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.

8:05 p.m. I just got this text from Rachel: “For the first time, chanting dies down.”

7:53 p.m. Rachel just spoke to a mother whose son has attended two of the schools on this year’s closure list. After he was bullied at KAPPA VII last fall, she says, the city offered him a transfer to the Academy of Business and Community Development, where he is in the sixth grade. The city removed KAPPA VII from the closure list yesterday (along with Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing and Visual Arts) but ABCD could be closed tonight. Unlike the other schools on the chopping block, ABCD would not phase out but instead would close at the end of the year.

“I asked the DOE to transfer my son for safety and he was transferred to ABCD. Now it’s being closed,” said the mother, Eleanor Pedway. “It’s not fair. He doesn’t deserve that.”

Pedway said her son is “the happiest he’s been since he left elementary school” and hasn’t had any problems with bullying at ABCD.

7:48 p.m. Some of the parents who had joined the union’s protest outside Brooklyn Tech before the Panel for Educational Policy meeting are saying they feel cheated out of the chance to speak before the panel that will decide their schools’ fate.

Donna Hamlet, president of the parent association at Far Rockaway’s P.S. 215, which could close, tells Jessica that she rode a UFT-sponsored bus from Far Rockaway to Fort Greene. When she received a laminated pass to speak at the “People’s PEP,” the alternate meeting the union had planned, she thought she had signed up to speak in the regular meeting. By the time the march was cancelled, the PEP’s official sign-in list was closed.

Hamlet said she would have spoken from her heart about the lack of support she has seen during her son’s stint at P.S. 215, where he is in fifth grade. “When we got a C no one stepped in. When we got a D no one stepped in. When we got an F no one told us,” she said. “The parents found out from the news.”

7:47 p.m. The latest rumor to fly is that Occupy the DOE and the UFT will walk out of the auditorium together at 8 p.m. The move would be an unexpected show of unity after an afternoon in which the two groups seemed to be at odds over their protest tactics.

7:45 p.m. After two hours of non-stop “people’s mic,” the protesters who are affiliated with the Occupy movement have grown quieter and hoarser, but they are still at it. A self-proclaimed socialist takes the mic and says the issue isn’t just about school closures.

“Why haven’t the unions done anything to stop this but protest?” he asks. “We need a break from Democrats and Republicans. It’s not about school closures, it’s about closing society of the working classes.”

7:35 p.m. The emphasis on the “people’s mic” and the union’s late entry seems to have limited the number of people signed up to speak. There are 125 people signed up on the official speaker list, according to a Department of Education spokesman. That’s about a quarter of the number of people who signed up to speak at last year’s closure hearings.

Last year, 345 people signed up to speak at the first of two panel meetings to vote on school closures. Two days later, about 150 people signed up to speak at the second meeting.

7:20 p.m. UFT President Michael Mulgrew explains his decision to call off the union’s scheduled march to its planned “People’s PEP” at P.S. 20 and dispels the rumors that union members plan to walk out.

“We said fine, if you don’t want us marching in the street so we’ll go here,” Mulgrew tells Rachel. “Everyone’s here now. That’s how the balcony’s full.”

7:16 p.m. Up in the balcony, Jessica is speaking with a group of teachers from Grover Cleveland High School, which is not facing a closure vote tonight but instead has been slated for turnaround. An ESL teacher says Chancellor Dennis Walcott visited her classroom just a few months ago and complimented her instruction. Now the city says half of the teachers at the school will have to be replaced over the summer.

Another Cleveland teacher pointed down to members of the PEP on the stage below and said, “We work so hard. If you put one of those people in front of a classroom for a month they wouldn’t survive.”

7:15 p.m. Rachel just spoke with a UFT spokesman who said the union’s march to P.S. 20 was cancelled by an executive decision by President Michael Mulgrew. “Mulgrew changed his mind,” the spokesman said. Teachers from the schools up for closure had put together presentations about their schools. Now many are sitting high up in the auditorium’s balcony.

7:10 p.m. Most of the panel members, including Chancellor Dennis Walcott, appear to be transfixed by the spectacle, Rachel says. A handful — including the tweeting Manhattan borough president’s appointee, Patrick Sullivan — instead appear to be reading something

7:05 p.m. In response to another question on Twitter, this time posed by GothamSchools, panel member Patrick Sullivan says again that the noise is a big problem when it comes to making sure tonight’s meeting complies with the state’s open meetings law. Yes, panel members have headphones, but members of the public have to be able to hear, too.

“The public has to hear,” Sullivan tweets. “Nobody heard the chair’s or secretary’s statements.”

7:04 p.m. Noah Gotbaum, a parent who sits on the Community Education Council for District 3, is getting fed up by all of the people using the Department of Education’s official microphone. He says into it, “I will be the last person to use this PEP mic. That means when you see hands raised please hold talking and then the people’s mic will take off.”

Then Gotbaum directs protesters to look at the back of the program distributed by the Occupy group for lyrics. The room erupts into song: “This little school of mine, we’re gonna let it shine …”

6:51 p.m. Patrick Sullivan, an outspoken member of the panel who often casts a lone “no” vote, is apparently sending Twitter messages from Brooklyn Tech’s stage. Responding to NY1 reporter Lindsey Christ’s Tweet about the volume of protesters in the auditorium, Sullivan says the noise is a real problem.

