GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The city’s $46.6 billion teacher pension system sold its shares in the firearms industry yesterday, becoming the country’s largest retirement fund to divest from publicly-traded gun manufacturers since December’s elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., Comptroller John Liu announced today.

But the vote to do so wasn’t unanimous — and the single dissenting ballot came from a member appointed by the city’s most powerful gun control advocate: Mayor Bloomberg.

Ray Sarola, acting as a fill-in for Bloomberg appointee Carolyn Wolpert, voted against divestment during an executive session meeting last week, a spokesman for the Teacher Retirement System said. Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm, of the Department of Education, missed the vote but said yesterday at the board’s monthly public meeting that she opposed divestment as well. (more…)

So many schools are getting turned around, restructured, or intervened-upon these days that parents have added a new phobia to their list: the school-closure fever.

Parents at a Bronx elementary school recently scheduled a protest demanding that their school not be shut down and their principal keep his job. They also wrote a blog post. But the school is not actually scheduled for closure at all.

The Bronx’s P.S. 73 is one of 47 schools in the city who haven’t made the annual progress on their test scores required by the federal No Child Left Behind Act for five years running. The schools are assigned a “Joint Intervention Team,” a group of city and state officials who visit the school and recommend how to improve it.

The intervention teams can recommend that a principal be removed or a school be phased out, but they can also make less dramatic suggestions to change how the school is run. And it’s likely to be three more months before the team issues its recommendations on P.S. 73, DOE spokesman Jack Zarin-Rosenfeld said. (more…)

Reports that a deal has been reached on mayoral control have been exaggerated, according to sources in Albany.

The New York Post reported today that Senate Democrats had reached an agreement on mayoral control and would abandon their demands for fixed terms for members of the citywide school board.

But sources in Albany said that no deal had been made and that senators were still haggling over the details. Though most sources said the deal outlined by the Post is likely to happen eventually, they said that until senators found a way to end the gridlock, no agreement could be considered final.

According to the Post, the compromise amounts to the Senators agreeing to vote for the Assembly’s bill, in exchange for an amendment that would be passed later and would provide for more parental involvement in the system.

The article notes that Senator John Sampson, the Democratic conference leader who has led the opposition to reviving mayoral control without substantial changes, has “signed on to the deal.”

“There is no deal yet,” said a source involved with the negotiations. “I think that this won’t get settled until they have a path back into the chamber.” (more…)