A ruling by the Public Employment Relations Board dated Aug. 26 officially certified the union to serve as “exclusive negotiating agent” for Opportunity’s teachers, paving the way for the UFT to assume all collective bargaining rights on behalf of its employees.

With the ruling, the UFT now represents 13 New York City charter schools.

The decision comes nearly four months after teachers held a secret “card check,” during which a majority of teachers signed authorization cards stating that they wished to be represented by a union. Administrators refused to recognize the results within 30 days, setting up the official hearing process through PERB, which began in June.

In reviewing the union vote cards, PERB threw out nearly a third of votes that belonged to teachers who were no longer employed at Opportunity, according to a UFT official. That includes more than a dozen teachers who were abruptly fired at the end of the school year.

The firings led teachers and UFT organizers to accuse school CEO Leonard Goldberg of  retaliating against and intimidating teachers who were loyal to the union, a charge that has been officially filed by UFT lawyers through PERB. Those charges have not been heard yet, the official said.

Through a lawyer, Goldberg has denied that the firings were related to the teachers’ union activities. Both Goldberg and his lawyer declined to comment on the PERB decision.

In explaining their initial decision to unionize, Opportunity teachers said they felt that the school’s founding philosophy had changed and isolated their voices from school policy decisions.

“The school has changed dramatically since I started. Now I feel like I work for a company, not a school,” Jennifer Mitchell told GothamSchools in July. Mitchell, one of the school’s longest-tenured teachers, was among the founding members on the union organizing committee.

Opportunity Charter School has a short but troubled history. Founded by Goldberg in 2004 on a unique mission to serve high rates of special education students and students with learning disabilities, the school struggled on performance reviews, prompting the DOE to  renew its charter only on a shorted term. An investigation last year found aides physically abused students in some instances of behavioral intervention.

The decision means that UFT will now handle all negotiations as part of a collective bargaining agreement that will decide how employees are hired and fired, how much they are paid and how long they work. In exchange, Opportunity’s teachers would become dues-paying union members.

I felt a wave of the familiar not-working-but-still-getting-paid-teacher-in-summer guilt. I thought about the fact that I didn’t have kids and what my mother would say. I pressed 1, mentally crossing my fingers I wouldn’t be called to volunteer. That evening a voicemail message told me to report to Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn Friday morning for my 12-hour shift. I was in shock. I played the message for my roommates and they howled with laughter, especially when the awkward automated voice said “12-hour shift.” At this point, I didn’t know these calls were only being made to city workers.

The next day I made my way to Clara Barton. I knew it was the right thing to do, and honestly, feared I might get in trouble if I didn’t show (the message was unambiguously in the imperative). There were about 15 of us that day — an industrious bunch — and we got to work unpacking the large bins that had been stored at the school for years for an event like this. They were filled with instructional videos and books, forms, walkie-talkies, flashlights, notepads, signage, batteries, tape, markers, pens, and more. Along with the three other teachers in the group, I drooled over this abundance of brand-new school supplies — particularly the oodles of Post-It brand poster paper (with the sticky back!) that every teacher knows cost 30 bucks a pop. Our schools might stop just short of putting campus safety in charge of supplies, but apparently the city’s Office of Emergency Management had plenty to go around.

We were to be an evacuation center: a place for evacuees to check in before heading to a “satellite” hurricane shelter. I ended up with the job of entering information on the website OEM uses to keep track of its staff and evacuees. By now I knew of course, that only city employees had been asked to volunteer. I wondered why there were so few teachers — most people were from the Human Resources Administration. Eventually I heard back from the teacher friends I had texted. Many of them had been contacted; they had all said no. Two were away, the rest were just not interested. I didn’t get the sense that anyone had refused out of spite for the Department of Education or the city; it seemed more that they weren’t keen on spending a hurricane working at a shelter.

I liked my computer-based job because it involved sitting in an office and typing quickly — both of which made me feel official. Around 6 p.m., the school’s custodian came in and yelled for everyone to stop; we were being shut down. There was a collective sense of disappointment: all that work for nothing?

