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Ninth-grader Geronimo Miranda joins sixth-graders Ariyelle Ceasar, Tiane Jackson, Cheyanne Young and Nia Manerville in describing Wadleigh Middle School's positive qualities at a school truncation hearing Jan. 26.

A who’s who of elected officials and Harlem leaders turned out Thursday to defend the Wadleigh Secondary School of Performing Arts against the Department of Education’s plan to close its middle school.

About 200 parents, students, activists, and staff packed the school’s auditorium Thursday evening for a public hearing on the proposal. Just before, officials who included City Councilman Robert Jackson, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, State Sen. Bill Perkins, and Comptroller John Liu all held court in the packed lobby of the Harlem campus. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and the city’s NAACP chief, Hazel Dukes, also spoke at the hearing.

They said the city was giving up on a neighborhood institution by moving to close Wadleigh’s middle school. Jackson promised to call Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Dennis Walcott today to air his opposition to the plan.

Wadleigh’s 440-student high school would remain open under the plan, as would another middle school in the building, Frederick Douglass Academy II, which narrowly escaped closure this year after earning an even lower progress report score than Wadleigh’s middle school. A charter school, Harlem Success Academy I, is set to move its middle school grades into the building, according to a plan the city set last year. (more…)

People on both sides of the charter school fight are not happy about a hefty City Council earmark that’s going to the teachers union’s charter school.

The funding, sponsored by City Councilman Erik Dilan and approved last month in the council’s annual capital budget allocations, gives the union $2 million to develop a plan for moving its charter school out of the two East New York buildings it shares and into space of its own.

The announcement comes as charter schools and their critics are locked in fierce debate over how the city funds and allocates space to charter schools. That dispute is central to a lawsuit, filed in May by the UFT and NAACP, that seeks to stop 16 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

The lawsuit alleges that some charter schools receive disproportionate public resources, and some of its backers say the City Council earmark is another example.

Teacher activist Norm Scott called the funding “a double outrage, maybe a triple outrage.” (more…)

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…)

Four of the 15 campaigns the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform is targeting this fall are in New York.

The group is actively raising money for Andrew Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaign, the re-election campaigns of State Senator Craig Johnson and Assemblyman Sam Hoyt, and for Basil Smikle’s race against State Senator Bill Perkins. DFER also wants to raise money to run other campaigns to influence other state senate races, but a report the organization released today didn’t specify which races.

Hoyt and Johnson led Albany’s efforts to pass legislation that helped New York win the federal Race to the Top competition. Both supported lifting the cap on charter schools early on, ignoring fierce opposition from the teachers’ unions — which aren’t endorsing them in this election. Cuomo has been less vocal so far on education, but DFER’s financing is a sign that he might favor the kind of policies the group endorses: the spread of charter schools, the introduction of merit pay, and the weakening of teacher tenure policies.

DFER has spent more than $17 million in three years trying to influence local elections, according to the report. The amount appears to have jumped recently. Last year, the group’s executive director told GothamSchools that DFER had spent “a few million” since 2006. The energy stems in part from the Race to the Top, President Barack Obama’s grant competition that prompted 34 states to change their laws to match Obama’s reform goals, which DFER vigorously supports.

Read DFER’s six-page report (in pdf) on its political goals here.

With the Democratic primary a few weeks away, the battle over a West Harlem senate seat — turned charter school proxy war — is heating up.

On NY1 last night, Senator Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle debated Perkins’ support for charter schools. Perkins accused Smikle of being too cozy with charter school supporters (“We all know that it’s the hedge fund charter movement that has initiated his candidacy, with the support of course of the New York Post,” he said). And Smikle fought back, charging Perkins with intentionally pitting charter school parents against district school parents.

More interesting than the back and forth is how Perkins is now describing his relationship to charter schools. Months ago, Perkins’ line was that he had been an early supporter of charter schools — he spoke on NBC’s Morning Joe about founding a charter school — but that the reality had not lived up to his expectations. Rather than acting as incubators for new teaching methods traditional public schools could adopt, charter schools had become rouge, unregulated agents, he maintained.

Now, Perkins’ explanation for his position has evolved. Replacing the narrative of charter schools not doing what they were intended to do is one about how his April hearing on charter schools directly impacted and improved the state’s charter school law. (more…)

Charter school advocates’ day of political action in Albany last week appears to have had an unintended consequence: State Senator Bill Perkins now wants to hold hearings to expose an alleged lack of oversight and parent voice in the schools.

In a half-hour interview on WWRL’s Working New York radio show this Saturday, Perkins said that a group of charter school parents who have become disenchanted with their childrens’ schools came to see him and left a lasting impression. Those parents belong to the New York Charter Parents Association, a recently-started group that’s supportive of charter schools, but quite critical of their management.

