Bill de Blasio said the issue is “very personal” for him, citing his children, who attend public schools, and his service on a school board. “I think we need profound reform of mayoral control,” he said, but did not go into specifics.

“I’m offended at any effort to reduce the democratic participation of parents in our school system. I believe there’s a way to do mayoral control right. I think there are virtues in the system if there is transparency, if there are clear checks and balances, if there is a forum for actual debate, if there is a role for communities and for local residents and for parents.”

Eric Gioia said the school governance system under Bloomberg and Klein has been holding kids accountable, but not adults. He said school should end at 5 p.m., not 3 p.m., and that children should begin school at the age of three, not five.

“I believe that we should have mayoral control, but I think for all that stuff you talked about, the smoke and mirrors and all that, that shouldn’t be a question because we should have independent outside audits of the school system. Transparency and accountability doesn’t mean testing the kids every two weeks — it means that the bureaucracy has to have transparency and accountability. And that is what we’re missing right now.”

Mark Green accused Bloomberg and Klein of “a father knows best, top-down approach,” to educational policy. “They’re ruining the value of the managerial accountability — that you want someone responsible sitting guard on one of the two great responsibilities of municipal government: law enforcement and education.”

“The best way to balance mayoral control, avoid mayoral dictatorship, and have someone who understands education, is to elect Billy Thompson the mayor of New York City.”

Norman Siegel called Klein “irresponsible and reckless,” for extending a contract to 2015, which would be well past the end of Bloomberg’s potential third term. “If mayoral control is defined by what Bloomberg and Klein have done since 2002, then I am opposed to mayoral control,” he said.

“With regard to test scores, it’s possible there’s a fraud going on here by Klein and the people at the DOE. I’m being told — and we’re doing research right now — is that the exams, in fact, instead of having 44 to pass, it’s been lowered to 28.”

Alex Zablocki, the lone Republican, said he did support mayoral control of schools. “I don’t believe it’s perfect, but as someone who’s 26 years old and left the public school system right before they turned over control to the mayor, I do remember a system, back then, that was filled with bureaucrats…and I believe that there was a lot of waste. With that said, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of waste now.”

“We do need more parental control and more voice…Educators need more of a voice than ever. What’s happening right now in the department of education is people that run corporations trying to run a school like a corporation.”

Brian Culot, principal of the Anderson School since 2006, announced just as school was ending for the summer that he would not return this fall. Instead, he is taking over at Cottage Lane Elementary School in Blauvelt, N.Y., which is near his Rockland County home.

“It was a shock,” said Judi Aronson, until today Anderson’s network leader in the empowerment schools organization. As the community superintendent for District 3 in the 2005-2006 school year, Aronson helped bring Culot to Anderson from a downtown elementary school.

Culot’s announcement came at a particularly tumultuous time for the school, which was preparing to move seven blocks south into the MS 44 building on the Upper West Side. The move, which took place this month, was part of a contentious plan to alleviate overcrowding by relocating several schools in the neighborhood, some against their will. Anderson never opposed its move, which will allow it to expand slightly but also requires it to share space with a middle school that is being closed due to poor performance.

With the move now complete, Aronson said parents at the school, which admits only top scorers on a citywide gifted exam, had turned their attention to finding a replacement for Culot. (The building is still “an absolute mess,” she said.) The first round of the search is over and a hiring committee will soon evaluate candidates Aronson helped recruit, she said.

“I was very impressed by the parents,” she said. “They were very anxious. … They could have taken the anxiety and become very angry. But they’ve been incredible.”

It used to be common for city principals to be hired away by suburban school districts. But changes to the pay scale for principals helped reduce incentives for them to leave the city.

Camila Diaz, 17, received a full ride to college from the Leonore Annenberg College Scholarship Fund.

Camila Diaz’s summer plans are crammed with the kinds of activities zealous parents schedule for high school juniors.

First there was College Summit, a college application program at Yale, then the LEAD business program at Stanford, and then she’s off to the Dominican Republic to spend time with her family and, of course, study for her SATs.

“That’s Camila,” said her principal at the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics, Edward Tom. “She’s a planner. She’s probably been thinking about college since she was 5.”

Diaz, 17, is one of five high school juniors nationwide who will receive a full college scholarship from the Leonore Annenberg College Scholarship Fund. She is the only New Yorker among them. All New Visions-affiliated schools were encouraged to nominate two students for the award, which goes to academically successful high school juniors who have faced serious challenges.