We went home. The next morning I got another call asking me to report to the center. When I arrived it was as if the previous day had never happened. I didn’t recognize any of the volunteers (there were now more like 40). Eventually I did find two of the people from the day before. The atmosphere was noticeably busier. I noticed a guy intently opening and charging walkie-talkies, which struck me as strange since we had done that the day before. An hour later someone found the walkie-talkies we had unpacked, charged and labeled the day before.

I soon resumed my position at the computer and began registering staff and recording time in and out. It turned out this was an important job since, rumor had it, we were to be paid for our time! I was doubtful that this could be true, but one of my co-volunteers was convinced (and ready to work through the night and the next day — she had credit card debt to pay off). I learned that the second day’s much larger group was attributable to the latest round of messages, which emphasized compensation. There were still very few volunteers from the DOE — perhaps their faith in the city’s credibility was a bit low? I’m not Bloomberg’s biggest fan — but I was impressed that the city was claiming they would pay us (then again, I thought of my grandmother’s saying, “Promises are free”).

Around 6 p.m. I left, before the end of my 12-hour shift, as I had not brought supplies to stay overnight, and I was afraid of not being able to get home later. I said goodbye and made my way home in the drizzle, glad to have done a mitzvah.

That didn’t stop dozens of teachers from lining up outside the Brooklyn Museum yesterday afternoon for one of the last hiring fairs before school starts next week. Members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose positions have been cut, mostly due to budget cuts or school closures, received special invitations to the job fair from the DOE, encouraging them to be “proactive” in their job search.

If those teachers are not offered jobs this week, they will be asked to rotate between different schools on a weekly basis as substitute teachers, according to an arrangement made by the teachers union and the DOE earlier this summer to avoid teacher layoffs. In previous years, ATRs were typically assigned to one school for the entire year to cover for absent teachers.

There were 1,940 teachers in the ATR pool as of Aug. 19. Typically, the pool shrinks in the first weeks of the school year as principals hasten to fill open positions.

Those who logged into the job portal for excessed teachers yesterday morning found information on what schools to report to in September.

English teacher Jerome Madramootoo, who was excessed after the city began phasing out Jamaica High School in June, said he was assigned to work at Newtown High School in Queens next month, but given no specific information about what he would be doing there.

Madramootoo said he hoped it would be teaching English, his license area. But he said he wondered what impact he could make on a temporary basis. He came to the job fair armed with a copy of the high school year book he helped produce at Jamaica High School in 2010. He said he wouldn’t be able to lead long-term projects like year books as a substitute teacher.

“The only benefit is that you still have your salary,” he said. “But who would you learn more from, a teacher you had for the full year, or a teacher you had for a half year, or a week? I can’t finish a novel with you, I can’t get into poetry with you in just a week.”

He decried the lack of stability in the new ATR system, and said it hurts students by denying them regular access to qualified teachers.

“You can’t bond with students if there’s no stability. This agreement is not about the students at all.”

Other teachers at the job fair said they were willing to take their chances on the weekly substitute teaching assignments, even though they acknowledged that their experience would be wasted.

“I feel like I’m robbing the kids,” said one Brooklyn elementary school teacher whose position, which she held for five years, fell victim to last-minute budget cuts.

She said this job fair was her first, and she deliberately did not make much of an effort to find a new position.

“I got an assignment for September at a middle school, but I teach elementary school,” she said. “And [a colleague] told me that at the beginning of the year, you don’t really do anything because there aren’t very many teachers absent anyway. If the DOE doesn’t take this seriously, why should I?”

Correction: A previous version of this article stated that the job fair was intended for excessed teachers only. According to DOE officials, other people  were also invited to attend.

Much of “Class Warfare” will be familiar to GothamSchools readers. The book’s main characters include, on one side, former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and, on the other, teachers unions president Randi Weingarten; many of its main plot points center on New York City, and some of the key classroom scenes take place in Harlem.

