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Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, center with his head bowed, was elected president of the new Board of Education.

This piece was reported by Philissa Cramer and Anna Phillips.

The mayor’s top education aide is the new president of the Board of Education, Joel Klein remains chancellor, and Mayor Bloomberg is vowing to stay the course of his reforms to the public schools — even though mayoral control expired at midnight yesterday.

“We’re trying to continue on as though mayoral control was approved,” Bloomberg said at a City Hall press conference this afternoon.

The actions occurred at a speedy meeting of the new Board of Education, which was hastily put together early this morning during a meeting at Gracie Mansion. (Read our live-blog of the meeting here.) Seven new Board members, appointed by the city’s borough presidents and the mayor, voted unanimously to keep Klein as schools chancellor. They also elected Dennis Walcott, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for education, as its president.

Despite the meeting’s air-tight pace and agenda (it lasted only nine minutes and allowed no public comment period), there were small signs of dissent. The appointee of the Bronx borough president, Dolores Fernandez, abstained from votes to make Walcott president and to endorse a revised version of mayoral control that passed the Assembly two weeks ago.

In an interview after the meeting, Fernandez said she abstained from voting because she was caught off-guard by the quick, seemingly pre-determined pace of the meeting. Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, said the meeting was scripted, but Fernandez wasn’t looped into the plan. Diaz added that he might request that the Board convene again before September 10, the date members this afternoon set for their next meeting. (more…)

Spurred by a series of meetings held by Queens’ borough president, charter school administrators, parents and students are gathering at The Renaissance Charter School in Queens to dispel “misinformation” about their schools in a discussion on Wednesday night. Queens is far from the center of the city’s charter school debate, which has been raging in Manhattan and Brooklyn, but with the opening of two new charters in as many years, and increased attention to the issue city-wide, some parents and elected officials have voiced their opposition to the schools.

Nicholas Tishuk, the Director of Programs and Accountability at Renaissance and the organizer of the event, said that the discussion is the beginning of an “information campaign” targeted at charter school critics. Principals of two other Queens’ charter schools, VOICE and OWN, will participate in the panel.

Tishuk has been attending Queens Borough President Helen Marshall’s monthly Advisory Board meetings, where he said charter schools dominate the conversation. (Marshall said in February she has ” fought against charter schools.”) He invited some of the most outspoken critics at Marshall’s meetings to Wednesday’s discussion, hoping to show them that charter schools  aren’t “this big bad thing.”

“We’re all mom and pop schools here,” Tishuk said. “We’re all single-standing schools that are not ‘invading’ communities.” Tishuk wants to address complaints that charter schools take away funding from regular schools, aren’t connected to communities, and counsel out “problem kids”—none of which apply to Queens’ schools, he says.

Queens will have six charter schools next fall, including the city’s biggest, Our World Neighborhood Charter School. VOICE charter school started in 2008, and Growing Up Green, in Long Island City, opens this fall. VOICE is using a Department of Education school location for now, while the borough’s other charter schools occupy their own space. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, charter schools taking over public school space is a hot-button issue, one that has mostly been avoided in Queens. (more…)