Diaz plans to apply early action to either Stanford or Yale — colleges, she said, that have strong economics departments and require all students to take certain classes. “I wanted some guidelines in what I had to take,” she said, adding that she’d like to work in finance.

An only child who lives with her mother in the North Bronx, Diaz came to the school after a year and a half of being home-schooled while she endured repeated leg surgeries.

“Having lived a life where she’s undergone surgery a number of times and to still be able to excel in other areas of her life is something to be admired,” Tom said. “She serves as a role model for other kids who now understand that they have no excuse.”

Diaz said she hadn’t fretted over paying for college, but was grateful not to have to go into debt to meet other expenses. “We’re considered the poorest of the poor, not in a bad sense, but we get financial aid really easily,” she said. “But things like books and room and board, I’d have to get loans for.” The Annenberg scholarship will pay for all of Diaz’s college costs, including a laptop and a small stipend.

According to Tom, 85 percent of students at the Bronx high school qualify for free or reduced lunch. This is the second year in a row that a student at the school has been selected for the scholarship. In June, 85 percent of the school’s senior class graduated on time, and 95 percent received Regents diplomas, according to Tom. The school is the subject of a documentary, “Whatever it Takes,” that was screened recently.

Tom opened the Bronx school in 2005, modeling it on the Manhattan Center for Math and Science, where he had worked as a math teacher. Unlike its Manhattan counterpart, the Bronx high school does not select its students based on their test scores, only giving preference to Bronx students who show up at the school’s open house.

Last year the school had 2,000 applications for its freshman class of 108 seats.

“It’s a really small school, I know all my peers, and I know the staff really well,” Diaz said. “It’s been more like a family environment.”

Dr. Steiner, the Dean of the School of Education at Hunter College, is positioned to change the policies that have been very rewarding to politicians and school boards, but have shortchanged children in our state.

New York, like many other states, has been engaging in wholesale grade inflation of standardized tests. This is driven by the constant pressure of making “annual yearly progress” to conform with the federal “No Child Left Behind Law,” which demands the impossible result of all students performing at grade level by 2014.

Since we are dealing with human children, this is a highly unlikely outcome. And since the federal government foolishly allowed the states to set their own standards, many states, including ours, have engaged in what can only be described as deceptive practices: making the tests easier, changing the scoring scale to provide better results, and in some cases both.

Politicians love higher scores because they imply higher student performance that reflects well on them. Much of Mayor Bloomberg’s advertising campaign hinges on these soaring scores. But inflated scores don’t mean our children are any smarter. 

The fact that New York’s scores have not aligned with the federal National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP tests — scores rising on the state tests while the federal counterpart is flat — is a dead giveaway that something is wrong. Dr. Steiner’s predecessor, Richard Mills, was an unabashed apologist for the inflated state tests, a position that the Board of Regents apparently no longer could condone, paving the way for Mills’ exit.

When the last round of state test results were released this spring, Meryl Tisch, the Chancellor of the Board of Regents, offered repeated words of caution about these scores, much to her credit.

Now the other shoe has dropped.

In choosing Dr. Steiner, I believe that the Regents are sending a clear signal that they expect a new era of rigorous instruction. High standards are what David Steiner is all about.

Dr. Steiner first came to my attention some years back through an article he co-authored critical of the curricula of major schools of education responsible for the training of our teachers. While those schools heavily stress the writings of “social justice” advocates like Jonathan Kozol, casting the students as victims of underfunded schools and all manner of societal ills, Dr. Steiner wondered where the instruction of actual teaching methods and content had gone. Where, for instance, are the ideas of E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who advocates for rich and systemic content instruction throughout our children’s academic careers?

This article, widely quoted, made David Steiner, then an Associate Professor of Education at Boston University, a fresh voice in the tired educational establishment. 

Having served as Director of Arts Education at the National Endowment for the Arts, he established a reputation as an advocate for providing students a rich and deep curriculum. As an advocate for the teaching of literature, music, and art, as well as the “tested” subjects of reading and math, he recognized that it is the content of the instruction that makes academic skills worth acquiring.

I suspect that it is inconceivable that Dr. Steiner will permit the continuation of the wink-and-a-nod lip service that school districts in New York pay to arts education in violation of the state guidelines.

As Dr. Steiner has written, commenting on the television program “Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader,” “our children are too often deprived of the experience of immersing themselves, losing themselves in creations of complexity, imagination and beauty.”

