The United Federation of Teachers is turning up the heat on Mayor Bloomberg with a new television ad marking mayoral control’s double-digit birthday.

In a separate ad appearing in print today, the union is also continuing its appeal to parents in the ongoing fight over teacher evaluations.

The 30-second television ad, which comes as the union is locked in stalemate with the city over new evaluations, targets Bloomberg’s education track record months before mayoral control’s 10th anniversary. From the ad:

Ten years as Mayor, and Mike Bloomberg still doesn’t get it.

Cathie Black. Fudged education test scores. Closing schools. Parents shut out of the process.

And just last month, Bloomberg said in a perfect world he’d cut the number of teachers in half, doubling class size.

The ad alludes to but does not mention the teacher evaluation fight, for which the union has been pilloried by Bloomberg and other politicians and in the press. The ad concludes:

Mayor Bloomberg, let’s be honest: If you really want to do right by our kids, you’ll work with teachers and parents and stop playing politics with our schools.

Union officials said the ad would start airing today on New York-area TV stations and continue to repeat until Jan. 30. According to the union, the ad buy is estimated to reach more than 8 million viewers multiple times each during programs as varied as “Inside City Hall,” “Top Chef,” Knicks games, and “Jeopardy!”

UPDATE: A full-page “Open Letter to New York City’s Parents” that the union placed as an ad in today’s New York Daily News tackles the evaluations issue head on. The letter, which is not the first that the union has paid to run in recent weeks, urges Bloomberg to “look around the country — and around the world” to understand that teacher evaluations should be used to help teachers improve.

The letter to parents is below.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. Diaz’s PEP appointee, Monica Major, frequently opposes DOE policies, and Diane Ravitch, an outspoken critic of the department, is the summit’s keynote speaker. Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott is also scheduled to appear.

“This is the first step toward creating a new agenda for education in the Bronx,” said John DeSio, a spokesman for Diaz.

The daylong event, which closed for registration earlier this month with more than a thousand registered attendees, will feature a panel of education policy heavyweights: Major; Shael Polakow-Suransky, the DOE’s chief academic officer; Ernest Logan, president of the principals union; teachers union president Michael Mulgrew; James Merriman, head of the city’s Charter School Center; and Betty Rosa, a member of the state Board of Regents.

Workshops for parents and teachers will address topics such as advocating for special education services and college-readiness challenges for English Language Learners.

Desio said Walcott agreed to speak shortly after he was appointed chancellor in April, and Ravitch signed on in August.

“This is an important event and these are two of the most important individuals in education in the Bronx and the city,” DeSio added. “This will be a great opportunity for their voices to be heard.”

Building more oversight over contracts was one of the goals of the reauthorized mayoral control law passed by state lawmakers in 2009. The law handed review power of contracts to the Panel for Educational Policy, the citywide school board controlled by the mayor. But since 2009, several panel members have complained that they lack the information necessary to review contracts before approving them, making their oversight authority meaningless.

In the case of the contract with Future Technology Associates, the firm accused of fraud yesterday by the city schools investigator, panel members had less than a day to review detailed information about the contract before voting on it in September 2009, according to email messages obtained by GothamSchools. Officials shared the information in response to a request by the Manhattan representative on the panel, Patrick Sullivan.

The contract came up for a renewal vote at the first meeting of the PEP after the mayoral control reauthorization. In an email to Sullivan the day of the meeting, department General Counsel Michael Best cited reauthorization as motivating school officials to prepare more thorough background materials.

Sullivan, an opponent of the Bloomberg administration’s education policies, responded that those materials — which included a draft agreement between the city and Future Technology Associates — were not sufficient. He said that a day to review them was not enough time.

A spokeswoman for the Department of Education did not respond to a request for comment today. School officials have previously said that it would be impossible to provide detailed information to panel members because in most cases the contracts are still under negotiation when they come up for PEP approval.

In his 2009 email, Best said that his “understanding” was that the city’s practice was in line with those of boards of educations around New York, which he said do not review draft contracts before approving them. He said the more powerful Board of Education that existed before Mayor Bloomberg won control of the schools in 2002 operated the same way.

A spokeswoman for the New York State School Boards Association, Barbara Bradley, disputed that characterization, saying that New York school boards have access to full contracts before they approve of them. “They do their homework, they don’t rubber-stamp the contracts,” Bradley said. “If they want to go through it line-by-line, they could. But they’re also relying on the superintendent at the board meeting to lead them through this kind of thing, or their school attorney.”

In an interview today, Sullivan called on the chairman of the PEP, Tino Hernandez, who is a mayoral appointee, to step down. “Someone needs to take accountability for the failure of the PEP here,” Sullivan said. “The PEP didn’t carry out its oversight role as mandated in the state education law, so I think we need to have a chairman who is willing to make that happen.”

Hernandez, the former chair of the City Housing Authority who was appointed to the PEP in 2004, did not respond to emails from GothamSchools today.

Gbubemi Okotieuro, the PEP’s Brooklyn representative, seconded Sullivan’s request for more information about contracts. He suggested that the Department of Education share the information it has on each contract one to two months before it comes up for a vote. “Don’t just give me two weeks notice. Give me good information well before a major contract is about to come up,” he said.

The 2009 reauthorization also handed more oversight power of contracts to the city comptroller, who reviews contracts after they are approved by the PEP. In July 2010 the DOE proposed that the PEP vote to give blanket approval of all contracts, but it withdrew this proposal after John Liu, the comptroller, spoke out against it and brought it to the attention of state legislators.