But the following insights — some of them more solidly sourced than others — were news to us. Here’s a run-down of Brill’s most intriguing New York-related reporting:

The war behind the war: Bloomberg v. Klein

• On labor issues, Bloomberg sometimes undercut Joel Klein. Klein’s team thought they could get the UFT to sign off on a change in the teacher termination process. But Bloomberg, who was nearing reelection, told them not to push their luck. “The mayor blinked,” the DOE’s one-time labor chief, Dan Weisberg, told Brill. “The mayor just gave up.” Weisberg said he “clashed almost daily” with City Hall over back-channel contract negotiations in 2005.
• Similarly, Brill reports that in 2006, Bloomberg told Klein and Weisberg to “stand down” on pushing a time limit for teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve. As Klein left office last year, he was still calling for that policy.
• Bloomberg was weighing a third term even a year into his second, and his education policies reflected that. The 2007 teachers contract included little in the way of substantive policy, an oddity at a time when Klein was setting an aggressive tone at Tweed. In fact, the only major change, a schoolwide bonus program, was spiked this year. “The plan,” Klein told Brill, “was to make some progress in the 2005 contract — which we did, though not enough — and then go in for the kill in 2007. Mike deciding to run for a third term completely killed that.”

What Klein really thought of his proteges and more that you didn’t know about him

• Klein didn’t think he would be chancellor. Brill reports that a mutual friend suggested that Bloomberg consider Klein, but after their first meeting, Klein “didn’t think he had connected with Bloomberg.” Bloomberg now says he picked Klein because “Jesus Christ wasn’t available.”
• The animosity displayed between Klein and Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president for most of his tenure, was real. “Joel Klein would come to detest [Randi] Weingarten as much as she detested [Klein ally, PS 49 Principal Anthony] Lombardi and him,” Brill writes.
• Klein isn’t uniformly proud of his protégés. Former Klein deputies now head school systems in Baltimore, New Haven, Chicago (where Jean-Claude Brizard came from Rochester, N.Y.), and New Jersey. But in some of those places, Klein said his former deputies had not been bold enough. “All of them had big minds, but not all had strong minds,” he told Brill. Brill and Klein do not name names. Among the former Klein deputies now leading education efforts in other cities, at least two have received criticism from proponents of aggressive reform. In Baltimore, Andres Alonso has been positioned as a more collaborative alternative to Klein; in New Haven, Garth Harries, the number-two school official, led an agreement with the teachers union that critics charge included too many concessions.
• Klein’s pension from his eight years as chancellor is guaranteed at the same rate as city teachers’ — 8.25 percent per year. The benefit structure is costly for the city, as we reported last year. “Who else but Bernie Madoff guarantees 8.25 percent a year permanently?” Klein asked.

What Randi Weingarten thinks of Michael Mulgrew, why Eva Moskowitz started Harlem Success, and more charter school politics:

• Klein created the idea of charter school co-locations with the precise intention of generating a political fight. He told Brill that he slipped $250 million for charter school co-locations into 2005’s larger-than-ever budget and “nobody noticed.” He also said that his decision to give the UFT charter school space inside a city school building was strategic. “Once Randi’s school was co-located, she could never be against co-location in principle,” Klein told Brill. “She’d have to oppose the specifics of the co-location plan but not the idea.” Since then, the UFT has twice sued the city over the specifics of its co-location plans. The union also received City Council funding this year to plan its charter schools’ exit from their co-located site.
• Weingarten hasn’t approved of the battle that her successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, has waged against charter schools. Brill writes that Weingarten told friends that she was embarrassed by Mulgrew’s efforts to prevent the lifting of the charter cap in 2010 because she thought the union had already lost. The cap was lifted when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, usually a friend of the union, suddenly threw his support behind the move.
• The cap probably could have been lifted sooner if the city had made a few concessions. Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told Brill that she wanted Klein to give up his commitment to co-location as part of the negotiations around lifting the charter school cap in 2010. “If Joel would give up on co-location and look at doing something on saturation, it would sure ease all the tension,” Tisch told Brill.
• Harlem Success Academy wasn’t Eva Moskowitz’s idea. Brill reports that several hedge-fund managers approached Moskowitz’s husband, Eric Grannis, for advice about starting a network of charter schools; Grannis had previously helped launch the Girls Prep charter school. After Moskowitz critiqued the hedge-fund managers’ plan, they offered her the job — but they told Brill they hadn’t planned to do so before that.