“There’s a parent movement that’s not being paid attention to within the charter schools,” said Perkins, who recently supported a bill backed by the teachers union that would have lifted the charter cap while placing tight restrictions on how and where the schools open. (more…)

Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. delivered a speech in Spanish against no-bid contracts. (GothamSchools)

The circus around the State Senate intensified today as half a dozen senators gathered to complain that Mayor Bloomberg would not meet them at the bargaining table. Immediately afterward, senators confirmed that negotiations are, in fact, ongoing.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be negotiated with,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a persistent critic of mayoral control. Joining Perkins on the steps of City Hall were Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada, Eric Adams, Ruben Diaz Sr., and City Councilman Robert Jackson. All of the senators were among those who supported a failed bill that would have curtailed mayoral control.

After the press conference, Monserrate acknowledged to reporters that negotiations were already in progress. “We’re at the table,” he said. “There are some meetings occurring.”

Those meetings, which began on Monday after mayoral control talks fell apart last week, are being held by Democratic conference leader John Sampson’s staff and deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf.

Senators would not discuss the details of the negotiations today, but they reiterated their support for increased parent involvement, funding for art programs, and fixed terms for citywide school board members. A source close to the discussions described the talks as “fragile.” (more…)

When senators return to work on Wednesday, they will likely vote to bring back mayoral control — but they may also pass checks that would further curb the mayor’s power.

Details about what those checks would look like began to surface last night, when four senators introduced three amendments with specific changes.

Sens. Malcolm Smith, Martin Dilan, Bill Perkins, and Shirley Huntley have all proposed bills that would amend the bill passed by the Assembly, which Mayor Bloomberg supports. Two of the bills call for state funding for a parent training center and only one would prevent the mayor from firing his appointees to the citywide school board at will.

Smith’s amendment comes as a surprise. As Senate Majority Leader, a post he held a little over a month ago, he was a vocal supporter of Bloomberg’s policies.

Smith’s bill and the Dilan/Perkins bill would give $1.6 million per year for two years to the New York University Center for Urban Education, which would run a parent training center. Another $600,000 would be divided among the city’s student success centers, which work to increase the number of students in public high schools that go to college.

Huntley’s bill would leave parent training to the borough presidents, and sets aside no extra funding for the project. (more…)

Protestors at P.S. 123 yesterday applauded lawmakers pushing for limits on charter schools in Harlem. Eva Moskowitz, the C.E.O. of the Success Charter Network, was a particular target. (Photo screenshot from video below.)

The next front for the Harlem school wars could be Albany.

City Council member Inez Dickens yesterday proposed changing the state law to cap the number of charter schools that a single operator can open in a given school district.

She was speaking at a protest against the Success charter school network’s expansion into a traditional Harlem public school, P.S. 123.

Dickens said she had the support of state Sen. Bill Perkins, and Keith Wright, an Assemblyman representing Harlem, said he would introduce legislation to make that change on his side of the legislature.

A neighborhood- and operator-specific cap would add to what exists now, a cap on the number of charter schools across New York state at 200. There are 1,500 public schools in the city.

Such a cap would also squarely challenge the strategy the Success Charter Network has pursued of opening a large number of charter schools in a designated area; Eva Moskowitz, the network’s CEO, has said her goal is to open 40 Harlem charter schools in the next 10 years. (more…)

ALBANY, N.Y. — Cornered outside of the press offices this morning, State Senator-turned-Democratic-Conference-Leader John Sampson said he was still planning to push his own school governance bill.

Asked whether he would support Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s plan, Sampson said that while the Democrats still had to discuss Silver’s bill, he wants “to put forth” the bill that he supported: the “Better Schools Act.” The bill would end the mayor’s ability to appoint the majority of the 13 members of the Panel for Educational Policy.

“I would like to … look at their bill and look at our bill and see if there can be some compromise,” he said.

Asked whether the Democrats were going to allow the bill to expire without a vote, Sampson replied, “You shouldn’t ask us that question, you should ask Senator Skelos that question. You know, we’ve got to come to some sort of agreement, so until then, as I would say, to be continued.”

Asked what would happen if the Assembly passed the bill and then left Albany, Sampson said: “If we are out of town,we can’t make any changes, therefore you have no school governance.”

Senator Bill Perkins, another supporter of the “Better Schools Act” said last night he was optimistic that the Senate would be able to insert fixed terms into the bill. Of Silver’s bill, he said: “From what I heard, it’s not something that I would want to vote for.”