He draws the distinction between possessing just facts such as knowing that Poseidon was a god in the literature of the ancient Greeks, in itself “useless in promoting economic well-being,” and the actual study of the poetry of Homer and Virgil, noting that “to have these verses as constant companions is to know something a 5th grader does not: to hold beauty in the mind, and to swirl it in the glass of delight.”

If he can fill our children’s glasses with real knowledge, and demand the tough standards that will prepare students to compete in the global marketplace, he will bring a most refreshing change to the schools of the Empire State.

As mayor, City Councilman Tony Avella would undo Mayor Bloomberg’s trademark school funding program, Avella told GothamSchools in a an exclusive interview.

Currently, the city uses a program called Fair Student Funding to give schools money based on the needs of the students they serve. Under Fair Student Funding, a school with more students scoring at the lowest level on state tests would get more money than a school where the majority of students are meet the standards for proficiency, for example.

Avella said the current system, as well as the one it replaced, is vulnerable to “political favoritism” and “back-room deals” that end up giving some schools more resources than others. He said he would do away with the Fair Student Funding approach, except on a case-by-case basis where there are “extenuating circumstances,” and instead give each school the same amount of money. “Every student should be getting the same amount of money, every school should be getting the same amount of money,” he said.

But he also said that parents should be permitted to hire additional support staff with donated dollars, a practice that has come under fire recently because parents at some schools were violating city and union rules with their hiring practices.

“If there are parents who want to get involved and raise money on their own, I don’t see why we should hinder them,” Avella said. “If they can provide a little extra for their particular school, I don’t see a reason in hindering them.”

Avella’s campaign website lists one of his major education accomplishments as working with parent-teacher associations to make schools in his Queens City Council district “the best in the five boroughs.”

The proposed solution came from schools chancellor Joel Klein, who recommended that teaching assistants who are hired and paid for by parent associations be renamed “substitute school aides.” Though the change appears to be cosmetic, the new job title allows parents to bypass the citywide hiring freeze and retain their current employees at a similar salary to what they’ve paid for years.

According to Department of Education officials, calling parent-paid support staff “substitute school aides,”  would allow them to work under D.C. 37 union rules, rather than those of the teachers union (though they would not be D.C. 37 members). Under the D.C. 37 contract, substitute school aides are paid about $12 per hour and are not given benefits — conditions that mirror their current work situation. Parent associations can pay them throughout the year, rather than having to collect all the money before school starts, as some had worried. Were these employees to become members of the teachers union, they would have to be paid significantly more and receive benefits, which few parent associations say they can afford to offer.

Previously, these employees were vetted and hired by parent associations to serve as recess aides, clerical workers, and teaching assistants. They were not affiliated with any union. After the teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers, complained that city schools were employing non-UFT workers for UFT jobs, the DOE said it would crackdown on the practice.

One thing working in the PTA’s favor is that the job title, “substitute school aide,” is already being used in some schools, although DOE officials could not say how widely.

The tentative agreement, reached during a meeting today at Tweed Courthouse which Klein, UFT president Michael Mulgrew, elected officials and parents attended, is not a sure bet. D.C. 37 officials were not present at the meeting and have yet to agree to go along with the plan.

It may be a tough sell. Today, the DOE released the number of teachers and administrative staff who have been “excessed” this year, meaning that they have lost their jobs and are looking for work within the school system. According to the department’s numbers, 900 school support staff employees have been excessed, among them many substitute school aides. Currently, there are only 100 vacancies for these positions in the city. With hundreds of its own members already looking for jobs, it could be difficult for D.C. 37 to allow these employees to work under its job title, but not hold union membership.

“Everyone in the room felt very positive about the chances of having supplemental assistants or whatever specific title they will have, in the classroom this fall,” said City Councilman Daniel Garodnick. “But again we did not finalize it today,” he cautioned.

Ron Davis, a spokesman for the UFT said this wasn’t a long term solution. “We will be exploring ways to develop some apprenticeship or internship program so these teaching assistants can eventually become teachers,” he said. As for support staff who do clerical work and are not on the teaching track, “That’s something we’re going to have to work out,” he said.

“I think everybody’s happy with this short term solution,” said Jennifer Noban, president of the Parent-Teacher Association at Lillie Devereaux Blake School (P.S. 6), who attended the meeting today. Noban said her school had 17 parent-paid aides.

D.C. 37 officials could not be reached for comment this evening.

