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We’re stationed right now at Brooklyn Technical High School, where the Panel for Educational policy is meeting to vote on the fates of 11 schools the city wants to close. The panel will also vote on whether to allow half a dozen new schools to open.

There are three different protests planned for the meeting and we’ll be covering all of them, along with the comments made by members of the public who came outside of an organized protest. Stay tuned all night — we’ll be at Brooklyn Tech until the last vote is cast.

(Just a reminder: Our live-blog is in reverse chronological order. If you want to read from the beginning, start at the end of the post.)

12:01 a.m. The votes are complete, the protesters gone, the panel members departed — and now the reporters are leaving, too, after talking with Chancellor Dennis Walcott about his first Panel for Educational Policy vote on closures since becoming chancellor last April.

“I understand the emotions involved,” Walcott told the reporters. “But sometimes we have to make tough choices that people find unpopular.’”

11:21 p.m. In an anti-climactic moment, the panel unanimously approves a slate of Department of Education contracts totaling nearly $85 million. (Nearly $80 million of that was for a single contract, a one-year extension of a contract with a company that provides school busing services.

11:19 p.m. A lot of people are feeling unhappy after tonight’s Panel for Educational Policy votes. But not State Sen. Daniel Squadron, who had supported the expansion of Brooklyn’s P.S. 8 that was the only proposal to win unanimous approval tonight. “Tonight’s vote to approve the new P.S. 8 middle school is great news for Brooklyn!” Squadron says in a statement.

Members of the Panel for Educational Policy vote during tonight's meeting.

11:18 p.m. And the voting on school closures and co-locations is over. Each proposal before the Panel for Educational Policy has been approved, and next fall 22 schools or portions of schools will start phasing out. An additional school, the Academy of Business and Career Development, will have disappeared forever.

Diane Peruggia, the Staten Island borough president’s appointee to the panel, abstained from voting on the closure of the only Staten Island school on the list. The appointees of Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro typically do not vote along with their fellow borough presidents’ appointees. Also, Molinaro had said he would not visit P.S. 14 until a new school opened in the building, signaling that he supported the city’s closure proposal. But parents on Staten Island were upset that the borough was poised to experience its first school closure under the Bloomberg administration.

11:06 p.m. As the panel races through its agenda items, which include co-locations of new and existing schools in addition to closures and truncations, the same vote count repeats itself over and over. The four borough presidents’ appointees vote against each proposals, while Mayor Bloomberg’s appointees line up to support them. The only exceptions are for two schools that are actually adding grades. There, the Bronx and Manhattan representatives on the panel abstained from the votes; everyone else lent their support.

11:05 p.m. The next five votes are for two closures (of Aspire Prep and Satellite III middle schools), two middle school truncations (of the Academy for Social Entrepreneurship), and two-colocations (of a new middle school in Aspire Prep’s building and the expansion of Brooklyn’s P.S. 8 into a neighboring high school building). The expansion of P.S. 8 was approved unanimously, the first proposal to win full approval tonight. The four borough presidents’ appointees voted against the other plans.

11:02 p.m. The voting has begun. The first schools up for closure are Gompers, Gateway, Jane Addams, and Grace Dodge. Repeating a familiar pattern, the appointees of the borough presidents of Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Queens oppose each closure, but they are outvoted by the mayor’s appointees and the schools will begin to phase out this fall.

11 p.m. Eduardo Marti, the City University of New York’s panel appointee, says he plans to vote in favor of each school closure proposal. “I think this is a very courageous action we’re taking tonight,” he says.

10:45 p.m. At this point, the audience has dwindled from thousands at the peak of the meeting to just about 50 people. There are parents from Brooklyn and the Bronx, some students from Legacy School for Integrated Studies, and a handful of stalwart Occupy protesters. (more…)

Across the state, school districts are inching toward teacher evaluation deals one week before a deadline Gov. Andrew Cuomo set last month.

According to NYSUT, the state teachers union, 100 school districts have agreed on how to put new evaluations in place and 400 districts “report making progress.” That leaves just over 200 districts that, like New York City, are nowhere near agreeing with their local unions on new evaluation systems.

Cuomo said last month that if districts do not settle on new evaluations by next week, he would use the budget amendment process to change the state evaluation law. Last year, in a hint of what the changes might entail, the governor pushed state policy-makers to double test scores’ weight, from 20 to 40 percent, in an action that drew a successful legal challenge from the union. (more…)

A slide from the IBO's report about schools up for closure.

For the third year in a row, the city’s data watchdog has concluded that the schools the city is trying to close serve especially needy students.

In 2010 and 2011, the Independent Budget Office put together longer reports about the city’s school closure proposals on the request of Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council’s education committee. But this year, the office, which has a special mandate to scrutinize the Department of Education’s facts and figures, compiled details about the demographics, performance, and funding of schools on the chopping block on its own. Then it released the statistics in an easy-to-read, stand-alone format.

Among the many people who are receiving the IBO’s 13-slide presentation by email today are the members of the Panel for Educational Policy, who are set to vote on the closure proposals tonight, according to spokesman Doug Turetsky.

“It’s an accessible format so people can see the stats and come to their own conclusions,” he said.

UPDATE: Department of Education officials disputed some of the data in the slides and said the budget office had not given them as much time to review the report before publication as an agreement between the two offices requires.

They urged the IBO not to release the report and then to retract it once it was published because data on at least one slide did not match information the city had provided. The budget office retracted one slide that showed change over time in the number of students with special needs at the schools.