“Open meetings law requires proceedings to be audible by public,” Sullivan writes. “PEP is in violation.”

6:50 p.m. A spokesman for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz says his appointee to the panel, Gbubemi Okotieuro, will vote against all of the closure proposals on the table tonight. “They don’t want to listen to anyone,” the spokesman says about the city. “They dont want to hear anyone.”

A view of the PEP meeting from the balcony, where UFT members were seated after aborting a protest march.

6:49 p.m. Jessica is in the nosebleed section with UFT members who were directed there by police after aborting their march to P.S. 20.

A small group of charter school parents are brandishing signs supporting the city's closure policy.

6:48 p.m. A contingent of about 20 charter school parents are standing by silently inside the auditorium. They are holding up handwritten signs that say, “Better Schools Now.”

6:44 p.m. Jackson got his statement out over the shouting and takes aim at the city’s latest plans to overhaul 33 struggling schools. “Until 2002 a pep rally meant something good,” he says. “Our kids are not soccer balls to be kicked around from transformation to restart to turnaround. They’re not Legos to be built in crazy ways for the mayors castle in the sky.”

6:42 p.m. Four busloads of parents, teachers, and students came from Staten Island, where the Bloomberg is trying to close a school for the first time.

Jose Santano’s son attends the school, P.S. 14, and father and son are together at Brooklyn Tech tonight. Santano says he’s confident. “We’re going to win,” he says.

6:38 p.m. Looks like Councilwoman Letitia James got the good news about the school in her district after all. James is the first to speak during a period of time reserved for elected officials — and she thanks the city for keeping KAPPA VII open but says the meeting’s “chaos” shows that the department had failed at engaging communities. State Sen. Bill Perkins had been first, but he is outside with other elected officials who are addressing the union crowds.

But after James completes her statement on the official microphone, Occupy protesters recruit her to stand on a seat and speak on the people’s mic as well. Her shouting prompts Patrick Sullivan, a panel member who routinely votes against school closures, to say, “I can’t hear what anybody is saying.”

“Join the club,” says Michael Best, the Department of Education’s top lawyer.

Shouting also drowns out the next official speaker — Robert Jackson, chair of the City Council’s education committee and himself an opponent of many Department of Education policies. “Use the people’s mic!” protesters say. “We are the speakers!”

6:35 p.m. Rachel and Jessica are both reporting that the UFT’s protest has taken a turn. Instead of going to P.S. 20, six blocks away, the union members are flooding into Brooklyn Tech instead, where the auditorium had been abuzz but nowhere near packed. UFT chief Michael Mulgrew is with them and they are filling the balconies, which had been empty.

On Twitter, the union is offering an explanation: “NYPD won’t allow march to #PeoplesPEP so UFT protesters are headed into #PEP.”

6:30 p.m. The UFT’s march to P.S. 20 is starting to move, slowly but surely. Jessica is sticking with the union tonight and reports that college students affiliated with the Occupy movement are imploring union members to enter Brooklyn Tech and attend the panel meeting instead of the union’s alternate meeting. “Be there for the children,” union members are being told.

6:26 p.m. I just got a press release from City Councilwoman Letitia James opposing the closures of three schools in her district.

“The DOE has not provided struggling public schools with the resources and support needed to be successful, instead closing the schools, oftentimes in the face of loud community criticism,” James said in a statement.

But the press release is a day out of date. Yesterday, the city removed KAPPA VII, one of the schools in James’s district, from the closure proposal list. Remaining are P.S. 22 and the middle school grades of P.S. 161, where parents held a one-day boycott earlier this week against the plan.

6:21 p.m. Brian Jones, the teacher-activist from the Grassroots Education Movement, has now taken the dais set up by protesters inside Brooklyn Tech’s auditorium. “This is our meeting,” he shouts, thrusting his fist into the air.

But the protest’s power is mixed. Rachel reports that people in the back of the auditorium can’t hear what’s being shouted in the front. Not everyone who is using the “people’s mic” is saying the same thing. Plus, the Department of Education has set up multiple loudspeakers, so panel members can be heard over top of the protesters’ shouting.

6:20 p.m. Jessica reports that after about an hour of elected officials speaking to them, union members are preparing to march to P.S. 20. It’s cold and dark, but at least a few hundred people appear prepared to make the six-block trek.

“Sorry for all the typos my fungers are frozen,” she tells me by e-mail.

6:13 p.m. Students from Legacy School for Integrated Studies, who have been uncommonly active throughout the closure process, are leading the first chants as the panel meeting officially gets underway.

6:05 p.m. The meeting hasn’t yet gotten underway but panel members have taken the stage. Department of Education officials say they doubt the protests will derail the meeting, a position that Chancellor Dennis Walcott established earlier today. Each panel member has a headphone next to his or her microphone to facilitate hearing the speakers who have signed up on the official list.

6:03 p.m. Occupy protesters are bringing more than their own microphones tonight. They’re also preparing for their own votes, handing out neon green index cards to be used as ballots.

6:01 p.m. Geoff has found the first person to sign up to speak during the public comment portion of the evening. Shamona Kirkland is a member of the elected parent council for District 19. She arrived at 4 p.m. and put her name on the list when it opened at 5:30 p.m.

