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News from New York City:

• One chartering agency approved pre-K for a charter school; another rejected it. (Daily News)
• Rumor has it Sen. Shirley Huntley wanted a principal fired before she’d vote for mayoral control. (Post)
• A charter school principal says charter schools provide the best option for special education. (Post)
• Chancellor Joel Klein lists four of his favorite books, and they’re not about management. (Post)
• The 9 minutes of the new Board of Education’s lifespan were among the city’s most productive. (Times)
• DFER’s Joe Williams says Arne Duncan should bar New York from Race to the Top funds. (Daily News)
• Philanthropist George Soros is supplying a cash bonus for poor children this fall. (Times)
• New state ed chief David Steiner says teacher preparation is his top priority. (Jamestown Post-Journal)

And beyond:

• A 4-year teacher in a D.C. charter school explains why she’s leaving the profession. (Washington Post)
• More Chicago schools have gone year-round, a move that Arne Duncan supported. (Chicago Tribune)
• The Minneapolis Star-Tribune editorializes in favor of a new model of teacher-led schools.
• The city’s former health commissioner says schools should not close for swine flu. (Post, Times)
• Textbooks are becoming obsolete as school districts turn to technology. (Times)
• Nationwide, school bus routes are on the chopping block this year. (Times)
• D.C. public school students work as government interns. (Washington Post)
• Jay Mathews: The moment is right to find more scholarship money for poor students. (Washington Post)

• One of Eli Broad’s big ambitious projects is close to dead: that art museum.
• John Merrow’s ninth 10th Michelle Rhee episode asks if rising test scores mean better schools.
• A new online high school promises a safe space for gay students.
• NYC Educator says Arne Duncan “asks fewer questions than the NY Post editorial board.”
• Congrats to the Notebook, a school news site in Philly, for a national shout out.
• Tom Vander Ark suggests creating a market in assessments and standards.
• Margaret Spellings has a new job, heading the Chamber of Commerce’s foundation.
• The city Department of Education is looking to hire a FOIL attorney.
• When the next control fight arrives, Norm Scott wants to see more parents and teachers in the streets.
• An audit finds that Detroit’s school system is a wasting equipment and money.
• John Hughes gave movie watchers spinach with their candy, Rotherham remembers.
• And a teacher blogger has some advice on how to treat your textbook.

Rupert Murdoch and Arne Duncan. (Images via Creative Commons)

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”

New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.

“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.

The news series the Post ran extolling mayoral control

Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Duncan’s quote does illustrate a strange alliance that fought hard for mayoral control’s renewal, Murdoch and the secretary of education among them. (more…)

Nothing in the renewed mayoral control legislation that passed yesterday altered the role of district parent councils, but that hasn’t stopped one council president from starting to rethink his role under the new system.

Jim Devor, president of the Community Education Council in Brooklyn’s District 15, said that the renewed attention to parental involvement and a new parent training center offer parent councils the chance to redefine themselves. Many council members around the city have felt marginalized and have a strained relationship with the city education department. According to Devor, the councils could now become “conduits” between the Department of Education, the training center and parent associations and parent-led School Leadership Teams.

“We could see ourselves as the barefoot doctors for parent training,” Devor said.

Devor said that CEC members should be among the first to avail themselves of the training the new center will provide and can then reach out to their parents and schools and effectually pay the training forward.

Little is known yet about the details of the $1.6 million dollar parent training center created in the mayoral control re-authorization bill. The legislation calls for the center, which will be operated by the City University of New York, to train parents in all five boroughs on how to effectively work both in their schools and also on the district- and city-wide levels. The center will also assist parents in communicating with teachers, school administrators and Department of Education offices. The legislation additionally mandates that the center will “conduct outreach and recruitment” to increase the diversity of parent-led council and leadership teams in schools and districts.

Given the new center’s as-yet vague mission and relatively small budget, Devor said he suspects it will be difficult for the new training center to make deep inroads with parents on the ground level throughout the city.  The already-established parent councils could act as arms to assist in distributing the center’s training message to parents throughout their districts.

Community Education Councils are officially charged with evaluating district superintendents, approving district zoning plans and reviewing their district’s capital plans.

• The Senate returned school control to the mayor. (GothamSchools, Times, Post, Wall Street Journal)
• It also added an oversight committee to watch the DOE. (Daily News)
• The Post and the Daily News hail the Senate’s vote, saying that kids are coming out ahead.
• Schools Chancellor Joel Klein praises the renewal, even if the process to get to it was “noisy.” (Post)
• The Post tallies praise for its mayoral control series from Arne Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg, and others.
• Arne Duncan said the vote is “a big victory for the children of New York City.” (Post)
• Dakota Reyes, principal of Brooklyn’s PS 372, reminds readers how mayoral control helped her. (Post)
• Schools in New York and elsewhere could be used as swine flu immunization centers. (USA Today)
• In letters to the Times, New Yorkers suggest tasks for new state education chief David Steiner.
• Downtown Express visits the School of One, located in Manhattan’s Chinatown.
• John Fund: That politicians choose their kids’ schools and also oppose vouchers is a scandal. (WSJ)
• Jay Mathews revisits Rafe Esquith, the indefatigable California teacher. (Washington Post)

