How much of a difference has the UFT’s decision to sit out the race made for comptroller Bill Thompson’s campaign? The answer likely rests on the continuum between not much and not at all, election observers said today.

Those who argue that a UFT endorsement would have helped Thompson, if only modestly, point to the UFT’s powerful voter turnout machine. In an election predicted to see few voters, the ability to mobilize teachers and parents could be a deciding factor in who wins tomorrow.

A spokesman for the union, Dick Riley, estimated that union volunteers had made about 200,000 calls and distributed 50,000 pieces of campaign literature this year on behalf of endorsed candidates in citywide, borough and city council elections. The union also sends out robocalls urging its members to vote for candidates and its president, Michael Mulgrew, made appearances with candidates at press conferences.

To the Thompson campaign, which was been criticized for lacking discipline, an army of UFT volunteers with supplies on hand would have been a welcome sight. But Thompson may need more help than that, observers said.

“If they had endorsed Thompson it would have been a big plus, but it wouldn’t have been enough” said James Vlasto, a former communications director for public advocate Betsy Gotbaum.

Vlasto, who has worked on 30 campaigns in New York City, said the UFT’s support would not have raised Thompson’s poll numbers significantly, as the campaign’s flaws were too pronounced to be solved with one endorsement.

The Thompson campaign “had some unions, they had vehicles that could spread the word for him, [but] they missed out,” Vlasto said. “They spent all their time and money saying eight years is enough, and that’s a fine slogan, but there are other issues.”

Other observers said no amount of phone-banking or literature-distributing by the UFT would have made a difference for the Thompson campaign, as it was already mid-October when a chapter leader at a delegate assembly meeting offered a resolution to endorse Thompson. The motion was postponed and the union never returned to it.

“Without significant efforts by a union following a late endorsement in a race, the impact of the endorsement can be negligible,” said Benjamin Kallos, the director of policy and research for Mark Green’s campaign for public advocate.

This is not the first time the UFT has decided wait out a mayoral election, especially during contract negotiations. Following the end of contract negotiations in 2005, the UFT chose not to endorse Bloomberg or his Democratic challenger Fernando Ferrer. The UFT was also neutral in 1993 and 1997.

“It’s not uncommon that unions will not take a position when they’re sitting at the bargaining table,” said District Council 37 Local 372 president Veronica Montgomery-Costa. DC 37 endorsed Thompson over the summer and Montgomery-Costa spoke from the campaign’s headquarters where union volunteers were working.

“If they don’t pick the right candidate it could have a devastating impact on negotiations,” she said.

Vlasto said the UFT’s decision to keep the last two mayoral campaigns at arm’s length had caused it to cede political power to the the Working Families Party, an idea Riley disputed. “As to our clout, both De Blasio and Liu made it a point to address our delegate assembly after their endorsements,” Riley wrote in an email. ”

“One presumes that Liu had some reason for having his victory party after the runoff here at the UFT and Cy Vance (endorsed by the UFT but not the WFP) singled Mulgrew out at his primary night celebration to thank him for the UFT’s contribution to his victory.”

A spokesman for the Thompson campaign did not return requests for comment.

Given half an hour each on the Brian Lehrer Show, Thompson and Cerf took questions on school safety, the accountability structure, and what major changes they (or their candidate — Cerf hasn’t said whether he’ll return to the Department of Education after the election) would put in place over the next four years. Throughout the interview, Thompson emphasized his interest in lowering class sizes and shifting school administrators’ focus away from standardized tests. Cerf spoke at length about the importance of using technology to cater to students’ different learning styles. Neither offered clues to how the city would pay for these changes.

Asked by host Brian Lehrer to name the greatest innovation he’d bring to the city’s schools, Thompson had one word: curriculum.

I think we’d like to make sure that schools teach things like reading and writing — we’re seeing a number of our students who can’t write. I think things like science, civics, and history, art and music education, phys ed, those should all be part of a curriculum and we’re seeing them start to disappear. So I think that, given where we’re at these days, that is innovative.

It’s not a question of reducing the number of standardized tests, it’s reducing the focus on them, he said.

Thompson called the current administration’s focus on standardized tests “obsessive.” He  noted that recent data from the national math exam showed New York State students’ scores to be flat, whereas students’ scores on the state’s exam have risen in the last several years.