6 p.m. At least some of the people on hand aren’t part of any organized protest. Stephen Lazar, a teacher who has contributed to the GothamSchools Community section, has arrived and tells Rachel, “I’m just here to listen.”

5:59 p.m. The elected officials speaking to union members outside of Brooklyn Tech are many and include Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, City Councilwoman Inez Dickens, Comptroller (and mayoral candidate) John Liu, and City Councilman Charles Barron. All sound a similar note, Jessica reports: Bloomberg has had 10 years to fix the city’s schools and increased school funding by millions of dollars — so why are schools failing? Several speakers call for legislation to halt mayoral control, which took a hit in a poll released this week.

Brian Jones, left, and UFT VP Leo Casey debate tactics.

5:56 p.m. Leo Casey, a UFT vice president, is arguing with a teacher, Brian Jones, outside Brooklyn Tech. They are openly debating each other’s group’s tactics. Jones wants to know why the union has encouraged members not to enter the panel meeting. Casey says it’s because the union does not want a confrontation with Jones’s group, the Grassroots Education Movement, which has been involved in the Occupy protests.

5:47 p.m. Rumors are flying. One rumor swirling among Occupy protesters is that the union is encouraging people to walk out of the PEP meeting. In fact, they’ve asked members to consider not entering at all and instead walking six blocks to P.S. 20 for the union’s alternate meeting.

A second rumor, heard among the union members, is that the panel is planning to watch the public comment period not from Brooklyn Tech’s auditorium but instead from a video feed in a secret location, behind closed doors. Open meetings laws require a public comment period and for the panel to discuss and vote on agenda items in public, but it’s not clear whether the panel members must be present for the public comments.

5:40 p.m. Now groups of Occupy protesters are gathering at Brooklyn Tech’s four outside corners. An organizer explains what the group has planned once its members are in the 3,000-seat auditorium: ”We’re not going to sign up to speak on the electronic mic.” Instead, they’ll use the “people’s mic,” the acoustic voice amplification technique pioneered by Occupy.

A teacher who retired in 1996 from now-closed Prospect Heights High School, Susan Metz, says this is her second PEP meeting and second protest. “The idea of closing schools is absolutely criminal,” she tells Rachel. “The adults are not committed to helping students.”

5:33 p.m. Teachers from William E. Grady High School, which faces turnaround, have gathered in a large group, brandishing a banner in the school’s signature red color. They say they support the UFT, whose president, Michael Mulgrew, taught at the school. But they also say they will be attending the regular PEP meeting, not the union’s alternate event.

Chris Manos, Grady’s chapter leader, says he is not optimistic about the impact of the protests. “If I was a gambling man I would bet my house that this wouldn’t make a difference no matter what,” he said.

5:30 p.m. Inside Brooklyn Tech, members of the specialized high school’s National Honor Society are patiently waiting to sell chips and sodas to PEP attendees. The union is preparing for a press conference and speakers are filing in but are not buying snacks.

5:08 p.m. The first signs of difference among the three protest groups have started to emerge. Protesters affiliated with the Occupy movement, many of them young teachers, are greeting people who have started to enter the school building. “Welcome to the People’s PEP,” they say.

Kelly Wolcott, an organizer in the group who teaches in Brooklyn, said the Occupy protesters would not join the UFT when it constitutes its own meeting at P.S. 20.

“We’re not doing the march,” she said. “We’re letting the UFT do its own thing.”

5:05 p.m. A group of student activists from Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School have now arrived and are meeting with organizers from the Occupy movement, which has plans to try to derail the panel meeting that starts in an hour. It’s not the first trip to the PEP meeting for some of the students — they had testified in past years about how their school would continue to flounder without additional resources.

5:04 p.m. A group of teachers from P.S. 19 in Williamsburg, which could close, has arrived on a bus from Williamsburg, with signs describing the school’s problems. Laraine DeAngelis, a third-grade teacher who has been at the school for 26 years, said P.S. 19 had lost its librarian, technology teacher, math and literacy coaches, and science teacher in recent years. She says she has never been to a PEP meeting before.

4:50 p.m. In addition to the 23 schools on the closure slate tonight, the UFT has also recruited teachers from the 33 low-performing schools that are facing “turnaround” to rally at tonight’s meeting. Turnaround, which would require the schools to close and reopen with new names and teaching staffs that are at least half new, is not on the PEP’s agenda tonight.

Outside Brooklyn Tech, teachers from Automotive High School, which is on the turnaround list, have joined the union crowd. Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch has described Automotive as a “warehouse” for high-needs, low-performing students.

“This mayors notion of “fixing the school is closing the school” is ridiculous,” said Joe Puntino, a history teacher at Automotive. “We want to support or fellow union brethren.”

4:45 p.m. The scene outside Brooklyn Tech is most calm, still. But preparations are underway for the three protests planned for the evening and the massive crowds expected to accompany them. Six police vans are parked on DeKalb Avenue, Rachel reports. A teachers union vice president, Leo Casey, has also arrived.

A UFT banner on the corner of DeKalb and South Elliott Place has attracted about two dozen teachers. Three teachers who say they are from a Brooklyn elementary school tell Rachel that they will be attending the union’s “People’s PEP” alternative, which will happen at P.S. 20 six blocks away.

Chart from Independent Budget Office report about schools slated for closure. (Click to enlarge.)

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.

