GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

• Why are unions still powerful? Americans like checks and balances too much. (Antonucci)
• Russ Whitehurst says Harlem Children’s Zone works, but not as advertised. (Brookings)
• Joel Klein is now partnering with Microsoft to make a school e-mail system. (Datamation)
• Why forcing teachers to work at struggling schools doesn’t work. (This Week in Education)
• A first look at the first step in the federal education budget process. (Ed Money Watch)
• Meanwhile, edujobs isn’t totally dead — not yet, at least. (Politics K12)
• The University of Phoenix took more than a billion in Pell grants, a record. (Quick and the Ed)
• Charter school critic Sen. Bill Perkins was endorsed by two former mayoral candidates. (Daily Politics)
• Round 2 admissions for public pre-K are underway and seats are open. (Insideschools)
• John McWhorter and Richard Thompson Ford debate the merits of segregated schools. (Bloggingheads)

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein hasn’t weighed in on a state political race in several years, but he’s doing so now.

According to the New York State Board of Elections website, Klein gave $1,000 last month to Upper East Side Assemblyman Jonathan Bing. The chancellor’s wife, Nicole Seligman, a Sony executive vice president, also gave Bing $1,000.

The chancellor and his wife live in Bing’s district, where he’s being challenged by Gregg Lundahl, a government teacher at Washington Irving High School. And it can only have helped Bing’s relationship with Klein that he introduced a bill last spring to eliminate seniority-based layoffs for teachers. At the time, teacher layoffs seemed inevitable to the Department of Education and Klein was pushing for an end to the policy that lays off the newest teachers first. (more…)

When we posted the report about the tragic field trip taken by students at Columbia Secondary School, we noted that it had arrived in record time, less than a month after sixth-grader Nicole Suriel drowned at Long Beach. Today, we received a report that reflects a more typical timeline for the Special Commissioner of Investigation.

Today’s report is about a trip that several Beacon High School students took to Cuba — in 2007. A three-year investigation revealed that Beacon students had traveled to Cuba in previous years, that Principal Ruth Lacey had opposed the 2007 spring break trip, and that a Beacon teacher organized a trip anyway, with the help of a pacifist nonprofit. All of this should make headlines, except that newspapers reported most details within days of the group’s return — when the teacher, Nathan Turner, and five students were stopped while trying to reenter the country.

SCI chief Richard Condon is recommending that Turner, a Communist who posted pictures of Fidel Castro in his classroom, not be allowed to work in city schools. That would have been a useful recommendation two years ago, before Turner resigned from Beacon.

Why the delay? It’s unlikely that Condon’s office was preparing reports about charges of systemic misconduct, such as grade-changing and test-tampering, but one can only hope. (more…)

In a recent article in the journal Education Next, Mike Antonucci reviewed the finances of the two largest teachers unions, the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). He found teachers unions in states like Oregon, Colorado, and Montana spent several hundreds of dollars per teacher for political campaign spending on candidates and ballot initiatives. New York, according to Antonucci, spent only $5 per teacher.

But this is only part of the picture. Another source of political spending can be found in financial documents that the city teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers (UFT), filed with the federal government. According to this “LM-2″ filing, the UFT spent around $31 per teacher, or a little over $2.4 million overall, out of a $202 million budget, on political activities during the 2008-2009 school year.*  The UFT membership, however, consists of more than just teachers. If you included total UFT membership — 164,462 — spending on political activities would be around $16 per member. (To be clear, Antonucci only considered active teachers in his calculations.)

In addition to this spending, which includes things like lobbying, buses to events, and phone banks, the UFT has a political action committee (PAC). The PAC is a stand-alone group whose specific purpose is to dole out money to politicians, groups, and ballot measures that the union supports. The UFT’s PAC, known as the Committee on Political Education (“COPE”), is funded by voluntary member contributions as well as other sources.

COPE spent $187,411 in 2008-2009 on donations to politicians. The fund’s balance — the amount that could theoretically be given away — has also dramatically increased, to $1.35 million in July 2009, from an average of $124,000 during 2000-2005.  Furthermore, contributions to the COPE — the amount that members have voluntarily given to the union’s political activities — have reached their highest level in 10 years. In contrast, the amount the UFT spent on political activities independent of COPE has remained relatively constant at around $2.5 million annually. (more…)

• The city’s charter school chief, Michael Duffy, is leaving to join the for-profit Victory Schools. (WSJ)
• Charter school advocates upped their lobbying, spending $600,000 in Albany this year. (WSJ)
• A state report shows test standards are low. (GothamSchools, Times, Daily News, NY1, Post)
• The city dropped a proposal to let it evade some contracting requirements. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• City students work in biomedical research labs through a science mentoring program. (NY1)
• A Brooklyn movie theater that’s been unused since 1969 will soon house a charter school. (NY1)
• State officials are putting more energy into linking K-12 and higher education standards. (USA Today)
• Massachusetts wants to limit the growth of online schools. (Boston Globe)
• The Washington Post says all new evidence points to success for KIPP schools’ extended days.