“I think teaching to the test is a phrase that ends conversations rather than begins them,” Cerf said when asked if the schools’ emphasis on testing was having a detrimental effect.

I do believe that teaching test taking skills is not good for the long-term educational interests of children. I believe that focusing on the standards that we’ve decided as a society are important, and focusing on that, and then evaluating the degree they’ve learned those standards, is exactly the right focus.

When a caller said she had quit after 16 years of teaching at a city school because her principal had allegedly fudged students’ test scores and ended suspensions to boost the report card grade, Cerf defended the system. He said that the alternative to the current accountability system was “an absence of accountability for student learning altogether.”

Any system of accountability is going to have occasional problems with it, I think it’s inevitable.

…

I think most of our principals are pretty terrific and I believe they’re getting better and better and better every year. I don’t think the answer to sort of manage the variation in the quality of principals is more top down bureaucracy, more compliance checks, more box checking, more inspectors, more you-better-do-this-or-else. I think that the history of school reform in this country shows that sort of Soviet-style, top down, we know what you ought to do and we’re going to make sure that you do it, doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.

Cerf said that he and Thompson were in agreement on one major issue: teacher bonuses. Following a segment in which Thompson said he believed in awarding bonuses for student performance on standardized tests to schools rather than individual teachers, Cerf said he agreed.

“That puts us in the middle,” he said.

Right out of the gate, Mayor Michael Bloomberg launched into a list of comparisons between the Department of Education during the last eight years and the Board of Education during the time that Comptroller Bill Thompson was president. He recited graduation statistics, said that schools are safer today than they were in the 1990s, and boasted about test scores increases.

Thompson said it was ironic that Bloomberg was holding him accountable for the city’s schools when the mayor has repeatedly said that no one had control over the Board of Education.

“He pointed out, under the old Board of Education, no one was in charge. The mayor, the board, the chancellor, so many people were in charge, no one was in charge, so it’s ironic that he would try and distort facts and information, try and change the past, to say that I was the person who was in charge of the Board of Education. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“If he believes nobody was in charge, why didn’t he try to get control?” the mayor shot back.

The bottom line is he did help us get mayoral control … we got mayoral control as much because when he ran it [the Board of Education], the schools were terrible, and the public and the legislature said no más. We’re going to finally fix the system and that’s how mayoral control got enacted.

Asked by NY1′s Dominic Carter, who moderated the debate, whether his tenure could be compared to Bloomberg’s, Thompson offered his clearest explanation yet of his BOE days.

“I didn’t run the school system,” he said. When Carter repeated the question, Thompson appeared to change tactics, saying that he “led a reform effort” at the Board of Education.

“I helped to end decentralization, putting someone in charge for the first time in decades. I helped to move math scores up and increase reading scores. Did I do a good job? Is it a record that I am proud of? Yes. … The truth is if it wasn’t for the work that I did, mayoral control wouldn’t have happened.”

“You don’t get a medal for rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic, and that’s exactly what he did,” Bloomberg responded.

The Daily News’ Adam Lisberg asked the mayor about teachers’ salaries. ” In your time in office, teachers salaries have gone up 43 percent, and total education operating expenditures at the DOE have gone up 55 percent. Do you really think most parents would agree that the schools are 43 percent or 55 percent better?”

Bloomberg answered:

“I don’t think that’s the measure because there’s inflation built in there, there’s the competitive factor, we have to pay our teachers what they can make elsewheres. After all, while they’re dedicated people and they want to help our children and they don’t go into public service to make a lot of money, they still have to pay the rent.”

At the precise moment that the debate ended, Bloomberg’s campaign sent out a press release declaring that the mayor had won.

Bill de Blasio, a Brooklyn city councilman, and Mark Green, who was the public advocate during the Giuliani administration, have surprisingly little that they agree on, except that the city’s school system needs improvement.

De Blasio did not say where he stands on the growth of charter schools. Instead, he notes that the siting process needs to be improved and that teachers in charter schools should be able to unionize. Asked if the current statewide cap for charter schools needs to be changed, he writes only that the number should be evaluated.

Green, who is typically more blunt, states that he does not support curbing charter schools’ growth and that he believes the cap, which is currently set at 200, is “hindering” New York’s access to federal education dollars.