City officials argue that the low-performing schools should be closed because other schools serve similar student populations with better results. But critics of the closures often counter that the schools were set up to fail after the city sent them comparatively larger numbers of ill-prepared students, students with disabilities, and students who are just learning English.

The tables confirm that many of the schools slated for closure have been enrolling increasingly high percentages of the city’s most challenging students over the last decade.

At Grace Dodge Career and Technical Education High School and Samuel Gompers Career and Technical Education High School, 47 percent of students had posted eighth-grade reading scores in the lowest third citywide in 2003. By last year, at least 61 percent of the schools’ students fell into that category.

Other findings in the IBO presentation:

• On virtually every measure of performance, from test scores to attendance to graduation rates, the schools on the closure list fell short of citywide averages.
• All of the high schools enrolled more ninth-graders who were overage for their grade than the citywide average. At two schools, Grace Dodge and Legacy School for Integrated Studies, overage students made up more than half of the freshman class last year.
• All of the high schools enrolled more ninth-graders with special needs than the citywide average. Two schools, Gompers and Legacy, had more than twice as many ninth-graders in special education than the citywide average.
• All of the high schools on the list have seen their concentrations of students with special needs and overage students rise dramatically since 2003. All but two also have more English language learners now than they did in 2003, too.
• The high schools on the closure list spent more per student than the citywide average last year, particularly on teachers and staff. They spent less than average on equipment and supplies.
• A smaller proportion of the schools’ funding than average came through the city’s Fair Student Funding formula, which is designed to promote funding equity. They got more in federal funds and other funds from the city.

The IBO’s complete presentation is below:

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.

The stated goal of the Occupy protesters is to stop the panel from conducting its business by holding an alternate, “democratic” meeting in the same space. Occupy the DOE protesters derailed a special meeting of the panel last fall, and students steeped in Occupy tactics caused Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott to cut short a town hall meeting in the Bronx last week.

A key difference is that tonight’s votes must happen — and, according to the state’s open meetings law, they must happen in public, after public input.

But Walcott said he would not let tonight’s meeting be driven off course by protesters and accused the union of masterminding the Occupy protest in addition to its own.

“There are important proposals up for discussion tonight and my hope is that we will have a respectful process where people can be heard,” Walcott said in a statement. “But if all the UFT wants to do is bus in Occupy Wall Street to disrupt public meetings — which provides absolutely no benefit to students — then we will just have to work around that.  We are prepared to move forward even if there are disruptions.”

The UFT provided some support for the Occupy movement this fall, but it is not providing transportation expressly for Occupy protesters, according to union officials. Still, they said, it is possible that some Occupy-affiliated protesters might board the 13 buses the union is running for families and teachers at schools up for closure. Most of the buses will come from schools in the Bronx, eastern Brooklyn, and Staten Island that could be closed tonight, and Harlem’s Wadleigh Secondary School for Performing and Visual Arts is expected to fill two buses even though its middle school is no longer at risk.

If the protests prove overwhelming for city officials and panel members, state law does allow the votes to be delayed. While the PEP has typically voted on closure proposals in early February, it can legally approve closure proposals up until the end of the school year as long as it has met deadlines for informing the public about the proposals and holding public hearings at each of the affected schools.

Hearings for the 23 schools up for closure tonight took place over the last few weeks. In the coming weeks, the department is poised to formally propose as many as 33 additional closures under the federally mandated school improvement strategy known as “turnaround.” If the city moves forward with those plans, which Mayor Bloomberg announced during his State of the City address last month, it would need to hold additional public hearings and the PEP would need to vote on the proposals. The city has said that would likely happen at the panel’s April meeting.

The Department of Education said today it would no longer seek to close the middle grades of Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing and Visual Arts or the KAPPA VII middle school in Brooklyn. Teachers reported getting the news at the end of the day today, one day before the citywide school board was set to vote ont he closure proposals.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott said the department had made the decision after listening to community input at public meetings and behind the scenes.

“While these two schools continue to struggle, what we learned is that they are also poised to quickly improve,” he said in a statement.

But supporters of the schools, particularly Wadleigh, said the city’s statement was a smokescreen and said they would still travel to Thursday’s Panel for Educational Policy meeting in Brooklyn to protest closure votes for 23 other schools.

The real reason for the unusual reversal, they said, was that influential politicians in Harlem had sprung to Wadleigh’s aid — and threatened the Bloomberg administration in the process.

By keeping Wadleigh open, “they’re trying to divert attention from the issue that legislators are finally stepping forward against mayoral control,” said Noah Gotbaum, a member of the district’s elected parent council who had been involved in efforts to save the school.

Angered by Wadleigh’s position on the chopping block, Assemblyman Keith Wright had crafted legislation to roll back mayoral control and give some authority to other entities, such as the State Education Department and the City Council.

Wright had previously been undecided on mayoral control of the city schools. But he joined a growing number of New Yorkers who are dissatisfied with the governance structure after nearly a decade under Mayor Bloomberg. A poll released today found that just 13 percent of city voters believe the mayor should retain sole control of the schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013, a number that has been more than halved in the last five years.

Today, Wright said that he was pleased by the news that Wadleigh would be saved but would still circulate his bill, a first step toward formally introducing it.

