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A screen shot of the web site registered 9 days ago that touts Eva Moskowitz for mayor in its title.

Two websites registered recently — one earlier this month — raise an intriguing possibility: Could a charter school leader jump into the next mayoral race?

The website addresses tout Eva Moskowitz, the founder of the Success Charter network, and Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone and Promise Academy charter schools, for mayor. Neither site includes any content.

The websites, EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com and GeoffreyCanadaForMayor.com, might reflect mounting concern among charter school supporters that Mayor Bloomberg’s successor will not continue his level of support for charter schools.

The nervousness may have increased when Anthony Weiner resigned from Congress last week. Of all the likely mayoral candidates, Weiner had appeared to be one of the more supportive of charter schools.

“Personally, as a New Yorker, Bloomberg’s successor has weighed heavily on my mind,” Democracy Prep charter network founder Seth Andrew, who registered the URL touting Canada in December, said in an e-mail statement. “While I think Mr. Canada would be a great choice, we’ve never talked about it and he’s made it publicly clear that he loves his day job.”

Andrew used his personal email and mailing addresses to register the Canada site.

EvaMoskowitzForMayor.com was registered anonymously through a hosting service based in California on June 6, according to WhoIs.Net, which publishes records of web site registrations.

Responding to a request for comment by e-mail, a spokesperson for Moskowitz said that she had never heard of the domain. “Looked into it. Don’t know anything about this domain. Let me know if you find out who bought it,” Jenny Sedlis, the director of external affairs at Moskowitz’s charter network, wrote via e-mail. (more…)

In a feature today, Anna Phillips reports on what Thompson was really like while president of the Board of Education:

…That was Thompson the manager, whom former board members, colleagues, and even political rivals from that era describe as “fair,” “conciliatory,” and possessing a “quiet leadership,” that created a working majority on an often-fractious board.

“He tamed the board in a good way,” the former colleague said.

Yet those who praise him as a calm leader stop short of saying he led a reform movement in the halls of 110 Livingston St., the old home of the Board of Education. As president of the board, they say, the structure of his job prevented him from doing more than strongly nudging the chancellor to propose one thing or another.

In the first policy speech of his campaign for mayor, Comptroller Bill Thompson announced a ten-point plan to improve the city’s public schools.

Simultaneously attacking Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s schools record and outlining his own priorities, Thompson outlined a plan focused broadly on changing curriculum and school environments, improving programs for under-served groups such as English-language learners  and special education students, increasing community participation in schools and improving transparency in the Department of Education.

Item number one on the mayoral hopeful’s list was appointing a career educator as chancellor, a position currently filled by Klein who is a trained lawyer and does not have a background in education.

“We need a Schools Chancellor with a solid and extensive education background,” he said, “who not only cares about children, but who understands fundamentally what goes on in the classroom and respects the tough work that teachers and principals perform on the front lines of our system every day.” (more…)

Comptroller William Thompson is releasing his second education audit in two days right now, this time focusing on testing conditions and oversight in the city schools. Also for the second time in two days, the comptroller has barred a Department of Education spokesman from his announcement.

Today’s audit exposes “major flaws in testing by the New York City Department of Education,” Thompson’s office said in a press announcement this morning. But the audit says, “Our observations conducted at the sample schools on the day of testing did not reveal any instances of cheating.”

Today’s report is already drawing some of the same criticism from the city as yesterday’s audit, about how city schools qualify students for graduation. That audit found sloppy record-keeping at many city schools but no clear evidence of grade-tampering. City officials charged that Thompson conducted the graduation audit for political, rather than professional, reasons. As the city comptroller, Thompson’s job is to audit official city statistics. But he is also the main challenger to Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection bid.

DOE press chief David Cantor leveled the first complaints about today’s audit just minutes after the press conference began — a press conference that he was not attending after being kicked out by a member of Thompson’s staff. (more…)

Remember how, in 2001, when he was first running for mayor, Michael Bloomberg vowed to require all public school students to wear uniforms, to bring in private companies to take over long-failing schools, and to re-evaluate tenured teachers every two years?

