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Changes in the way public schools are run that were ordered by a law this summer could take until the end of the school year to implement, school officials said today.

At a meeting of the City Council Education Committee this afternoon, council members, along with teachers union president Michael Mulgrew, accused the Department of Education of dragging its heels in putting key provisions of the new school governance law into place.

At issue is how soon the DOE will make three key changes: returning superintendents to work exclusively in their districts, including parents of special education and English-language learner students on Community Education Councils and beginning work to open a new parent training center.

Testifying before the Council, Micah Lasher, the education department’s executive director of public affairs, said that he expected all of the new changes to be implemented fully by the end of this school year.

But Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson complained that time frame is too long. “The law doesn’t give you a year,” he said. “We need this implemented now.” (more…)

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…)

Meet the Department of Education’s new chief lobbyist, Micah Lasher.

At the Post’s Daily Politics blog, Liz Benjamin reports that Lasher, a 27-year-old political whiz kid fresh off a stint in Rep. Jerry Nadler’s office, is now the DOE’s executive director of public affairs. That’s the position held by Terence Tolbert until his sudden death at the beginning of November while he was on leave working for the Obama campaign in Nevada. Lasher has already updated his Facebook profile (above) to reflect his new job.

As the DOE’s top lobbyist, Lasher is now responsible for pushing the DOE’s agenda in Albany. At the top of that agenda, of course, is convincing lawmakers to preserve mayoral control before the 2002 law giving control of the city schools to the mayor expires at the end of June. Lasher will also have to work some magic if the city’s schools are to escape relatively unscathed in this year’s budget fight. (Fortunately, he has experience working magic; he published a book on the subject when he was just 14.) (more…)