“I think it’s still appropriate,” he said. ”It was clear on its face the Bloomberg administration was trying to clear the space for some co-location of a charter school, which is absolutely ridiculous. I just thought it was wrong.”

The charter school, Harlem Success Academy, was approved last year to move into the building in September and will do so as planned, according to department officials.

That issue has Wadleigh’s advocates unwilling to celebrate victory. A woman who answered the phone at the school this afternoon said that department officials had informed students and teachers in two separate meetings this afternoon about the change. She said teachers and staff were relieved by the news but wanted to know whether the middle school, which enrolled just 86 students last year, would be able to expand.

“Before we jump up and down we need to know the answers,” said the woman, who said she did not want her name published because she was afraid of reprisal.

“Of course we’re happy that we’re not being closed but it’s still a perplexing feeling,” said Anthony Klug, Wadleigh’s union chapter leader. “We still strongly believe that no school should be in this predicament.”

And Paul McIntosh, the school’s librarian who had recruited fiery scholar Cornel West to Wadleigh’s defense, said he thought the building would have space for a third school only if Wadleigh’s substantial arts spaces are reduced. (A second school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, made the department’s closure shortlist but was ultimately not selected to close.)

“While one can applaud what happened today, it still doesn’t rest well with me as far as what I have observed,” McIntosh said.

One of the many elected officials who had sprung to Wadleigh’s defense, City Councilwoman Inez Dickens heard the news by phone directly from Walcott this afternoon and asked whether HSA would still move into the building, according to a spokeswoman, Lynnette Veslaco.

“The fight’s not over, but it’s a good day today,” Velsaco said. “The council member still has an issue with the co-location.”

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who had appeared at a raucous public hearing about Wadleigh’s closure last month, said he hoped the news would augur additional resources for the school.

“These turnabouts are all too rare, and the victory is a credit to this vibrant school community that never gave up,” he said in a statement. “I look forward to working further with parents and teachers to keep Wadleigh on the right track, and to ensur[ing] today’s announcement is followed by the concrete support Wadleigh needs to succeed.”

Hazel Dukes, head of New York City’s chapter of the NAACP, said she was impressed by tightly organized defense of Wadleigh that she experienced at the closure hearing. That organization must have frightened city officials, she speculated.

“They knew that hell was going to break lose” if Wadleigh were closed, she said.

It’s a sentiment that Wright seconded. “Wadleigh was the line in the sand,” he said. “They would have had to come through the community before we’d let them close it down.”

City officials denied the charge that Wadleigh’s last-minute save was politically motivated.

“We make decisions based on the outcomes we believe we can achieve for students, and over the course of our engagement process we came to believe that Wadleigh’s Middle School has a good chance of turning around under new leadership,” said Frank Thomas, a department spokesman.

The current principal, Herma Hall, announced last week that this Friday would be her last day at the school, and next week, Tyee Chin, who currently works at Brooklyn’s Edward R. Murrow High School, will take over.

A scant number of schools have been removed from the closure list at the eleventh hour before, often after receiving a groundswell of support. Last year, the city withdrew its proposal to close Brooklyn’s P.S. 114 after community leaders and elected officials, including de Blasio, argued that the school had been undermined by an incompetent principal. In 2010, the department decided to phase out only portions of Alfred E. Smith Career and Technical Education High School after originally suggesting that the entire school should be closed. (Ultimately, no school closed that year because a lawsuit voided the closure votes conducted in February.)

But many schools that are now just a day from a closure vote have had vigorous defenses mounted on their behalf, to no avail. And the second school removed from the closure list today, KAPPA VII, hadn’t mounted a perceptible defense at all.

The city said the principal who took over at KAPPA VII this year had made positive changes that appeared likely to continue.

Still, even the president of KAPPA VII’s local parent council, Khem Irby, was surprised when she learned the school would remain open. She said she thought a different school in the district that had demonstrated community support, Satellite III, was a more likely candidate for resurrection.

“We were expecting it to be Satellite III, not KAPPA VII, if anything. definitely,” she said. “They’re not doing what we asked. We just had a long meeting with DOE last night and we asked for Satellite III.”

Satellite III is one of 23 schools that face closure votes Thursday night by the Panel for Educational Policy, which has never rejected a city proposal. Twenty of them would be phased out and three are middle schools that would be closed.

On Tuesday, more than 1,200 charter school parents traveled to Albany as part of Lobby Day. Their main ask was that legislators set aside seats for them on the city’s elected parent councils. The councils, known as Community Education Councils, frequently discuss charter schools but have no formal authority over them.

A Department of Education spokesman told me on Tuesday that the city’s position on the request had not changed since 2009, when officials argued that seating charter parents on CECs would represent an inappropriate conflation of charter and district school management.

As it turns out, that’s not quite true. The city hasn’t actually made up its mind about whether to support a bill introduced by two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter school parent.

I heard today from Micah Lasher, the city’s chief lobbyist in Albany, who said that the city had taken a deeper look at the issue on request from charter advocates and found merit in their argument.

“There’s a recognition that the CECs are a primary arena in which education debate play out on the local level and at the moment charter parents’ voices are largely not part of those debates in large measure because they are not well represented on the CECs,” Lasher said. “We’re quite sympathetic to that concern.”

But at the same time, he said, charter schools are distinct from district schools for a reason. The Bloomberg administration has encouraged charter schools to proliferate and has promised to fast-track dozens of new schools.