These are among the fun facts included in a self-evaluation Bloomberg released today, running through all the promises he made in his 2001 and 2005 campaigns, and reporting that he’s followed through with most of them (97% in 2005, the report says).

The list of education promises Bloomberg terms stick-a-fork-in-it “Done” (as opposed to those he “reconsidered”) includes many that did obviously happen, but it also includes claims that could inspire challenge. Four promises that caught my eye:

• Improve access to selective schools for students in under-served communities. (2005 campaign promise) The mayor’s report notes that the city now offers summer workshops for parents to encourage them to consider having their children take the entrance exam for selective high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science. The city has also offered summer test-prep institutes for low-income students. Still, The New York Times reported last year that proportionately fewer racial minorities were taking the admissions exam, and a lower percentage were passing. There was little change when the paper reexamined the figures this year. Gifted and talented programs for primary school students, meanwhile, have also gotten less racially diverse under Bloomberg’s watch, The Times reported.
• Give teachers more control over how they teach. (2001 promise) The report explains that this “done” stems from the new availability of “a series of tools for teachers that highlight students needs and provides teachers the information to focus on helping students master their subjects.” I assume that refers to projects like ARIS, the data warehouse, and the periodic assessments known as Acuity, meant to give teachers an ongoing portrait of what students do and don’t know throughout the school year. While some teachers embrace these tools, others say the tools limit the way they teach, forcing them to focus too much time on test preparation. (more…)

Believe it or not, there are just four months before the city’s mayoral election, and tonight the three declared candidates will take questions from a group whose endorsement is still outstanding.

Tonight’s Working Families Party forum isn’t a debate, per Mayor Bloomberg’s refusal to debate his two challengers, Democrats William Thompson Jr., the comptroller, and City Councilman Tony Avella. Instead, the candidates will each answer the same seven questions, of which one is about the city schools:

The question alludes to the recent Center for New York City Affairs report that showed that some large high schools suffered as the city opened more small schools.

The Working Families Party hasn’t yet endorsed a candidate, which Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News says doesn’t bode well for Thompson. (The teachers’ union is a major financial backer of WFP; in a recent gift, the union sent $20,000 to the party in February 2008.) Tonight’s forum could be a deciding factor in whom the party endorses. Watch the forum online here starting at 5:30 p.m.

The worst examples of overspending on DOE contracts, according to Comptroller William Thompson.

Department of Education contracts routinely cost the city far more than initially estimated, according to an analysis that City Comptroller William Thompson issued just before today’s City Council hearing. The under-estimations could be costing taxpayers a fortune in the price of things like Xerox machines and cafeteria equipment, whose prices could be negotiated at much lower rates if the city could accurately predict just how much schools would end up using them.

One out of every five DOE contracts that ended in the last two years went over its estimated cost by at least 25 percent, according to Thompson’s analysis. In the most egregious overrun, a contract with Xerox Corporation to lease copy machines to schools ended up costing the taxpayers more than $67 million. It had been estimated at a cost of $1 million.

In a crossly worded letter sent to Chancellor Joel Klein today, Thompson, a mayoral candidate who has been highlighting public school issues as part of his criticism of Mayor Bloomberg, called the overruns part of a “troubling pattern of mismanagement” at the department.

Department of Education officials strongly disputed Thompson’s accusations and his figures in an interview and in testimony to the City Council today. The contracts at issue, called “requirements” contracts, can stretch above their estimated costs because they never actually set a total amount of services to be provided. Instead, they set a certain price for the service — say, renting a copy machine, or of placing a classified ad — and let the number of times the department will buy the service stay open-ended. (more…)

Rep. Anthony Weiner at today criticized Mayor Bloomberg's work in the public schools — and seemed like he might want to keep doing that straight into City Hall.

Anthony Weiner, the congressman who used to be a mayoral candidate and now is not so sure, sounded very much like he’s still running at the Assembly hearing in Brooklyn today on mayoral control.

