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The citywide board that became a hotly-debated issue in the fight over mayoral control is back with a mixture of old and new faces.

Mayor Bloomberg announced his eight appointees to the Panel for Educational Policy on WOR Radio’s The John Gambling Show this morning. Of the people he named to the board, four will return to their previous positions, while the other four will join the panel for the first time.

Bloomberg said that the new panel will complete the process of restoring mayoral control. “It is the last step in re-establishing the school governance that has led to all of these improvements over the past seven years,” he told Gambling.

The newly-formed panel will not be an exact replica of the previous one, but the changes are more modest than some had hoped. Going into this summer’s school governance fight, critics who charged that the PEP was little more than a rubber stamp for the mayor’s policies had hoped to give members fixed terms and to prevent the mayor from appointing the majority of its members. Though neither of those changes happened, the new panel will have some increased oversight of things like contracts and school utilization.

The mayor’s appointees have close ties to his administration. One new PEP member, Gitte Peng, spent five years as a senior education policy adviser to Deputy Mayor for Education Dennis Walcott. Peng helped craft the original school governance legislation that consolidated the mayor’s control of the schools.

Walcott briefly served as president of the Board of Education this summer before mayoral control was reauthorized. Bloomberg said today that Peng’s appointment would permit Walcott’s presence “live on” at the board. (more…)