“Our longstanding concern about preserving the independence and autonomy of charter schools that has been so critical to their success remains a concern,” Lasher said.

A Department of Education spokesman, Frank Thomas, explained today that the department supports opportunities for all parents to get involved, no matter what kind of school they attend. But he suggested that installing charter school parents on CECs could undermine a movement that has been based on separation from the traditional district school bureaucracy.

“We want to see all parents of public school children — whether they attend a charter or a non-charter school — get more involved, and applaud the Charter Center for pursuing this goal,” Thomas said in a statement. “At the same time, real autonomy has been critical to the success of the city’s public charter schools, and we would not want to erode that independence and inadvertently give those pushing an anti-charter agenda the power to throw up more roadblocks.”

He added, “Given these goals and concerns, we will follow the discussion in Albany and reserve judgment on this legislation.”

Nearly twice as many New Yorkers trust the teachers union to protect students’ interests than they do Bloomberg, according to a new poll out of Quinnipiac University. Bloomberg’s approval rating on schools has hovered around 25 percent since early 2011, according to the poll.

The poll, conducted Jan. 30-Feb. 5, found that 56 percent of registered voters in New York City say they trust the union more to go to bat for students. Less than a third, 31 percent, said they trust Bloomberg more. (The poll of 1,222 registered voters had a margin of error of 2.8 percent.)

Among households containing public school students, the split was even more pronounced. Just 21 percent of those voters picked Bloomberg, and 69 percent chose the teachers union. Parents’ backed the union more often than even households with union members.

The news comes in an education-packed poll conducted after a month in which in a showdown over new teacher evaluations led Bloomberg and Gov. Andrew Cuomo each to ratchet up rhetoric against teachers and their unions. The poll found that the percentage of New Yorkers with favorable opinions of teachers had fallen, from 54 percent last March to 47 percent now.

But while a different poll earlier this week found high approval for Cuomo’s school policies, a set of questions designed to assess New Yorkers’ feelings about a slate of policy initiatives Bloomberg proposed during his State of the City address last month elicited mixed results.

In that speech, Bloomberg proposed increasing the salaries of teachers who receive high ratings on new evaluations and offering loan forgiveness to top college students who become city teachers.

The poll asked New Yorkers for their opinions on those ideas and others. Here’s what they said:

Overall, according to the poll, just 26 percent of New Yorkers approve of how Bloomberg has handled the schools. That figure is statistically identical to the 25 percent low Bloomberg received last spring, during the waning days of Cathie Black’s brief tenure as chancellor. Fifty-seven percent of poll respondents said Bloomberg’s takeover of the schools had been a failure, the same as last year.

Black New Yorkers and those living in the Bronx gave Bloomberg his lowest approval ratings on schools, 21 percent and 19 percent respectively. He did best among New Yorkers making more than $100,000 a year: A full third of them said they supported his schools management.

The news for Chancellor Dennis Walcott was also not good. His approval numbers stayed the same since December, at 34 percent, but his disapproval rate has continued to inch upward and now stands at 37 percent.

Overall, just 13 percent of New Yorkers said the mayor should retain sole control of the city schools after Bloomberg leaves office in 2013. Two-thirds said a new mayor should share control with an independent school board. The law authorizing mayoral control of the city schools is set to expire in 2016.

Half of respondents say they want their next mayor to be someone with government, rather than business, experience. But they gave only mixed reviews to the job performance of three city officials who are plotting mayoral runs: City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, and Comptroller John Liu.

Charter Parent Action Network Director Valerie Babb addresses charter school parents and students in Albany. (Photo courtesy of the New York City Charter School Center)

An annual caravan of charter school parents to Albany took place today with a specific mission: convince legislators to approve a bill allowing charter parents to run for the city’s local parent councils.

It’s a battle that charter advocates will have to fight without the Department of Education’s help. The city has never supported allowing charter parents to run for parent councils, even as it has encouraged the proliferation of charter schools and allowed them to operate in district space.

State law requires that each school district in the city field an elected parent council, known as a Community Education Council, to provide an avenue for parents to weigh in on schools policy. Some of the council’s duties, such as presiding over public hearings about co-locations, involve charter school issues. But the Bloomberg administration has constrained the councils’ authority and their only statutory function is to redraw school zone lines, which do not affect charter schools. They do not actually approve or reject co-locations.

Still, the CECs are seen as one of the few formal venues for parents to voice opinions about department policies, and charter school parents see the exclusion as an equity issue. They have convinced two legislators — Assemblyman Peter Rivera, a Bronx Democrat, and State Sen. Marty Golden, a Republican from Brooklyn — to introduce a bill that would reserve one of the 11 seats on each council for a charter parent.

“In order to protect our children and their continued access to a great public education, charter parents need and deserve a seat at the table to help inform the decisions about the schools in their neighborhoods,” said Valerie Babb, director of the Charter Parents Action Network, in a statement. “By supporting this legislation, our lawmakers will send a strong signal to families that their voices carry just as much weight as other public school parents in their districts.”

The city’s position is that the same signal would also undermine the very foundation of what makes charter schools unique. In 2009, District 1′s council invited charter parents to join and said they would lobby for a change to let the parents participate. At the time, a department spokeswoman pointed out that there is a reason the state law and city regulations do not have a mechanism for including charter parents in district committees.