In an e-mail today, Klein encouraged principals to list and fill their open positions as soon as possible to help reduce the number of teachers without jobs. 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. If the size of the pool swells, the department could end up shouldering thousands of teachers’ salaries — all while the teachers aren’t officially on a school’s staff.

Klein emphasized that principals should plan to fill their vacancies with teachers who already work in the system, especially the more than 2,300 who currently lack a permanent position. “You should be aware that excessing conditions make it unlikely that we will lift hiring restrictions across the board,” he wrote. Restrictions have been lifted in a handful of specific license areas, most recently in special education, where the hiring freeze was lifted yesterday.

Some have speculated that principals might try to evade the hiring restrictions by not listing their open positions publicly before the “open market” period of teacher hiring ends next week.

“That’s maybe what some of them were trying to do and that’s why we had Joel send out the e-mail today,” said Photo Anagnastopoulos, the department’s chief operating officer.

There are currently about 2,400 teaching positions open in the city schools and about 2,340 teachers who don’t have positions, according to data released by the Department of Education today.

Nearly 2,000 teaching positions were cut at the end of the school year, the “overwhelming majority” because of budget cuts that totaled as much as 8 percent of schools’ budgets over the course of the last school year, department officials said today. The numbers released today marked the first time since principals submitted their budgets June 18 that the department disclosed how many positions had been cut.

Since the end of June, fewer than 400 of the teachers whose positions were cut at the end of the school year have been hired by other schools, according to the department.

The city’s excess pool currently has 1,570 teachers whose jobs were cut this year and 770 teachers whose jobs were eliminated in the past. The latter number is down from about 1,100 teachers in the pool at the end of April. About 300 of those teachers were offered permanent positions at schools since then.

In addition to the 2,340 teachers currently without positions, there are also 300 school psychologists and social workers who do not have jobs at schools but whose salaries are being paid by the department.

Teachers are protected from layoffs, even if they do not land a position in a school. No such protection exists for the 900 excessed school aides, paraprofessionals, and other people who do not belong to the city teachers union. There are only about 100 openings for those kind of positions. 

Here’s Klein’s complete letter to principals:

Dear Colleagues,

I wanted to give you an update on the hiring restrictions and how they impact our overall budget situation for the upcoming school year.

When we implemented the hiring restrictions in May, we did so to ensure that the size and cost of the excessed staff pool did not grow to the point where even more cuts would be required. I am aware that these restrictions limit your choices, but this policy is the only way to preserve your ability to select your own staff, a hard fought change in school hiring that we sought and achieved based on your feedback.

We continue to monitor the excess situation on a daily basis. A number of you have already selected internal candidates, including excessed staff, to fill your vacancies. But even with these hires, we still have many teachers in excess. As a result, we need to work together before the start of the school year to avoid any year-to-year increase in the number of teachers in excess and avoid unacceptable financial consequences. I am sure some of you are waiting to either declare or fill vacancies with the hope that hiring restrictions will be lifted soon. While I understand your desire to staff your schools with the candidates you feel will be the best fit, you should be aware that excessing conditions make it unlikely that we will lift hiring restrictions across the board in any other subject areas. To date, we lifted the hiring restrictions for almost all districts in special education and for all schools in other shortage areas, such as bilingual special education, speech, and most sciences.  Prospectively, there may be some targeted lifting of restrictions – in specific districts and subjects – but I anticipate even those targeted exceptions will be very limited. As we continue to monitor the situation, we may even need to re-impose some hiring restrictions in areas where we have lifted them.

Given these circumstances, you should not hold back on creating and filling vacancies. The best internal candidates – both teachers in excess and other teachers seeking transfers – are available now and the widest possible pool exists during the Open Market Transfer period, which by contract closes on August 7. It is crucial that you are staffed appropriately for the opening of school and therefore should create and fill vacancies as quickly as possible from the current pool of available internal candidates. Your HR Partner and the Office of Teacher Recruitment & Quality can assist you in identifying internal candidates. Many of the teachers in excess are relatively new teachers who you and your colleagues hired one, two or three years ago; many others are also dedicated teachers who could be a good fit for your school. Some excessed teachers can be hired with a subsidy, whereby central will bear a significant part of the cost even after you hire them.

