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A screen shot of the web site registered 9 days ago that touts Eva Moskowitz for mayor in its title.

Two websites registered recently — one earlier this month — raise an intriguing possibility: Could a charter school leader jump into the next mayoral race?

The website addresses tout Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Charter network, and Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Academy charter schools, for mayor. Neither site includes any content.

The websites, EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com and GeoffreyCanadaForMayor.com, might reflect mounting concern among charter school supporters that Mayor Bloomberg’s successor will not continue his level of support for charter schools.

The nervousness may have increased when Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress last week. Of all the likely mayoral candidates, Weiner had appeared to be one of the more supportive of charter schools.

“Personally, as a New Yorker, Bloomberg’s successor has weighed heavily on my mind,” Democracy Prep charter network founder Seth Andrew, who registered the URL touting Canada in December, said in an e-mail statement. “While I think Mr. Canada would be a great choice, we’ve never talked about it and he’s made it publicly clear that he loves his day job.”

Andrew used his personal email and mailing addresses to register the Canada site.

EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com was registered anonymously through a hosting service based in California on June 6, according to WhoIs.Net, which publishes records of web site registrations.

Responding to a request for comment by e-mail, a spokesperson for Moskowitz said that she had never heard of the domain. “Looked into it. Don’t know anything about this domain. Let me know if you find out who bought it,” Jenny Sedlis, the director of external affairs at Moskowitz’s charter network, wrote via e-mail. (more…)

Students and families protested today in Harlem against the NAACP's involvement in a lawsuit against school closures and charter school co-locations with district schools. (Chris Arp)

About 2,500 people rallied in Harlem this morning, calling on the NAACP to withdraw from its lawsuit with the teachers union against the city Department of Education. That lawsuit seeks to stop the closure of 22 schools as well as the placement of several charter schools in district school space.

Speakers at Thursday’s rally included charter school parents and teachers, Harlem Children’s Zone president and CEO Geoffrey Canada, and the actor Seth Gilliam from “The Wire,” whose child is a on a waiting list for a charter school. Speakers and attendees denounced the NAACP’s participation in a lawsuit they said would harm charter schools primarily serving students of color.

“Ms. Dukes, turn your back on this lawsuit,” said Kathy Kernizan, the parent of a student at the Uncommon Schools charter network, referring to Hazel Dukes, president of the NAACP New York State Conference.

A letter to Dukes with signatures from charter school advocates was circulated through the crowd asking the organization to withdraw from the suit. A spokesperson for the New York City Charter Center, which helped organize the event, said that more than 2,000 signatures had been collected this week.

“We gotta demand quality education,” Canada told the crowd. “We have to be prepared to fight for that.” The city Department of Education’s proposal calls for two of the charter schools associated with the Harlem Children’s Zone, the Promise Academy charter schools, to be co-located inside district schools.

The charter center spokesperson said the protest, held outside the Harlem State Office building at 125th Street, was not the work of any one organization. But at least two groups appear to have taken leading roles: the charter center, an advocacy and support organization for charter schools in the city, and the Success Charter Network created by Eva Moskowitz. Many of the families at the rally had children at one of the Success network’s nine schools. (Seven of the network’s schools are named in the lawsuit.)

Click here for a slideshow of photographs from the rally.

(more…)

Myrta Cuadra-Lash, the executive director of Sinergia, hopes to replicate the Harlem Children's Zone in East Harlem. (via Sinergia)

If Myrta Cuadra-Lash gets her wish, she could become Latino New York’s version of Geoffrey Canada, the now-famous founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone.

The executive director of the non-profit Sinergia, Cuadra-Lash is applying for a federal grant to create a Children’s Zone for Latino youth. She’s focusing on East Harlem, which is predominantly Latino, whereas the population currently served by Canada’s program is African-American. Though Cuadra-Lash’s idea is in its early stages — she’s applying for a one-year planning grant — she’s already brought three public schools, Mount Sinai Medical Center, two colleges, and other community organizations on board.

Promise Neighborhood grants are part of the Obama administration’s goal to replicate Canada’s program, an anti-poverty experiment that follows children from birth to adulthood. Zeroing in on a few neighborhood blocks in Harlem, the Children’s Zone offers parenting classes, after school activities, and has started its own network of charter schools. The program has received high praise — and some questions about the strength of its results so far and its scalability. (more…)

The last time he led a New York City project, Geoffrey Canada, the founder of Harlem Children’s Zone, had the teachers union as his opponent. Now the two are partnering on a grant proposal that would take struggling elementary schools and surround them with the support services that barely exist outside their doors.

Naturally, the two have a buffer: Good Shepherd Services and the Children’s Aid Society, which is the lead applicant for an Investing in Innovation Fund (i3) grant — money that was set aside as part of the federal stimulus package. The grant proposal calls for $30 million to be used over four years to reduce absenteeism in nine schools in low-income neighborhoods like Harlem, the South Bronx, and Central Brooklyn.

