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Screenshot of the campaign page against the UFT/NAACP lawsuit (click to enlarge)

Michelle Rhee’s new advocacy organization is jumping into the fight between the NAACP and charter school families with a new email campaign that has been flooding elected officials’ inboxes since Friday.

The campaign targets elected officials who co-signed a lawsuit, along with the teachers union and the NAACP, demanding that the Bloomberg administration halt its plans to close struggling district schools and replace them with charters.

Students First, which Rhee founded last year, sponsored the campaign, titled “Tell NYC Officials: Don’t Decrease Charter School Space.”

“Remove Your Name from the Charter School Lawsuit,” reads the subject line in the identical emails, which has been sent to the dozen officials listed as plaintiffs in the suit. In four days, more than 550 emails have been sent from people from all over New York State.

“New York needs more quality public school options,” the email reads.

“That is why I ask that you remove your name from the lawsuit that threatens to close several existing charter s ychools [sic] and to prevent others from enrolling new children. This action is tantamount to condemning thousands of kids to failing schools who otherwise would have an opportunity at a great education.” (more…)

A list of proposals being pushed by the city teachers union to overhaul state charter school laws could shape the imminent debate over how and when to raise the charter school cap.

The proposals, which conclude a UFT report on charter school demographics, are intended to force charter schools to open their doors to the same populations served by district schools, which would mean enrolling larger numbers of English language learners and students with special needs. In the days leading up to January 19, the deadline for states’ applications to the federal Race to the Top competition, the union’s proposals could become bargaining chips for legislators hesitant to raise the charter cap without requiring significant changes in the way state charter schools are run.

Flanked by legislators from both houses at UFT headquarters in lower Manhattan on Sunday, union chief Michael Mulgrew called on Albany to, among other things, require charters to maintain student populations with similar demographics to the school districts in which they are located, centralize charter school admissions under the city or state education departments, cap the salaries of charter school administrators and ban charter schools from sharing space with district schools in New York City until the city has met its class size targets.

Mulgrew and the lawmakers insisted that the changes would bring the state’s charter schools closer to their original mission, as written in state law, to reduce educational inequities.

“The original intent of the law was fairness and access for all students,” Mulgrew said. “The way the law is written currently, we know that is not happening.” (more…)

State lawmakers are warning that if the Department of Education doesn’t comply with the new governance law immediately, they will try to force them to.

School officials came under attack earlier this week when they laid out their time-table for implementing changes ordered by the legislature. The law required that community superintendents work exclusively “predominantly” with schools in the districts where they are assigned. Education department officials said that it would take a full school year to make that happen.

Assembly members critical of the department said this week that was too long.

“It’s violating, certainly, the spirit of the law,” said Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn.

Maisel said that if the department continued to defy what he said was the intent  of the law, legislators in Albany do have one recourse–amending the legislation.  “There’s no law that says we couldn’t come back and come up with another piece of legislation,” he said. (more…)

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and his fellow Democratic lawmakers are gathering right now in a private conference to discuss the future of mayoral control of the city’s public schools, an Assembly member just told me. This marks the first time the lawmakers will meet as a group to discuss the subject since private debate and lobbying launched last year.

“I am waiting very anxiously,” Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn told me on the telephone just now, as he waited for the topic to shift to school governance. “This is a culmination of like a year and a half of a lot of talk. This needs to be done.”

When Democrats in the state Senate met on the same subject earlier this month, the meeting ended with lines clearly drawn as to which lawmakers favor which kinds of changes. Tonight’s meeting could provide the same kind of insight for the Assembly.

Maisel said that Silver has already been meeting individually with lawmakers to get their opinions, especially lawmakers from New York City. Lawmakers have also been busily entertaining a parade of advocates (including, in Maisel’s case, Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein) and meeting with each other.

Maisel said that his own meetings with other lawmakers suggest there is some consensus among Assembly Democrats. One surprise: Maisel said that most Assembly Democrats favor adding at least one of two substantial checks to the mayor’s power: either taking away the power to appoint the schools chancellor or taking away control of a majority of school board members.

“They just don’t want the mayor to have this autocratic control of the schools without any kind of participation from anybody else,” he said.

We first reported that this conference had been scheduled last week.

Hazel Dukes, president of the New York NAACP, urged Assembly members to make changes to mayoral control

By now you know a bunch of the highlights from the big mayoral control hearing Friday. Diane Ravitch argued for taking power away from the mayor, the administration argued for keeping it, and some students summed the whole thing up pretty nicely.

But there were other highlights, too, that I didn’t go over Friday. Here’s a rundown:

• New York NAACP President Hazel Dukes charged the Bloomberg administration with over-stating its civil rights accomplishments. “Despite repeated claims, the achievement gap has not diminished in any grades or subjects since this administration came to office,” she said.

Dukes also advised Assembly members to carve into the mayor’s control of the schools by adding checks and balances to the power of the mayor and chancellor. “You got to put the teeth in now, and when they don’t do it, just like that groundhog did the other day, you’re going to have to bite,” she said. “We need to make sure that no man, not any man in this city or woman can just have all the power about our children.”

• Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell, whose sister is the famous TV personality Rosie O’Donnell, criticized the Bloomberg administration for having too few educators control education policy. He described a meeting with a senior education policy aide to the mayor. When O’Donnell asked about her background, the adviser said she went to school, became a lawyer, and has siblings who are educators.

“My sister used to have a very famous talk show, but that doesn’t make me qualified to be an executive at NBC,” O’Donnell said. (more…)