I am aware that some schools will have staffing needs for short and long term absences. Please remember that you cannot use per diems and F-status staff to cover vacancies; this is something we will be monitoring. Per our agreement with the UFT, if you need to fill a vacancy caused by a leave or a sabbatical, you can hire excessed staff on a provisional basis. A provisional hire means that you are hiring the individual for only this coming year. At the end of the school year, that teacher will return to the excess pool unless you both agree he or she should remain on your staff. Questions about this process, subsidies or other matters pertaining to excesses should be directed to your HR liaison in the ISC or CFN.

Only by working together can we successfully navigate this challenging situation. I realize that you have already had to make difficult and painful decisions as a result of current budget conditions. In the case of staffing, however, critical steps remain. To the extent that vacancies are not scheduled or that the process of filling them is being delayed, the actions of individual schools have the potential to negatively impact all of our schools. I am deeply grateful for all that you are already doing to make the best choices for your school under difficult circumstances, but I ask that you please move expeditiously to schedule and fill your vacancies.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

Assembly members said today that they had serious doubts that the state should spent money on a parent-training center when the city’s school system has already gone through a round of budget cuts. Others were skeptical that parents of public school students would benefit from training. The center would cost the state $1.6 million, and would be housed at CUNY.

“It sounds like a colossal waste of money to me,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens). “I know people want to have parent training, but our problem has never been that the parents don’t know what they’re doing, it’s that there’s no power locally,” he said.

“Obviously the senators seem to think they have a deal, but no one has checked with us,” Weprin said.

Assemblyman Micah Kellner (D-Manhattan) was equally unenthusiastic. “I’m not a fan of the idea of parent training centers,” he said. “If we want a better relationship between parents and the DOE [Department of Education] it’s not about parents needing to be trained better, it’s about making sure the DOE is listening to parents.”

“It seems like a boondoggle to me,” he added.

Advocates for the creation of a parent-training center have said it would encourage and aide parents in getting involved in their Community Education Councils and School Leadership Teams.

Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) said he would support training for parents on education councils and leadership teams, but was wary of voting for a the bill if it “was going to be some very diluted, very broad based outreach effort to parents.”

“Citywide, we’re talking about an almost insignificant amount of money,” he said. “It’s hard for me to even conceive how you even get any bang for that limited amount of buck.”

The parent training center bill is one of four amendments that are part of the deal brokered last week by Democratic state senators and Mayor Bloomberg. As part of the agreement, senators promised they would vote for Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver’s school governance bill, provided that the Assembly passes these amendments. Silver’s bill preserves mayoral control of schools, while making modest changes.

Speaking on a radio program this morning, Silver said he would only guarantee that the Assembly would discuss the amendments when it returned to Albany. However, Assembly members would “be sympathetic,” to the Senate’s proposed amendments, he said.

Other amendments would create a council on the arts, would require schools to hold yearly school safety meetings with parents, and would give district superintendents more school oversight.

The Assembly members I spoke with were generally supportive of these measures, which require no funding, but did not have a sense of how popular they were with their colleagues. Bloomberg has already signed a memorandum of understanding, agreeing to implement the amendments administratively, regardless of how the Assembly votes.

Weprin questioned the necessity of signing these amendments into law.

“These things don’t seem like laws to me, they seem like things the mayor should just be doing,” he said, adding, “I guess the senators needed to save face.”

Liz Benjamin of the Daily News is reporting that senators will interrupt their summer recess to vote next Thursday on the school governance bill passed last month by the Assembly. The early-August vote adheres to the timeline set out by Mayor Bloomberg and the UFT when the mayoral control deal was brokered late last week, after the Senate had already decamped for the summer.

But the school governance saga won’t end once the Senate passes the Assembly bill, which adds some checks to mayoral control. Benjamin reports:

The Senate is moving ahead with its votes on chapter amendments despite the fact that the Assembly, which passed its mayoral control reauthorization bill in June, has not yet agreed to do the same.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this morning reiterated that the only commitment he has given is to discuss the amendments with his majority members in when they return to Albany.

Outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who played a major role in the Senate negotiations, told GothamSchools last week that conversations with Silver led her to believe that the Assembly will pass the chapter amendments. “You know the Assembly will in good faith look at the chapter amendments,” she said.

Tony Avella, the underdog mayoral candidate, doesn’t want to be left out of the fight that’s brewing between Mayor Bloomberg and Comptroller William Thompson, Avella’s competition for the Democratic nomination.

