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The last months’ governance craziness overshadowed what had become a summer ritual: The process by which the city proposes how it wants to spend state Contracts for Excellence dollars, and the public gets to respond with its thoughts at formal hearings.

The hearings happen because Contracts for Excellence dollars are only doled out to districts that prove they will spend the money in certain kinds of programs pre-approved by state school officials.

But this summer, the New York City Department of Education skipped over the mandated date for hearings, which are supposed to occur in all five boroughs, without holding them. A public comment period will be postponed until the fall, but New York state plans to send the city the funds anyway, before that happens.

“Funds that are continuing last year’s Contract can be used,” a state education spokesman, Jonathan Burman wrote in an email. The “commissioner’s approval is required before funds allocated to new purposes can be used.” The state’s grim financial picture has meant that the city won’t receive any more Contracts dollars than it did last year.

An official at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, whose lawsuit alleging that the city schools are historically under-funded by the state led to the creation of the Contracts for Excellence fund, said that the state’s logic makes little sense given the tough fiscal climate. (more…)

Renewed mayoral control is only a few hours old, but Manhattan’s borough president has already announced his pick for the soon-to-be revived citywide school board.

Borough President Scott Stringer said he would reappoint Patrick Sullivan  to the Panel for Educational Policy. The PEP was eliminated on July 1 when the city’s school governance law expired and will soon be resurrected now that the law is back in place.

Stringer first appointed Sullivan, who is a a senior vice president at Chartis International — an insurance corporation — and a public school parent, to the panel two years ago. He quickly became the board’s most vocal critic of Chancellor Joel Klein’s educational policies. Stringer explained the decision today via phone while sitting in a noisy lower Manhattan diner.

“I thought it was important today to make it clear that we’re going to have an appointee who has a reputation for being the most vigilant and the most independent member of the PEP,” he shouted. “He calls it the way he sees it.” (more…)

The widow of Mitchell Weiner, the Queens assistant principal who died of swine flu in May, will sue the city, claiming that her husband died because of negligent practices. In a claim filed today, along with her three sons, Bonnie Weiner asks for $20 million to compensate the family’s loss.

The claim targets the city, the education department, the health department, and the Board of Education. (My understanding is that there is no legal difference between the Department of Education and the Board of Education, but this could be an interesting test case of the board’s legal standing.)

Read the full claim while we get more details.

Joel Klein. (File photo)

Joel Klein stayed positive about his reputation in an interview last night on NY1, even as host Dominic Carter played two different clips showing elected officials (both candidates for citywide office) criticizing the schools chancellor.

Klein chalked up any complaints he’s received to politics — and said President Obama is receiving the same kind of flak on the national stage, for implementing a similar education program.

“He’s putting those out there, and you know what’s happening? You get push back,” Klein said.

(I put in a call to David Cantor, Klein’s spokesman, and I’ll write to Klein too, because I’m curious what push back he’s referencing. Both teachers unions have largely supported the Race to the Top stimulus fund, if tentatively. Maybe Klein has in mind Diane Ravitch? Or could he have read Leonie Haimson’s Huffington Post piece yesterday, “Arne Duncan Has Become An Embarrassment”?)

Klein was particularly sanguine about the proposed extension of the city’s so-called “social promotion” ban announced yesterday. “When I came on here in 2004, when the mayor ended social promotion, you had the pictures — everybody was demonstrating, and all the noise,” Klein said. “Now it is 2009 and we have ended social promotion in every one of these grades, and you know what? You don’t hear noise any more, Dominic. You know why? People know what’s right for kids.” (more…)

• Mayor Bloomberg is expanding his ban on “social promotion.” (Times, Daily News, Post, GS)
• Yet a research study scrutinizing the ban started in 2004 is still not public. (GothamSchools)
• Thompson and Bloomberg sparred over who banned social promotion. (GothamSchools)
• Governor Paterson will sign the renewed, slightly revised mayoral control law today. (NY1)
• Audits found attendance figures were padded when Bill Thompson ruled Board of Ed. (Post)
• A bag lady donated hundreds of thousands to Hebrew University. (Daily News)
• Disabled students get a greater share of physical punishment in American schools. (Times)
• A school nurse shortage could make a renewed swine flu epidemic in schools scary. (USA Today)

• A City Council candidate’s wife says private school protects their special-needs son.
• One ed mayor to another: Cory Booker suggests that Bloomberg go bald. (Visualization aid.)
• A troubling number of Dallas high school grads struggled in college, Holly Hacker reports.
• Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains a K-12 curriculum idea. (Republished from before-he-was-famous.)
• Billions of the ed-stimulus dollars sit fallow in state’s coffers, NPR’s Claudio Sanchez reports.
• Following yesterday’s Post op-ed, an emotional why-I-left-my-school story from Boston.
• Telling his side of the para story, Leo Casey accuses Eva Moskowitz et al. of caring only about money.
• School began again for little Bill Clinton, the boy the Christian Science Monitor was following.
• Mike Antonucci says the latest education Census shows why teacher layoffs are inevitable.
• Politico profiles Arne Duncan, saying he could become the most influential ed/sec ever.
• Telling that CNN’s “Black in America 2″ was about the achievement gap.
• The charter school student who was expelled — and fought back. (Via NYC Educator.)
• And stay tuned to Twitter tomorrow. Bloomberg’s managing his own account!

Mayor Bloomberg’s proposal to expand a social promotion ban will likely be the first item on the school board’s agenda when they reconvene. But board members will have to vote on the proposal before the results of the only research on the effects of holding back failing students in the city have been released.

The results of a study that the city commissioned from the research institute the RAND Corporation in 2004 are scheduled to be released this fall, according to Department of Education spokesman Andy Jacob. But that will almost certainly come after the Panel for Educational Policy votes on the proposed expansion of Bloomberg’s new promotional standards to include fourth and sixth graders.

(The Panel for Educational Policy was dissolved after mayoral control expired June 30 but will reconvene now that the Senate has re-authorized the law.)

Less than two percent of third, fifth and seventh graders were held back last year under Mayor Bloomberg's tougher promotion standards. Data provided by the New York City Department of Education.

Preliminary results of the RAND study, which looks at the performance of third and fifth graders affected by the Mayor’s promotion policy over time and will include data from the 2008-2009 school year, were delivered to the Department of Education last year, Jacob said. The study was designed to follow students for five years, Jacob said, and so final results of the study will not be available until the research is completed.

The RAND Corporation did release a working paper in 2006 that surveyed promotion and retention policies around the United States and placed New York City’s practices in context.

Even without research findings on the end of social promotion in New York City, Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein insist that holding back failing schoolchildren benefits them unquestionably. (more…)

The Bloomberg and Thompson campaigns spent the afternoon jealously guarding their claims to having ended social promotion, though whether either candidate has ended the practice is debatable.

Bloomberg campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson led the attack this afternoon, saying that as president of the Board of Education Bill Thompson, currently the city’s comptroller, failed to end social promotion. Broadly defined, social promotions means that students are bumped from one grade to the next irrespective of academic problems.

Thompson’s campaign shot back, defending the mayoral hopeful. “Bill Thompson was at the forefront of ending social promotion long before Mike Bloomberg decided to claim this initiative as his own,” read an email from the campaign.

In 1999, when Thompson was president of the Board of Education, he did vote for a measure that forced students in grades 3-8 who had low test scores, poor grades, and abysmal attendance to take summer school or repeat a grade. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg called for an end to social promotion for the city’s fourth and sixth graders this morning, a change that would expand one of the most hotly debated education policies of his tenure.

At a press conference this morning, the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein called their efforts to end social promotion “a great success,” citing rising test scores and the decreasing number of students enrolled in summer school. Ending social promotion means that students who do not meet proficiency standards on state tests are held back until they do. Some of these students attend summer school and are bumped to the next grade in the fall when they pass the exam, while others can have waivers signed that let them out of retention program.

Bloomberg said that once the citywide school board is reconstituted, he would ask it to end the policy in grades four and six — the only remaining tested grades in which social promotion is still in practice. In 2004, when several board members told the mayor that they would vote against ending third grade social promotion, he had them removed and replaced overnight with people who supported his policies. The event is commonly known as the “Monday Night Massacre.”

Standing in the library of the Patrick Henry School (P.S. 171) in East Harlem, Bloomberg said that with the new retention policy, “kids will either learn what they need or teachers will know they haven’t learned.”

Asked about researchers’ claims that retention policies can raise the dropout rate, Bloomberg said he was “speechless,” adding, “It’s pretty hard to argue that it does not work.” Klein said that since 2004, when the DOE ended social promotion for third graders, support for its end has been “unanimous.”

There is significant opposition to the administration’s retention policies, said Norm Fruchter, director of the community involvement program of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform. (more…)

The ongoing plight of parents at a Bronx secondary school could augur the future for a new Gates Foundation education initiative.

Last week, the Gates Foundation announced that it would pour $6 million into opening new early college schools in New York State. It’s not clear how many, if any, of the programs will be in New York City, but any that are could face the same problems as Bronx Early College Academy, a three-year-old school that is being moved far away from the college with which it’s ostensibly linked.

Parents at BECA have been lobbying all year against the move, which they say will make it harder for the school to carry out its mission of providing students a college experience while they’re still in high school. I wrote about Annabel Wright, a BECA parent leader, back in May, and now she has published an open letter to President Obama about the school at the NYC Public School Parents blog. Writes Wright:

Parents believed in the academic program and the mission of BECA enough to look beyond what we did not have. We held on to the promises made by DOE officials that they would find us a suitable site near to Lehman or on the college campus itself, with all of the amenities that a high-tech, early college program should provide – as well as a site that would allow our children to easily attend college classes during the school day when they reached 9^th grade.

Yet now, the school is being moved six miles away to the South Bronx –even further away from Lehman.

The pattern is a familiar one for early college schools, which aim to offer a college experience while students are still in high school. Several of the city’s early college schools have had seen their CUNY collaborations erode over time because of space constraints and the colleges’ competing priorities. I wrote about the trend in April in the Village Voice. (more…)