Much of “Class Warfare” will be familiar to GothamSchools readers. The book’s main characters include, on one side, former Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and, on the other, teachers unions president Randi Weingarten; many of its main plot points center on New York City, and some of the key classroom scenes take place in Harlem.

But the following insights — some of them more solidly sourced than others — were news to us. Here’s a run-down of Brill’s most intriguing New York-related reporting:

The war behind the war: Bloomberg v. Klein

• On labor issues, Bloomberg sometimes undercut Joel Klein. Klein’s team thought they could get the UFT to sign off on a change in the teacher termination process. But Bloomberg, who was nearing reelection, told them not to push their luck. “The mayor blinked,” the DOE’s one-time labor chief, Dan Weisberg, told Brill. “The mayor just gave up.” Weisberg said he “clashed almost daily” with City Hall over back-channel contract negotiations in 2005.
• Similarly, Brill reports that in 2006, Bloomberg told Klein and Weisberg to “stand down” on pushing a time limit for teachers in the Absent Teacher Reserve. As Klein left office last year, he was still calling for that policy.
• Bloomberg was weighing a third term even a year into his second, and his education policies reflected that. The 2007 teachers contract included little in the way of substantive policy, an oddity at a time when Klein was setting an aggressive tone at Tweed. In fact, the only major change, a schoolwide bonus program, was spiked this year. “The plan,” Klein told Brill, “was to make some progress in the 2005 contract — which we did, though not enough — and then go in for the kill in 2007. Mike deciding to run for a third term completely killed that.”

What Klein really thought of his proteges and more that you didn’t know about him

• Klein didn’t think he would be chancellor. Brill reports that a mutual friend suggested that Bloomberg consider Klein, but after their first meeting, Klein “didn’t think he had connected with Bloomberg.” Bloomberg now says he picked Klein because “Jesus Christ wasn’t available.”
• The animosity displayed between Klein and Randi Weingarten, the teachers union president for most of his tenure, was real. “Joel Klein would come to detest [Randi] Weingarten as much as she detested [Klein ally, PS 49 Principal Anthony] Lombardi and him,” Brill writes.
• Klein isn’t uniformly proud of his protégés. Former Klein deputies now head school systems in Baltimore, New Haven, Chicago (where Jean-Claude Brizard came from Rochester, N.Y.), and New Jersey. But in some of those places, Klein said his former deputies had not been bold enough. “All of them had big minds, but not all had strong minds,” he told Brill. Brill and Klein do not name names. Among the former Klein deputies now leading education efforts in other cities, at least two have received criticism from proponents of aggressive reform. In Baltimore, Andres Alonso has been positioned as a more collaborative alternative to Klein; in New Haven, Garth Harries, the number-two school official, led an agreement with the teachers union that critics charge included too many concessions.
• Klein’s pension from his eight years as chancellor is guaranteed at the same rate as city teachers’ — 8.25 percent per year. The benefit structure is costly for the city, as we reported last year. “Who else but Bernie Madoff guarantees 8.25 percent a year permanently?” Klein asked.

What Randi Weingarten thinks of Michael Mulgrew, why Eva Moskowitz started Harlem Success, and more charter school politics:

• Klein created the idea of charter school co-locations with the precise intention of generating a political fight. He told Brill that he slipped $250 million for charter school co-locations into 2005’s larger-than-ever budget and “nobody noticed.” He also said that his decision to give the UFT charter school space inside a city school building was strategic. “Once Randi’s school was co-located, she could never be against co-location in principle,” Klein told Brill. “She’d have to oppose the specifics of the co-location plan but not the idea.” Since then, the UFT has twice sued the city over the specifics of its co-location plans. The union also received City Council funding this year to plan its charter schools’ exit from their co-located site.
• Weingarten hasn’t approved of the battle that her successor at the UFT, Michael Mulgrew, has waged against charter schools. Brill writes that Weingarten told friends that she was embarrassed by Mulgrew’s efforts to prevent the lifting of the charter cap in 2010 because she thought the union had already lost. The cap was lifted when Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, usually a friend of the union, suddenly threw his support behind the move.
• The cap probably could have been lifted sooner if the city had made a few concessions. Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch told Brill that she wanted Klein to give up his commitment to co-location as part of the negotiations around lifting the charter school cap in 2010. “If Joel would give up on co-location and look at doing something on saturation, it would sure ease all the tension,” Tisch told Brill.
• Harlem Success Academy wasn’t Eva Moskowitz’s idea. Brill reports that several hedge-fund managers approached Moskowitz’s husband, Eric Grannis, for advice about starting a network of charter schools; Grannis had previously helped launch the Girls Prep charter school. After Moskowitz critiqued the hedge-fund managers’ plan, they offered her the job — but they told Brill they hadn’t planned to do so before that.

