“Their first reaction was always a suspension,” Wishwasrao recalled Wednesday at a City Council hearing about the Department of Education’s suspension data released last month.

Wishwasrao said he was suspended “constantly” for what he said were small infractions, such as chewing gum and wearing a hat in school. Sometimes he was more disruptive, “talking back to a teacher, yelling at a dean.”

Finally, Wishwasrao testified, a guidance counselor met with his father to explain that high school probably wasn’t right for him and “it would be better if I get a GED rather than a high school diploma.”

Wishwasrao never graduated and is now pursuing his GED.

Wishwasrao was part of a chorus of criticism from students and advocates who testified at the hearing, held by the City Council’s education committee. Their testimonies came directly after DOE officials shed more light on suspensions in the city schools and promised changes to how some suspensions are handled.

At least 45,939 students — or 4.5 percent of the city’s student population — were suspended during the 2010-2011 school year, Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm said in her testimony. The majority of them — 70 percent — were suspended just once, she said, but more than one in 10 — about 6,000 students — were suspended three or more times.

Grimm defended the data against criticism that principals and superintendents were unnecessarily punishing students. She cited trends that showed long-term suspensions for more severe behavior and suspensions were declining and said that preliminary data for the 2011-2012 school year indicated a 13 percent decrease in all suspensions.

“Our schools are safer, suspension rates are declining, and students and staff are embracing more positive and progressive approaches towards high-quality learning environments,” Grimm said in her testimony.

But she acknowledged concerns about suspensions for certain groups, particularly young students. At least 814 suspensions were issued to students in third grade or below. Grimm said the department would monitor elementary schools with higher-than-average suspension rates.

“We have identified our younger children in particular as those who we want to pay attention to,” Grimm said.

In addition, Grimm and Elayna Konstan, who oversees long-term suspension centers known as alternative learning centers, announced that the DOE will try to ease the transition back into schools from ALCs by using transition coaches. The program is part of the city’s Young Men’s Initiative to aid black and Latino youth. The DOE sent about 15,000 students to ALCs last year, but just over half ended up attending, meaning that thousands of students spent their suspensions outside of a school environment.

Council members zeroed in on racial disparities in the suspension numbers. Black students, who make up about one third of the student population, represented half of all suspensions. At one point during the hearing, Councilman Charles Barron ordered every DOE official in the room to stand, then chastised Grimm because she and her colleagues were not black.

“Not a single black man is here to give you his perspective,” Barron said. “All white. Why wouldn’t you bring a black man here to give us insight?

Later in the hearing, Councilman Robert Jackson pressed the issue of race with advocates, including representatives of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which pushed for the data’s release.

“Why do you think black students are being suspended at such a high rate?” he asked. “Is it because they’re black? Is it because of racial discrimination? Is it because they’re more troubled? Is it because they’re more intimidating to teachers because they’re bigger?”

Udi Ofer, the NYCLU’s advocacy director, said there many factors could help explain black students’ higher suspension rates but noted that national research has found that black students are suspended more often than white students for the same infractions.

Council members did not address the fact that the suspension data the DOE released is incomplete. Citing federal privacy laws, the department did not release data about suspensions at hundreds of schools where there were fewer than 10 suspensions.

Another student who testified, Chanwatie Ramnauth, a senior at Hillcrest High School, said she did not believe that the school’s administration was accurately recording suspensions. According to official data, Hillcrest had fewer than 10 suspensions last year, so the DOE did not release details about the infractions. But Ramnauth said she saw suspensions issued daily at her school. She said she saw a dean on Monday confront one student who wanted to know why she was being suspended.

“He told her ‘It’s like a give-and-take marriage,’” Ramnauth recalled in her testimony. “You give me the authority to suspend you and I allow you to go to class.”

Deputy Chancellors Kathleen Grimm and Marc Sternberg hear feedback from parents on plans to rezone schools in District 2.