On Race to the Top, including what the Obama administration really thought about New York’s application:

• The Race to the Top competition was partially inspired by the Gates Foundation. In 2008, the Gates Foundation held a small-scale competition to encourage school districts and teachers unions to work together. When an Obama administration official first proposed the idea of having states compete for federal funds, they were reminded that the Gates competition had achieved its aim of fomenting collaboration.
• Race the to Top could have been three times bigger. When Obama administration officials approached David Obey, a member of the House of Representatives who controlled the appropriations committee, he wasn’t happy that the competition would annoy the unions and that his state, Wisconsin, was unlikely to win. So he cut the initial proposal of $15 billion (out of $100 billion being distributed to schools) down to the $5 billion that made up the first Race to the Top competition.
• Other states were supposed to beat New York, which came in second in Race to the Top’s second round. New York’s win — after a dismal showing in the first round — came largely because the state and its teachers unions agreed to toughen teacher evaluations (the same evaluations that are now being disputed in court). Federal officials were shocked to see that the people hired to evaluate Race to the Top applications gave so much credit to union collaboration in New York. They were also distressed that Colorado and Louisiana, which had reshaped their laws in response to the competition, had not made the cut — to the point that they considered changing the rules after the competition was over. Politics K-12, Education Week’s education politics blog, has the complete run-down on the rankings shakeup that Brill writes caused “near-panic” at the U.S. Department of Education.

Rubber rooms, Wendy Kopp and LIFO, and more miscellaneous extras:

• The number of teachers removed from the classroom on misconduct charges is tiny and falling. In the year after the city closed the rubber rooms that housed teachers accused of misconduct, Brill reports that just 155 teachers were removed from the classroom, down from 250 to 300 teachers a year before that.
• Teach for America tempered its opposition to “last in, first out” layoffs, which would have heavily affected its members, out of pragmatism. “It should be obvious how I feel but we have to work with these school systems and teachers every day,” TFA founder Wendy Kopp told Brill.
• Capacity is a big problem. Brill describes how top Harlem Success staff members quit midyear, citing the toll of their long hours and high-pressure jobs on their relationships and bodies. Meanwhile, the superintendent of Pittsburgh’s schools told Brill that even if he replaced the weakest 3.5 percent of his teachers each year with better teachers, he would be able to “refortify” only a third of his workforce in a decade. And that’s in a system with just 2,200 teachers, compared to nearly 80,000 in New York City.

That’s one argument the United Federation of Teachers is making as it moves toward its final attempt to prevent teachers’ individual ratings from going to press. Last week, the state’s Appellate Court echoed a low-level judge in ruling that the ratings, known as Teacher Data Reports, are public information and should be released.

Today, the union asked the Appellate Court for permission to take the case to the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. If the Appellate Court doesn’t grant permission, the union can also ask the Court of Appeals itself. The Court of Appeals doesn’t accept every case brought before it, and if it declines to hear this one, the Appellate Court’s decision would stand and the union would be out of options.

The Court of Appeals is more likely to take on cases that are potentially precedent-setting. Today’s filing stresses the “considerable violence to the limited but real privacy protections public employees possess” that the release of Teacher Data Reports could inflict, in addition to noting, as the union has done repeatedly, flaws in the reports themselves.

“In finding that the subjective, evaluative, and pre-decisional information contained in the inaptly named Teacher Data Reports, or ‘TDRs,’ is not exempt from public disclosure under FOIL, this Court has significantly narrowed the rights not only of new York City teachers but of all public employees in the State of New York,” the filing begins.