• Sen. Padavan says mayoral control talks in 2015 will sound a lot like they did this year.
• “Where’s the beef?” asks Sen. Perkins.
• State senators created a subcommittee on mayoral control that some are calling redundant.
• Norm Scott says writing “protect us” across the UFT’s survey won’t create change.
• Responding to a Jay Mathews column, a teacher says testing promotes depth over breadth.
• USDOE seems to have left lawmakers off the list of stakeholders in Race to the Top applications.
• South Dallas considers naming two schools after Obama and Sotomayor. Michelle gets a library.
• Rhode Island’s Board of Regents is feeling the pressure from Race to the Top.
• A California state appeals court ruled today that tests can be given in English-only.
• Our decentralized school system has one major benefit: experimentation.
• How many ELL dropouts is way way too many?
• The Squire Family Foundation wants philosophy teachers to join a network called PLATO.
• And the Times’ new restaurant critic is a former New York City public school teacher.

A New York non-profit whose political action committee supports critics of mayoral control is making its debut into city education politics tonight. But its strategy is to hold off supporting city candidates this election year and instead spend the fall collecting community input.

Glynda Carr

The effort kicks off tonight with two “neighborhood dialogue” meetings in Brooklyn and Queens, said Glynda Carr, executive director of Education Voters of New York, a three-year old branch of the national Education Voters of America.

The group has previously supported some of mayoral control’s staunchest opponents in Albany. But Carr said that she aims to launch a public conversation about schools freed of political agendas, including her own. “These neighborhood dialogues aren’t going to be framed,” she said.

Carr said she planned to use the fruits of the fall meetings to map out an agenda for future local campaign work.  If she succeeds, her group could become a key player amid a crop of new lobbying groups directing their dollars with education issues in mind. (more…)

New York state senators resurrected mayoral control today, voting 47 against 8 to pass the legislation this afternoon.

According to the Daily News’ Liz Benjamin, debate over the bill lasted for two hours and turned personal when critics of mayoral control attacked the bill’s supporters, Sens. Daniel Squadron and Frank Padavan. The Senate also passed four amendments that will create a parent training center, an arts council, yearly school safety meetings, and expanded oversight of principals by superintendents.

Jimmy Vielkind at Politicker reports that the dissenting senators were Bill Perkins, Ruben Diaz Sr., Shirley Huntley, Kevin Parker, Velmanette Montgomery, Eric Adams, Carl Kruger, and Tom Duane. Perkins and Diaz also voted against all four amendments.

Standing on the Senate floor, Diaz forecast how tomorrow’s editorials would receive his vote. “You read it, tomorrow they’re going to call me a monkey, they’re going to call me a clown, they’re going to call me stupid. They’re going to call me all kinds of things,” he said.

The NY Post, which has been mayoral control’s biggest cheerleader, is reporting the news with an exclamation point in its lede.

“Mayor Bloomberg is still the undisputed educator-in-chief of New York City public schools!”

(more…)

Jason Raymond

A New York City high school teacher is one of three fellowship winners who, come Monday morning, will begin new jobs in Washington, D.C., as full-time employees of the Obama administration’s Department of Education.

In the middle of June, Jason Raymond, who has taught English and journalism at the High School for Law and Public Service for seven years, learned that he had been chosen for the department’s Teaching Ambassador Fellowship. He quickly packed up and moved to D.C., where he will be part of a program created by the previous secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, to bring teachers into the rooms where education policy is crafted.

Raymond, 38, whose expertise is in adolescent literacy, college readiness, and urban schools, said he will be working in the office of elementary and secondary education.

“I’m going to be bringing my teacher voice to policy,” he said, explaining that he would sit in on conversations about certain grants the DOE planned to distribute. As a Washington fellow, it will be Raymond’s job to point out proposed ideas that may not work well in the classroom and suggest alternatives, but the scope of his influence will be limited.

“It won’t be that I’m sitting in a room with other policy experts and saying you know here’s what I think we should do,” he said, noting that the details of what he’d be focusing on were still be worked out. (more…)

• The State Senate is expected to vote on mayoral control today. (GothamSchools, Newsday, NY1)
• The Post says it will believe the Senate’s expected mayoral control renewal when it sees it.
• The Department of Education has cut a longtime program to reduce truancy. (Daily News)
• The Gates Foundation gave New York State $6 million to create more early college schools. (Post)
• The Irish Echo profiles former DOE official Michelle Cahill, who now works for the Carnegie Corporation.
• CUNY’s summer enrollment is higher than ever before, as students try to speed graduation. (Daily News)
• In D.C., district schools outperform charter schools on standardized tests. (NPR)
• A new study suggests that Obama’s election could be boosting black parents’ volunteerism. (USA Today)
• The Times says D.C. should bring charter operators to its high schools, no matter what the union thinks.
• Thomas Carroll (again!) explains why he thinks Randi Weingarten’s agenda has hurt kids. (Daily News)
• The Syracuse Post-Standard says it approves of NYC’s strategy of letting kids be paid for their grades.