On Race to the Top, including what the Obama administration really thought about New York’s application:

• The Race to the Top competition was partially inspired by the Gates Foundation. In 2008, the Gates Foundation held a small-scale competition to encourage school districts and teachers unions to work together. When an Obama administration official first proposed the idea of having states compete for federal funds, they were reminded that the Gates competition had achieved its aim of fomenting collaboration.
• Race the to Top could have been three times bigger. When Obama administration officials approached David Obey, a member of the House of Representatives who controlled the appropriations committee, he wasn’t happy that the competition would annoy the unions and that his state, Wisconsin, was unlikely to win. So he cut the initial proposal of $15 billion (out of $100 billion being distributed to schools) down to the $5 billion that made up the first Race to the Top competition.
• Other states were supposed to beat New York, which came in second in Race to the Top’s second round. New York’s win — after a dismal showing in the first round — came largely because the state and its teachers unions agreed to toughen teacher evaluations (the same evaluations that are now being disputed in court). Federal officials were shocked to see that the people hired to evaluate Race to the Top applications gave so much credit to union collaboration in New York. They were also distressed that Colorado and Louisiana, which had reshaped their laws in response to the competition, had not made the cut — to the point that they considered changing the rules after the competition was over. Politics K-12, Education Week’s education politics blog, has the complete run-down on the rankings shakeup that Brill writes caused “near-panic” at the U.S. Department of Education.

Rubber rooms, Wendy Kopp and LIFO, and more miscellaneous extras:

• The number of teachers removed from the classroom on misconduct charges is tiny and falling. In the year after the city closed the rubber rooms that housed teachers accused of misconduct, Brill reports that just 155 teachers were removed from the classroom, down from 250 to 300 teachers a year before that.
• Teach for America tempered its opposition to “last in, first out” layoffs, which would have heavily affected its members, out of pragmatism. “It should be obvious how I feel but we have to work with these school systems and teachers every day,” TFA founder Wendy Kopp told Brill.
• Capacity is a big problem. Brill describes how top Harlem Success staff members quit midyear, citing the toll of their long hours and high-pressure jobs on their relationships and bodies. Meanwhile, the superintendent of Pittsburgh’s schools told Brill that even if he replaced the weakest 3.5 percent of his teachers each year with better teachers, he would be able to “refortify” only a third of his workforce in a decade. And that’s in a system with just 2,200 teachers, compared to nearly 80,000 in New York City.

A Photoshopped combo: Robert Duffy, Andrew Cuomo's selected running mate, along with a photo of an anti-mayoral control poster. Duffy supports mayoral control. (Via Flickr)

Newly announced gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo’s choice of running mate, announced this afternoon, seals the deal on his education position. The Cuomo ticket is in basically the same camp as Barack Obama and Joel Klein: in favor of charter schools and mayoral control and not afraid to challenge the teachers union.

The running mate, Robert Duffy, mayor of Rochester, has advocated for bringing mayoral control of schools to Rochester, against teachers union opposition. To defend his argument, he has cited the school system “down the Thruway” — the New York City schools under Chancellor Joel Klein. A former Klein staffer, Jean-Claude Brizzard, is Rochester’s schools superintendent. And in his State of the City address earlier this month, Duffy singled out Uncommon Schools’ Rochester charter school, True North, for praise.

That’s in keeping with what Cuomo has been saying about education since officially announcing his candidacy this week. “I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools,” he declared, announcing a list of core principles that also included his support for gay marriage and abortion rights.

Cuomo has also received the blessing — and a so-far undisclosed donation — from the lobbying wing of Democrats for Education Reform, Education Reform Now. DFER Executive Director Joe Williams told me today that he’s “impressed” with Cuomo, who breakfasted with Williams’ hedge fund board members in April.

There may be some small ways in which the new ticket steps aside from this camp, though. When I called up Rochester teachers union president Adam Urbanski this morning, he told me he thinks that Duffy “will make a terrific lieutenant governor.” He said he strongly disagrees with Duffy on mayoral control, and that he expects the union will clash with Cuomo and Duffy on charter schools. But he said the two men have a wide range of agreements:

He is in favor of neighborhood schools to the extent possible; he is in favor of schools serving as centers for the community and neighborhoods – in other words he is in favor of comuntiy schools. He’s in favor of strong discipline and school safety. He’s in favor of rigor.

Indeed, in the same State of the City speech, Duffy endorsed the idea of a neighborhood school:

We will guarantee a place for elementary school children at their nearest neighborhood school, if that is what the family wants. There will be choices of other schools with special programs and services, but every young child will be able to attend a neighborhood school if their parents choose. That will reduce transportation costs overall, and allow us to provide transportation for all families that need it.

He also endorsed the idea of “community schools”:

The school buildings themselves will become bridges to neighborhood-based services – instead of islands that sit vacant every afternoon, weekend and over the summer.

A revised law has been on the books for nearly a month, but the new system is still a mystery. Though the law calls for a new parent center, greater oversight of the Department of Education’s contracts, and an independent auditor of the department’s education data, all of these alterations are in their infancy, and none have been put in place.

Won as part of a deal between a group of runaway senators and Mayor Bloomberg, the parent center is perhaps the most concrete change with the least clear future. It will be housed at CUNY and will cost the city and state $1.6 million, but education officials have yet to define its role or how it will differ from the DOE’s current parent outreach, the Office for Family Engagement and Advocacy. Asked how far along the center’s development is, a DOE spokesperson had no comment.

The comptroller’s office, which has been given enhanced oversight of DOE contracts under the new law, is in a similar purgatory. Just as the position has gained new power, it has been caught in an election season that will endure until November, leaving neither the current office holder, mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson, nor his potential replacements, with the time take advantage of the law.

At the Independent Budget Office — the group chosen to double-check the DOE’s math — things are moving at a faster clip.

