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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…)

The fight over mayoral control isn’t over, according to a stalwart group of activists who convened a meeting Saturday to plan how to increase local control of city schools.

Comptroller candidate John Liu and mayoral candidate Tony Avella joined an energized and sometimes raucous crowd of around 70 public school parents, teachers and advocates at the launch event for the Coalition for Public Education, held at the lower Manhattan headquarters of the municipal union District Council 37.

The coalition could be one legacy of this spring’s protracted debate over school governance. That debate was finally settled, at least for the next six years, when Gov. Paterson signed into law a new bill that continues a modified version of mayoral control. Vowing to keep the fight against mayoral control going into the new school year, coalition organizers announced rallies in four boroughs for the first day of school next week.

“The struggle continues on this battle,” said Esmeralda Simmons, director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. “Do not be fooled into thinking that because something has happened in Albany, there’s nothing else that can be done.” (more…)

A group of parents is forming its own political action committee and donating small amounts of money to candidates who share their educational views.

Members of the NYC Coalition for Educational Justice, a group that focuses on educational barriers facing low-income and minority students, will debut their new PAC tomorrow on the steps of City Hall. At this point in the campaign season, the group is supporting four challengers and nine incumbents — among them Speaker Christine Quinn and Education Committee chair Robert Jackson — for City Council.

The PAC is “really designed to support those candidates who we have goals in common with,” said Victoria Bousquet, a coalition parent member. The PAC is technically independent from CEJ.

“It’s really a matter of when we interviewed them, the general feedback – how they felt about English Language Learners, about middle schools, about the new Regents requirements, and parental involvement,” she said, adding, “No one’s perfect. We know that none of them are going to be infallible.”

The list includes incumbents Helen Diane Foster, Gale Brewer, Charles Barron, Julissa Ferreras, Letitia James, Rosie Mendez, and Melissa Mark Viverito. (more…)

City Council member Charles Barron outside Tweed Courthouse yesterday. (GothamSchools Flickr)

City Councilman Charles Barron tried to haul Schools Chancellor Joel Klein off to jail yesterday but left Tweed Courthouse empty-handed.

His attempted citizen’s arrest came during a rally yesterday to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s continued school control even after mayoral control legally expired last week. Midway through event, Barron took the microphone and ascended Tweed’s steps, some of the crowd following him.

“They are in there illegally,” he said when he got to the doors, which were closed. “They should have to leave. This is the people’s building now.” The doors had been open earlier during the event.

“This is a citizen’s arrest,” he declared, ostensibly because Klein did not vacate his offices after mayoral control technically ended. (In fact, the newly convened Board of Education voted the next day to rehire Klein as chancellor and give him the same authority he had before the mayoral control law expired.)

“Is the chancellor in there?” he asked the security guards on the other side of the glass doors. “No? Tell him I’m looking for him.”

Barron, who has called for Klein to be fired before, said a longtime community activist, Jitu Weusi, should be the chancellor. Weusi was a lead organizer of yesterday’s event, which attracted about 100 people from across the city. (View more pictures from the rally.) (more…)

With the deadline for next year’s city budget looming, elected officials are eyeing early-childhood centers slated to be cut under Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget as a key reduction to reverse. More than a dozen officials, including two mayoral candidates and three out of five borough presidents, decried the possible cuts today at a City Hall rally alongside hundreds of parents and workers associated with the centers.

The proposal would cut the budgets of early-childhood programs and replace kindergarten programs currently operated outside of the school system with Department of Education kindergarten classes. The city says that moving the kindergartens is necessary in order to save the Administration for Children’s Services $15 million.

But parents today said that the current programs cover the burden of child-care in a way that schools, which end at 3 p.m. and are shuttered on holidays, cannot. The programs at risk of being shut are operated out of ACS, the city’s social services arm for children, as part of larger daycare operations. Head Start, the early childhood program, is also slated to see its budget slashed by 3 percent.

Desiree Jean-Mary said she is upset that her son, Joshua, who attends a Head Start program in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, might not be able to continue there next year when he enters kindergarten. Right now, Jean-Mary, who has two other children, picks Joshua up at 5 p.m. after her job as a home health aide is over for the day. “It would be really hard if I had to find somewhere else for him to go — I don’t want that,” she said. (more…)

Assemblywoman Inez Barron of Brooklyn. (Courtesy of Barron)

Among those who will decide whether to scrap, renew, or revise the law granting the mayor control over the city’s public schools is an impeccably dressed former principal with an aggressively anti-Bloomberg position.

Inez Barron, of Brooklyn, is the wife of Charles Barron, the City Council member who recently called for Joel Klein’s resignation and urged that mayoral control be abolished. She also happens to be a member of the state Assembly, the body that, along with the Senate and Governor Paterson, will decide what to do about mayoral control before June 30 (next month!).

Her election in November brought her into a group of state lawmakers who have also voiced a slew of concerns about mayoral control. But Barron, who worked for the city schools for many years, including as the principal of PS 81 in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, appears to have one of the more radical criticisms.

At a panel I moderated last weekend, Barron said she favors letting the current law sunset altogether and writing an entirely new version, rather than simply “tweaking” the current system as some have advocated. (more…)

I reported last week on the news that the teachers union, the New York Civil Liberties Union, and others are suing the city over the Department of Education’s plans to shut down struggling traditional public schools and replace them with charter schools. As I said, the lawsuit is a reaction to the city’s decision to install a growing number of charter schools inside traditional public school buildings.

The lawsuit is also part of the larger debate on who should rule the city’s public schools. For proof, view this video, taken by the union activist Norm Scott, of a Brooklyn rally at one of the public schools targeted in the lawsuit, PS 150 in Oceanhill-Brownsville. In it, City Councilman Charles Barron leads a crowd of students in a cheer that simultaneously opposes the plan to shut down PS 150 and replace it with three charter schools — and criticizes mayoral control. (“End mayoral control now!” the crowd ends up chanting at the end.)

Now, Barron is often far on the fringes of New York City politics. (He has praised Robert Mugabe.) But he’s not the only one making the connection between the controversy over charter school siting and the mayoral control fight. A source last week suggested to me that the lawsuit offers a window into the union’s thinking on the issue. The union, the source said, will probably push to prevent the mayor alone from making decisions to give space to charter schools. It will also likely challenge the mayor’s ability to give the chancellor the sole authority to shut down schools he deems struggling.