“We should continue with the experiment of charter schools and continue to raise the cap modestly in order to maximize on the flow of federal funds to support New York City educational initiatives,” he writes.

Neither candidate is eager to see Chancellor Joel Klein return for round three. Green is quite clear: Klein should voluntarily step down and make way for a new chancellor. De Blasio writes that he disagrees with many of Klein’s reforms, but doesn’t say whether Klein should stay or go.

De Blasio writes that limited parental involvement is the single greatest problem facing the city’s schools. In a bullet-point list, he names the various ways he plans to make more data available to parents, as well as improve the Department of Education’s communication with parents.

Green says that the city’s first priority should be reducing class size.  He notes that suburban class sizes are significantly smaller and that the city’s goal should be to have no more than 20 students in each class.

In an election focused on the city's schools, Comptroller Bill Thompson years as president of the Board of Education have become a misunderstood talking point.

As the mayoral race heats up, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Comptroller Bill Thompson are butting heads over Thompson’s education record.

Thompson describes himself as a prescient reformer who, as president of the Board of Education, a position he held from 1996 to 2001, oversaw a higher test score increase than Bloomberg has as mayor

In its first televised attack ad, which aired today, Bloomberg’s campaign calls Thompson a do-nothing bureaucrat who allowed a broken system to remain as it was. “When Thompson was president of the Board of Education, he ran the old system,” the ad says. “Dropout rates increased. Kids promoted even if they didn’t learn.”

The truth is far away from both of these poles. Interviews with people who worked with Thompson at the time and a review of newspaper articles from the period suggest that Thompson’s tenure at the Board of Education was neither innovative nor obstructive. It is better summarized by a story about a creamsicle.

In the 1990s, when Thompson was president of the board, a colleague with young children offered him a seat in his office and Thompson, accepting, unwittingly rested his arm in melted popsicle goo.

“I managed to get kids’ melted creamsicle popsicle crap all over his suit and he walked around like that all day,” said the colleague, who asked to remain anonymous because he still works in education. “He never got upset or went bonkers.” Instead, Thompson laughed off the sticky predicament, teased his co-worker, and in his typical unflappable manner, went back to work.

That was Thompson the manager, whom former board members, colleagues, and even political rivals from that era describe as “fair,” “conciliatory,” and possessing a “quiet leadership,” that created a working majority on an often-fractious board.

“He tamed the board in a good way,” the former colleague said.

Yet those who praise him as a calm leader stop short of saying he led a reform movement in the halls of 110 Livingston St., the old home of the Board of Education. As president of the board, they say, the structure of his job prevented him from doing more than strongly nudging the chancellor to propose one thing or another.

“The Board of Education acted as a policy approval body,” said James Vlasto, who was a spokesman for the board shortly before Thompson was appointed in 1994. “It didn’t initiate the policies. Basically, it was the chancellor that ran things and the board said, ‘Oh maybe you should amend this or that.’”

When Thompson did try to flex political muscle, he got mixed results.

According to Sy Fliegel, president of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public School Association, a nonprofit organization, when billionaire Carl Icahn wanted to open residential schools in the city, Thompson was interested but then-Chancellor Rudy Crew “was not wild about it.”

Thompson pushed Crew to take on the project and though the chancellor eventually came around, the schools never materialized, Fliegel said. He doesn’t blame Thompson, he said. “It was a different system.”

From Wall Street to Livingston St.

Thompson, 56, who grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and graduated from Midwood High School, was the son of a prominent Brooklyn politician and judge. After a stint as an investment banker on Wall Street, he was appointed to the Board of Education in 1994 by Brooklyn borough president Howard Golden. Years before, he had worked for Golden as his deputy.

The board was a territorial place. Of the seven members, two were appointed by the mayor and the remaining five were borough president appointees who often protected and defended their president’s pet projects.

In 1996, when board president Carol Gresser fell out of favor with Mayor Giuliani, the board elected Thompson with Giuliani’s backing.

“His modus operandi was such that he was able to negotiate the various things that he wanted to get done,” said Sandra Lerner, who was the board’s Bronx appointee during Thompson’s presidency. Lerner said Thompson rallied the board members around the creation of the chancellor’s district.