The Department of Education’s third — and likely final — proposal for rezoning in Manhattan’s District 2 received a lukewarm reception from Lower Manhattan parents at a public hearing Monday night.

DOE officials retracted some of the more controversial elements of the department’s rezoning proposal but warned that some overcrowded schools would not see relief, prompting grumbling from parents who had come to urge the officials to build more schools in the district.

In the revised plan, unveiled this week, Tribeca’s popular P.S. 234 and the Greenwich Village’s P.S. 41 and P.S. 3 will not be rezoned. Two of the original proposals, which called for the rezoning of schools in Lower Manhattan, Chelsea, and Greenwich Village, were unanimously rejected by the District 2 CEC earlier this month.

Now, the rezoning’s only major effect would be to trim some Lower Manhattan school zones to create a zone for the Peck Slip School, a new elementary school that is set to open in Tweed Courthouse next fall.

City officials, including deputy chancellors Marc Sternberg and Kathleen Grimm, said the change in plans was a response to vocal opposition from parents at P.S. 234, who argued that altering the school’s zone would change its character. But Sternberg and Grimm stressed that the tradeoff is that their latest proposal would not meet demand for school seats in the neighborhood. The parents had urged the officials to build more schools rather than shifting students among existing ones.

“You’re right to ask for more, but we don’t know if we can give you more,” Sternberg said. “We are looking for solutions where the money falls short, as it most certainly will.” 

“I consider it much better than the previous proposal,” Tribeca parent Einar Westerland told the audience. But Westerland, whose 10-year-old son attends P.S. 234 and whose 3-year-old will enter kindergarten next fall, said he recognizes that the new plan for his school, which has a long wait list for admissions, will not change the demand on seats.

“I support the CEC suggestion that parents who are wait-listed be given some preference — to be put through a lottery system and sent to some arbitrary section of the city is not acceptable,” he added, referring to a part of the CEC’s proposal that would call for students who are zoned for the overcrowded schools but cannot finds seats to be given preference in the general lottery for schools.

CEC officials said the addition of the as-yet unzoned Peck Slip elementary school, which would incubate in Tweed Courthouse, the DOE headquarters, before being placed somewhere in Downtown Manhattan, would do too little to alleviate the district’s endemic overcrowding.

“We’re growing faster than we can build our way out of the problem,” council member Michael Markowitz said. “Peck Slip alone is not enough.”

The Department of Education presented this revised proposal for rezoning several schools in Lower Manhattan. Click image to expand it.

Kelly Shannon, principal of P.S. 41, and Lisa Siegman, principal of P.S. 3,  told officials at the meeting that they are happy preserve the schools’ shared zone in Chelsea and Greenwich Village. help both those schools managed enrollment in equitable ways so that every zoned family is given a spot in one of the two schools. Currently families in those areas can chose which school to attend, but the DOE’s original proposal would have split up the two schools.

About 30 of the parents at the packed meeting came from P.S. 116 in Murray Hill, which had not been affected by any of the rezoning plans but is also facing overcrowding. A new school set to open in 2013 is meant to siphon off over-enrollment there, but P.S. 116 parents have been waging a campaign to find relief sooner. Last night, they urged the department to open a new elementary school, for the area earlier than planned as an alternative to adding more kindergarten seats to their school.

Meera Wagman, whose son is in kindergarten at P.S. 116, urged officials to allow the new school, P.S. 281, to incubate in a satellite location while its building is under construction. P.S. 281 is scheduled to open in 2014.

Crowding at the school has put a strain on space, she said. “It’s unsafe, and it’s a bad environment for learning.”

“We have serious concerns about the incubation you’ve proposed,” Sternberg said, responding to a proposal the CEC put forth two weeks ago when it vetoed the rezoning plan. “But we are not ready to foreclose on it. We hope to find a solution that’s good for everybody. We may not.”

Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services and Kathleen Grimm, DOE deputy chancellor, testify before a city council hearing on education barriers facing homeless youth.

