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Public Advocate Bill De Blasio reads the transcript of a radio show that Bloomberg appeared on Friday.

Critics of Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to slash after-school services to tens of thousands of students are forecasting that the cuts will have a grave effect.

Today, they earned an accidental endorsement from an unusual source: Bloomberg.

“We have a lot of kids who unfortunately don’t have parents at home when they leave in the morning or get home in the afternoon and it’s harder to supervise kids,” Bloomberg said during a radio appearance this morning to promote the city’s anti-truancy campaign.

The comments were convenient fodder for Public Advocate Bill De Blasio, who released a report today that painted a doomsday scenario about how the cuts would contribute to crime and hurt citywide employment rates.

De Blasio called Bloomberg “disconnected” and said the issues he raised on the radio were precisely a reason to preserve the after-school programs. (more…)

About 200 people attended a forum in Brooklyn Monday night about high-stakes testing.

The architect of many of the metrics the city uses to assess teachers and measure student growth spent Monday evening defending his work against a steady stream of criticism from parents and educators.

Chief Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky sat on a three-person panel titled “High-Stakes Testing 101″ hosted at The Brooklyn School for Collaborative Studies and The Brooklyn New School. The panel included two principals, Long Island’s Sean Feeney and Elijah Hawkes formerly of the James Baldwin School in Manhattan, who have publicly criticized the city’s and state’s use of testing data to measure student growth and evaluate teacher effectiveness. Hawkes was one of about 170 city principals to sign on to a petition Feeney authored against the state’s use of student test scores in teacher evaluations.

That system, in which student growth on standardized test scores count for at least 20 percent of teacher ratings, was officially signed into law last week in Albany.

Polakow-Suransky said the parents and principals were right to have qualms about the new system. He said the tests currently in use are imperfect and acknowledged, as the principals’ protest points out, the evaluation system allows for scenarios in which a teacher can have the full confidence of her principal yet still be rated ineffective if her students show zero growth.

“I agree with you that principals should not ever be in this situation where ultimately their judgment gets trumped by a mechanistic formula,” Polakow-Suransky said after Feeney raised the issue. “I think that’s an important thing that we need to look at as we work to implement this.”

But for the most part, the department’s second in command defended the city’s accountability system against concerns that test scores are being used inappropriately and that longer tests are negatively affecting schools’ curriculum and culture. (more…)

Flier faxed today to City Councilman Robert Jackson

The main purpose of a charter school parent rally tomorrow is to demand that the NAACP withdraw from a lawsuit that threatens some charter schools. But not everyone being recruited to the rally is being told that the NAACP is its intended target.

The office of City Councilman Robert Jackson received a fax at 3:33 p.m. that asks elected officials to “support us and come speak at the rally tomorrow.” The fax, whose origin was not identified, says the rally is “to save our schools from the lawsuit” and is signed “Harlem Parents.”

Jackson, who chairs the council’s education committee, is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed by the UFT and NAACP to stop 22 school closures and prevent 17 charter schools from opening, moving, or expanding.

In fact, more than 1,600 parents have signed on to a letter to the NAACP, according to Kerri Lyon, a spokeswoman for the New York City Charter School Center, which is supporting the rally. “They clearly know who is standing in their way,” Lyon said. (more…)

Excerpt from a memo to principals from New Visions for Public Schools.

One of the city’s 11 school support organizations is warning principals not to trust information they find in the $80 million data warehouse the Department of Education re-launched this year.

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein promised that the system, called ARIS, would revolutionize the way teachers and principals do their jobs, by giving them a one-stop source of information on everything from a student’s attendance record to his test score history.

But a newsletter sent to principals last week by New Visions for Public Schools, an outside contractor that works with 75 city schools, describes ARIS as inaccurate. “Please do not rely on the accuracy of the data in ARIS,” it says. (Read the full newsletter, a Word document, here.) The warning follows a cacophony of problems that met ARIS’s first launch last school year.

A Department of Education spokesman, Andrew Jacob, said the memo is right to say that some data are still missing from ARIS, but wrong to challenge the available data’s accuracy. (more…)