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Screenshot of the campaign page against the UFT/NAACP lawsuit (click to enlarge)

Michelle Rhee’s new advocacy organization is jumping into the fight between the NAACP and charter school families with a new email campaign that has been flooding elected officials’ inboxes since Friday.

The campaign targets elected officials who co-signed a lawsuit, along with the teachers union and the NAACP, demanding that the Bloomberg administration halt its plans to close struggling district schools and replace them with charters.

Students First, which Rhee founded last year, sponsored the campaign, titled “Tell NYC Officials: Don’t Decrease Charter School Space.”

“Remove Your Name from the Charter School Lawsuit,” reads the subject line in the identical emails, which has been sent to the dozen officials listed as plaintiffs in the suit. In four days, more than 550 emails have been sent from people from all over New York State.

“New York needs more quality public school options,” the email reads.

“That is why I ask that you remove your name from the lawsuit that threatens to close several existing charter s ychools [sic] and to prevent others from enrolling new children. This action is tantamount to condemning thousands of kids to failing schools who otherwise would have an opportunity at a great education.” (more…)

State lawmakers are warning that if the Department of Education doesn’t comply with the new governance law immediately, they will try to force them to.

School officials came under attack earlier this week when they laid out their time-table for implementing changes ordered by the legislature. The law required that community superintendents work exclusively “predominantly” with schools in the districts where they are assigned. Education department officials said that it would take a full school year to make that happen.

Assembly members critical of the department said this week that was too long.

“It’s violating, certainly, the spirit of the law,” said Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn.

Maisel said that if the department continued to defy what he said was the intent  of the law, legislators in Albany do have one recourse–amending the legislation.  “There’s no law that says we couldn’t come back and come up with another piece of legislation,” he said. (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…)

ALBANY, NY — One branch of the state government is functioning today. Lawmakers in the Assembly pushed Silver’s mayoral control bill through the ways and means committee this afternoon, readying the bill for a final vote tomorrow.

The bill immediately passed with no discussion. At least three Assembly members voted against Silver’s plan, including Mark Weprin and Jeff Aubry of Queens and Deborah Glick of Manhattan.

Aubry said he was concerned that the bill did not place fixed terms on members of the citywide school board and that it gives the mayor a majority of the appointees to the Panel for Educational Policy. Both he and Glick are supporters of the “Better Schools Act.”

Tomorrow, the Assembly will vote on the bill, and even its most vocal critics agree that its passage is guaranteed.

UPDATE 2 (from Elizabeth): Billy Easton of the Campaign for Better Schools points out that nothing is final, even if the Assembly bill passes. “Tomorrow is an Assembly vote on their initial proposal,” he said. “That does not mean that that’s the final vote that they will take on this matter. We have to see what unfolds.” Easton added that lobbyists for the campaign are meeting with members from both the Assembly and the Senate.

Exactly how negotiations between the two houses will unfold, however, is almost impossible to figure out. Anna reports from Albany that she only persuaded one senator to talk to her about mayoral control today — and his response was to say, “It can’t stay the way it is,” and walk away laughing. (more…)

The state Senate ground to a standstill on the question of who should control the city’s public schools this week, but a consensus among members of the Assembly looks like it will be easier to come by — and it could come soon.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told New York City members this week that he will hold the Assembly Democrats’ first conference on the issue next week, according to a member who was there, Mark Weprin of Queens. The conference will kick off formal talks within the Democratic conference about whether to reauthorize, revise, or scrap the 2002 law that granted control of the city’s public schools to the mayor.

Several Assembly members are already putting together legislation on the subject, much of it influenced by the constellation of advocacy groups that are bombarding Albany this week. A slew of Assembly members are standing behind recommendations put out by the Campaign for Better Schools, while bills in line with the recommendations of Betsy Gotbaum’s commission on school governance and the Parent Commission on School Governance are said to be on the way. Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn today introduced a bill, backed by the city principals’ union, that would beef up the power of superintendents.

