act is in their interest.

Here’s the full document: (more…)

A week after principals were required to submit their budgets for next year, the city still doesn’t have an answer to the question of how many teachers are losing their positions because of budget cuts.

That question is essential for the counterintuitive reason that positions cut at schools actually don’t save the system any money. If a principal can’t pay for a teacher, the teacher goes into a pool of “excessed” teachers whose salaries are paid by the department. That pool already contains more than 1,700 people and has been criticized as a burden on the city’s budget. If the size of the pool swells because of the budget cuts, the department could end up shouldering thousands of teachers’ salaries — all while the teachers aren’t officially on a school’s staff.

Department of Education staff are still crunching the budget numbers, officials say. The department’s chief operating officer, Photeine Anagnastopoulos, told me on Tuesday that the excess situation was shaping up to be “not as bad” as she and others had anticipated, particularly considering that principals haven’t yet launched the bulk of their hiring for the fall.

But a source familiar with the budget process says the numbers have been delayed because the department is “scrambling” to check principals’ math about whether they need to cut positions. Staff at the department’s service centers are “going over budgets in high-excess schools trying to negotiate fewer excesses,” the source said. (more…)

We’re five days away from the expiration of mayoral control, and there’s stronger-than-usual rumbling today that a deal is in the works to bring a power-sharing agreement to the State Senate.

That means that mayoral control could come up for a vote today. The Senate will convene at 3 p.m. for a special session Governor Paterson called for yesterday evening.

Mayor Bloomberg demanded that the Senate pass the Assembly’s mayoral control bill.

“If the Senate passes something that differs by one word or more it is saying to the city: We want to resurrect the Soviet Union, we want to bring back chaos,” he said today.

An official at the governor’s office told me that Paterson put the Assembly’s mayoral control bill on his agenda for the session. Senator John Sampson, a critic of the 2002 mayoral control law, introduced his own bill on Tuesday. His proposal calls for two-year fixed terms for members of the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide school board. It also provides $25 million in funding for a parents’ training academy that would instruct parents in how to navigate the Department of Education’s bureaucracy.

Update: Billy Easton, of the Campaign for Better Schools, responds to the mayor’s quote. “Unlike the Soviet Union, we live in a democracy. And in this democracy, the mayor needs to negotiate with both houses of the New York State Legislature. By throwing around inflammatory rhetoric and refusing to negotiate with Senator Sampson and the Senate Democratic leadership the mayor is becoming yet another obstacle as the June 30th deadline looms ahead.”

Update 2x: Liz Benjamin is reporting that, rather than make a deal and get to work, the Senate Republicans and Democrats refused to vote on any bills today. The saga continues.

Victoria Cruz and her girlfriend of two and a half years, Deoine, were voted “best couple” at their high school, Mott Haven Village Prep.

Cruz, a reporter with the program Radio Rookies, produced a segment for WNYC about how she and Deoine won the honor despite ballots that asked students to pick one girl and one boy — and how it feels to be unable to show the yearbook with their picture to her grandmother, who doesn’t know she is gay.

Listen to the segment here: 

• Scott Stringer’s transition-from-mayoral-control plan involves consulting with school officials. (NY1)
• The mayoral control countdown clock is at just six days, and Albany is still in chaos. (Daily News)
• Parent involvement remains a big issue in the control debate, among those who are having it. (NY1)
• Sen. John Sampson says he wants the opportunity to vote on his own mayoral control bill. (Post)
• NY1 has video from Randi Weingarten’s resignation speech yesterday.
• Sol Stern says the calendar deal between the UFT and the city is bad for kids. (Daily News)
• Results on a DOE survey show that parents, teachers, and students are happy with their schools. (Post)
• Parents sometimes give up gifted seats to stay in their neighborhood school. (Riverdale Press)

• An excessed teacher begins chronicling his job-hunt in the Community section.
• A blogger asks: Where is the adult supervision on NYC Prep?
• James Eterno, ICE’s candidate for president in the 2010 UFT elections, makes his debut.
• Tips on what teachers should know that the DOE isn’t telling them.
• Clara Hemphill summarizes the small schools report in HuffPo.
• Accountable talk says what matters is whether Mulgrew thinks like Randi.
• Bloomberg begins to prepare for a mayoral control doomsday scenario in the Senate.
• The Associated Press writes up Randi Weingarten’s New York City resignation.
• Charlie Barone says the Green Dot contract is now up for grabs for principals.
• Some ideas about how to use federal dollars to improve assessments.
• The Cleveland school board is ordering serious thinking about a 50% graduation rate.
• Maryland may introduce the first Barack Obama Elementary School.
• A federal research fund will invest in studying how to improve “chronically” failing schools.