Thompson proved a steady ally, but not to Giuliani. “Rudy Crew opposed us, and most of the time Thompson supported him,” said Herman Badillo, who was then a liaison between Giuliani and the board. Badillo, a strong Bloomberg supporter, said Thompson’s offense was that he didn’t push Crew forcefully enough on issues like school governance and ending social promotion.

“As far as I’m concerned, he failed,” Badillo said. “He only kept the structure that had been there before. He did not support any changes.”

Bloomberg and Thompson’s campaigns have traded testy press releases over who ended social promotion first.

In 1999, Thompson did vote for a measure that compelled students in grades 3-8 who had low test scores, poor grades, and abysmal attendance to take summer school or repeat a grade. Yet, by most accounts the rule was loosely enforced. The Daily News reported at the time that of the 63 percent of students who were promoted following summer school, only 42 percent passed the math and English tests.

It’s not clear whether anyone in New York has ever ended the practice. Bloomberg, who tightened retention policies, has been accused of promoting children to the next grade level even if they are academically behind.

Thompson has also claimed that he paved the way for mayoral control, referring to school governance reforms that the state legislature passed in 1996. According to several accounts, Thompson went to Albany and lobbied hard for the law, which was the first major step in re-centralizing the school system after the community school boards were put in place in 1969.

The legislation stripped the 32 boards of the power to hire and fire principals and gave it to the superintendents. The boards could still nominate candidates for superintendent, but the chancellor could veto them, which Crew and his successor occasionally did. The law also gave the chancellor legal authority to dismiss board members who were ineffective or simply corrupt.

In 2002, when Bloomberg mounted a campaign to install mayoral control of schools, Thompson was ambivalent. He didn’t want the mayor to have absolute authority, he told the press, but he did want the chancellor to be a mayoral appointee, subject to the Board of Education’s approval.

The board’s most weighty responsibility was hiring and firing the chancellor. Asked what Thompson’s greatest accomplishment was, many cited his decision to go to war with Giuliani over the appointment of Crew’s successor. Giuliani’s choice for interim chancellor, Robert Kiley, was a former head of the MTA, but Thompson backed Harold Levy, a Citigroup executive and former member of the state Board of Regents.

“Bill flat out beat Giuliani at his own game,”  said a former colleague who had worked on the board’s staff. “From that position, that was very impressive. People say, ‘Well he doesn’t have fire in the belly,’ but that took fire in the belly. That was a risk.”

While Giuliani railed against Thompson in the city’s newspapers, Thompson defended the board’s choice which, in hindsight, is tinged with irony. Thompson now campaigns on the promise that he’ll name a chancellor who is an experienced educator. Levy was not. After he was voted in 4-3, Levy had to get a waiver from the state department of education, just as Chancellor Joel Klein did.

Limited Power

Thompson and UFT President Randi Weingarten in 2008

Thompson’s campaign is not eager to defend or discuss those years.  When I called the campaign with questions about the policies Thompson had worked on as president of the board, a spokeswoman emailed over three documents.

“The attached memos should answer all of your questions,” she said.

The documents were a laundry list of attacks on Mayor Bloomberg’s education record. None of them mentioned Thompson’s tenure.

In the drifts of pro-Bloomberg fliers that wash up on doorsteps, the campaign holds Thompson responsible for graduation rates, test scores, and the number of school safety incident reports for the five years he was president of the board.

“When it mattered — not in the context of lofty campaign promises, but for more than half a decade when Mr. Thompson was in a position actually to make a difference for children — he simply did not and could not deliver,” said Chris Cerf, a policy adviser for Bloomberg’s reelection campaign.

“He was the elected board president and to say that all the problems that existed can’t be ascribed to him, that makes no sense,” Cerf said.

In a system Bloomberg has repeatedly faulted for its lack of accountability, it’s difficult to distinguish failures or successes that belonged solely to Thompson.

Many people who worked with Thompson at the time, among them Herman Badillo, say the lines of authority were less than clear.

“The fact was that nobody really had control of the school board,” Badillo said. “Nobody could really say they were in control.”

When the board voted against the city’s 2000-2001 budget after Giuliani cut millions of dollars from the board’s allocation, Thompson described the body as helpless to change the situation. “Several of us considered the mayor’s move illegal, so we refused to ratify the budget,” Thompson told the Daily News. “But it made no difference. The reality is the mayor controls the budget and the board’s vote on it is perfunctory.”