Despite improvements, the city is still falling short at protecting homeless students from disruptions to their education, advocates told members of the City Council today.

Education committee chair Robert Jackson said he convened a hearing on obstacles facing homeless students in part to follow up on the story, reported by the Daily News last year, of a high school student who was unable to take a required Regents exam because she had to spend the day with her family going through the city’s shelter intake process. Since then, the Department of Homeless Services revised its policy to excuse children from most of the lengthy intake process.

“We’re pleased that this harmful policy was changed,” Jackson said. But he said, “This is but one example of the hardships faced by homeless students. DHS’s placement of families in shelters outside of their original community, combined with the [Department of Education]‘s busing restrictions, lead to many students in shelters having to transfer schools, thereby disrupting their education.”

DOE and DHS officials said they are increasingly collaborating to help students classified as homeless, who have quadrupled since 2008 to more than 65,000 and who make up a significant portion of students who are chronically absent from school. But the officials said they could do more to help more support students’ legal right to remain enrolled at their “school of origin,” the school they were enrolled in before becoming homeless.

DOE Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm said the DOE has counted 50,000 students in temporary housing, 20,000 of them in shelters. “Our number indicates about 65 percent remain in their school of origin,” she said. “We have no idea why parents move a child from a school, and maybe that’s something we could address.”

Advocates said the answer could be found in the city’s policies about school transportation and placement.

“Unfortunately, specific practices at DOE and DHS all but guarantee educational instability for a large swath of homeless students,” testified Jared Stein, the assistant director of New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students, an advocacy group that helps school districts work with homeless students. 

He suggested the DOE waive its 5-mile limit on the length of school bus routes so that students who need to travel long distances to reach their school of origin are able to. He also said that the DHS should place more homeless families with multiple school-aged children, who number in the thousands, in homes close to the school the youngest child in the family attends.

Seth Diamond, DHS commissioner, said his department tries to place families in their youngest child’s school district, but can’t always do so because of the family’s needs or availability in shelters.

“We want to do better than 35 percent,” he said, citing the department’s current success rate. “It is too low.”

But city officials said they were doing better than ever at addressing other challenges that homeless families face.

Diamond said for the first time this year the DHS has held “parent summits” on truancy, in addition to providing ongoing counseling services to students struggling to complete high school and apply to college.

And Grimm said the DOE and DHS have been collaborating more to share information with families and with each other, particularly by sharing up-to-date data on student attendance with shelter counselors.

For the first time this year, she said, “shelter staff can now know what school a child went to yesterday.”

The revelation has advocates and elected officials lambasting the city for not disclosing the agreement’s extension.

The original agreement, between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Board of Education President William Thompson, was set to expire in 2002 and was widely assumed to have done so. But in fact, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quietly renewed the agreement in January 2003.

The renewal came to light for the first time this month, after Assemblyman Karim Camara urged his colleagues to consider school safety issues when deciding how to vote on mayoral control, according to Udi Ofer, director of advocacy for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU was working with legislators to raise the profile of school safety in the mayoral control fight.

When Camara met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Silver showed him a copy of the memorandum’s renewal, Ofer said. The paragraph-long agreement was signed by Bloomberg and Klein on Jan. 22, 2003, and does not include an expiration date.

The renewal contradicts information the City Council received during a 2007 hearing on school safety, where council members repeatedly asked whether any formal document existed to define the relationship between the city schools and the police department.

At the hearing, a deputy chancellor, Kathleen Grimm, testified that mayoral control made such an agreement unnecessary, because the mayor controls both the schools and the police. (I reported about the hearing for Insideschools.)

Grimm’s inaccurate testimony is important because it shows just how little accountability exists in the realm of school safety, Ofer said. In addition to Grimm, a police department deputy told NYCLU that no memorandum was in effect, he said.

“If they knew of this [Memorandum of Understanding], then they lied to us,” he said. “If they didn’t know, then the people who are in charge of implementing school safety have no idea of what rules govern them.”