In an exclusive interview with GothamSchools, Avella said he’s the reason that Comptroller William Thompson has taken to calling for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to be fired. ”He’s now copying me because he’s now seeing that I’m — my campaign is getting some attention because of my stance when it relates to education,” Avella said. Avella’s campaign issued a press release accusing Thompson of flip-flopping last week, when Thompson first said he would fire Klein.

Avella also echoed the mayor’s criticism of Thompson’s education record. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t see how he could ever run for mayor given that everybody knows how bad the Board of Education was,” Avella said in the interview. Thompson was the president of the Board of Education from 1996 to 2001.

PS 123 has gone from an F-rated school to a B-rated school, and you’d think that would merit some encouragement from the Department of Education. You’d be mistaken. Rather than expand upon the progress they’ve made, the building that houses PS 123 has become a civics lesson for all who teach and study there—a newly designed two-tier education system. 55 years ago, Brown v. Board of Education stated, “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” At PS 123, separate educational facilities can be found within the same school building.

In fact, some families have one kid in 123, and another in HSA. But it’s pretty clear to all that the schools are different. For one thing, all HSA classrooms are painted and renovated before kids even attend. A few weeks ago, protesters questioned why the whole school couldn’t be painted, rather than just the HSA section. You have to wonder why an administration that prides itself on placing “children first” would allow so many children to be second priority.

HSA classrooms are air-conditioned. They are equipped with 21st-century technology, like smartboards and overhead projectors. Parents tell me they get new furniture and carpets. You have to wonder how PS 123 kids feel, seeing what the charter kids get. You don’t need to wonder what parents want—they want their kids to study under the best possible conditions, and HSA is an in-your-face reminder just what lottery winners can get.

Even the bathrooms are renovated. HSA kids get new furniture in the bathrooms, including chairs, as well as potpourri. I’m not sure why they need chairs in the bathrooms, but I think the potpourri is a nice touch. Having seen scores of public school bathrooms that would turn your stomach, I think Ms. Moskowitz is onto something.

At a July 20th rally at PS 123, several speakers stated that the DoE supplied Ms. Moskowitz with a list of students who’d scored 3s and 4s on citywide tests. Those students were then sent invitations to apply. A parent compared HSA and PS 123 to the plantation and the big house—some get first-class treatment while others toil away. And some kids, apparently, watch their siblings in the big house while they’re stuck in the plantation.

It’s one thing to allow innovative charters to offer kids courses of study they may not get in neighborhood schools. It’s quite another to systematically starve public schools of resources while making a blatant show of what charter schools get. It’s hard to see how PS 123 staff and students can stay inspired and focused on improvement when they’re so clearly receiving fewer resources and opportunities than their neighbor. It must be particularly infuriating to know that kids who don’t work out at HSA will quite possibly be bounced right back into PS 123—which gets the test scores, the expenses, and whatever undesirable behavior that caused the kids to be transferred, while HSA keeps the funding.

At the June 20th rally, I spoke with an HSA parent who felt the controversy was not necessary. He said there were vacant school buildings nearby, and that the city denied them to Ms. Moskowitz, thus forcing her to move into PS 123. Perhaps if the city had allowed her to use those buildings, there would not be so much unrest floating around this school. Is the Department of Education trying to make parents feel that neighborhood schools are second-class institutions?

I don’t begrudge the kids in HSA their classrooms or learning conditions. If smartboards help them, if air-conditioners make them more comfortable, if catered snacks from Fresh Direct keep them focused, fine. I only wonder why PS 123 kids can’t have the same. I also wonder, from my vantage point in a trailer well past its expiration date, why my kids can’t have decent learning conditions either.

Because, frankly, all kids should have decent learning conditions—whether or not they happen to win charter lotteries.

Arthur Goldstein teaches English as a Second Language at Francis Lewis High School in Queens. He is also the school’s UFT chapter leader.

In the weeks since the Department of Education announced it would begin enforcing a long-ignored policy that requires parent associations to employ union members at union salaries, parents have scrambled to come up with ways to keep their school aides. But some have said they’re working in the dark, and without a clear understanding of whether they’ll be able to choose the people they hire or determine how much to pay them.

The meeting, which will be held at 10:30 a.m. at Tweed Courthouse, will include parent association members, elected officials, DOE employees, and a representative from the teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers. It was a complaint from the union that prompted the DOE to begin enforcing its policy.

Patrick Sullivan, co-president of the Parent Teacher Association at the Lower Lab School (P.S. 77), said the meeting had been called so that DOE officials could explain the policy to parent leaders and so parents could offer solutions of their own.

