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This week’s issue of The Nation magazine is devoted to education, offering a unique opportunity to peer into the school views of left-of-Obama liberals. (Pedro Noguera, NYU professor and Joel Klein critic, guest-edited the issue.)

Among thought pieces by Diane Ravitch, Linda Darling-Hammond, Noguera, and Susan Eaton are three reported dispatches from our own Philissa Cramer.

Her story is under the headline “Bright Ideas.” One idea is the city’s new iZone, where one innovator says of his efforts:

“We’re not trying to replace the teacher,” Ben-Dov says. “We’re trying to empower her…. Our belief is that computers can help the teacher do her job better.”

The magazine also includes a piece by David L. Kirp profiling community schools run by Children’s Aid — right here in New York.

New York City needs to overhaul the way it screens and labels immigrant students who speak little English and may have missed years of school, according to a new report by Advocates for Children.

Since 2003, the city has handed out over $19 million to 129 different schools to help them serve students with interrupted formal education, known as SIFE. Despite the grant money, AFC reports that too few of these students are identified — many wind up wrongly classified as needing special education — and those who are still find themselves placed in schools where no one on staff is trained to help them.

Though SIFE students fall under the umbrella group of English language learners, they experience problems in school that other immigrant or non-English speaking students don’t. When Isabel, one of the 12 students profiled in the report, moved with her family to New York at age 12, she was the age of most sixth graders, so the DOE put her in a sixth-grade bilingual class. But Isabel had never attended school before, she spoke a then-unwritten language, and knew neither English or Spanish. She was lost, and by age 15, she had only the literacy skills of a kindergartner. AFC lobbied for her to be transferred to a high school for international students, but many SIFE students who don’t find the right school end up dropping out. (more…)

A Photoshopped combo: Robert Duffy, Andrew Cuomo's selected running mate, along with a photo of an anti-mayoral control poster. Duffy supports mayoral control. (Via Flickr)

Newly announced gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo’s choice of running mate, announced this afternoon, seals the deal on his education position. The Cuomo ticket is in basically the same camp as Barack Obama and Joel Klein: in favor of charter schools and mayoral control and not afraid to challenge the teachers union.

The running mate, Robert Duffy, mayor of Rochester, has advocated for bringing mayoral control of schools to Rochester, against teachers union opposition. To defend his argument, he has cited the school system “down the Thruway” — the New York City schools under Chancellor Joel Klein. A former Klein staffer, Jean-Claude Brizzard, is Rochester’s schools superintendent. And in his State of the City address earlier this month, Duffy singled out Uncommon Schools’ Rochester charter school, True North, for praise.

That’s in keeping with what Cuomo has been saying about education since officially announcing his candidacy this week. “I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools,” he declared, announcing a list of core principles that also included his support for gay marriage and abortion rights. (more…)

Another day has gone by without the State Assembly voting on a charter cap bill, but that doesn’t mean the members are twiddling their thumbs. They voted today to approve the new teacher evaluation system that came out of a deal between the state and teachers union earlier this month.

The system would make students’ test scores a factor in teacher evaluations, a change that state officials believe will improve New York’s bid for Race to the Top funds. It would also give principals the choice of labeling teachers one of four options — highly effective, effective, developing, and ineffective — rather than the current choices of satisfactory or unsatisfactory.

City education officials have criticized the new system for being vague and forcing districts to work out some elements of the system with their local teachers union. While the agreement calls for 20 percent of a teacher’s evaluation score to come from her students’ test scores, it requires another 20 percent to come from local assessments, which districts and unions would have to negotiate. (more…)

Maybe we’ll have a charter cap deal after all.

We’re hearing that the mayor’s top political aide, Howard Wolfson, is in Albany right now meeting with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and representatives of the city and state teachers unions. They’re all trying to hammer out a deal that would allow 260 more charter schools to open in New York State. And they’re racing against a super-tight deadline: June 1, next Tuesday, when the state’s second application to the federal Race to the Top competition must be delivered to the U.S. Education Department headquarters in D.C.