Doug Turetsky, a spokesman for the IBO, said the organization is in the process of interviewing candidates for education-related positions, but did not have a set idea of what the education data analysis arm of the IBO would look like.

“We’re feeling our way a bit here as we figure out who’s out there. In tandem, we’re figuring out how to get this in place,” Turetsky said. “We’re talking to a variety of people from academics to advocates and everyone in between to get greater insight into where people’s concerns lie and what they’re interested in.”

One of the more immediate changes is taking place in the role of superintendent. Under the new law, superintendents will have greater supervision of principals and more oversight of schools’ budgets. District family advocates will also now report to superintendents rather than the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, reverting to the way the system worked before the office’s creation in 2007.

Comptroller candidate John Liu and mayoral candidate Tony Avella joined an energized and sometimes raucous crowd of around 70 public school parents, teachers and advocates at the launch event for the Coalition for Public Education, held at the lower Manhattan headquarters of the municipal union District Council 37.

The coalition could be one legacy of this spring’s protracted debate over school governance. That debate was finally settled, at least for the next six years, when Gov. Paterson signed into law a new bill that continues a modified version of mayoral control. Vowing to keep the fight against mayoral control going into the new school year, coalition organizers announced rallies in four boroughs for the first day of school next week.

“The struggle continues on this battle,” said Esmeralda Simmons, director of the Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar Evers College. “Do not be fooled into thinking that because something has happened in Albany, there’s nothing else that can be done.”

Conference organizers were joined by two of the state legislature’s staunchest mayoral control opponents, Senators Bill Perkins and Eric Adams.

Avella and Frances Villar, another mayoral candidate, also called for greater checks on mayoral power and for the phasing out of the city’s charter schools. Liu and public advocate candidate Norman Siegel made pitches for greater transparency and oversight of the Department of Education.

By the end of the afternoon, small groups of parents, teachers, students and activists had developed broad guidelines for the coalition’s continued work. Most recommendations revolved around the need for an independent parent union and more well-developed teacher training.

But, organizers said, if changes to school governance structure don’t happen soon, they will take increasingly vocal action. Organizers are already planning rallies at four schools around the city on the first day of school, though they have yet to decide the exact locations.

City Council member Charles Barron asked the audience to continue lobbying politicians for change in school governance. But if major change doesn’t come, he said, activists should organize massive nonviolent resistance to schools controlled by the mayor.

More audio highlights from the event are below:

The smooth stylings of the “Say No to Mayoral Control” rap greeted parents and teachers as they arrived at the meeting:

Democratic mayoral candidate Tony Avella said that he would choose the next schools chancellor based on his or her experience as an educator in New York City schools:

Avella also argued that charter schools are a diversion from the real task of improving all of the city’s public schools:

Frances Villar, the 26-year-old Party for Socialism and Liberation mayoral candidate, explained why she also opposes charter schools:

Comptroller candidate John Liu praised the new school governance bill for granting the comptroller greater oversight over Department of Education contracts and said that he was eager to exercise that power:

Public advocate candidate Norman Siegel called for greater oversight of the Department of Education.

New York State Senator Eric Adams discussed the role parent involvement should play under the new school governance structure.

Mayor Bloomberg announced his eight appointees to the Panel for Educational Policy on WOR Radio’s The John Gambling Show this morning. Of the people he named to the board, four will return to their previous positions, while the other four will join the panel for the first time.

Bloomberg said that the new panel will complete the process of restoring mayoral control. “It is the last step in re-establishing the school governance that has led to all of these improvements over the past seven years,” he told Gambling.

The newly-formed panel will not be an exact replica of the previous one, but the changes are more modest than some had hoped. Going into this summer’s school governance fight, critics who charged that the PEP was little more than a rubber stamp for the mayor’s policies had hoped to give members fixed terms and to prevent the mayor from appointing the majority of its members. Though neither of those changes happened, the new panel will have some increased oversight of things like contracts and school utilization.

The mayor’s appointees have close ties to his administration. One new PEP member, Gitte Peng, spent five years as a senior education policy adviser to Deputy Mayor for Education Dennis Walcott. Peng helped craft the original school governance legislation that consolidated the mayor’s control of the schools.

Walcott briefly served as president of the Board of Education this summer before mayoral control was reauthorized. Bloomberg said today that Peng’s appointment would permit Walcott’s presence “live on” at the board.

Obligated by the new law to appoint two public school parents, the mayor named Linda Lausell Bryant and Joe Chan. Bryant heads Inwood House, a family support center that has contracted with the city’s Department of Education to work with pregnant students.

Chan was formerly a policy advisor to Deputy Mayor Daniel L. Doctoroff and more recently was appointed by the administration to head a council on the redevelopment of downtown Brooklyn.

Rounding out the new additions is Tomas Morales, president of the College of Staten Island. Morales “looks forward to working with his fellow appointees, each of whom are respected leaders in their fields,” a spokesperson for the college wrote in a statement.

Though the mayor’s office did not offer reasons for previous board members’ decisions not to return, at least two seats were vacated by former appointees who are barred from the panel by the new law. One is Joel Klein who, as chancellor of the city’s schools, can only be an ex-officio, non-voting participant.

PEP members can no longer be employed by a board or agency where the mayor has the majority of appointees, a rule that may have excluded former panel member Alan Aviles, who is president and CEO of the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation.

Bloomberg also replaced panel members Dr. Edison Jackson and Marita Regan. Jackson announced his resignation in June, just before the last meeting of the panel before mayoral control lapsed.