In 2001, Thompson left the board mid-term after the Conflicts of Interest Board ruled that he could not raise money to run for city comptroller while working as a top city employee. He landed in a heated campaign against Herbert Berman, a Brooklyn City Councilman who chaired the Council’s finance committee and who blamed Thompson for a mysterious $2.8 million gap  in the School Construction Agency’s budget that year. When the Daily News endorsed Thompson, it said the missing capital spending money for schools was “not an easily forgivable sin for either candidate,” but “they were hardly the only ones responsible.”

Mr. Cerf, a widely admired figure in the education world,

Which education world, New York Times?

The first thing we can learn from this piece of news is that Bloomberg definitely means to continue trying to shape the education world into the one Cerf supports. But whether Cerf will really be capable of doing what the Bloomberg campaign seems to expect him to do — deliver the charter school parent vote — is a wide open question.

Organizing public school parents is hard for anyone, and Cerf has struggled just as much as everyone else who ever tried. Indeed, some of his efforts epitomize the awkward desire of the white, Ivy League-educated “reformer” to reach out to the poor, minority communities their efforts seek to help.

Cerf was a mastermind behind Klein’s first big political push, the Education Equality Project, whose approach to grassroots mobilization included working closely with the Rev. Al Sharpton, who agreed after receiving a large donation to his nonprofit. Despite the partnership, turnout to a trumpeted EEP rally in D.C. was disappointing, and EEP has not thrown any followup rallies since.

Allies of Cerf’s former employer, the for-profit education turnaround company Edison Schools, also turned to Sharpton in 2003, seeking his support for their effort to take control of five struggling New York City schools. But the effort didn’t work, and the schools were never privatized.

Cerf was the no. 2 adviser to Joel Klein at Tweed Courthouse.

Still, there are some reasons for the Bloomberg campaign to think Cerf could help them. He is seen as the mastermind behind a parent outreach push to renew mayoral control, which in turn is seen as a success. It was Cerf who hired Peter Hatch, the director of the group Learn NY, which managed to persuade a long list of community groups to sign onto its platform, getting parents to show up at rallies and take a bus to Albany.

Of course, it was Hatch, not Cerf, who led the group, and city contracts with many groups on the Learn NY list no doubt helped. Also, it’s far from clear that Learn NY really delivered a stirring in the streets. At rallies I attended, Learn NY parents always appeared slightly bored.

Charter school parents in particular are what the campaign seems to want Cerf to organize, and that might be an easier audience. The pro-mayoral control effort, for instance, was boosted by charter school parents, who often seemed much more energetic in their sign-holding than Learn NY parents. But whether Bloomberg can count on charter school parents to turn out for his campaign with as much energy is an open question.

“I think that the mayor has really taken the charter school community for granted,” Joe Williams, the executive director of the lobbying group Democrats for Education Reform, just told me on the phone. Williams, whose group fights on the state and federal level for policies friendly to charter schools, said that the mayor cut charter school funding from his capital plan, declined to help charter supporters fight a state cut in funding to the schools, and has not supported charter school leaders in their gruesome fights over school space.

Parents, he said, are paying attention. “They’ve watched as their school leaders have gotten the shit kicked out of them, trying to get space for their public schools in public buildings,” Williams said. “It’s the kind of thing, if the mayor was leading on it, the mayor would be able to take all the hits. But he’s let the charter school leaders dangle out there, taking all the hits.”

Cerf, talking to me from his new desk at Bloomberg’s campaign headquarters, wouldn’t get into specifics about his new role, except to say that he had taken the job because he thinks keeping the mayor in office is important for public education. “I really do believe that what has happened in New York is incredibly important and powerful and has been more effective than any urban reform ever that I can think of,” he said.

“It should be an interesting 50 days,” he said of his new job. “That’s when the election is. Actually, 48 days, 9 hours, 39 minutes, and 22 seconds. There’s a little time clock here.”