“I think there’s going to be a range of proposals,” Sullivan said, adding that among them would be the suggestion to create new job titles for support staff.

Ann Forte, a spokeswoman for the DOE, said that unless an employee’s job description was significantly different from a paraprofessional, it would be difficult for the DOE to create a new job title. “If it’s still doing sort of the same things, I think we’d still get to the same point where this should still be a UFT person,” she said.

Another concern for parents is whether they’ll be able to afford to pay their employees’ union-set salaries and benefits. While some schools are careful to match union salaries, others pay less and few offer benefits. Many parents said they anticipate having to dismiss employees they can no longer afford and some are worried that they’ll have to raise all of the money by August in order to hire anyone.

“We want to be able to pay for the positions throughout the year,” Sullivan said. “PTAs don’t have the money now. We fundraise throughout the year, nobody has money in August for a full year of salary and benefits.”

Forte said that parents and principals could reach their own agreements on deadlines for fundraising. “There’s nothing in the chancellor’s regulations that says all the money has to be there by August,” she said. “But if the funding dries up, the principal is then liable for that cost.”

Many of the parents who will be at tomorrow’s meeting have children attending elementary school on the Upper East Side, where overcrowding has propelled parents to hire teaching assistants to effectively decrease class sizes. Keith Powers, chief of staff for Assemblyman Jonathan Bing, said representatives from P.S. 6, P.S. 77, P.S. 116, P.S. 183, and P.S. 290 would be there, as would Bing and City Councilman Daniel Garodnick.

Sullivan said he has been trying to arrange a meeting with the DOE for months, but had gotten no where until he called elected officials. “This is long overdue,” he said. “Right now the obstacle is not the UFT, the obstacle is the DOE.” Sullivan said his school, P.S. 77, has 14 parent-paid assistants.

Having parent associations hire support staff “benefits everybody,” said Andrew Lachman, treasurer and political action chair of the PTA at the Manhattan New School (P.S. 290). “This benefits the DOE, it benefits the taxpayers, it benefits the teachers, and most importantly it benefits the children. We should all find a way to make this work.”

Principals in districts 9, 19, and 23 must still fill special education positions from the pool of teachers already employed by the city. Those three districts, located in the Bronx and Brooklyn, have either a low number of vacancies or a high number of special education teachers whose positions were eliminated, according to a DOE spokeswoman, Ann Forte. City officials still have not said how many teaching positions were lost to budget cuts at the end of the school year.

Today’s change is the third since the city told principals in early May they would be able to hire only current teachers for new positions or to fill vacancies. Three weeks ago the city started allowing principals of District 75 schools, which serve the city’s most disabled students, to hire new teachers. A week later, school doors opened for most aspiring science teachers. The vast majority of teaching positions remain closed to new teachers.

The change also means that more than half of this year’s Teaching Fellows cohort are now eligible for jobs. Of this year’s Teaching Fellows, 330 are assigned to teach special education. An additional 70 were assigned to District 75, and others were assigned to teach science.

Below the jump is an e-mail sent to new Teaching Fellows today explaining the change.

Dear [xxx],

We are writing with an update regarding Department of Education hiring guidelines. Hiring restrictions on new (external) teacher candidates have now been lifted for special education vacancies, with the exception of Community School Districts 19 and 23 in Brooklyn and District 9 in the Bronx. This means that schools with special education vacancies at either the elementary or secondary level can hire new teachers, including Fellows who are training to teach in special education classrooms.

As you continue your job search, be sure to:

• Notify our office of any interviews that you schedule (remember not to schedule interviews during university coursework or SAF sessions during this final week of training). Please let us know where you interview, the name of the person that interviewed you, how it went, and what next steps you plan to take. You can e-mail this information to fellowsplacement@schools.nyc.gov. Once we know you have interviewed with a school, we can help to follow up with hiring representatives.
• Use the Job Search Action Plan located on the ‘Job Search’ tab of your My NYCTF page to guide you in your job search.
• Continue to network with other Fellows, contact schools, and send out your resume.
• Plan to attend NYCTF placement support events such as interview workshops starting the week of August 10 as well as the additional district-wide Teacher Recruitment Fairs. Further information about these fairs will be communicated shortly before the events.

If you have questions about the hiring guidelines or your job search, please contact our office at FellowsPlacement@schools.nyc.gov or 718.935.4147.