Spokesmen for Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. and Queens Borough President Helen Marshall both said that they will reappoint Anna Santos and Dmytro Fedkowski, respectively, to the panel.

They will join Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s appointee, Patrick Sullivan, who was re-named to the panel earlier this week.

A spokesmen for Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz said the president is still interviewing candidates for the position and hoped to announce a decision before the school year begins.

A DOE official said he did not know when the panel would officially reconvene.

The mayor’s new appointtees did not return calls for comment today.

Borough President Scott Stringer said he would reappoint Patrick Sullivan  to the Panel for Educational Policy. The PEP was eliminated on July 1 when the city’s school governance law expired and will soon be resurrected now that the law is back in place.

Stringer first appointed Sullivan, who is a a senior vice president at Chartis International — an insurance corporation — and a public school parent, to the panel two years ago. He quickly became the board’s most vocal critic of Chancellor Joel Klein’s educational policies. Stringer explained the decision today via phone while sitting in a noisy lower Manhattan diner.

“I thought it was important today to make it clear that we’re going to have an appointee who has a reputation for being the most vigilant and the most independent member of the PEP,” he shouted. “He calls it the way he sees it.”

In July, when borough presidents and the mayor rushed to create a Board of Education, Stringer appointed his legal council Jimmy Yan. “I needed someone who could grasp the legal issues that would be involved,” he said. “It very well could have been Patrick. He didn’t necessarily want to do it.”

Stringer said he did not know when the PEP would be reconstituted, or whether the other borough presidents — who appoint five of the 13 board members — would rename their previous appointees. The DOE did not return calls for comment.

The new mayoral control law would bring few changes to the panel, Sullivan said. “The mayor has the super majority and he’s shown that he’ll replace anyone who disagrees with him,” he said. “There’ll be more votes on contracts and on changes in school configurations, but I don’t expect him to lose any votes.”

Sullivan said he was undecided about how he would vote on the mayor’s plan to end social promotion for fourth and sixth graders, which the mayor has said would be the panel’s first order of business.

“I would like them to release the RAND studies,” he said. “I don’t see why they would ask for the vote without releasing the years of research.”

The borough president said he had concerns about ending social promotion. “We have to make sure that if we’re going to leave kids back, that there’s a real mechanism to support them. It’s something that our office has been very critical about.”

Rupert Murdoch and Arne Duncan. (Images via Creative Commons)

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”

New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.

“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.

The news series the Post ran extolling mayoral control

Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Duncan’s quote does illustrate a strange alliance that fought hard for mayoral control’s renewal, Murdoch and the secretary of education among them. In addition to running a series of news articles highlighting victories of mayoral control in the past seven years, Murdoch’s Post also published an aggressive slew of editorials mocking anyone who stood in the path of a full-throttled renewal of the mayor’s power. (Remember Randi Weingarten, puppet master?)

Murdoch also played a behind-the-scenes role in his position as co-chairman of the Partnership for New York City, a lobbying group that represents business interests. (The other co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs.) The group kept a low profile during the mayoral control fight, but worked behind the scenes to broker a compromise between groups fighting over the law, including the city teachers union and the Bloomberg administration.

Duncan fought for mayoral control, too, and he often did so in the pages of the Post. It was in that newspaper that he first entered the local fight, offering an exclusive interview previewing remarks he made the next day at the Sheraton, where the National Action Network was holding a conference on education. Duncan then sat down with the paper’s editorial board, where he criticized a cut to charter schools by the state. Later, he penned a letter to a civic group that got into the nitty-gritty policy question of whether or not to give school board members fixed terms. (Like the Bloomberg administration and the Post, Duncan opposed them.)

While the efforts of the newspaper and the secretary probably did play a role in renewing mayoral control, the accuracy of the stories that the Post ran is arguable. The paper called the city’s racial achievement gap “the incredible shrinking race gap,” yet a recent New York Times story, a story I wrote in the New York Sun, and analysis by academic researchers suggests much more modest language is in order. The paper also wrote story after story about turnaround schools — without once profiling the schools that have remained failures despite mayoral control.

Not to be a Grinch, or even to argue that “balance” could have solved the problem. But is a little editorial independence so much to ask for?

Glynda Carr

The effort kicks off tonight with two “neighborhood dialogue” meetings in Brooklyn and Queens, said Glynda Carr, executive director of Education Voters of New York, a three-year old branch of the national Education Voters of America.

The group has previously supported some of mayoral control’s staunchest opponents in Albany. But Carr said that she aims to launch a public conversation about schools freed of political agendas, including her own. “These neighborhood dialogues aren’t going to be framed,” she said.

Carr said she planned to use the fruits of the fall meetings to map out an agenda for future local campaign work.  If she succeeds, her group could become a key player amid a crop of new lobbying groups directing their dollars with education issues in mind.

In 2008, NY EdPAC, Education Voters of New York’s political action committee, considered candidates’ positions on increased accountability under mayoral control in their criteria for endorsements. According to campaign contribution records, among the list of candidates the group supported in 2008 are Senators Eric Adams, Kevin Parker, Velmanette Montgomery and Ruben Diaz, Sr., four of the eight who voted against mayoral control today. The group gave a total of just over $69,000 to 43 state legislature candidates around New York state in 2008. The group piloted its legislative strategy in New York in 2006 and 2007, supporting the winning campaigns of three candidates in Westchester, Syracuse and Nassau County, Long Island.

