Long before Murdoch’s News Corporation was accused of employing illegal news-gathering strategies, Murdoch and his wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch, were supporters of the Shuang Wen School. The Chinatown dual-language school was revealed last year to be illegally charging families for mandatory Chinese instruction.

In 2004, the Murdochs pledged three years of financial support for Shuang Wen’s after school programs, according to an article published in a city’s Chinese language paper at the time. That pledge amounted to half a million dollars, the Grand Street News later reported. In 2008, Murdoch praised the school during a lecture delivered in Australia.

Shuang Wen’s longtime principal, Ling Ling Chou, was removed several weeks ago under cloud of at least nine separate investigations into the school. Her interim replacement, Iris Chiu, has not received a warm welcome: Shuang Wen parents are defending Chou and fighting against the DOE’s investigations and oversight. They have filed a lawsuit alleging that discrimination is behind the city’s scrutiny, and some say they might withdraw their children in protest.

Wendi Murdoch’s relationship with the city schools extends beyond Shuang Wen. Until at least last year, she was a board member of the Fund for Public Schools, the Department of Education’s private fundraising arm. It’s unclear whether her tenure on the board began before or after Rupert Murdoch approached fund vice-chair Caroline Kennedy for help getting Grace, his oldest daughter with Wendi, into the private Brearley School.

What Kennedy and Chancellor Joel Klein claim:

Kennedy told the Times that the Fund was a mere “pass-through,” collecting “an average of $2 million a year” before she got there. “We kind of re-launched it and revitalized it, you know. Now, we’ve raised $238 million since then,” she said. Klein’s CNN article said that Caroline “took over an office that previously oversaw donations to PTAs and alumni associations and re-created it around a model of a public/private partnership,” claiming that “under her leadership, the Fund has raised more than $240 million.”

What Barrett found in actual documentation:

But the Fund’s tax forms show that the $11.2 million it raised in Caroline’s first fiscal year—which ran from July 1, 2002, to June 30, 2003 (she started the job that October)—was very similar to the $10.7 million raised the year before. The total actually dropped to $10.9 million in 2003-2004, the only full fiscal year that Kennedy was on staff. It grew to $14 million when she left, and then exploded nearly two years after she was gone, to $39.6 million. Kennedy and Klein’s figures of $238 million and $240 million credit her for everything the Fund raised for the four years that she was merely a board member, an absurd exaggeration.

1. What is your position on mayoral control? Should it be reauthorized with no changes or are there any revisions that would be acceptable? For instance, Geoffrey Canada’s group has argued that the Bloomberg administration did not do enough to involve parents in decision-making. Do you agree with that assessment?

2. What portion of money raised by the Fund for Public Schools went toward the advertising campaign called “Keep it Going NYC”? Could you explain the specific importance of those advertisements? I’ve heard several explanations but never a really clear one about how they directly or indirectly help the public schools.

You can see the answer Kennedy did provide to a mayoral control question from the Times here, saying she supports it broadly but is open to revisions “so long as they don’t prevent the Mayor from taking the actions he thinks are appropriate and for which he will be held accountable.” I haven’t received a reply to my questions yet. Any others we should be asking?

“She helped us raise money, she helped us forge partnerships, and she spent time with our kids in the schools,” he said. “I think that says a lot about her. She could have done a lot of things with the time she had.”

Klein also answered host Bob Schieffer’s concern that Kennedy doesn’t have the gumption to face reporters in the halls of Congress by saying that Kennedy did public press events with him in New York. True. Although, as Philissa pointed out last week, she didn’t answer every question. Here’s what the Times reported when she left the Fund for Public Schools in 2004 after two years of service:

In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, ”I put in as much time as I can.”

Caroline Kennedy is the vice chairman of the Fund for Public Schools.

The state assembly’s decision to study whether the Fund for Public Schools should be exempt from a state law that asks nonprofits for detailed financial disclosure reports is something to watch. That’s because the charity group’s exemption stems from a claim that has enabled the city Department of Education to opt out of a list of other laws and protocols: the notion that the Department of Education is not legally a city agency, and therefore doesn’t have to follow city law.

