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Education historian Diane Ravitch spoke to the Parents Across America audience last night.

One of New York City’s most vocal parent activists is launching a national organization, enlisting parents in cities across the country in a fight against the Obama administration’s proposed changes to the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Called Parents Across America, the group was developed jointly by Leonie Haimson, the executive director of Class Size Matters in New York, and Julie Woestehoff, of Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE) in Chicago. Its formal launch was at a forum last night in a public school in Tribeca, where parents from as far as San Francisco and Seattle traveled to share their unfortunate experiences with local education laws and policies.

Parents Across America’s platform is against much of what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has done, such as his competitive grant program Race to the Top, and the federal School Improvement Grants he’s given to states to turn around their lowest-performing schools. The organization also opposes Duncan’s blueprint for what he wants out of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act’s eventual reauthorization. (more…)

A week after announcing that the city will recommend the closure of a controversial Manhattan charter school, city officials have begun to reach out to help parents plan where they will send their students next year.

In a letter sent yesterday, the charter school office executive director Recy Benjamin Dunn formally told parents that the city is recommending that the state shutter Ross Global Academy.

This is the first letter from city officials to Ross parents concerning the decision. City officials held a meeting with the school last week, and expect to release their final report recommending closure later this week or next, a Department of Education spokesman said.

Last year, when the city revoked the charter of East New York Preparatory School, officials set up a one-year program at the school that students could opt into rather than transferring to other district or charter schools. In this case, Ross parents have not yet missed the deadlines to apply to other schools and the city is encouraging them to submit applications before the Department of Education’s January deadline. (more…)

A bill that would create a parent-training center is expected to sail through the Senate next week. But it could face an uphill battle in the Assembly.

Assembly members said today that they had serious doubts that the state should spent money on a parent-training center when the city’s school system has already gone through a round of budget cuts. Others were skeptical that parents of public school students would benefit from training. The center would cost the state $1.6 million, and would be housed at CUNY.

“It sounds like a colossal waste of money to me,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens). “I know people want to have parent training, but our problem has never been that the parents don’t know what they’re doing, it’s that there’s no power locally,” he said.

“Obviously the senators seem to think they have a deal, but no one has checked with us,” Weprin said.

Assemblyman Micah Kellner (D-Manhattan) was equally unenthusiastic. “I’m not a fan of the idea of parent training centers,” he said. “If we want a better relationship between parents and the DOE [Department of Education] it’s not about parents needing to be trained better, it’s about making sure the DOE is listening to parents.”

“It seems like a boondoggle to me,” he added. (more…)

The Senate may be nearing an agreement on mayoral control, but now there’s a new debate — over how to increase parental involvement, and what involvement means.

At the center of the debate are the two parent groups most actively lobbying Albany, and each has its own slightly different vision.

The Parent Commission on School Governance is pushing for a kind of parent union, which it calls an Independent Parent Organization and Training Academy.

According to Patricia Connelly, a member of the Parent Commission, the organization would act like a think tank-cum-lobbying force for parent advocate groups and would be modeled on the now-defunct United Parent Association.

“It can be a place where people come together and learn from one another,” Connelly said, adding that the group would also do research and train less experienced parents.

“Right now we don’t have an institutionalized role and people say well there’s OFEA [Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy], but that’s just an arm of the Department of Education and it’s more about delivering PowerPoint presentations rather than what we really need to know to be effective advocates,” she said. (more…)