Carr has also been a critic of mayoral control and has testified to the State Assembly urging a more autonomous Panel for Educational Policy, the school board under the mayor’s tenure. She is the former chief of staff to State Senator Kevin Parker, a sponsor of the Better Schools Act, which would have removed the mayor’s control over the Panel for Educational Policy and was defeated in July.

NY EdPAC isn’t the only political action committee currently wading into the city educational fray. Last month members of the parent-led NYC Coalition for Educational Justice launched their own committee to support City Council candidates. The Democrats for Education Reform lobbying group, launched in 2007, has also been pouring money into local New York races with an eye to advancing its pet causes of charter schools and aggressive accountability for failing schools.

Imagine: NY Schools will continue to hold public forums throughout August and use ideas from the meetings to generate questions for mayoral candidates’ debates and City Council candidates’ forums this fall. The ultimate goal is to create a policy “blueprint for 21st century schools” that the group will present to the new mayor and City Council, she said.

The schedule and locations for Imagine: NY Schools’ “neighborhood dialogue” meetings can be found here.

The Center for Immigrant Families (CIF) joins others across the city and nation who are working for justice and equity in our public schools-one of our last remaining universal public goods in the United States. Public education is a human right, not a luxury, and our schools should nurture the development and learning of every child.  As parents, caregivers, and concerned community members, we want schools that reflect, respect, serve our communities — and that draw upon the rich resources within our communities as sources of learning and support.

Mayoral control and the system we have now does not support this vision. 

Instead, under Mayor Bloomberg, a top-down, business model has been imposed on an educational system that promotes high-stakes and punitive testing. These tests not only cause enormous stress, but also prevent meaningful learning and critical thinking. Today, only 3 percent of our children’s school day is spent on physical or creative activities.

Our children need art, physical education, and enrichment activities, not test prep. Despite what has been proven to be disastrous for young children, the mayor wants to test children in grades K-2.

High stakes testing and NCLB — especially under mayoral control — has led to the closing of many schools.  When schools are closed, the results can be devastating. Entire communities are destroyed and are labeled as ”failures.” Instead of being given the resources that they need to survive and flourish, closed schools are often replaced by schools that do not serve our children. Within gentrifying neighborhoods, these new schools often serve “special” pools of students and can be a “draw” to real estate developers. We have seen this happening in our own neighborhoods in Uptown Manhattan.

Other examples of mayoral control show that our experiences here in New York are not isolated. They point to a pattern in which mayoral control has been used to move forward agendas for charters and other ”public-private partnerships” — which we understand to be deep inroads towards the privatization our public schools.

Much public discussion centers around the role of parents. Recently, the issue of parent training has been raised. As parents and caregivers, the notion of parents needing to be “trained” often comes from a race and class biased deficit model — focusing on what we need to learn rather than on what and how we can contribute and how we can build genuine parent, school, and community partnerships.

Many claim to know the needs of low-income, immigrant, and parents of color. We say: please take the time to hear what we — as parents and our children’s first educators — believe our children need to grow and flourish. We ask that you join us, and the growing movement to work for justice and transformation of our public education system.

Perla Placencia and Ujju Aggarwal are collective members of the Center for Immigrant Families (CIF), an inter-generational and collectively-run organization of low-income immigrant women of color and community members. Our mission is to address the inter-connected challenges facing our communities by linking our personal/psychological well-being, health, and development to sustained organizing focused on the root causes we confront and their multi-layered impact on our lives and communities. We work to build sustainable power and leadership among low-income parents of color to ”take back” the schools and demand a public education system that truly serves our children.

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.

Advocates for the creation of a parent-training center have said it would encourage and aide parents in getting involved in their Community Education Councils and School Leadership Teams.

Assemblyman Rory Lancman (D-Queens) said he would support training for parents on education councils and leadership teams, but was wary of voting for a the bill if it “was going to be some very diluted, very broad based outreach effort to parents.”

“Citywide, we’re talking about an almost insignificant amount of money,” he said. “It’s hard for me to even conceive how you even get any bang for that limited amount of buck.”

The parent training center bill is one of four amendments that are part of the deal brokered last week by Democratic state senators and Mayor Bloomberg. As part of the agreement, senators promised they would vote for Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver’s school governance bill, provided that the Assembly passes these amendments. Silver’s bill preserves mayoral control of schools, while making modest changes.

Speaking on a radio program this morning, Silver said he would only guarantee that the Assembly would discuss the amendments when it returned to Albany. However, Assembly members would “be sympathetic,” to the Senate’s proposed amendments, he said.

Other amendments would create a council on the arts, would require schools to hold yearly school safety meetings with parents, and would give district superintendents more school oversight.

The Assembly members I spoke with were generally supportive of these measures, which require no funding, but did not have a sense of how popular they were with their colleagues. Bloomberg has already signed a memorandum of understanding, agreeing to implement the amendments administratively, regardless of how the Assembly votes.

Weprin questioned the necessity of signing these amendments into law.

“These things don’t seem like laws to me, they seem like things the mayor should just be doing,” he said, adding, “I guess the senators needed to save face.”

Liz Benjamin of the Daily News is reporting that senators will interrupt their summer recess to vote next Thursday on the school governance bill passed last month by the Assembly. The early-August vote adheres to the timeline set out by Mayor Bloomberg and the UFT when the mayoral control deal was brokered late last week, after the Senate had already decamped for the summer.