Sincerely,

Chris, Melody and Abigail
Placement Support Office
NYC Teaching Fellows

(via GothamSchools Flickr)

The executive board of New York City’s teachers union elected Michael Mulgrew its new president today, an event that has been widely expected since Randi Weingarten said she would resign to focus on national issues.

Union members will get a chance to vote in a formal presidential election in 2010, when Mulgrew will run for the position he now holds. Weingarten nominated Mulgrew for the position and, with the backing of the union’s largest party, the Unity caucus, he is likely to be elected next year.

Formerly the union’s chief operating officer, Mulgrew was the only candidate nominated for the presidency. Union rules prevent regular members from offering their own nominations. Mulgrew will become president on August 1.

The UFT press release follows:

MICHAEL MULGREW ELECTED UFT PRESIDENT

The Executive Board of the United Federation of Teachers tonight voted to elect Michael Mulgrew as the UFT’s new President effective August 1. Mulgrew, who has been serving as the union’s Vice President for Career and Technical Education (CTE) High Schools since 2005 and its Chief Operating Officer since 2008, replaces outgoing president Randi Weingarten.

Mulgrew, 44, was nominated at a special meeting of the union’s Executive Board on July 9th, after Weingarten announced in late June that she would be devoting herself full time to leading the Washington DC-based American Federation of Teachers.

Michael is the fifth president of the UFT in its storied 49-year history, following Charles Cogan (1960 to 1964), Albert Shanker (1964 to 1986), Sandra Feldman (1986 to 1998) and Randi Weingarten (1998 to 2009).

“The UFT has a long and renowned history of advocacy on behalf of our city’s public school students and educators, and I am very proud and humbled to be the union’s new president,” said Mulgrew after the vote. “There are huge challenges ahead, and our team and I will work hard to continue that important work.”

“Michael is a fantastic choice,” said Weingarten. “The role of president requires tremendous strength, judiciousness, caring and savvy, and Michael has all of those qualities. His strong determination and hard work, first as a teacher, then as a chapter leader and later as a union vice president have been first-rate, and I know first-hand his intense desire to create more opportunities for children and improve the professional lives of educators. He will continue the great work this union has done for many years, and our public schools will be better and stronger for it.”

The United Federation of Teachers represents more than 200,000 active and retired members, including teachers, classroom paraprofessionals, school secretaries, attendance teachers, guidance counselors, psychologists, social workers, education evaluators, nurses, laboratory technicians, adult education teachers and home child-care providers. The UFT also runs more than 300 teacher training centers around the five boroughs as well as two charter schools.

Much of the action is happening in the comments section of a Huffington Post column posted yesterday by Comptroller William Thompson, who has been gaining on Mayor Bloomberg in polls. In the column, titled “Why Joel Klein Should be Fired,” Thompson described what he called “a pattern of brazen actions taken by the Department of Education that fly in the face of basic management standards.” 

Within hours of the column’s publication, DOE press secretary David Cantor had responded. ”Virtually all of Mr. Thompson’s claims are incorrect or distortions,” Cantor wrote in his comment, the first attached to Thompson’s column. 

Then, the mayor’s campaign manager, Howard Wolfson, jumped into the fray, posting a link to the campaign’s official response today, which indicates that Thompson’s five-year tenure as Board of Education president in the 1990s could be a prime target for the Bloomberg campaign. From the statement: 

So, here are the facts: When Mr. Thompson ran the old Board of Education most test scores declined or were flat. Dropout rates went up four points and graduation rates showed little improvement. Pervasive violence in our schools prevented children from learning. Billions in cost overruns were rampant and shoddy accounting even failed to accurately count the number of students in the system.

Despite this poor record, Mr. Thompson insisted on politics as usual, opposing Mayoral Control and failing to end social promotion. In short, Mr. Thompson had ample opportunity to improve and reform a dysfunctional system, and he failed to do so.

But Thompson is looking forward while the Bloomberg campaign is fixated on the past, according to Thompson spokesman Jeffrey Simmons, who also posted a comment. (Simmons got attention last week when he barred DOE employees, including Cantor, from attending two of Thompson’s press conferences.) From his comment:

As Mr. Cantor – and his campaign compatriot – cry foul and discuss the past, Thompson is addressing the future, and a public school system that is held accountable, reigns in out-of-control contract spending (just look at today”s Daily News column exposing another example of over-the-top costs), and strengthens parental involvement in schools.

Here’s the Bloomberg campaign’s official response to Thompson’s ongoing criticism: