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Protesters derailed the monthly city school board meeting last night, filing out during the middle of the meeting with chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, one-man-rule has got to go!”

The protesters are part of the Campaign for Better Schools, a coalition of community groups that is pushing the state legislature to add checks to the mayor’s control of public schools. They argue that the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the mayor’s school policies. Panel members have almost always voted with the administration since Mayor Bloomberg fired three members who signaled they would oppose a third-grade promotion policy in 2005.

The group began the meeting, at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, with a rally outside the school, then filed quietly into the meeting room, nearly filling the lower level of an auditorium as they listened to a presentation about swine flu. But as Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who chairs the PEP, tried to shift the topic of conversation to test scores, the Campaign for Better Schools protesters stood up, and one member launched into a speech encouraging panel members to “think for yourselves.”

“In the meantime, for those of you who cannot, we have brought you something that we hope you can use moving forward,” the speaker said, referring to actual rubber stamps the campaign had made that read “PEP approved.”

As the protesters left the auditorium, one of them, William Hargraves, launched into an impassioned speech of his own, which starts at the beginning of the second minute of the video above. “Yo, chancellor,” he said. “What did you prove? Ninety percent of your audience left. … You’d rather be in front of nobody so that you can say what you’ve got to say, than to hear what the majority got to say?” (more…)

In the debate over the future of mayoral control, one sticking point has been the proper role of the city school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy. Today, a coalition pushing for significant changes to mayoral control is taking its PEP recommendations to the panel’s front steps, at the same that state lawmakers are powwowing in Albany about the panel’s future.

Advocates for checks on the mayor’s power say that the system needs an independent school board whose members can freely vote against mayoral proposals when appropriate. But Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have said that changing the composition of the PEP would introduce policy gridlock and undermine the mayor’s accountability on education matters.

The Campaign for Better Schools, a coalition of community groups, is calling on state legislators to change the panel’s composition so that the mayor no longer controls a majority of seats. Campaign members are planning to rally in support of that position at 5:30 p.m. today outside Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, where the PEP is holding its monthly meeting at 6 p.m.
 
“We want to highlight the fact that the PEP is simply just a rubber stamp for the policies of the mayor,” said Shomwa Shamapande, a campaign spokesman. About 200 campaign members are expected to protest before the meeting, then enter Stuyvesant’s auditorium for the meeting itself, he said.

By tonight, it’s possible that a deal will have been struck about the future of the PEP. (more…)

The five-borough tour by members of the State Assembly’s education committee to listen to public comments about mayoral control ends today with a marathon hearing in Brooklyn.

The hearing begins at City Tech at 10 a.m. and, like its predecessors, is likely to stretch long into the evening. Education committee chair Cathy Nolan says today’s hearing will focus on the Department of Education’s business contracts, as well as on academic achievement under mayoral control, reports Helen Zelon for Insideschools. One person who will testify on behalf of the DOE for the first time is Eric Nadelstern, the official who was recently promoted to “chief schools officer” for the system, Zelon reports.

Some mayoral control fans got an early start this morning. An e-mail sent by an intern at Learn NY, the group lobbying to preserve mayoral control, suggested that attendees arrive an hour early, at 9 a.m., “for visibility.” East Brooklyn Congregations, a coalition of churches, is also holding a pre-hearing rally to support mayoral control; David Brawley, a co-chair, said in a press release that the coalition is bringing 350 parent and community leaders to represent the roughly 350 new schools created under Mayor Bloomberg’s school leadership. Last month, Elizabeth met an EBC leader, Reverend David Haberer, and took this video of him explaining why he supports mayoral control:

Then, late in the afternoon, after they get off from work, parents who support changing the school governance structure will pour into the hearing, according to April Humphrey, who organizes the Campaign for Better Schools, which is calling for more community involvement in school governance. About 150 Campaign for Better Schools supporters arrived at last week’s Bronx hearing around 5:30 p.m., Humphrey told me.

The coalition protest yesterday at City Hall. (Courtesy Campaign for Better Schools)

The newest addition to the debate over how much power the mayor should have over the public schools, a coalition of 25 community groups called the Campaign for Better Schools, unveiled its position yesterday [link corrected] — that the public should have a say in policies that rule the public schools.

The pro-checks and balances stance is not a surprise. The groups behind this coalition — including the parent-led group called the Coalition for Educational Justice, the New York Immigration Coalition, the Hispanic Federation, and the NAACP — have campaigned against the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein since they took office, often portraying them as orchestrating power plays against the public will.

What is new is the argument the group is deploying to make its case. Rather than portray the mayor and Chancellor Joel Klein as dictators (remember the posters during the budget cut wars that portrayed Klein as a greedy “Simpsons” villain and Bloomberg as Pinocchio?), they are zeroing in on the pair’s results — and calling them failures. (more…)