But the school governance saga won’t end once the Senate passes the Assembly bill, which adds some checks to mayoral control. Benjamin reports:

The Senate is moving ahead with its votes on chapter amendments despite the fact that the Assembly, which passed its mayoral control reauthorization bill in June, has not yet agreed to do the same.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this morning reiterated that the only commitment he has given is to discuss the amendments with his majority members in when they return to Albany.

Outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who played a major role in the Senate negotiations, told GothamSchools last week that conversations with Silver led her to believe that the Assembly will pass the chapter amendments. “You know the Assembly will in good faith look at the chapter amendments,” she said.

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.

“No determination about the future of the Campaign for Better Schools has been made,” said the campaign’s director Billy Easton, in an email today.

“There is no question that the groups who comprise the Campaign for Better Schools will continue working together and organizing for educational justice,” he wrote.

At least a portion of the campaign’s funding will end this Friday, when a $350,000 grant from the Donors’ Education Collaborative, known as DEC, is set to expire.

“The grant was given a little over a year ago to encourage debate around the issue of mayoral control,” said Norma Rollins, coordinator of DEC. Rollins added that all of the campaign’s lobbying efforts were funded separately.

Steven Bell, a member of the 3Rs Coalition, which has worked with the Parent Commission to lobby for increased parental involvement, said his group would continue lobbying regardless of whatever deal is brokered.  “Even after the legislature passes whatever they pass, we’ll probably continue working,” he said.

Leonie Haimson, a member of the Parent Commission, was more guarded about the organization’s future. “I think we’ll be putting out a statement later,” she said. “I don’t think we want to jump the gun at this point.”

Standing outside of 250 Broadway, where a dozen of the city’s senators met and others listened in by phone, Democratic conference leader John Sampson said, “One thing you can say today is, we have an agreement with respect to school governance.”

Senators cautioned that the deal’s language has yet to be finalized on paper, but what they described mirrors an earlier agreement that fell apart last week. Today’s agreement would add extra checks to a mayoral control bill passed by the Assembly, including a parent training center based out of CUNY, an increased supervisory role for superintendents, and a new citywide arts panel. According to a statement released by Sen. Carl Kruger’s office, the deal also includes the creation of a Senate subcommittee to oversee the Department of Education.

“All’s well that ends well,” said outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who said that she has been acting as a “go-between” for the two sides, spending Thursday night on the phone helping to broker today’s deal.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, Dawn Walker, released a statement saying:

The agreement “preserves the accountability and authority necessary to ensure that the gains we’ve made — in math and reading scores, graduation rates and school safety — continue. At the same time, the agreement addresses concerns that have been raised by legislators in a way that makes sense.”

Sens. Sampson and Pedro Espada were vague about when they would return to Albany to pass the Assembly’s mayoral control bill. Espada said it would happen “before children start school in September.” But Walker’s statement sets the date as the first week of August.

When the senators do return, it’s expected that they will pass the Assembly’s mayoral control bill, as well as the chapter amendment they agreed to today. Weingarten said that when the Assembly returns for session, Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver would introduce the amendment.

As usual, not everyone is on board. Throughout the afternoon, senators sent conflicting messages as to whether they had actually reached a deal with the mayor. Sens. Hiram Monserrate and Ruben Diaz Sr. left the meeting, telling the waiting press that a deal would be reached either today or tomorrow.

“The four amigos are divided today,” Diaz said in Spanish to a group of reporters. “It’s a done deal, but we’re not all in agreement.”

“We’re not exactly home yet,” Monserrate said.

Minutes later, Sens. Espada and Sampson emerged to announce that an agreement had been reached.

Sen. Bill Perkins told the Daily News’ Liz Benjamin that the issue of police presence in schools had not been addressed to his satisfaction. “I’m looking for something stronger,” he told Benjamin, who says she will believe there’s a deal when it passes the Senate.

Hashed out by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and the two top Senate Democrats, Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, the agreement is several steps away from being finalized. The rest of the Senate’s Democratic conference will have to sign onto the agreement — and so will the state Assembly. Even more difficult, for the deal to become law before the next school year, both houses of the legislature will have to return to Albany this summer to pass legislation.

The Assembly already passed a bill renewing mayoral control of the public schools, with some tweaks, before the end of its regular session. The bill enjoyed the support of the Bloomberg administration, but senate Democrats, once they solidified their thin majority, pushed back against signing onto an identical copy. They pushed for extra tweaks including  a way to guarantee parent involvement in the public schools.

At the heart of last night’s deal is the parent training center, which, according to the deal, will be housed at CUNY. Even this decision has not been without controversy. Initially, senators advocated for the center to be lodged at NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, but the mayor and schools chancellor Klein objected, centering their concerns on a retired scholar, Debbie Meier, who has criticized Bloomberg’s education policies and has office at the Center.

The Center’s director, Pedro Noguera, said he wasn’t sure if Meier was the real reason the parent training center is going to CUNY. “NYU didn’t like being in the middle of a controversy,” Noguera said, adding that high-level administrators at the University were “all very sensitive about alienating the mayor.”

As for why Klein and Bloomberg opposed the placement: “I think they might be scared of a center in a place they feel they can’t control,” Noguera said. Bloomberg administration sources have said that CUNY was chosen because senators wanted a center with arms in all five boroughs.

Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. delivered a speech in Spanish against no-bid contracts. (GothamSchools)

The circus around the State Senate intensified today as half a dozen senators gathered to complain that Mayor Bloomberg would not meet them at the bargaining table. Immediately afterward, senators confirmed that negotiations are, in fact, ongoing.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be negotiated with,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a persistent critic of mayoral control. Joining Perkins on the steps of City Hall were Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada, Eric Adams, Ruben Diaz Sr., and City Councilman Robert Jackson. All of the senators were among those who supported a failed bill that would have curtailed mayoral control.

After the press conference, Monserrate acknowledged to reporters that negotiations were already in progress. “We’re at the table,” he said. “There are some meetings occurring.”

Those meetings, which began on Monday after mayoral control talks fell apart last week, are being held by Democratic conference leader John Sampson’s staff and deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf.

Senators would not discuss the details of the negotiations today, but they reiterated their support for increased parent involvement, funding for art programs, and fixed terms for citywide school board members. A source close to the discussions described the talks as “fragile.”

Adams said Mayor Bloomberg had “misunderstood” his opposition. Saying that the senators would not “knuckle over,” he added, “We’re solid in our communities, you can do what you want.”

Nursing bruises from the city’s editorial boards, the group spent as much time chastising absent editors as it did railing against no-bid contracts, the subject of Diaz’s speech.

“We are going to be the bad guys,” Adams said. “It doesn’t matter what you think of us. It matters what the parents think of us.”

The presidents made the request in a letter to Deputy Mayor and Board of Education President Dennis Walcott today, asking for a Board of Education meeting as early as this August. They wrote:

The political situation in Albany remains unsettled, and while the Senate may return in the fall, experience has sadly shown us that even weeks of negotiation can prove fruitless. We must prepare for the possibility that the stalemate will continue and the Board as presently constituted will be the governing authority of the system and its more than one million children for some months.

The acknowledgment comes 22 days after the Board of Education first met in a scripted eight-minute session during which a majority vote called for the board not to meet again until September.

A third borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. of the Bronx, endorsed the letter today in a statement, saying he wants to take the challenge a step further:

I would be willing to take their recommendations a step further and demand that the Board of Education meet as soon as possible to vote on each of the issues they have raised.

The three borough presidents alone cannot dictate what the Board of Education does, as they have only 3 of 7 votes. A meeting “as soon as possible” might also be hampered by the fact that Diaz’s appointee, Dolores Fernandez, is on vacation through Aug. 9, according to an e-mail she wrote to GothamSchools. Two other board members were appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, and the other two, appointees of the Staten Island and Queens borough presidents, include Walcott, a deputy mayor, and an ally of the mayor’s.

The full letter from Markowitz and Stringer is here, including a seven-point plan for how to reconstitute the pre-2002 school governance law.

UPDATE: I just spoke to Stringer, who disputed my characterization that he ever had an alliance with Bloomberg. “We never had an alliance,” he said. “We agreed on an approach, and we may all agree with this approach in 24 hours.”

Stringer, a former Assembly member, also predicted that the pre-2002 governance structure could last for “at least a year.” Lawmakers are not scheduled to return to session until January 1, 2010, but major bills like New York City school governance often take an entire session to negotiate.

Stringer said that the political reality means that elected officials must plan to follow the pre-2002 law, even if they support mayoral control, as Stringer and Markowitz both said they do in the letter to Walcott.

“When you quickly have to reconstitute a board, obviously you reconstitute a board so that you keep the system running, we don’t face lawsuits and dysfunction and political gamesmanship,” he said. “Now, going forward, we have to look at ways to make things better.”

Stringer said he is optimistic that Walcott will support his recommendations, noting that Stringer made the first suggestion to reconvene the Board of Education and the Bloomberg administration signed on.

UPDATE 2: The mayor’s office is signaling no interest in holding such a meeting. “We expect the governance debate in Albany to be resolved before the Board would need to meet,” Dawn Walker, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bloomberg.

7 Point Report Markowitz Stringer

Democratic conference leader John Sampson and senators Shirley Huntley and Martin Dilan met with advocacy groups and City Hall officials last night to restart negotiations, according to Senator Eric Adams (D-Brooklyn). And early this morning, members of Sampson’s staff met with deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf, according to a source close to the discussions. Cerf did not return requests for comment late this afternoon.

“There was a meeting held today with the mayor’s office that we believe went extremely well,” the source said.

“There was no agreement, but they’re moving forward. We’re hopeful that we’ll have something in the upcoming days.”

Sources said that Bloomberg did not attend either of the meetings. A spokesperson for the mayor’s office declined to comment on the negotiations.

Adams said he had “no idea,” whether the school governance fight would be resolved before the Fall. “We’re not scheduled to go back up to Albany until it’s time to deal with the deficit,” he said. “So I don’t know if we’re going to make a special trip.”

Talks fell apart at the end of last week after the teachers’ union, City Hall officials, and the largest group criticizing mayoral control, the Campaign for Better Schools, crafted a deal. At first, Democratic senators expressed support for the agreement, but later Sampson told a city source, “This is not one-tenth of what I need.”

Over the weekend, the impasse between the senators and City Hall seemed to push the verbal warfare to a new low. At a rally on Sunday, Sen. Bill Perkins accused the mayor of “treating us like we’re some people on his plantation.” Bloomberg shot back with a historical jab,  implicitly comparing himself to Neville Chamberlain and New York State senators to Nazis.