The claim doesn’t come from nowhere; the city school system has been a state-authorized entity since it was created in the 1840s, and only briefly became a fully city-run entity, thanks to a power play by Boss Tweed circa 1873. But the claim is important because it’s the reason the DOE has given for exempting itself from a laundry list of other city laws and protocols over the years. So if the assembly forces the Fund to disclose its finances, that could produce a ripple effect.

Here’s a partial list of laws and protocols the DOE has avoided via this claim, compiled largely from a list Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters put together in testimony (Word doc) to a mayoral control panel recently:

• City agencies must follow competitive bidding procedures before granting contracts to outside groups, but the Department of Education does not have to and has given out many no-bid contracts.
• The Department of Education, with Mayor Bloomberg’s blessing, refuses to abide by a law the City Council passed called the Dignity for All Students Act.
• The City Council passed a law almost unanimously allowing students to carry cell phones to school, but the Department of Education kept its ban intact, arguing the council has no authority over the DOE’s discipline code.

The whole thing is especially confusing because, at other times, the Department of Education has appeared to exempt itself from state law. An example: the fact that the DOE gives barely no notice to official parent groups when it decides to close a school in their district — even though advocates say state law requires the department to consult with the parent groups, called community education councils.

The twin exemptions collide in confusing ways. A good example: There’s confusion over who has the primary authority to audit the Department of Education, the city or the state comptroller, according to a report (PDF) by a school governance commission put together by the city’s public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum. And education advocates, including Campaign for Fiscal Equity members, told me that the city comptroller has not been able to access basic reports on how the school system spent its money since 2004.

Correction: In an earlier version of this post, I misstated who has authority to audit the Department of Education.

Sitting at a table by the restaurant’s front door, Ms. Kennedy sat alone for a short time until Ms. Weingarten arrived.

The first time I ever saw Weingarten in a close setting, it was at Sarabeth’s on the Upper West Side, where I noticed a man (Michael Mendel, it turned out, a vice president of the union) waiting for at least 20 minutes for his breakfast date. I also once sat for half an hour in the grand dining room of the Harvard Club, waiting for her to show.

The tardiness was no surprise, given Weingarten’s tireless work ethic, and neither was it irritating, given that she will always sit with you through and beyond the allotted time, once she’s arrived. Now that she’s not only president of the local union but also the national, commuting between New York and Washington, the astonishing thing is that she can ever make a date at all.

Sarah Jessica Parker, Joel Klein, Caroline Kennedy, and deputy mayor Patricia Harris at an October Fund for Public Schools event. Photo by Rubenstein, via Flickr

As Caroline Kennedy travels across the state in an unusual campaign to become its newest senator, New Yorkers are scrutinizing her work history. Among the questions being asked is how much time she actually spent at the city Department of Education when she headed its fundraising office for nearly two years starting in 2002.

Back in 2004, when Kennedy stepped down from her DOE position, David Herszenhorn wrote in the Times:

In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, “I put in as much time as I can.”

This week, Wayne Barrett argues in the Village Voice that Kennedy’s reported fundraising totals at the DOE are merely “hype.” Kennedy’s resume is now being exaggerated by Klein and others to make her appear skilled, when in fact her “aura” underpinned her fundraising success, Barrett writes:

The former Klein aide who would only talk to the Voice anonymously said that he sat near Kennedy’s cubicle and that when she came in, she would “only stay a couple of hours or so.” He said she was brought into meetings with potential donors and added to the fundraising effort by her quiet presence and charm.

So we don’t know the exact structure of Kennedy’s work at the DOE. Why should we care?

In addition to the obvious reasons about whether Kennedy’s ready for public office, there’s also a public school point of interest.

Although Kennedy hasn’t been on DOE payroll since 2004 (when she earned $1), she is still the vice chair of the Fund for Public Schools, the department’s non-profit fundraising wing, and she has appeared as recently as October at its events. If she takes her star power to the Senate, DOE fundraising could lose out at a time when private donations could become more vital than ever.