But other slides showed that the schools up for closure enroll more than the average proportion of students who have disabilities, are overage, or are considered English language learners, confirming analyses published elsewhere. (more…)

The 23 schools that the Panel for Educational Policy could vote to close or shrink tonight would join more than 100 other schools shuttered in the last decade.

We put together a map that shows the 113 schools that have been partially or completely phased out under the Bloomberg administration alongside the 23 schools that could join them tonight. We also included the 33 schools that the city has said it would require to undergo “turnaround,” a process that entails closing a school and reopening it immediately after changing its name and at least 50 percent of its teachers.

New schools have opened in the buildings where schools have closed, and evidence suggests that the high schools in particular are better than those they replaced. But the Bloomberg administration has also proposed closing 11 schools this year that replaced schools it closed in the past.

The map is interactive so be sure to click around to explore.

View map on GeoCommons

A snapshot from one of two Panel for Educational Policy meetings about school closures in 2011.

Boisterous protests against school closures have long been accused of lending a circus-like atmosphere to the annual meetings where the Panel for Educational Policy votes on closures. This year, though, the opposition will actually have three rings.

Three separate groups are planning protest actions during tonight’s PEP meeting, where the citywide school board is set to vote on — and presumably approve — 23 school closures and truncations. (Changes to two schools were taken off the table yesterday.)

City officials have vowed not to let the protests disrupt the panel’s proceedings, suggesting that panel members and protesters alike could be in for a long and potentially combative night. Last year, the panel approved 22 closures in two separate meetings that each lasted well past 1 a.m. In 2010, the panel’s vote on 20 school closures took place just before 4 a.m., after more than 10 hours of protests and public comment.

Tonight, the United Federation of Teachers, which has orchestrated the most substantial protests in the past, is planning to start its protest outside Brooklyn Technical High School but then constitute an alternate event, a “People’s PEP,” at P.S. 20, an elementary school with a 600-seat auditorium six blocks away that the union has rented for the evening. Union officials said teachers from the schools up for closure would be invited to give presentations about their schools at the P.S. 20 meeting.

Another group that has been active in opposing the closure proposals, the Coalition for Educational Justice, is taking a different approach: Instead of walking out from the meeting, CEJ members and those active in affiliated groups, including the Alliance for Quality Education and the Urban Youth Collaborative, are marching in protest to it. After a 5 p.m. rally, they’ll walk five blocks east on Dekalb Street to Brooklyn Tech, where they will continue to protest against the city’s proposed closures.

A press advisory for the CEJ event warns that protesters will use the “people’s mic” to amplify their voices during the panel meeting. And they won’t be alone using that strategy. A third protest set for tonight is by “Occupy the DOE,” which grew out of the Occupy Wall Street movement that popularized the human microphone tactic. (more…)

Occupy Wall Street activists Justin Wedes (right), and filmmaker Kevin Breslin (center) speak to a small group of students and staff at Paul Robeson High School, including English teacher Stefanie Siegel (left).

This week, the subject of Justin Wedes’s regular after school meeting with Paul Robeson High School seniors was part lesson on activism and social media, and part strategy session.

Meeting in the East Brooklyn school’s first-floor student lounge, which in the past year has served both as a place to unwind at the end of a long school day and a place to strategize ways to challenge the city’s school closure policy, Wedes detailed the plans to protest at the meeting where city officials will vote on which schools to close.

Wedes, who is a former city teacher, vocal opponent of school closures, and high-profile Occupy Wall Street organizer, is marshaling activists from within schools to join the Occupy movement in commandeering the evening PEP meeting, effectively prohibiting the agenda proceedings.

Wedes said he has spoken with students and teachers at a handful of city schools this winter in preparation for the event, including Herbert H. Lehman High School and Legacy High School for Integrated Studies.

On Thursday, the city’s Panel for Education Policy is scheduled to vote on half of this year’s controversial slate of school closures. In past years, protesters have delayed the evening vote until the early hours of the following morning. Wedes said the goal is to prohibit the vote from happening at all.

“We’re going to occupy it. We’re going to shut it down,” he said to the gathering of a half-dozen students and staff from Robeson. The PEP “won’t be able to vote.”

(more…)

• City Council Speaker Christine Quinn is set to propose making kindergarten mandatory. (WSJ)
• Two families are suing so they can send non-vaccinated children to school with sick classmates. (WNYC)
• Parents at Flushing’s P.S. 201 are angry a worksheet asked children to spell “gun” and “rob.” (NY1, Post)
• The city took two school closures off the list late Wednesday. (GothamSchools, SchoolBook, NY1, WSJ)
• Protesters affiliated with the Occupy Wall Street movement plan to try to disrupt the closure votes. (NY1)
• Citing MDRC, the Times endorses efforts to replace large high schools with small, specialized ones.
• A father affiliated with the group Education Reform Now says he supports the closure plans. (Post)
• The investigation deepened into the school aide accused of sex crimes. (Times, Daily News, WSJ, Post)
• A suit aims to stop a Success Academy charter school from coming to Cobble Hill. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• A Catholic girls school with a top basketball team will close due to enrollment. (Post, Daily News, NY1)
• At Paul Robeson High School, which is phasing out, students eat lunch at 2:01 p.m. (GothamSchools)
• Some say Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is the only reason an ex-legislator got a state ed job. (Post)
• A Bronx principal is throwing a gala to celebrate the school’s progress report grade jump. (Daily News)
• Baltimore teachers are reporting higher-than-usual numbers of low mid-year evaluations. (Baltimore Sun)
• The Obama administration is set to announce a first round of 10 No Child Left Behind waivers. (WSJ)
• A study of Chicago’s recent school “turnaround” efforts found evidence of improvement. (Tribune)