“Either explanation would be a bad one,” he said.

After I sought comment from her office, Council Speaker Christine Quinn released a statement earlier this week calling the department’s incorrect testimony “completely unacceptable.”

“It undermines the Council’s ability to conduct effective oversight and has prevented any real conversations on the subject of reform,” she said. “When representatives of city agencies testify at Council hearings, we take it on faith that their testimony is accurate.”

Knowing the agreement was still in effect would have changed advocates’ approach to improving school safety, Ofer said. Advocates would also have pushed harder to compel the city to provide semi-annual evaluations of school safety, as required by the memorandum. At the October 2007 City Council meeting, Grimm testified that those evaluations were not taking place.

But more important than what the agreement’s existence changes is what it says about the city’s respect for the law, Ofer said.

“What’s in place was mischaracterized to the public for years,” he said. “It is fundamentally wrong when a legal document exists and the people in charge of enforcing it don’t even know it exists.”

NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information Law request against the police and schools departments to find out if a memorandum existed, Ofer said. The police department sent NYCLU a copy of the 1998 without the 2003 renewal. The education department simply did not respond, he said.

In 1998, Giuliani and Thompson, now comptroller and a mayoral candidate, inked a deal to turn control of school safety over to the police department the following year. But after 2002, the police officers assigned to schools did not disappear. Instead, their number swelled.

The October 2007 City Council hearing came after a series of high-profile flare-ups, in which students were arrested for minor infractions and a principal was hauled from his school in handcuffs after intervening in a student’s arrest.

Grimm referred me to the Department of Education’s press office for comment. I have yet to hear back.

MOUextension From Karim Camara’s Office

The newly closed schools are PS 242 in Flushing and PS 130 and P 993, which share a building in Bayside. They will reopen on Tuesday, after the long weekend, along with most of the other closed schools, the department said. A few schools are scheduled to reopen on Friday.

Comptroller William Thompson, City Council members, and even usually timid members of the Panel for Educational Policy have criticized the DOE over the quality of its communication about the flu crisis. Today, Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm announced that the department would start sharing to-the-moment attendance data, in a move she said parents and teachers have requested. The data, which will be updated daily, are available here.

I eyeballed the attendance data quickly and saw lots of elementary school attendance rates far below the citywide average rate of 93 percent of elementary schools. Attendance in the Queens districts where the flu is most severe is obviously down significantly: JHS 169 in Flushing, which usually has 94 percent of students present, had only 66.9 percent attendance today, for example. In a neighboring district, another middle school, 51st Avenue Academy, had only 67.4 percent of students show up today, compared to 97 percent on a typical school day.

In a statement, Grimm repeated the department’s criteria for determining whether a school should be closed, which center around a spike in the number of students reporting to the school nurse with flu-like symptoms. “Absenteeism alone is not a basis for closure,” she said.

The teachers union is planning to share its own flu-monitoring reports tomorrow. Union president Randi Weingarten is set to announce the union’s results at IS 227 in East Elmhurst, Queens, the school that PEP member Dmytro Fedkowskyj said had been laid low by flu. IS 227 also had an attendance rate under 70 percent today.

At a meeting I attended tonight, the head of the city’s school district for severely disabled children, Bonnie Brown, said DOE staff members have been calling the homes of all students who are absent from the district’s schools to find out whether they are suffering from the flu.

Anyone who stayed until the bitter end of a three-hour meeting last night about kindergarten waitlists in Manhattan got a surprise: an uncharacteristic apology from a top DOE official.

Hundreds of parents turned out for a meeting of the parent council for District 2 to vent about having been shut out, at least for now, of their neighborhood schools. Last week, Manhattan parents protested at City Hall after 273 children were put on waiting lists at many elementary schools.

Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm arrived late to the meeting after spending her afternoon dealing with the swine flu outbreak in Queens. She sat quietly in the audience and listened to a tense back and forth between school officials and angry parents. The auditorium had mostly emptied and council members were preparing to adjourn when Grimm approached the microphone to make a surprise statement, which I captured on video above. Here’s a key part of what she said:

I also want to say something that I thought I heard people from the DOE say tonight, but just in case you didn’t, I want to say, I’m sorry. We’re sorry. We have stumbled on some of this planning.

The two officials leading the meeting told parents during the meeting that most schools should be able to eliminate their wait lists by the middle of June, after families find out where they’ve been offered seats in gifted and talented programs. John White, who heads the Department of Education’s efforts to manage school space, said that more children in each area qualified for gifted admissions than there are children on the waiting list.

Simply qualifying for gifted programs does not assure a child a seat in the programs, which have far fewer seats than there are eligible children. But White said that he is confident that the wait list numbers give an inflated sense of how many children will actually not find spots, noting that if the pace of enrollment growth suggested by the wait lists is real, it would be a substantial departure from past years.

If every single child on the waiting lists in Greenwich Village and on the Upper East Side actually attended the school they are listed for next year, kindergarten enrollment in each neighborhood would be a third higher than last fall, he said. In recent years, those neighborhoods have seen annual growth in kindergarten enrollment of 1 to 7 percent. (According to discussions on the Urban Baby Web site, many families haven’t yet made up their minds about whether to enroll in public or private school for the fall.)

Parents last night received White’s reassurances that children would find spots and that the DOE is working on a plan to prevent the problem from recurring with strong skepticism. Elizabeth Rose, the PTA president at PS 183 on the Upper East Side, where there are 31 zoned children on the wait list, said, “We have no confidence that gifted and talented will clear that number.” Other parents asked how the department plans to accommodate families who move into a school’s zone over the summer. And others hammered away at what they said is the core issue, the city’s failure to meet projected enrollment increases with new school buildings.

“Are you all happy with what you’ve heard tonight?” asked parent council member Michael Markowitz at one point midway through the meeting. “No!” audience members shouted in response.

A week after the city stopped giving daily updates on the swine flu epidemic that last month forced closures at multiple schools in Queens, including one public school, three more schools are being closed because of the disease.

The city Department of Health urged the Department of Education to close the schools, all in Queens, because they all have higher-than-normal numbers of students reporting flulike symptoms. At one of the schools, IS 238 in Hollis, an assistant principal is seriously ill with a confirmed case of the H1N1 flu strain, also known as swine flu. Mayor Bloomberg said today during a press conference about the outbreak that health officials think the administrator might have been in poor health before contracting H1N1 flu.

According to the New York Times, 241 students were absent at IS 5 in Elmhurst today. Typically, 96 percent of the school’s 1,500 students are present every day, according to DOE data; today, that figure was 84 percent. At PS 16 in Corona, the Times reported, dozens of students went home sick just today. And at IS 238, four students plus the administrator have been documented as having swine flu.

The DOE has been monitoring the situation at the schools for several days, according to Kathleen Grimm, deputy chancellor for finance and administration at the DOE. Today the DOH decided that the disease’s spread needed to be contained, and so the schools will be closed for at least the next week as a “precautionary measure,” she said. Students and staff will not be asked to make up the missed time, she told me.

I spoke with Grimm tonight after a meeting in Manhattan about school overcrowding, to which she arrived late because of the health crisis in Queens.

The Times had reporters on the ground at several of the schools late this afternoon when the closures were announced. From the newspaper’s report about the scene outside IS 238:

Kvon Williams-Sparks, 13, an eighth grader, said he had noticed an increase in the frequency with which janitors were cleaning the bathrooms, and said the assistant principal had not been at work since Monday. “On Monday, I found a notice in the library that said, ‘If you are sick, you should stay home,’” Kvon said. “But nobody has otherwise talked to us.”

DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.

With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.

One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. The charter schools office is going to Eric Nadelstern, the system’s new “chief schools officer.” The groups that have supported career and technical education and small learning communities within larger schools will report to Marcia Lyles, who leads the department’s teaching and learning division. And the “systems planning” personnel, who work on creating, siting, and closing schools, will now fall under the supervision of Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for finance and administration.

Still reporting directly to the chancellor, in addition to Grimm, Lyles, and Nadelstern, are accountability czar James Liebman; Christopher Cerf, the deputy chancellor who supervises human resources and communications; and Chief Operating Officer Photeine Anagnostopolous. Cantor said the new organization is not set in stone but he does not expect “seismic change.”

1:20 p.m. Education Committee chair Robert Jackson led off right away with the elephant in the room: the economy. He said the city is facing “very difficult economic times” and noted that the mayor has requested that all city agencies reduce their capital requests by 20 percent. Economic conditions didn’t stop Jackson from saying that the council wants to “take [the SCA] to task for unresolved problems and exaggerated claims.” In particular, he pointed to the authority’s claim that the current capital plan is the largest in the city’s history, noting that many more seats were created in the early years of the 20th century. Jackson also noted the Campaign for a Better Capital Plan‘s finding that more school seats were added in the last six years of the Giuliani administration than in the first six year’s of Bloomberg’s.

1:30 p.m. Kathleen Grimm, the DOE’s deputy chancellor for administration, drew some laughter when she read from her prepared testimony about the DOE’s recent “capital accomplishments” the departments’s oft-repeated claim that the current capital plan, which runs through the end of June 2009, is the largest in its history. She said in the future she’ll be specifying that it’s the largest plan in SCA’s history, not the DOE’s. The state created SCA in 1988.

1:45 p.m. SCA head Sharon Greenberger walked council members through a Power Point presentation about the proposed capital plan. She noted that the SCA did incorporate a plan for class size reduction into its calculations — but the reduction was to 28 students in grades 4-8 and 30 in high school, not 23 as the state Contracts for Excellence requires for those grades.

1:55 p.m. The economy rears its ugly head again. Jamie Smarr, head of the DOE’s Education Construction Fund, said he’s not focusing right now on developing new public-private partnerships to create more school seats. “My principal job is to keep the projects that we do have going through [the economic] contraction,” he said. Those projects, all of which are located in Manhattan’s District 2, include the PS 59/High School for Art and Design building whose plans were released in October.

2:10 p.m. Picking up on what’s clearly becoming a theme, Jackson and Grimm argued about the class size targets used in developing the capital plan. Jackson asked when the DOE and SCA will adopt the class size targets required by the state. Grimm’s answer: Never. “When we look at our targets and factor in the actual utilization of these classrooms … we really do arrive on a citywide level at targets that are 20 or 21,” she said. In other words, Grimm said, classes can get down to the size the state requires even if the city doesn’t build more school seats than it already plans to. Jackson didn’t buy Grimm’s logic. “Those numbers are not acceptable to me as the chair, to advocates, or to parents,” he said. “What they really mean is that children will be in overcrowded classrooms.”

2:20 p.m. Has anyone ever made a joke about Kathleen Grimm’s name? She certainly lived up to it just now when she responded to a question about school construction costs. “It is a very expensive proposition,” Grimm answered. “That’s why we are trying to use every tool we have to address overcrowding in our schools, so we don’t have to rely on capital dollars. We don’t have enough.”

2:25 p.m. Jackson has turned the floor over to his colleagues on the council. Most of them are asking about overcrowding issues in their own districts. Judging from their questions, if overcrowding is only a local problem, as the DOE says it is, it seems to affect a lot of localities.

2:40 p.m. It’s return of the light bulbs here in the Council Chambers! Last week during a hearing on the DOE’s proposed budget reductions, Council Member Lew Fidler said the city should cut costs by switching to energy-efficient light bulbs. Now Fidler said the situation is worse than just wasteful: Many schools don’t even have the fixtures to accept energy-efficient bulbs. Grimm said the current plan provided for fixture modernization but that the initiative had been cut back.

3:05 p.m. The subject has turned to Transportable Classroom Units, otherwise known as trailers. In the current capital plan, the city said it planned to removed all TCUs by 2012. But the proposed plan calls for removing trailers on an ad hoc basis only. Fidler said the change amounts to “waffling” by the DOE and SCA. But Grimm said the agencies are only responding to what principals want. “No TCU will need to be used for classroom space when the projects are completed,” she said. “But if a principal wants to keep them, and we say they’re safe, we’re not going to stop them.”

3:20 p.m. Randi Weingarten is in the house, offering testimony that she said is influenced as much by her new role as the head of the national teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, as by her long-term experience in New York. She said the proposed capital plan “thinks small” and could hold New York City back if federal funds become available to stimulate local economies. I’ll have more on this later.

Weingarten’s testimony received a full-on round of applause in the usually staid chamber. One person who didn’t clap, but who wished he could have: Fidler, who said if it weren’t for the rules that bar council members from applauding, he would have been on his feet.

Weingarten also joined the list of people testifying that they are concerned about the SCA’s class size targets. The SCA’s planning “does seem to take aim” at the state’s class size goals, she said.

3:30 p.m.: The only actual New York City public school student in the room has taken the stand. Robert Moore, a 16-year-old student who attends the Bushwick School for Social Justice, testified on behalf of Make the Road New York, a community organization. He said his analysis showed that there aren’t enough ninth-grade seats in Bushwick to hold all of the neighborhood’s graduating eighth graders. “All students should have a choice to go to school in their community,” Moore said.

3:35 p.m. Leonie Haimson, the tireless advocate for smaller class sizes and one of the authors of the Campaign for A Better Capital report, could only address a handful of the issues outlined on her prepared testimony during her allotted time, but that was enough to for her to run through a litany of problems with the capital plan’s methodology, assumptions, and conclusions. She said the DOE and SCA are perpetrating “a huge deception” when they say overcrowding is merely a local problem, citing a survey her organization, Class Size Matters, conducted earlier this year that found that 86 percent of principals say large classes at their schools prevent them from providing a quality of education. Robert Jackson funded that survey.

Asked how much it would cost the city to reduce class sizes to the level CFE requires, Haimson said the answer — many billions of dollars — sounds “very scary.” But she said there are a number of ways to find the funds, from increasing the DOE’s share of the city’s capital spending from 13.8 to 20 percent (in keeping with its historical share) to halving the projected increase in charter school enrollment.

And about the Grimm’s explanation of why schools can still have small classes without the DOE and SCA reducing class size targets, Haimson said, “It makes no sense if you read it [in the capital plan] and it made no sense to me today.”

3:50 p.m. The tail end of this hearing reminds me of how many people have put in long hours trying to crack the problem of overcrowding. Dan Golub, the land use specialist at the Manhattan Borough President’s office, described his office’s two recent reports about how school construction isn’t keeping pace with residential construction. And he emphasized that the economic downturn shouldn’t stop new construction, as scary as it is. “We can’t plan for just the current economic situation,” he said.

4 p.m. There are a few people still hanging around to testify, but most council and audience members have left. I don’t blame them — this has been a bummer of a hearing, with testimony alternating between financial defeatism and complaints that the DOE and SCA aren’t planning to build as many schools as the city needs.

While far from easy, states with courageous governors could use this crisis to make a radical change: cut the budget by 10% and send the money directly to schools. Every school would get a three year performance contract (i.e., charter) and would be required to join a support network (which could include what used to be a school district, a university, a non-profit like New Tech Foundation, a charter management organization like Green Dot, a for-profit like Edison Learning, or a self-organized coop).

New York City schools already get to choose exactly how much bureaucratic support they want by selecting from a menu of support organizations, and paying the fee the organization (Empowerment? New Visions? Knowledge Network?) charges. What if a school could also select a new menu option: no bureaucracy at all? Some schools strongly rely on their support organizations — after Empowerment chief Eric Nadelstern offered a plan to let high-performing schools opt out of the bureaucracy, only five schools took him up on it, he told me recently. But I’ve heard of other schools that barely speak to their support organization, much less take them up on the programs that come with their fees.

The Department of Education’s budget czar, Kathleen Grimm, said last week at a City Council hearing that officials will consider such an option. From my live-blogging:

3:06 p.m. A council member summarized the new “empowerment” budgeting that allows school to pick a support organization to be work with, paying a fee for each organization depending on their preference. The organizations then provide help with professional development and budgeting. The member said he likes that new setup, but wonders whether the empowerment idea could be expanded, so that schools could opt out of paying for support services altogether. “Why not really do it?” he asked, adding that he visited several schools recently that said they would rather spend the money on something else, like a new art teacher. Grimm said that is something the Department of Education is considering.

(Vander Ark article via Small Talk.)

WHAT WE KNOW

• If the plan goes through as the DOE has outlined, schools will have lost about $560 million total since the mid-year cuts last year. The cuts have come from both the central bureaucracy and school budgets. How it breaks down:

• A substantial portion of cuts will come from cutting 475 administrative positions, moves that not only cut out their salaries but also add to the “fringe” blue portion of the graph above, since the department will no longer have to cover those employees’ benefits. Of the 475 total job cuts planned for the middle of the school year, none are teaching jobs, and no full-time school positions will be cut — although principals could choose to cut back on the hours that non-teaching staff like cafeteria aides put in.
• The largest bulk of those jobs, 284, will come from the DOE’s central offices at Tweed Courthouse. So far, 51 jobs have been selected for elimination. Those come from the Office of Portfolio Development, which manages new small schools and charter schools; the Office of Communications, which includes the press spokesmen and people who put out internal newsletters; the internal technology department; and the Office of Family Engagement, which helps parents get involved in the public schools.
• There are three other sets of job cuts: 43 vacant positions that had been slotted for social workers monitoring pre-kindergarten programs will not be filled; 54 jobs will be lost from the Integrated Service Centers, which are strung across the boroughs and offer schools legal help, human resources staff, and other help; and 95 are jobs related to maintaining school facilities, including 71 plumbing and electrician “trade” jobs and 24 administrative jobs.
• Schools are bearing the largest brunt of the cuts in terms of hard dollar figures, though as a percentage of total spending, central administration is cutting more — 6% of its budget compared to 1.3% for schools.
• Other cuts are from a smattering of programs and cost-saving methods, including not hiring Teaching Fellows during the middle of the year and changing the way faculty are paid to grade standardized tests, by taking $11 million out of the $22 million that had been slated to pay teachers to grade them in their after-work hours. (Now, non-classroom teachers will be expected to grade the tests during school hours.)

WHAT WE’RE WAITING TO HEAR:

• What will schools cut from their budgets to carve out the 1.3% that’s been ordered (pending City Council approval)? Principals had to turn in plans explaining this to the Department of Education, and the DOE promised to share the details with City Council members as soon as it knows them.
• How will the department find 233 more positions to axe at its Tweed Courthouse headquarters? That’s the number that still haven’t been identified as on the chopping block — and which, presumably, school officials still haven’t figured out.
• Will the City Council approve the cuts as the DOE outlined them, or will it ask for revisions? Today there were some voices of dissent: Robert Jackson, the education committee chair, said that he is not yet ready to approve the plan until he sees specifically what schools are going to cut, and other members pleaded for more efficiency at the department. Still, no council member specified a cut they wanted to see that the department wasn’t making, or drew a line in the sand that a planned cut would prevent them from signing off. The strongest voice was the public advocate, Betsy Gotbaum, who asked the department to cut diagnostic tests given during the year as well as the ARIS data warehouse. But she does not sit on the council.
• The Department of Education has not yet outlined how it plans to cut its budget in the next school year, and that will be an even bigger challenge. The cut the mayor asked from that budget: $385 million.