The UFT’s complete filing is below.

Scott Stringer is joined by his school board representative Patrick Sullivan and City Council members to demand a quick payback of stolen money from Verizon.

Opponents of the Department of Education’s $120 million contract with Verizon aren’t letting the contract’s approval silence their criticism.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer led a press conference today to demand that Verizon return hundreds of thousands of dollars that it earned through a contractor’s fraud.

City investigators found that Willard Lanham overbilled the DOE by $3.6 million while subcontracting with Verizon and IBM. The investigators’ report concludes that Verizon concealed irregularities in Lanham’s accounting until the department raised red flags of its own. Verizon made as much as $800,000 through the illicit transactions, according to the report.

Lanham, the man at the center of the scandal, was arrested and charged with mail fraud and theft, but his trial has not yet started.

Verizon officials said they would pay back the money, but Stringer said the fact that the company hasn’t done so already calls into question its integrity.

“You must return the money,” Stringer said. “You must send a signal to the city that you will be a good corporate citizen.”

A Verizon spokesman, John Bonomo, said the company is in talks about reimbursing the city.

“As we previously indicated, as a matter of goodwill we have told DOE we would return any inappropriate profits,” Bonomo said. “We have been in discussions with DOE.”

Many of the people standing behind Stringer outside the Municipal Building were members of the Communication Workers of America, a union that includes many Verizon workers. CWA members protested the contract during the Aug. 17 Panel for Educational Policy meeting when it was approved, but they said that their objection was to the approval coming while they were on strike. CWA ended its strike Aug. 22 and is set to resume negotiations with Verizon’s management tomorrow.

“Negotiations are still going on but just because we’re back to the table doesn’t mean Verizon will do the right thing,” said John Feaster, a staff representative with CWA’s Local 1101.

At our “On Education” panel last week, high school history teacher Stephen Lazar said he would would trade a higher salary for freedom from the Regents exam his students must pass to graduate.

“I would give up any raise in a second if you told me that once I showed that I can get my kids to pass the Regents — which I’ve shown over the past six years — that I can throw [the tests] out the window … and then I can really teach [students] how to think,” he said.

But what if the exams aren’t as limiting as Lazar and other teachers say? What if they’re actually useful? That’s the argument that Ama Nyamekye, a former city schoolteacher, makes in the Community section today.

In “A Teacher Finds Good In Testing,” Nyamekye describes what happened when she stopped resisting the Regents exam and started learning from it. She writes:

I once dismissed standardized testing for its narrow focus on a discrete set of skills, but I learned that my self-made assignments were more problematic. It turned out they were skewed in my favor. I was better at teaching literary analysis than grammar and punctuation. When I started giving ongoing standardized assessments, I noticed that my students showed steady growth in literary analysis, but less growth in grammar and punctuation. I was teaching to my strengths instead of strengthening my weaknesses.

Read Nyamekye’s complete essay, which originally appeared yesterday in the Commentary section of Education Week.

In college, I pumped my fist at a rally against standardized testing. I’d never seen the exam I was protesting, but stood in solidarity with educators and labor organizers who felt the testing movement was an attack on teachers, particularly those working in poor public schools. My opposition grew when I became a teacher in the South Bronx, one of America’s poorest communities. I wanted to uplift my students and resented the weight of a looming high-stakes test.

Besides, I thought good teachers should be left to their own devices. And, I was certain that I was a good teacher. For the most part, my students were punctual, respectful, and engaged. It wasn’t until my second year in the classroom that I began questioning this assumption.

In a routine evaluation, my principal praised my organization, management, and facilitation, but posed the following question: “How do you know the kids are really getting it?” She urged me to develop more-rigorous assessments of student learning. Ego and uncertainty inspired me to measure the impact of my instruction. I thought I was effective, but I wanted proof.

