Outgoing chancellor Joel Klein at his last Panel for Educational Policy meeting.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein vowed tonight that he will absolutely leave his position in January — even if efforts to block Mayor Bloomberg’s chosen successor succeed. Klein spoke at a meeting of the Panel for Educational Policy that held few distinctions except for the fact that it will be his last.

“I know it’s been controversial, but controversy is a necessary part of education,” Klein said, reflecting on his eight-plus years as chancellor. “I respect that, and I understand that when you do make changes and look at things differently that it’s going to upset people.”

He added, “I don’t know of any other way to change a system.”

The Panel for Educational Policy is the current incarnation of the city school board, formed in 2002 just as Mayor Bloomberg won control of the city schools and named Klein chancellor. Despite the historic circumstances, tonight’s meeting plugged along unremarkably, as many others have. Some protesting members of the public did attend, but they had a narrow issue in mind: opposition to the planned expansion of a small middle school in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn Technical High School held tonight’s meeting.

Other panel meetings this year have included loud protests by busloads of parents who target Klein personally for everything from closing schools to overseeing falling test scores. Tonight’s tone harkened more to the first-ever meeting of the panel, which the New York Times described this way in a headline the next day:

The city is cracking down on a New Jersey family that illegally enrolled their daughter at two of the city’s most competitive public schools.

Jill Schifter and Anthony Maulello’s daughter won a spot in the Professional Performing Arts School in 2005 and was accepted to the ultra-competitive drama program at LaGuardia High School two years later. But according to a report released today by Special Commissioner of Investigations Richard Condon, Schifter and Maulello live in North Bergen, N.J., not New York City, meaning their daughter wasn’t eligible to attend the schools.

Investigators responding to an anonymous tip last fall found that the couple had briefly placed utilities accounts at a friend’s apartment under their name in order to establish residency after enrolling at PPAS. It was only six months into the investigation, in February 2010, that Maulello signed a lease on an apartment in Manhattan.

The city is moving to collect nearly $25,000 from Maulello and Schifter, the art teacher at a Jersey City charter school, according to Department of Education spokeswoman Marge Feinberg. That figure represents five years’ worth of the tuition the city requires from public school parents who live outside of the city. (Last year, the city collected $692,895 in tuition, Feinberg said.) According to the regulation about non-resident enrollment, Schifter and Maulello’s daughter could also be thrown out of LaGuardia.

The story is an extreme example of a not-uncommon phenomenon. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein is expanding a pilot program that takes the experiments city schools often conduct behind closed classroom doors and brings them to other schools.

Called Innovation Zone, or iZone, the program began this year in ten schools and will grow to include 81 schools next year. At its core is a heavy emphasis on expanding online learning, a major focus of Klein’s tenure at the Department of Education.

Of the iZone schools, more than half will adopt the “virtual school” model. This involves using online Advanced Placement classes and credit recovery courses or simply combining online work and face-to-face instruction. Six schools will alter their schedules to make the school day or year longer and 35 will begin using software that’s designed to change instruction based on how much a student struggles or excels.

One of the six schools that will change its schedule next year is P.S. 50, an elementary and junior high school in East Harlem. A spokeswoman for The After School Corporation said the organization is in talks with P.S. 50 to extend the school day to 6 p.m. (more…)

A meeting to determine the fate of schools marked for closure is being moved from Staten Island to Brooklyn after parents and teachers protested that some would have to travel over two hours to attend.

The Panel for Educational Policy meeting, where members will vote on the Department of Education’s proposals to close 20 schools, will be held at Brooklyn Technical High School at the same date and time. The majority of the panel’s members are appointed by the mayor, and have never voted down any of the department’s proposals.

“In response to concerns about the location of the January panel meeting, the DOE has decided to hold the meeting at Brooklyn Tech and we will reschedule a meeting in Staten Island at a later date,” said DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte. (more…)

Queens in Brooklyn: The school's fourth floor was turned over to Queens high schools, which are among the most overcrowded in the city. Parents said school safety, AP course offerings, and class size would determine where their children applied.

Parents and their middle school students flooded the halls of Brooklyn Technical High School yesterday in search of the perfect high school. Over 34,000 people — up from last year’s 32,000 — attended the city’s annual high school fair to survey the hundreds of tables and glitter-soaked displays advertising the city’s 700 high schools. (more…)

The Chicago Public Schools employee in charge of running a Web site for the district’s alumni recently created an iTunes mix featuring music by Bo Diddley, Kanye West, and other famous CPS grads.

And the person who started the playlist is issuing a “playful challenge” to New York and Los Angeles to come up with comparable mixes, the Chicago Tribune reports.

What would a New York City public schools iTunes mix sound like? I didn’t actually create one, but I did come up with some musicians who got their starts attending the city’s public schools:

Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall '59

• Tony Bennett, Art and Design
• Harry Chapin, Brooklyn Tech
• The Cleftones, Jamaica HS
• Bobby Darin, Hunter College High School
• Al Kooper, Martin van Buren HS
• Thelonious Monk, Stuyvesant
• Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall HS
• Suzanne Vega, LaGuardia

What big names am I missing? A Stuyvesant alum compiled a list of albums by Stuy grads on Amazon.com, but does some enterprising soul want to curate an actual playlist for download? You’ll have to do it on your own, because the closest thing the DOE has to an alumni office is the Fund for Public Schools, and all it appears to offer alums are links to a handful of individual high schools’ alumni groups.