But the conference would be the first chance for Democrats to try to work out a consensus on the issue. The bills currently in circulation clash with each other on several points. More importantly, they also clash with the position of the powerful speaker, Silver, who supports giving the mayor a majority of appointees on the citywide school board. (more…)

A lineup of Department of Education officials challenged Assemblyman Mark Weprin's assertion that the public schools are overrun by excessive test prep. GothamSchools

Another snippet of Friday’s final Assembly hearing on mayoral control that’s worth highlighting is an exchange between school officials and Mark Weprin, the Assemblyman from Queens, over test prep.

Weprin has raised his concerns that the public school are doing too much test prep with Chancellor Joel Klein before. (He memorably hijacked a press conference that was supposed to be about Klein’s accomplishments.) This exchange gave school officials and Weprin a less awkward chance to duke it out. Weprin was incredulous when Eric Nadelstern, the chief schools officer, and a lineup of other officials told him that the Department of Education does not encourage test prep. “There’s an incredible amount of test prep going on. You know that, right?” he said.

When James Liebman, the chief accountability officer, told Weprin that only a tiny percentage of parents believe there is too much test prep going on in schools — about 1%, according to the department’s surveys — Weprin snapped back. “That’s unbelievably ridiculous,” he said. “You guys are either in denial, or you’re trying to pretend to be in denial. I thought it was just a given you knew how much test prep was going on.”

Officials clarified that they are in favor of testing; it just depends on which kind of testing. They said that giving diagnostic tests to assess what exactly students know and what they don’t is not test prep but a good way to help teachers educate children. “You will never find a serious educator who will say that merely teaching children how to take a test is a sufficient form of education or indeed a defensible form of education,” Cerf said. “To the extent people are being taught the content and then assessed on whether they have mastered that content by the milestone ages, that is not test prep.”

Technology constraints prohibited me from live-blogging Friday’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control of the city schools, which (for those not following along) is the policy that in 2002 handed near-total education authority over to the mayor — and which is up for renewal this June.

The strong thrust of Friday’s hearing, the last of five that have taken Assembly members on a tour through the boroughs, was that lawmakers are not happy with the system they created. Some have become even less happy during the hearings in every borough over the last few months.

A few flubbed exchanges with lawmakers have not helped the Bloomberg administration’s case. One such embarrassing moment happened one Friday, when officials failed to produce the graduation rate for black males.

Here are some of the highlights from Friday:

• Thirteen Assembly members attended the hearing, one of the largest showings so far, and I didn’t hear any of them speak positively about mayoral control. Two members made their dissatisfaction most clear. “I can assure you that my opinion has changed a lot in these hearings,” Assemblyman Daniel O’Donnell of Manhattan declared, after angrily chastising Department of Education officials during a question-and-answer session. “Talking to my legislative colleagues over the last three months, the question in my mind is no longer if we’re going to make any changes to the law. It’s going to be what changes are we going to make,” declared Mark Weprin of Queens. (more…)

Chancellor Joel Klein conducted at least one of his meetings with lawmakers in his office at Tweed Courthouse.

After suffering a beating from legislators who accused him of being rudely unresponsive to their concerns since taking office in 2003, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is taking the hint and reaching out.

In the last few weeks, Klein has walked  Mark Weprin, a Queens lawmaker who is one of his sharpest critics on the Assembly’s education committee, through his Tweed Courthouse headquarters; sat down with a handful of other lawmakers; and made appointments with more, including the committee’s chairwoman, Catherine Nolan. He has also begun, through his staff, to send out prompt replies to lawmakers’ requests.

“We’re getting letters answered, we’re getting information that we’ve asked for,” a spokeswoman for Nolan, Kathleen Whynot, said. “We have a really good working relationship right now with some of the DOE staff, which has been a nice addition.”

Assembly members said the outreach began after they launched a series of five hearings on the subject of mayoral control — the governance structure that Klein strongly supports, but which several lawmakers have criticized as authoritarian. The state legislature handed the mayor control in 2002, but the law they wrote sunsets this year, and so many in Albany are rolling up their sleeves and hoping to revise it.

The hearings were a chance for citizens to give their thoughts on how they’d like the law changed (or not). They also became opportunities for the lawmakers to air their concerns. Several of the complaints had to do specifically with Klein and his staff, who lawmakers said frequently failed to respond even to basic questions and concerns. The complaints accelerated at a hearing held in Manhattan where Klein himself testified, sitting before a row of lawmakers who took turns rebuking him. (more…)