In my third year of teaching, I put myself to the test. To formally link my instruction to quantifiable student outcomes, I decided my sophomores would take the state Comprehensive English Regents Examination a year early. As I deconstructed the test — which was a blend of reading-based questions and essays — I appreciated its ability to efficiently achieve what I could not.

Writing rigorous and comprehensive test questions is a meticulous and laborious science. The New York Regents’ exam was based on the science of assessment and aligned with state curriculum standards, core curriculum, and federal mandates. The state education department oversaw testing, ensuring questions were written and vetted to be “statistically and psychometrically sound,” and published an online archive of exams, rubrics, and sample student essays. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I decided to learn from these tools. What I learned was surprising and empowering.

I discovered holes in my curriculum. I once dismissed standardized testing for its narrow focus on a discrete set of skills, but I learned that my self-made assignments were more problematic. It turned out they were skewed in my favor. I was better at teaching literary analysis than grammar and punctuation. When I started giving ongoing standardized assessments, I noticed that my students showed steady growth in literary analysis, but less growth in grammar and punctuation. I was teaching to my strengths instead of strengthening my weaknesses.

The test also compensated for the inherently subjective act of grading. I was designing the quizzes and projects used to evaluate my students and, by extension, my instruction. My intimate knowledge of students and the bonds we forged in the classroom influenced my perception of their performance. I knew Michael was a talented, but lazy, writer. I admired the dogged work ethic of Lian, a Chinese-born student, who struggled to master English. Naturally, I was emotionally invested in the success of my students — their grades were my grades.

The test provided me with fresh perspectives on my work. I was not allowed to assess my students’ writing. Colleagues from my English department used detailed rubrics to grade each essay. These peers had emotional distance from the work and could scrutinize essays for evidence of achievement.

Most of the teachers I’ve worked with over the years don’t share my newfound enthusiasm. The 2010 Scholastic-Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation survey of 40,000 educators nationwide found that only 27 percent felt state standardized tests were essential or very important in measuring student performance. I’m now convinced that these sentiments are the product of a testing movement that has become more about fear and politics than pedagogy. Teachers, I believe, are pumping their fists for the wrong reasons.

Fear is at the heart of this backlash. My colleagues fear the proliferation of drill-and-kill instruction. This outrage, though understandable, should be directed at the policies and school leaders that use standardized testing as a replacement — rather than a measurement — for inspired instruction. These drill-and-kill practices demoralize teachers and warp the aim of assessment.

The most powerful opposition comes from the teachers’ unions. At a recent convention, the National Education Association insisted that it “will always be opposed to high-stakes, test-driven evaluations.” This rhetoric is a distraction from the underlying problem. Standardized testing reflects the curricular priorities of a state’s education agenda. Blaming the test for the shortcomings of that agenda is like blaming the barometer for the weather.

That’s not to say there is no room for improvement. On the whole, testing must become more innovative, technologically advanced, and better at identifying skills essential for college and career readiness. But the same is true of our public school systems. We certainly wouldn’t do away with America’s noble, but deeply flawed, experiment with public education.

Sadly, the actual merits and shortcomings of standardized testing often get lost in this stalemated debate that positions the test as either a scourge on teachers or a panacea for reform. In truth, the test is nothing more than a tool. It will not singlehandedly turn around swaths of failing classrooms or be the death of public education.

Only policies, leaders, and, most importantly, teachers wield that kind of power over school performance. Like any assessment tool — including the ones teachers regularly generate and assign — standardized testing has strengths and limitations.

When I “depoliticized” the test, I found a useful and flawed ally. The exam excelled where I struggled, offering comprehensive and standards-based assessments. I thrived where the test fell short, designing creative, performance-based projects. Together, we were strategic partners. I designed and graded innovative projects — my students participated in court trials for Shakespearean characters — and the test provided a rubric that guided my evaluation of student learning.

All of my students who took the exam passed. Most earned high scores. I also found a correlation between improved test performance and growth in reading and writing ability. Grammar and punctuation were still my students’ weakest areas, but there was evidence of growth.