“What makes a charter school a charter school is that they operate outside the jurisdiction of the district,” the spokeswoman said.

Today, department officials said the city’s position remains the same: Seating charter parents on CECs would represent an inappropriate conflation of charter and district school management. Charter schools and district schools are governed by different state laws.

It is true that charter school parents typically cannot enter the regular CEC election process — a process that has always attracted few candidates and last year was spectacularly botched. But they are in fact eligible to serve on CECs if they have children in both district and charter schools, had a child in a district school in the last two years, or are appointed by the borough president.

Lisa Donlan, president of CEC 1, said today that few charter parents avail themselves of those options.

“Why would they make that their main ask when they could do it now through a variety of mechanisms and they aren’t doing it?” she asked. “They don’t necessarily need to go up and change the legislation.”

The request was the centerpiece of this year’s Charter Lobby Day, which drew more than 1,200 charter parents to Albany today to push the CEC issue and other equity concerns. Last year, more than 2,000 people made the trek and focused on funding, particularly for facilities. The year before that, parents sat in on a budget hearing and took aim at a state law that capped the number of charter schools; later that spring, legislators raised the cap.

But while the size of the caravan was smaller this year, the number of schools represented increased. Of the city’s 136 charter schools, 114 sent parents to Albany today, where they were joined by parents from 22 additional schools across the state. Last year, parents from 80 of the city’s then-125 schools participated.

A father and son walk uptown after joining crowds to celebrate the New York Giants' Super Bowl victory.

City students were among the hundreds of thousands of New York Giants fans who flooded the streets around City Hall today to celebrate the team’s Super Bowl victory.

I took a lunchtime walk near our Lafayette Street office to soak in the spectacle and encountered, amid the crowds, families who had pulled their children from school today for the ticker-tape parade along Broadway’s Canyon of Heroes.

It’s a practice that is not officially sanctioned but got encouragement from former Mayor Rudy Giuliani in 2000, when he said students should be allowed to skip school for the Yankees’ World Series parade, as long as they read a book about baseball as well. After the Yankees’ 1998 World Series victory, high school attendance was 72 percent on the day of the parade, down from about 85 percent on typical days.

The Giants have been less of a draw in the past. In 2008, the last time the Giants won the Super Bowl, school attendance fell by about 4 percentage points on parade day across all grade levels.

About 20 seniors from Queens’ Bayside High School had gathered at the corner of Howard and Lafayette streets after the festivities.

“We were very excited. We didn’t go to school,” said one student who declined to give her name because she had skipped school. “The teachers know we’re here, but no, none came with us.”

Outside Roll and Go Pizza at the corner of Broadway and Franklin Street, I met five students from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School who said they had traveled from Brooklyn in a group of 20 but had lost their classmates in the crowds.

Senior Rifat Ahmed said she was too young to help celebrate the Giants’ 2008 win but had skipped school to celebrate the Yankees’ 2009 World Series victory. She said she went to FDR for two periods this morning — for a free period and gym class — before boarding the subway to Manhattan. (Another student said he hadn’t attended school at all today.)

“I just wanted the feeling of being there, with the toilet paper being thrown, and the footballs,” Ahmed said.

FDR is the school GothamSchools featured today in a story about teachers’ efforts to help an 18-year-old enrollee overcome illiteracy. It is also facing “turnaround,” or a process in which it would close and reopen with a new name and half of teachers replaced.

Ahmed said the city’s turnaround plan was misguided for FDR, which she noted serves many students who are considered English language learners and also routinely sends students to selective colleges with full scholarships.

“Our school has the greatest staff ever,” said Ahmed, a former executive in FDR’s student council. “Mayor Bloomberg — he’s not getting to know anything that’s happening there.”

Five students from Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School who attended the parade. Senior Rifat Ahmed is at center.

Last month, Cuomo vowed to withhold increases in state school aid to districts that do not settle in short order on new teacher evaluations that take test scores into account.

The poll, conducted last week by the Siena Research Institute, asked respondents, “Do you support or oppose the Governor’s plan to link school aid increases to the implementation of an enhanced teacher evaluation process?” Seventy-one percent said they support that plan. (The poll of 807 registered voters had a margin of error of 3.4 percent.)

The support was evenly split between respondents in New York City and the rest of the state and was especially high among black New Yorkers (77 percent) and young people between 18 and 34 (78 percent). Households with union members (61 percent) and Jews (63 percent) supported Cuomo’s plan least often, but even they stood by it in large numbers.

Respondents were more divided when it came to the size of the aid increase. Forty-two percent of New Yorkers said the size of Cuomo’s proposed increase — $800 million, compared to a $1.3 billion cut last year — was “about the right amount,” 39 percent said it was not large enough, and 15 percent said it was too great.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott was back in Albany today, where a week ago he met with legislators to push Cuomo’s backup plan on teacher evaluations: to use the budgeting process to impose new evaluations without the consent of local teachers unions.

Today’s trip comes days after Mayor Bloomberg proposed a city budget that increases school funding — based in part on an assumption that the city would pull down its expected aid increase from the state.

The Siena poll had all-around good news for Cuomo. In addition to the teacher evaluation news, Cuomo received a 74 percent approval rating and 52 percent of respondents — tied for the highest ever — said they think the state is moving in the right direction.