In a brief interview with me, Weiner said that if he does run for mayor, education would be an important part of his case against the incumbent, Michael Bloomberg. “Arguably the most important part of the conversation,” he said. He then declared of Bloomberg, “I think his most profound success was gaining mayoral control, and his biggest failure is what he’s done with it.”

Weiner’s testimony to the Assembly members who held the hearing comprised might have been his most bristling criticism of Mayor Bloomberg’s education program yet — and was certainly a departure from previous declarations that he has made promising not to “undo” Bloomberg’s work but to “build on” it. He said the mayor has both failed to empower parents and teachers — and has not produced good academic results. “When you look at the only true thing that you know can’t be fudged, how we’re doing on the national test, the results are decidedly mixed, and that’s putting it favorably,” Weiner said.

The candidate-like posturing came as a surprise to some at the hearing, who said they assumed the congressman’s recent decision to hand back $60,000 in campaign contributions meant he was out of the race. One attendee, Damon Cabbagestalk Jr., a black reverend who has run for public advocate in the past, smacked Weiner on the back as he left the room at City Technical College and told him he hopes he runs for mayor. “You’ve got my vote,” Cabbagestalk said. (more…)

Comptroller Bill Thompson, who is also a candidate for mayor, ended his appearance on NY1′s “Road to City Hall” last night with the clearest preview yet of how he will challenge Mayor Bloomberg on the schools front. He will quote Diane Ravitch.

Thompson cited Ravitch, the NYU education historian who has emerged as a prime critic of the mayor’s education efforts, after host Dominic Carter painted a picture of how Bloomberg is likely to portray the comptroller in campaign ads.

Carter imagined ads that would single out the comptroller’s tenure as president of the Board of Education, in a pitch to associate Thompson with the days before mayoral control of the schools, which the mayor has characterized as dismal.

Thompson replied by challenging Bloomberg’s portrait of the city schools’ progress since 2002. He said that the “eminent” Ravitch has shown that test scores went up just as much before Bloomberg took office as they did when Thompson served as Board of Education president. (He served in that role from 1996 to 2001.) A spokesman for Thompson today sent me to this Ravitch quotation as evidence. The key sentence:

The gains under Crew and Levy from 1999-2002 were larger on the state tests in both reading and math than under Klein from 2003-2007.

I reached Ravitch by telephone today. She told me that she was surprised to hear herself cited by Thompson. (Like me, she happened to be watching NY1 at just the right moment last night — though probably unlike me, in her case the timing of “Gossip Girl” had little to do with that.) “I’m not involved in his campaign or anyone else’s campaign,” Ravitch told me. “I don’t do politics. I haven’t been politically active since the Hubert Humphrey campaign in 1968.” (more…)

Comptroller Bill Thompson. (Via Azi's Flickr.)

My former colleague Jacob Gershman is very good at raising subjects everyone is talking about but nobody says in print. He did so with today’s piece on Comptroller William Thompson Jr., who is making school issues a big part of his mayoral campaign — without clarifying his positions on some of the main school issues of the day.

Gershman argues Thompson possesses a “carefully cultivated irrelevance.” But there is stuff we do know about where Thompson stands on education issues, though much of the facts raise more questions than they answer.

First, we know that he’s said he favors retaining control of the school system if he becomes mayor. It’s unclear exactly how much control he’d like to give himself (a big empty space, as we pointed out), but he’s said repeatedly that he supports the mayor having primary authority. “I may be in a shrinking group of those who support it,” he told a committee in testimony that was supposed to be off the record but which I obtained when I was at the New York Sun.

We also know the two main points of attack Thompson has selected for criticizing Bloomberg’s school efforts: He criticizes the mayor on transparency, which he says is so poor that even his office struggles to understand the school system’s finances, and parental involvement. Both of these are safe issues; they’re exactly the points conceded by one of the most prominent mayoral allies on schools, Geoffrey Canada, and they avoid the nastier battlegrounds of school closings, accountability, and charter schools. (more…)