GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

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.

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…)

A screenshot from DFER's web site advertises four new branches. (The Florida branch is yet to be official, according to executive director Joe Williams.)

The lobbying group whose H.R. recommendations virtually staffed President Obama’s Education Department is spreading its “reform” tentacles.

Democrats for Education Reform now has branches in Missouri, Colorado, and Wisconsin, in addition to its hometown, New York, and the organization plans to be in 10 states by 2011, executive director Joe Williams told me earlier this week.

“We have very good conditions at the federal level right now for at least talking about reform, but we’re really talking about what at the end of the day is a local issue,” Williams said. “So the strength of any national organization like ours is really going to come down to how strong its local units are.”

The new branches are mostly self-sustaining, relying on leadership from volunteer boards and local residents already active in education. “It’s a lot of people who were doing a lot of work on reform, but there was no political arm to engage at the political level,” Williams said.

What Williams calls DFER’s “outpost” in Colorado is a case study for its plans elsewhere. Rather than generate policy ideas, the organization focuses on raising money for candidates who support its favored brand of changes to education — policies like charter schools, merit pay, and higher teaching standards. Among the Colorado officials DFER supports is Mike Johnston, who advised candidate Obama’s presidential campaign and replaced the president of Colorado’s state senate, Peter Groff, after he joined President Obama’s education department. (more…)

There are 10 days to go before mayoral control expires and one day left of the legislative session. Given the standstill at the state Senate, that equation is leaving both supporters and opponents of the mayoral control in a state of high alarm.

Invariably, their panic is fueled by the complete unpredictability of the situation. No one has the answers to questions about what would happen if the Senate allowed the 2002 law to sunset, as State Senator John Sampson has threatened to allow.

“If everybody goes home for the summer we’ve got 32 school boards on July 1. Mayoral control is over. The clock is ticking and it doesn’t seem like anybody’s doing anything,” said Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, which favors preserving mayoral control.

Should the Senate pull itself together and reconvene, either by choice or by force, before the law expires, it remains unclear what kind of bill it will support. A bill has already passed the Assembly, but Sampson and other Democrats have said they want to amend that to add stricter checks to the mayor’s power. (more…)

A Queens charter school encouraged parents and students to call Governor David Paterson and Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith after it learned charter schools could see their funding frozen. Paterson and Smith are now sending the schools $30 million. (Nicholas)

Governor David Paterson and Malcolm Smith, the state Senate majority leader, are back in good favor with their long-lost charter school friends. Smith has just announced a plan to counteract a budget freeze that took the schools by surprise earlier this year, by sending the schools a one-time $30 million grant.

The grant is less than the $51 million that charter schools were slated to lose after legislators axed planned funding increases in their recent budget deal. And it will expire at the end of next year, leaving supporters to wage a new fight  over funds then. But a source familiar with the plan who is a supporter of charter schools said that $30 million will be enough to help schools that had been imagining slashing after-school programs and turning down extra staff they’d already hired for next year.

Smith announced the planned injection just now at a charter school lottery in Harlem, which Philissa is covering. The lottery is the annual event for the former City Council member Eva Moskowitz, who runs the Success Charter Network in Harlem. Harlem Success is expecting more than 5,000 parents at the lottery, which will determine which children are selected to attend the schools. (more…)

A thousand or more New York City charter school parents are expected to gather in Times Square tonight to urge Barack Obama to send his daughters to charter schools. At the event, they will sign letters to the Obamas making that case. More than 10,000 parents have already signed, according to the groups organizing the event, Democrats for Education Reform and the Black Alliance for Educational Options.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is also expected in Times Square, as is BAEO founder Howard Fuller.

The parents have a local message, too: they want the city to open 32 new charter schools by 2010.

First family-elect. (Via Flickr.)

Last night on “60 Minutes,” during her first interview as First Lady-elect, Michelle Obama was asked how she will decide where to send her daughters to school. “We want that to be a personal process,” she said.

Democrats for Education Reform, the lobbying group I profiled last week, is looking at the Obamas’ choice through a political lens. DFER wants the president-elect and his wife to consider sending their daughters to charter schools — and, barring that, to support charter schools, a top DFER issue.

The group is also asking charter school parents to plead with the Obamas, by mailing in a form letter: (more…)

In case you were concerned, I have not forgotten about the name-those-reformers contest. I just don’t think there’s an answer yet.

For evidence of why this is a pressing problem, please see this post by Ben Smith of Politico, in which he tries to summarize my post about Democrats for Education Reform — but stumbles in the tricky business of finding a single adjective to describe what kind of Democrats they are.