Mark Green, the frontrunner in the race, is probably not scratching his head over this choice. In 2001, when Green ran for mayor, then-president of the UFT Randi Weingarten dismissed his education policy proposals and ended up endorsing one of his rivals in the Democratic primary, Alan Hevesi. (NY Mag called Weingarten and Green nemeses.) When Hevesi took last place, the union picked Fernando Ferrer in the runoff against Green, only backing Green when he ran against Michael Bloomberg.

In a statement released by the UFT, union president Michael Mulgrew heaped praise on de Blasio.

“Bill’s willingness to tackle tough issues and causes has been particularly impressive as has his desire to make building community partnerships a top priority. His work on behalf of educators, especially early childhood educators, and the students they serve, has been critical, as has his work to preserve safety net services that so many New Yorkers are depending on during these difficult economic times. To be an effective Public Advocate, one must not be afraid of speaking truth to power, and Bill always speaks the truth.”

Comptroller candidate John Liu (image via Flickr)

Choosing its first favorite for a citywide race, the United Federation of Teachers will endorse John Liu for comptroller today at noon.

A recent poll shows comptroller candidate Melinda Katz has a modest lead over Liu, her main rival, though the four-way race remains tight, making union endorsements particularly important.

In a phone interview this morning, UFT president Michael Mulgrew said that Liu had impressed the teachers union with his work on the City Council’s Education Committee.

“He went out of the way to make sure he did his homework. He really knew all of the subjects,” Mulgrew said. “His homework that he would do on the city contracts was quite impressive — that he would know all the internal pieces and got into them, and the questioning of the no bid contracts.”

Mulgrew added that Liu’s business background and his work as chair of the Council’s Transportation Committee — he has frequently criticized the Department of Education’s re-writing of the school bus routes in 2007 — had been an additional draw.

“John Liu has always proved to be very independent,” Mulgrew said. “I believe that John will be someone who makes sure that the laws are implemented the way they were designed to be — strongly.”

Under the new school governance law passed this summer, the DOE now has to register all of its contracts with the comptroller’s office. The comptroller will also have greater authority to audit the department. Previously, the DOE had taken advantage of a legal gray area concerning whether it is a state or city agency, allowing it to dodge much of the contract oversight other city agencies are subject to.

The most recent data released by the New York City Campaign Finance Board shows that the UFT has given Liu and Katz similar amounts of money, suggesting that it was deliberating between the two. Yesterday, Liu picked up an endorsement from the United Firefighters Association.

The UFT has yet to endorse a candidate for mayor. The union’s endorsements are listed here.

To remedy this, GothamSchools is blanketing candidates’ inboxes with an education survey, asking candidates for their opinions on matters from how schools in their districts should be improved, to whether Chancellor Joel Klein should keep his job.

But there are dozens of races and even more candidates, so we’re asking our readers for assistance. If you know that a candidate in your district or borough is dodging important questions about the schools or has an interesting background in education, send us an email.

Joel Klein. (File photo)

Joel Klein stayed positive about his reputation in an interview last night on NY1, even as host Dominic Carter played two different clips showing elected officials (both candidates for citywide office) criticizing the schools chancellor.

Klein chalked up any complaints he’s received to politics — and said President Obama is receiving the same kind of flak on the national stage, for implementing a similar education program.

“He’s putting those out there, and you know what’s happening? You get push back,” Klein said.

(I put in a call to David Cantor, Klein’s spokesman, and I’ll write to Klein too, because I’m curious what push back he’s referencing. Both teachers unions have largely supported the Race to the Top stimulus fund, if tentatively. Maybe Klein has in mind Diane Ravitch? Or could he have read Leonie Haimson’s Huffington Post piece yesterday, “Arne Duncan Has Become An Embarrassment”?)

Klein was particularly sanguine about the proposed extension of the city’s so-called “social promotion” ban announced yesterday. “When I came on here in 2004, when the mayor ended social promotion, you had the pictures — everybody was demonstrating, and all the noise,” Klein said. “Now it is 2009 and we have ended social promotion in every one of these grades, and you know what? You don’t hear noise any more, Dominic. You know why? People know what’s right for kids.”

“Everybody’s behind it now,” Klein said of the retention policy, which holds back students who don’t pass standardized tests.

There haven’t been protests in the streets, but we are hearing from researchers who argue strongly against the policy. And Carter, who hosts the nightly “Road to City Hall” program, played two clips — one of Bill Thompson the comptroller and mayoral candidate, and another of John Liu, the City Council candidate running for comptroller — denouncing Klein’s leadership. Thompson has promised to fire Klein if he is elected mayor.

Other highlights:

• Klein said that he hopes Bloomberg decides to keep him on board if he’s elected to a third term, as Bloomberg has promised:
  

  I’ve always said I serve at the mayor’s pleasure. I believe that the mayor is proud to stand on the record we’ve accomplished together, and I look forward to continuing to serve with him. But Dominic this is not about Joel klein. And Michael Bloomberg will decide what’s best for the city at all times. I hope his decision is that we continue to work together. I think we’ve done great work together. I think we have a lot more of it to do.

• Klein said that Liu was correct to criticize the administration’s re-writing of city school bus routes in 2007. But he said that he has made up for that cost in other ways. “This year, we had 50% more kids going to City University. So, when he talks about leaving a kid out in the cold, that’s a bad thing, but when you talk about thousands and thousands of kids for years — they were left out in the cold for life,” Klein said.
• Klein also declared that, “Last year was the best year we had in public education in this city. It was really in every dimension a great year.” He said that he’s spent his summer meeting with principals and disclosed that he plans to meet with a group of about 30 from CUNY today.

Bloomberg campaign spokesman Howard Wolfson led the attack this afternoon, saying that as president of the Board of Education Bill Thompson, currently the city’s comptroller, failed to end social promotion. Broadly defined, social promotions means that students are bumped from one grade to the next irrespective of academic problems.

Thompson’s campaign shot back, defending the mayoral hopeful. “Bill Thompson was at the forefront of ending social promotion long before Mike Bloomberg decided to claim this initiative as his own,” read an email from the campaign.

In 1999, when Thompson was president of the Board of Education, he did vote for a measure that forced students in grades 3-8 who had low test scores, poor grades, and abysmal attendance to take summer school or repeat a grade.

Yet, by most accounts the rule was loosely enforced. The Daily News reported at the time that of the 63 percent of students who were promoted following summer school, only 42 percent passed the math and English language arts tests.

“As President of the Board of Education, Thompson had his chance to end social promotion, but he failed to do so and the old school system continued to advance failing students,” Wolfson wrote in a statement.

Thompson’s campaign responded, noting that despite the mayor’s claims to having raised test scores and held students to higher standards, graduates of the city’s public schools are often still unprepared for college level work.

That leaves him conveniently free to avoid questions about “aggressive policing in city schools,” which is one of the topics slated to be discussed at tonight’s debate, according to a press release put out by the New York Civil Liberties Union, the event’s co-host.

Instead, Bloomberg will be attending the National Night Out Against Crime, according to campaign spokeswoman Silvia Alvarez. Rather than trading talking points with his opponents, the mayor will spent all evening traveling to different precincts throughout the five boroughs to speak about crime and drug use prevention. Bloomberg has been an outspoken advocate for tighter gun control laws and is a member of the national coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

“It’s a conflict of schedules for the mayor,” Alvarez said.

An NYCLU press release states: “Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s campaign has not responded to repeated invitations from the civil rights community via mail, email and phone.”

Candidates Comptroller Bill Thompson, City Councilman Tony Avella, the Rev. Billy Talen, and Roland Rogers will be there.

Update: The NYCLU has decided to postpone the event. “We are postponing tonight’s Mayoral Candidates Civil Rights Forum due to the unavailability of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Comptroller Bill Thompson.  We are working to reschedule for a time that the candidates for mayor will be able to attend the forum.”

Bill de Blasio said the issue is “very personal” for him, citing his children, who attend public schools, and his service on a school board. “I think we need profound reform of mayoral control,” he said, but did not go into specifics.

“I’m offended at any effort to reduce the democratic participation of parents in our school system. I believe there’s a way to do mayoral control right. I think there are virtues in the system if there is transparency, if there are clear checks and balances, if there is a forum for actual debate, if there is a role for communities and for local residents and for parents.”

Eric Gioia said the school governance system under Bloomberg and Klein has been holding kids accountable, but not adults. He said school should end at 5 p.m., not 3 p.m., and that children should begin school at the age of three, not five.