All of the schools that are eventually chosen for the grant will have low-performing students, but they must also have a large number of students who don’t attend class. At least 30 percent of their students must be chronically absent, meaning they miss a month or more of school, hence the grant’s name: “Attend, Achieve, Attain,” or “a3.” (more…)

The Harlem Children's Zone is planning to open a new building for one of its two charter schools on the grounds of the Saint Nicholas Houses. The school's proposed site is marked on the map in blue.

The city and the Harlem Children’s Zone announced a deal today that would create more charter school space in Harlem — without, officials hope, setting off a new front in the bitter space wars there.

The deal would have the city and philanthropists team up to fund construction of a new building on the grounds of a Harlem housing project, the Saint Nicholas Houses, HCZ President Geoffrey Canada and New York City Housing Authority Chairman John Rhea said.

The new building would eventually nearly double the number of students in HCZ schools without imposing on nearby district schools in Harlem. The convenient deal could avoid political headaches, but it will also likely raise questions about whether erecting a new $100 million building in Harlem is the best use of city capital dollars. (more…)

Yesterday I highlighted a new book by some of Mayor Bloomberg’s most vocal education critics. Now, here’s a video put together by some of his biggest supporters, the folks at the pro-mayoral control lobbying group Learn NY.

On Sunday and Monday, Learn NY traveled from borough to borough to promote the governance structure, holding events featuring the group’s backers among religious and community leaders. The tour culminated in a rally at the Harlem Children’s Zone on Monday afternoon, which Learn NY said attracted more than 1,000 parents. The video above was shown at the Monday rally, which is why Harlem Children’s Zone founder and CEO Geoffrey Canada is featured so prominently. The video is the first produced by Learn NY and is meant to draw attention to President Obama’s support for mayoral control.

In recent weeks, Learn NY has focused on the bus tour and doesn’t have any other large-scale events planned before the June 30 end of the legislative session, spokeswoman Julie Wood said today.

We’ve said in the past that our long-term plan is to expand our Community section to include more voices. Today we’re taking a step in that direction with a contribution from Pedro Noguera, the New York University professor and co-chair of the Broader, Bolder project (the one that clashes with Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein’s Education Equality Project).

Noguera argues that David Brooks’ recent New York Times column on the Harlem Children’s Zone drew the wrong conclusion:

In most cases, these schools succeed not because they impart middle class values, (there is very little evidence that the middle class is the only group that values hard work and courteous behavior) but because of high academic expectations and a clear, coherent approach to educating children. Most importantly, these schools succeed because they also address social, health and psychological needs of the children and families they serve.

Read Noguera’s full commentary here. And please feel free to send your own commentaries. We’re building the Community section up slowly, but we are building it up.

Stephen Colbert, who has in recent months hosted KIPP charter school founder Mike Feinberg, cash-for-grades guru Roland Fryer, and New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, this week spent a few minutes talking with Geoffrey Canada.

Canada, who started the Harlem Children’s Zone, got his message across, loud and clear: Helping poor kids get a good education, go to college, and start careers is great news for the national bottom line.

Who’s the next ed-star Colbert should interview?

[Via This Week In Education]

Another Wall Street Journal report on how the financial crisis is hitting foundations highlights the Harlem Children’s Zone. HCZ, run by the mayoral control proponent Geoffrey Canada, was promised $25 million grant by the Starr Foundation, which is run by Maurice “Hank” Greenberg, the former chief executive officer of AIG.

Now, the Journal reports:

Anyone with a foundation whose endowment is heavily invested in AIG stock “is taking a bath,” says Mr. Greenberg, adding that he intends to fulfill current commitments but that gifts would inevitably be fewer and smaller in the months ahead. “You can’t give what you haven’t got.” …

Among the beneficiaries feeling the pinch are Harlem Children’s Zone Inc., to which Mr. Greenberg recently pledged $25 million. “I’m spending a lot of time now thinking about how we could replace the kind of support we’ve received from Wall Street,” says Geoffrey Canada, president of the organization, which provides parenting classes and charter schools for poor families. Mr. Canada says he is cutting 10% of his staff of 1,400.

Other New York City education projects could be affected. (more…)

The nonprofit pro-mayoral control advocacy group that was originally titled MASS, for Mayoral Accountability for Student Success, is now called Learn NY, and its official first day of existence is today. The group has close ties with the Bloomberg administration, but it is not being funded by the mayor, officials said in a background press conference with reporters this morning.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.

Something that will surely be asked — especially by critics of mayoral control and the Bloomberg administration, including Haimson — is how much of a “MASS” organization Learn NY really is. (more…)