The full breakdown of how New Yorkers responded to the poll question about teacher evaluations is below. (Click to enlarge.)

Independently, the two special education teachers have been contributing to the GothamSchools Community section for some time, Anderson writing about teaching elementary in the Bronx and Johnson about teaching high school in Brooklyn. Now they’re working together to rethink the very philosophy has driven many recent efforts to improve schools.

In a joint Community section dispatch, they argue for a new way of thinking to replace the idea that schools should be judged by their students’ test scores. They write:

We propose a fundamental shift in the framework and language we use to discuss educational reform. Instead of a framework that views students as products, we propose a framework in which the products of education are viewed as the contexts and content of schools themselves. The schools we produce should be positive and nurturing learning environments where students are engaged in a rich, coherent curriculum. Rather than view our students as widgets, we’d do better to view them as vibrant, dynamic organisms, and view the school, by extension, as an ecosystem. While such a model would make it harder to quantify school quality based on a simple numerical scale, it would enable us to have more productive conversations about systemic education reform, and to take action in targeted ways that will have a sustainable impact.

Read Anderson and Johnson’s full argument — and how it relates to the city’s controversial plan to “turn around” 33 struggling schools — in the Community section.

• Michael Winerip: Sub-literate essays can earn passing scores on the state’s Regents exams. (Times)
• A DOE contract with a company started by a former employee is raising eyebrows. (Daily News)
• The city is still trying to fire a teacher who retired last year after being found guilty of sex talk. (Post)
• Parents at P.S. 189 say kindergarteners were allowed to engage in sexual touching in class. (Post)
• Students from 45 public and private schools participated in a science fair at Grover Cleveland HS. (NY1)
• Educators and experts say Dominican students’ long absences are culturally bound. (GothamSchools)
• Parents, students, and activists say they will protest Thursday’s vote on school closures. (Daily News)
• One of the schools, Samuel Gompers High School, offers vocational training. (GothamSchools, NY1)
• Another school, P.S. 14, would be Staten Island’s first school closure under Mayor Bloomberg. (NY1)
• The Post blames potential disruptions at Thursday’s PEP meeting on the UFT and Occupy Wall Street.
• Among three schools opening on Staten Island next year is one set to be zer0-energy. (S.I. Advance)
• Students earned $250 selling pot-laced brownies to classmates at I.S. 208 in Queens. (Daily News)
• A columnist notes that Gov. Cuomo first derailed a state deal on teacher evaluations. (Times-Union)
• The Daily News says Cuomo must insist on a slate of evaluations conditions as his deadline nears.

And elsewhere:

• Cami Anderson proposal for a New York City-inspired reform plan in Newark is drawing fire. (WSJ)
• The governor of Connecticut is set to propose more charter schools and more money for them. (WSJ)
• A Pennsylvania district says it is being put out of business by a “charter school on steroids.” (Times)
• A reform group that has done “turnarounds” in 19 Chicago schools is earning mixed grades. (Tribune)
• The backlash against Texas’s high-stakes accountability system appears to be growing steam. (Times)
• No data support La. Gov. Bobby Jindal’s plan to expand a school voucher program. (Times-Picayune)
• More on the controversial pro-charter school video that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in. (Times)

Brooklyn Prospect students listen to sports writer John Walters talk about his career path and professional life.

When Brooklyn Prospect Charter School students next sit down to work on their school newspaper, they shouldn’t have any trouble coming up with stories to cover.

As one of more than 20 speakers at Brooklyn Prospect’s Career Day, I spent the morning talking with eighth-graders about what it’s like to work as a journalist. Newly armed with knowledge about the distinctions among news, features, and opinion writing, the students broke into small groups to brainstorm article ideas about their school.

One big piece of news, the students said, is that Brooklyn Prospect has hired a principal for its high school, which will open in September. A feature story might take an in-depth look at how the school has changed now that it is located inside Bishop Ford High School after leaving the Sunset Park High School building. And opinion columns could make the case for or against the required uniform, a green or white polo shirt with black or khaki pants.

The students pointed to one story that could easily be tackled in any of the categories: a new “no hugging” rule.

Some said a reporter would find that students dislike the new regulation because it squelches their ability to connect with each other. But others said the real story is that overzealous hugging had become an issue at the school.

Dan Rubinstein, the school’s founder, said the policy sounded more draconian than it is. The rule was intended to stop hallway disruptions before they became problematic, he said.

That kind of proactive approach has run through many of the decisions made at the three-year old charter school, Rubinstein said. And now that the school is on the verge of opening its high school, the choices are coming quickly.

The decision about who should helm the high school was finalized earlier this month. Kim Raccio, currently an assistant head of a British school that enrolls many American students, got the job after a selection process that included students, parents, and teachers, Rubinstein said.

It’s also nearing time to settle on a mascot for the school. While I was speaking with Rubinstein, two students in the “Underground Art Club” stopped by his office to float student-generated ideas that included the Narwhals, the Parrots, and the Red Squirrels.

(I was invited to speak at Brooklyn Prospect’s Career Day by Kelly Vaughan, a member of GothamSchools’ founding team who now teaches sixth-grade science there. But you don’t have to know a GothamSchools reporter to invite us to your school!)

In case you’ve missed them, here are the details: