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One outcome of Albany’s debate over mayoral control may have nothing to do with state law. The political wrangling may end up leaving the city with permanent parent advocacy groups.

Last Friday, Democratic state senators reached a deal with Mayor Bloomberg (that may or may not pass), essentially ending the drawn-out negotiations. Yet groups that were in the thick of the political fight just last week are intent on remaining active, even if the mayoral control debate has largely ended.

Learn NY, which was set up roughly a year ago by allies of the Bloomberg administration to campaign for mayoral control’s renewal, will continue to exist until the Senate passes a bill bringing mayoral control back. After that, the group’s future is uncertain.

Learn NY spokeswoman Julie Wood refused to comment in greater detail.

On the opposite side of the debate are groups like the Campaign for Better Schools, the 3Rs Coalition, and the Parent Commission on School Governance, all of which advocated for significant changes to the 2002 school governance law, but favored keeping mayoral control in place. Each them face their own existential questions. (more…)

One day before June 30, a lobbying group has launched an ad campaign to pressure the state Senate to renew mayoral control.

Learn NY, which is urging Senators to pass a version of the Assembly’s bill, is running advertisements, sending out robocalls, and planting its volunteers in the halls of the state capital today. The plan, according to spokeswoman Julie Wood, is to put enough pressure on state senators to force them to bring the issue to a vote.

“We’re in real jeopardy of having the school system be in chaos,” Wood said, echoing the mayor’s escalating warnings of anarchy.

The banner ads, which are running on three New York City politics websites — Politicker, Daily Politics, and NY1 — urge readers to call their state Senators and ask them to “pass the Assembly’s education reform bill now.”

There’s also a campaign to get people to sign the group’s online petition, as well as robocalls, which are going out to New Yorkers starting today. (If you’ve gotten one — please! — record and send it to tips@gothamschools.org.)

How long the campaign will last remains to be seen, Wood said. She said it’s possible that Learn NY would continue to operate after the school governance question has been settled. The nonprofit organization was created to champion mayoral control.

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.

Protesters derailed the monthly city school board meeting last night, filing out during the middle of the meeting with chants of “Hey hey, ho ho, one-man-rule has got to go!”

The protesters are part of the Campaign for Better Schools, a coalition of community groups that is pushing the state legislature to add checks to the mayor’s control of public schools. They argue that the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, is nothing more than a rubber stamp for the mayor’s school policies. Panel members have almost always voted with the administration since Mayor Bloomberg fired three members who signaled they would oppose a third-grade promotion policy in 2005.

The group began the meeting, at Stuyvesant High School in Lower Manhattan, with a rally outside the school, then filed quietly into the meeting room, nearly filling the lower level of an auditorium as they listened to a presentation about swine flu. But as Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who chairs the PEP, tried to shift the topic of conversation to test scores, the Campaign for Better Schools protesters stood up, and one member launched into a speech encouraging panel members to “think for yourselves.”

“In the meantime, for those of you who cannot, we have brought you something that we hope you can use moving forward,” the speaker said, referring to actual rubber stamps the campaign had made that read “PEP approved.”

As the protesters left the auditorium, one of them, William Hargraves, launched into an impassioned speech of his own, which starts at the beginning of the second minute of the video above. “Yo, chancellor,” he said. “What did you prove? Ninety percent of your audience left. … You’d rather be in front of nobody so that you can say what you’ve got to say, than to hear what the majority got to say?” (more…)

The crowd at Harlem Charter Night.

Mayor Bloomberg and Lil Mama cheered charter schools, school choice, and mayoral control of the public schools before a crowd of thousands of parents and students last night.

The mayor and the rapper even shared some tactics. “Do we want more parent choice?” Mayor Bloomberg yelled. “I can’t hear you! Do we want more competition? Do we want better test scores and higher graduation rates?”

Lil Mama was more successful with the call-and-response style. She called “Parent” while the crowd screamed back, “Choice!” “You don’t have to send your child to a regular public school,” the Harlem native said before performing two of her hits, “G-Slide” and “Lip Gloss.” “You can send them to a public charter school.”

While many of the kids seemed most excited to watch Lil Mama perform, a team of volunteers and interns at the pro-mayoral control group Learn NY were on hand to encourage parents to sign a petition supporting mayoral control, and a parade of education officials used the unprecedented crowd size to push their causes. (The legislature will vote on whether to renew the mayor’s control of the public schools in June.) (more…)

Community groups from Crown Heights, East Harlem, and the Ridgewood section of Queens are the latest to sign on with Learn NY, the group lobbying to preserve mayoral control.

The law that created mayoral control is set to expire at the end of June, and state legislators are currently grappling with whether to preserve, eliminate, or alter the school governance system. Learn NY is trying to amass a coalition to show legislators that many New Yorkers are happy with mayoral control as it currently exists. 

Yesterday the group announced that the coalition now has 40 members, up from just over 30 a month ago. The new additions range in size from a single person, in the case of Demetrius Carolina, pastor of Staten Island’s First Central Baptist Church, to all of Fordham University.

One of the organizations added to the list yesterday also runs one of the nine support networks that principals can hire to provide training for teachers. Fordham University’s network currently works with 10 schools. Other coalition members, including Urban Assembly, Ghetto Film School, and the Young Women’s Leadership Network, are lead partners for DOE schools created during Mayor Bloomberg’s administration. In the past, Bloomberg has been criticized for citing as backers organizations to which he or the city gives financial support.

Learn NY has solicited backers in a “grassroots” fashion since launching late last year, by reaching out to community groups and trying to sell them on Learn NY’s platform, spokeswoman Julie Wood told me. (more…)

Hispanic Federation president Lillian Rodriguez Lopez, center. (Via Flickr)

What exactly does it mean to be a “partner”? When Learn NY, the group fighting to preserve the mayor’s control over the school system, announced partnerships with three racial-minority groups last week, it seemed like evidence that the groups would join its lobbying battle.

But the president of one of the three groups, Lillian Rodriguez Lopez of the Hispanic Federation, told me late last week that “partner” in this case has a “very contained and limited” meaning. The Hispanic Federation will not adopt Learn NY’s position on mayoral control; it will come up with its own, separate position, after talking to parents, she said.

That keeps Lopez open to maintaining the scathing critique of mayoral control that she provided to Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum’s commission on school governance last year:

“The dial towards improvement has moved very, very slowly during the years of mayoral control and in certain communities we have seen the dial moving in the opposite direction towards a worsening of the schools,” she said in testimony that you can read here (page 130 — UPDATE: sorry about broken link, should work now).

In her testimony, Lopez blamed both the Bloomberg administration’s “corporate” approach to school policy and the mayoral control system itself, which she said silenced debate. She also challenged the idea promoted by Learn NY board chairman Geoffrey Canada that mayoral control brings a clear line of accountability. Lopez said that under mayoral control it has been impossible to know who is responsible for what. “Too many of us are unsure of what the system really looks like now,” Lopez said.

So why is Lopez partnering with Learn NY? She said that the resources the group offered her, combined with the chance to boost the voice of the Latino community, sealed the deal. (more…)

The city teachers union teachers union is catching no breaks on its proposed mayoral control position, which last night sailed through the first of two hoops required before it becomes official union policy.

First, the Department of Education and the group supporting mayoral control, Learn NY, dismissed the union’s proposal as a step backward, comparing it to the way the public schools were run before mayoral control. Both don’t like the union’s proposal to empower the Panel for Educational Policy, now seen as a rubber stamp, into an effective school board that would have to approve policy decisions.

Now, the mayor controls a majority of appointments on the panel, and can dismiss any of these members at a moment’s notice. Under the union’s proposal, the mayor would control only 5 of 13 seats, and term limits would protect board members from overnight removal.

“We can’t have it both ways,” Learn NY board chair Geoffrey Canada said in a statement. “Either one person is in charge, or no one is.”

The union is also receiving criticism from a group of its own members, who late last night released a minority report suggesting that the legislature carve even more power away from the mayor. (more…)

Unfortunately, I’m not able to be in Queens today for the first State Assembly education committee hearing on mayoral control, the official opening event in the battle over school governance. (The next hearing is next week in Manhattan; I’ll be there.)

But I’m guessing, based on having been to a number of events that previewed the showdown, that those who are testifying at Queens Borough Hall might be having trouble separating their thoughts on the idea of mayoral control with their views on the way Mayor Bloomberg has ruled the city’s schools since 2002. Learn NY, the pro-mayoral control lobbying group, thinks the distinction is important, but they’re not the only ones: The commission convened by Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum in 2007 to study mayoral control also did so without evaluating Bloomberg’s reforms. That commission ultimately argued in favor of a constrained form of mayoral control.

At Teachable Moment, John has a very good summary of how this distinction complicates the mayoral control debate. He writes:

Our image of mayoral control is so linked to Bloomberg that it’s hard to see it any other way.

This is, of course, not helped by the fact that Bloomberg, Klein, and Learn NY aren’t really even playing by their own rules. They will undoubtedly be highlighting rising test scores and graduation rates as evidence that mayoral control is working. They will point out the major dysfunctions that existed under many of the local school boards that mayoral control replaced. But that isn’t playing fair. If we’re really supposed to look at a governance system as a governance system, then we shouldn’t be looking at the successes under one man (who the system is designed to eventually replace) or the failures of the previous administrators.

What’s going on is a very sophisticated kind of mental jiu jitsu where every success under Bloomberg is hailed as proof that the system works while the failures are faults of the man and shouldn’t affect our view of the system. We’re also being asked to compare the platonic ideal of mayoral control (because we’re not looking at the policies Bloomberg implemented through it) to the very messy realities of the previous governance structure.

This isn’t exactly up is down thinking, but it certainly makes it hard to get a hold of a clear idea of what the terms of the debate actually are.

Learn NY, the pro-mayoral control group, is partnering with the Hispanic Federation, the Black Equity Alliance, and the Asian American Federation, the group announced today in a press release. The three groups are going to help Learn NY host forums.

On the heels of news last week that the publisher of El Diario is joining the Learn NY board, this could bring a not-so-covert racial dynamic to the mayoral control debate. Another way Learn NY might make the same point: Among the group’s lobbyists are former Bronx party boss Roberto Ramirez, who heads the MirRam group. Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan, chairwoman of the education committee, just told me MirRam lobbyists have already begun meeting with lawmakers to pitch Learn NY’s stance on the law. Learn NY’s lead spokesman so far has been Geoffrey Canada, the black C.E.O. of Harlem Children’s Zone.

Having the city’s non-white communities stand strongly for mayoral control would be a departure from the historical pattern. In the past, racial minorities have opposed mayors’ efforts to take control. Remember decentralization here in the 1960s, led in part by the black and Puerto Rican communities? The pattern applies to other cities, too, according to this essay (PDF) by Columbia Teachers College professor Jeff Henig:

The most important complaints have come from racial minorities, parents, and teachers. Despite the fact that it is presented in race-neutral language, mayoral control has sparked racially defined responses in a number of cities.

Here’s the full Learn NY press release: (more…)