Sticking points in today’s negotiations, we hear, include a continued effort to push against allowing SUNY to act as an authorizer of charter schools. Charter school supporters, led by the Bloomberg administration, say that snatching SUNY’s power is a poison pill that would force them to drop out of negotiations. They say the same thing about a proposal on the table that would mean charters could only open through an RFP-like process.

But our source says that the mayor’s side has given in on at least two key issues: a ban on for-profit companies managing charter schools and permission for the state comptroller to audit charter schools.

We’ll keep you posted as we hear more.

No news is actually no news today in the battle over the state’s cap on charter schools.

Aiming to boost the state’s Race to the Top application, the State Senate passed a bill at the beginning of the month that would more than double the number of charter schools allowed in the state. To become law, the Assembly has to agree. But the Assembly’s version of the bill will hinge on the outcome of negotiations between the city and its teachers union that started last week and continued through the weekend.

But the city and union did not sit down for negotiations today, sources told GothamSchools. That means that any deal on the charter cap — which state officials consider essential to winning $700 million in Race to the Top funds — would need to come either tomorrow or Friday. (more…)

Just in case there weren’t enough school-themed ads playing on your TV, the city’s teachers union is debuting one tomorrow.

Called “Happening,” it urges viewers to ignore that pro-charter school ad they likely sat through only seconds before and focus on the budget cut-induced chaos that will befall their local schools. Larger class sizes, no after school programs, and teacher layoffs form the three pillars of disaster, according to the ad. (more…)

If you think this year’s school budget projections sound dismal, just wait until next year.

That’s the takeaway from today’s Independent Budget Office report analyzing Mayor Bloomberg’s executive budget. The report provides a concise, if vague, summary of all of the cuts anticipated across city departments, including the 6,400 teacher jobs Mayor Bloomberg has said could be lost.

The report also looks ahead to the fiscal year that begins in July 2011:

Beginning in 2012, the city will no longer have federal stimulus funds for education. The Mayor has said the loss of this $853 million could result in the elimination of 14,000 teachers. If federal or state funds are not available to replace the stimulus funds, there is a strong likelihood that there will be significant pressure on the city to find the necessary dollars locally.

Bloomberg’s doomsday scenario could be averted by a bill proposed by Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin that would distribute $23 billion among states to stem teacher layoffs. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan touted the bill during his visit to New York City this week. 

Reporter Arun Venogopal holds the microphone for a parent at WNYC's forum on charter schools and district schools. (Photo by Stephen Nessen of WNYC

It’s become nearly impossible to get charter schools advocates and opponents in the same room or TV studio without someone pointing a finger and someone snarking back. But WNYC education reporter Beth Fertig got beyond the noise this week by talking to the parents, students, and teachers who operate outside of the political echo chamber.

Two charter schools and two district schools participated in the forum. Both sets of schools share building space — and peaceably at that. P.S. 242 is co-located with the Future Leaders Institute (FLI) charter school in Harlem and I.S. 217 with the South Bronx Classical charter school.

Parents, students and teachers discussed everything from school uniforms, to discipline, to how many special education and English language learners charter schools serve. (more…)

Much of the information that appears in a New York Times Magazine piece by Steven Brill (debuting online today) is not news, but there are a few New York-centric nuggets that are worth highlighting.

“The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand,” is a chronicle of the post-Race to the Top world in which a relatively small amount of money, $4.3 billion dollars, and a lot of political pressure from the federal government have led to concessions from teachers unions that many didn’t think possible under a Democratic president.

To many New Yorkers, that narrative is probably well-worn at this point (it may even be on your Facebook profile and tabloid pages in the form of paid advertisements) but Brill has some items that are entertaining.

• MOU shenanigans

Brill finds that New York, like a handful of other states, dressed up its application to make it seem like the unions were on board when they weren’t. State officials checked off all the boxes for every school district indicating that they had signed a memorandum of understanding with the teachers union that would allow the changes to teacher evaluation and merit pay to go through. But attached to the application was a separate MOU saying the union contract still held, preventing any of the changes from taking place. Because the MOU was essentially meaningless, Klein did not want to sign it, Brill writes. (more…)