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President Bill Clinton was joined by AFT President Randi Weingarten (behind him) and other union and city officials today to announce a $1 billion investment of the city's teacher pension fund into Hurricane Sandy recovery projects.

One billion dollars of the city’s teacher pension fund will be used to finance construction and repair projects for city roads, bridges, and homes, President Bill Clinton and other officials announced Thursday.

Clinton joined UFT President Michael Mulgrew, AFT President Randi Weingarten, City Comptroller John Liu, and U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan to announce the pledge, which Clinton called “a remarkable commitment” to “properly rebuild in the aftermath of Sandy.”

“This storm exposed weaknesses in our infrastructure that must not only be repaired, but we must rebuild in a different way,” said Donovan, who is now in charge of federal Sandy recovery efforts.

This will be the first time the city’s teacher pension funds are used for infrastructure projects, Liu said, even though the idea has been around for years.

“There’s always been apprehension about, is it going to work, is it potentially a vicious circle? So what I’ve seen is everybody is waiting for somebody else to do it, and therefore nobody does it. I’m very proud that, in this case, New York City is taking the lead,” Liu said after the announcement. (more…)

Joel Klein and Eva Moskowitz at the Harlem Success lottery in April 2009. (GothamSchools)

There’s a lot more than school siting and closures in the 77 pages of e-mails between Chancellor Joel Klein and charter school operator Eva Moskowitz.

The e-mails, obtained by the Daily News, include a little bit of news — such as that Bill Clinton considered weighing in on the charter schools fight — and a lot of insight into the way Klein and Moskowitz think about the politics of education. We’ve read every word of the 150+ e-mails and have collected the highlights below. 

A PERSONAL CHALLENGE: Moskowitz puts her expansion goal in personal terms, in an April 2007 e-mail to Klein: “I plan to be educating 8,000 of your children by 2013.”

SHE DIDN’T LIKE THE TWEED WORKFORCE, EITHER. We know that district school leaders and parents often clashed with Garth Harries, the Tweed official who for years led efforts to insert small schools and charters into their buildings. Now we learn that Moskowitz fumed at him, too. On May 16, 2007, she praised a new Department of Education official, Tom Taratko, to Klein. “He got done in 2hrs what garth could not accomplish in 9 months,” she declared, adding, “look out for him and hire more!!!!!” The more typical Tweed worker she describes this way: “maddening sluggishness and people afraid of their own shadows.”

POLITICKING FOR EXPANSION: In July 2007 Moskowitz described to Klein how she and her main financiers, John Petry and Joel Greenblatt, shored up support for her application to open three copies of the original Harlem Success Academy. They courted New York State Republican Committee chairman Ed Cox, who was at the time chairman of SUNY’s charter board. (more…)

National standards and tests: New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein “strongly support[s]” them. Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) charter schools founder Mike Feinberg is in favor. Education historian Diane Ravitch agrees. A recent Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll shows mixed feelings among the public (62% say we should have “common expectations” for all children, but 63% are satisfied with their own state’s standards).

And now, the Gates Foundation plans to advocate for national standards and offer free standards and tests to the states.

But will they succeed where others have failed? When then-President Bill Clinton pushed for national tests in the 1997, the New York Times reported broad public support for national standards and testing, but when it came to implementation, deep divisions over whose standards, what kind of tests, and how results would be used:

Still, the whole concept of standards was still relatively new back then, and the federal government played a fairly small role in education policy. Now, children in every state take yearly standards-based exams, and under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, schools are judged on the results. In this new climate, will states embrace the Gates Foundation’s standards and tests? And, as bloggers Aaron Pallas (a.k.a. skoolboy) and Alexander Russo have asked, is the Gates Foundation the right organization for the job?