The test didn’t make my students smarter. It made the teacher smarter. I learned that my job wasn’t simply to encourage students to relentlessly pursue knowledge. I needed to constantly test what I thought I knew about teaching.

The vast majority of the employees are part-time and earn between $12,000 and $27,000 per year with their pensions, including benefits, according to Santos Crespo, president of Local 372 for District Council-37, which represents the workers. He made the comments this evening on WBAI, 99.5 FM Radio.

“That’s chump change,” he said. “What is the city actually saving on these cuts?”

Crespo announced that the city would restore some positions for substance abuse and violence prevention specialists that were on the table to be cut. But he said the other positions were also necessary.

“They’re school aides and health aides, they’re family workers, they’re parent coordinators,” he said. “They make sure those kids are ready to learn, from the moment that child leaves for school.”

The Bloomberg administration’s announcement last week that it plans to layoff nearly 800 school employees, including 737 DC-37 members, caught some union leaders off guard last week. City officials said the layoffs are necessary because the unions involved would not agree to sufficient concessions.

But on the air tonight, Crespo denied that the DOE had given the union opportunities to negotiate: “They did not sit down with us and discuss alternatives at all.”

He also suggested that racial discrimination is driving the cuts, which are set to hit some of the city’s poorest black and Latino communities hardest.

“Up in Washington Heights they’re getting clobbered, East New York, Central Brooklyn, getting clobbered. Other districts are not so high,” he said. “This is very, very targeted. This is setting up communities for failure.”

Mabel Blandino, a school aide at PS 130 in the South Bronx and a DC-37 member, said she has played an important role at the school where she has worked for the past 14 years, supporting the teaching staff and offering the students emotional support.

“My kids went to the school. My grandkids are there,” she said. “And the other kids from my grandkids’ class, they call me grandma — What’s better than that?”

On Friday, DiNapoli rejected a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to build a statewide “Education Data Portal” that would have allowed schools and teachers to track and use student performance data.

State teachers unions and advocates had protested the contract because it was offered without competitive bidding and because Wireless Generation’s parent company, News Corporation, is embroiled in controversy over illegal wiretapping conducted by some of its publications. DiNapoli cited both concerns in his letter to the State Education Department turning down the contract.

The rejection marks yet another setback in the state’s school reform plans. Last week, a judge ruled that the state should not be allowed to use student test scores to count for 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations, bringing to a standstill a centerpiece of New York’s Race to the Top plans. Now the data clearinghouse that would make the evaluations possible is also at risk.

New York’s Race To The Top application said that a pilot data program would be in place by this September to begin collecting information in some of the state’s school districts, and the system was scheduled for wide release in October 2012. By 2013-2014, the portal was to serve 90 percent of the state’s intended audience, according to the Race To The Top application.

That timeline will have to be delayed because of the contracts snafu, according to SED spokesman Jonathan Burman.

The timeline was already in jeopardy before DiNapoli turned down the Wireless Generation contract. But the process to land a new vendor is sure to be time-consuming and politically fraught. First the state must set out a request for proposals from vendors that think they can meet the state’s requirements. After vendors submit bids, state education officials will evaluate the proposals and select one before hammering out a new contract. Finally DiNapoli must approve the new contract.

The final step is required for every state contract larger than $50,000; last year, DiNapoli reviewed 36,000 contracts. A spokesman for DiNapoli’s office said the comptroller had used the maximum allowed review period, 90 days, to scrutinize the data system contract because of the problems outlined in the rejection letter.

Wireless Generation might well be one of the vendors competing for the new contract, spokeswoman Joan Lebow said in a statement. “We hope to have an opportunity to assist New York State in its important work that shows leadership in educational technology,” she said.

State officials have always insisted that Wireless Generation was uniquely equipped to handle the project. The company is already building the data systems for other Race to the Top winners, including Delaware and Indiana.