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten made her New York City goodbye official tonight before a standing-room-only audience of union delegates. The group gave her two standing ovations and spontaneous cheers, including one woman who proclaimed, “You’re my hero!”

Weingarten said that her resignation from the United Federation of Teachers presidency will be effective on July 31st.

For roughly one year, Weingarten has been president of both the United Federation of Teachers local union and the national American Federation of Teachers — “even though each job is more than full-time, deserving 24/7 attention,” she said. Citing the need for each union to have its own full-time president, she said she was stepping aside “to ensure a smooth transition for the UFT.”

Weingarten has said that she favors handing the reins of the New York City union to Michael Mulgrew, who now serves as chief operating officer. The union’s executive board will decide who to name interim president in the next month. (more…)

After years of criticism that its school report cards are too difficult for most parents to understand, the city is redesigning the report cards that give each school a letter grade.

Starting this fall, the Department of Education will produce one-page progress reports that contain only the most important pieces of performance data about each school. The new reports are meant to deliver complicated accountability information “in a more parent-friendly way,” according to Phil Vaccaro, a representative of the department’s accountability office. Vaccaro presented a draft of the new report to the city school board yesterday.

The “progress report family summary” has the same content but a different design from the data-packed two-pager currently produced for each school. For example, instead of having eight different numbers to describe student progress, there is just one, the proportion of students who made a year’s progress in a single year.

A member of the school board, Dmytro Fedkowskyj, worked with the department to develop the new reports. ”We need to present them in ways parents can understand,” he said, adding that parents who misunderstood the reports could make misinformed school choices.

Critics of the progress reports said the family summary might actually be too simple. (more…)

For those unfamiliar with the bureaucratic behemoth that is the New York City Department of Education, the term “excessed” is somewhat strange.  Most spell check software (including this one) doesn’t even recognize it as a word.  But, indeed it is. I know because I looked it up two weeks ago, just for kicks.

There it is, at the bottom.  Number seven.  It’s a verb (used with object) that means:

And no, I didn’t look it up just for fun. I guess semi-morbid curiosity would be more accurate.

It was just over two weeks ago when I was in the classroom and an announcement was made calling three teachers and myself to the principal’s office for a brief meeting after school. (more…)

Randi Weingarten testifying at a mayoral control hearing in February. (GothamSchools)

Ending what might have been one of the city’s worst-kept secrets, Randi Weingarten this afternoon is announcing her plan to resign as president of the city teachers union at the end of next month.

Weingarten is making the announcement to members of the United Federation of Teachers right now at the union’s Lower Manhattan headquarters. Before today, she had not confirmed her intention to step down, even after news of her impending departure leaked to the media. Beginning in August, Weingarten will be devoting herself full-time to the presidency of the second-largest national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, which she assumed last summer.

A union press release (posted in full after the jump) contains praise for Weingarten’s 23-year tenure at the UFT from a host of prominent figures, including Gov. Paterson, Mayor Bloomberg, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

One name that doesn’t make an appearance in the press release is that of Michael Mulgrew, the union vice president who is widely assumed to be next in line for the presidency. Anna just posted a profile of Mulgrew in which she calls him “the new power broker you probably don’t know.” From the profile:

Mulgrew also couldn’t be more different from Weingarten. Tall and apple-cheeked, he has the physical presence of Mr. Clean (both shave their heads) and a quiet charm. “Women seem to like him,” noted one union member.

Still, he’s often bullish and he gained renown in the union for being one of a small number of people to stand up to Weingarten.

Read the complete profile. Below the jump, read the union’s press release announcing Weingarten’s resignation: (more…)