“I believe that we should have mayoral control, but I think for all that stuff you talked about, the smoke and mirrors and all that, that shouldn’t be a question because we should have independent outside audits of the school system. Transparency and accountability doesn’t mean testing the kids every two weeks — it means that the bureaucracy has to have transparency and accountability. And that is what we’re missing right now.”

Mark Green accused Bloomberg and Klein of “a father knows best, top-down approach,” to educational policy. “They’re ruining the value of the managerial accountability — that you want someone responsible sitting guard on one of the two great responsibilities of municipal government: law enforcement and education.”

“The best way to balance mayoral control, avoid mayoral dictatorship, and have someone who understands education, is to elect Billy Thompson the mayor of New York City.”

Norman Siegel called Klein “irresponsible and reckless,” for extending a contract to 2015, which would be well past the end of Bloomberg’s potential third term. “If mayoral control is defined by what Bloomberg and Klein have done since 2002, then I am opposed to mayoral control,” he said.

“With regard to test scores, it’s possible there’s a fraud going on here by Klein and the people at the DOE. I’m being told — and we’re doing research right now — is that the exams, in fact, instead of having 44 to pass, it’s been lowered to 28.”

Alex Zablocki, the lone Republican, said he did support mayoral control of schools. “I don’t believe it’s perfect, but as someone who’s 26 years old and left the public school system right before they turned over control to the mayor, I do remember a system, back then, that was filled with bureaucrats…and I believe that there was a lot of waste. With that said, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of waste now.”

“We do need more parental control and more voice…Educators need more of a voice than ever. What’s happening right now in the department of education is people that run corporations trying to run a school like a corporation.”

Tony Avella, the underdog mayoral candidate, doesn’t want to be left out of the fight that’s brewing between Mayor Bloomberg and Comptroller William Thompson, Avella’s competition for the Democratic nomination.

In an exclusive interview with GothamSchools, Avella said he’s the reason that Comptroller William Thompson has taken to calling for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to be fired. ”He’s now copying me because he’s now seeing that I’m — my campaign is getting some attention because of my stance when it relates to education,” Avella said. Avella’s campaign issued a press release accusing Thompson of flip-flopping last week, when Thompson first said he would fire Klein.

Avella also echoed the mayor’s criticism of Thompson’s education record. “To be perfectly honest, I don’t see how he could ever run for mayor given that everybody knows how bad the Board of Education was,” Avella said in the interview. Thompson was the president of the Board of Education from 1996 to 2001.

A school system run by Comptroller William Thompson would continue experimenting with teacher “merit pay,” he said yesterday in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools. But he said he wouldn’t expect such an experiment to yield much in the way of results.

His mixed message underscores the odd reality of performance pay plans. Though the plans enjoy increasing political support, no research studies have conclusively shown they improve student achievement.

“Would I continue merit pay? Yes,” Thompson said. “Should it make the difference? Hopefully not.”

Thompson told me he has supported merit pay as far back as his days as president of the Board of Education in the late 1990s. But he said giving some teachers more money for boosting student performance probably wouldn’t drive widespread improvement in the city schools.

He described a conversation with a retired teacher who argued that the possibility of an extra few thousand dollars on top of his $90,000 salary would not cause him to change his teaching strategies.

“If it creates a little extra incentive and a little extra recognition, that fine,” Thompson said. “But I wouldn’t see that as the way to be able to talk about better performance.”

I asked Thompson if it makes sense for the city to spend money on differentiating teacher pay if doing so shouldn’t be expected to improve student performance.

“There are a lot of those people who think that it may make a difference and number of those who think it won’t,” he said. “I think that what we’d like to see is to wait to see the outcomes and has it made a difference. I don’t think anybody has had enough time to be able to come to that conclusion.”

In fact, New York City does not have a true merit pay program right now. Such a program would provide financial incentives for individual teachers to do better. Instead, some schools are eligible for bonuses if their students’ performance on state tests improves. A team of teachers and administrators at participating schools then metes out the bonus money across the school’s teaching staff. After the program’s first year, there was no clear evidence that it boosted test scores.

That model is similar to the one introduced in the late 1990s by the Thompson-led Board of Education. That program, called Breakthrough for Learning, promised small bonuses to all teachers at schools in two districts if scores improved. At the time, Thompson called Breakthrough for Learning “an experiment worth having.”