But its approval seems unlikely, given DiNapoli’s citation of the company’s NewsCorp connection in justifying his rejection. That means the state could wind up buying a data system later than anticipated from a company that’s relatively untested in the data business.

“Our office will review all options to implement the kind of system our schools need to move forward,” Burman said.

OSC Letter to SED 8-25-11

That said, the stress of figuring out which courses to take has been far outweighed by the excitement of getting to know my classmates and professors. I have been continually awestruck by the knowledge and experience my professors bring to the classroom. I am equally humbled by the breadth and depth of experience of my fellow students.

In the past few days I met Ronald Ferguson, a man who literally wrote the book on closing the achievement gap; I listened to Sarah Lawrence Lightfoot speak, and literally got chills; I sat in on shopping sessions for about a dozen other professors who have in many ways shaped the direction and discourse on education in this country.

What also struck me in the midst of this exciting and overwhelming period is the need for me to stop and prepare to totally open my mind. During orientation’s opening ceremony, one of the speakers, Joseph Blatt, mentioned the need for us to “put down the duckie.” By this he meant the need for us to shed our biases, our hang-ups and preconceived notions, and open ourselves up to the rich discussions of the year ahead.

Over the past year I have felt pressured to create an ad hoc ideology. Since the New York Post published my op-ed in favor of releasing Teacher Data Reports last October, I felt pressured to take stances, sometimes based more on gut reactions to the attacks and assumptions of others, rather than a thorough, well-researched process. This is not a process that leads to the thoughtful formation of lasting, meaningful beliefs.

I am excited then to take a deep breath and “put down the duckie” as I prepare for the year ahead. I am putting down my Educators 4 Excellence duckie. I am putting down my teacher duckie. I am shedding as much as I can about what I think I know for certain, in order to really learn from my professors and peers about the issues that really matter to me. This isn’t to say I won’t use my experiences to act as a lens to aid my studies, but I am excited to approach my studies with a fresh perspective in order to come to an understanding about what I truly believe.

Brooklyn Tech's auditorium during a Panel for Educational Policy meeting in 2010. Now the school is a storm evacuation shelter.

With its 12 stories and massive auditorium, Brooklyn Technical High School has been used for many purposes: to hold school board meetings, as an enrollment center, even as a venue in a rooftop film series. This weekend, it will be a hurricane evacuation site for the first time.

Brooklyn Tech is one of dozens of city schools that are open to residents of flood-prone areas of the city who have been ordered to leave their homes as Hurricane Irene approaches. The schools make up most of the city’s evacuation sites, along with public colleges and the Belmont Racetrack.

In his 3 p.m. briefing about the storm, Mayor Bloomberg said school safety agents would staff each of the city’s 91 evacuation sites and that the Department of Education’s Office of SchoolFood would provide meals to those riding out Irene there.

Bloomberg is set to visit one of the sites, Newcomers High School in Queens, at 7:30 p.m.

Many of the people staffing the sites and pitching in on the city’s emergency management efforts are teachers. According to the New York Times’ Metro section Twitter account, the city created a database of public employees who could be asked to volunteer during an emergency, and many are teachers. Now, schoolteachers are getting automated calls asking them to volunteer, and about half of the 5,000 public employees who have already agreed to help out work in the DOE.

Watch the full episode. See more Metrofocus.

We’ve written about two interesting exchanges during Thursday’s “On Education” panel discussion, but there were many more over the course of the discussion’s 102 minutes. Now you can watch them all — at least until Hurricane Irene cuts your power out.

Of particular note: Prospective mayoral candidate William Thompson’s prognosis on teachers contract negotiations (starting at 27:40); Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz on her efforts to deal with “the burnout factor,” which include giving teachers 11 weeks of paid vacation (36:55); Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch decrying exaggeration in the city’s claims of improvement (1:09:00); and UFT Vice-President Leo Casey and Moskowitz debating whether schools should be run like businesses (1:12:00).

Manhattan Media organized the discussion, and City Hall News and GothamSchools moderated it. The video is provided by Metrofocus, a new project of WNET.