GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A 1998 agreement that gives the city’s police department control over school safety is still in effect, despite city officials’ insistence that it had expired more than six years ago.

The revelation has advocates and elected officials lambasting the city for not disclosing the agreement’s extension.

The original agreement, between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Board of Education President William Thompson, was set to expire in 2002 and was widely assumed to have done so. But in fact, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quietly renewed the agreement in January 2003.

The renewal came to light for the first time this month, after Assemblyman Karim Camara urged his colleagues to consider school safety issues when deciding how to vote on mayoral control, according to Udi Ofer, director of advocacy for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU was working with legislators to raise the profile of school safety in the mayoral control fight.

When Camara met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Silver showed him a copy of the memorandum’s renewal, Ofer said. The paragraph-long agreement was signed by Bloomberg and Klein on Jan. 22, 2003, and does not include an expiration date.

The renewal contradicts information the City Council received during a 2007 hearing on school safety, where council members repeatedly asked whether any formal document existed to define the relationship between the city schools and the police department. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s school leadership has been characterized by secrecy, defiance of the law, and a heavy hand in school discipline, the New York Civil Liberties Union declared today in a report titled “The Price of Power.”

The report details NYCLU’s experiences with the Bloomberg-controlled Department of Education stalling on responding to Freedom of Information Law requests, refusing to comply with student safety-related laws passed by the City Council, and refusing to provide basic data about military recruitment that the organization said the U.S. Armed Forces provided freely.

The report deliberately avoids some of the major questions of the debate about mayoral control of the city’s schools, including whether the mayor should appoint the chancellor and whether the mayor should control the number of seats on the citywide school board. But it does offer recommendations on the law, which is set to sunset June 30 if it’s not renewed or revised.

The recommendations include making the public school system a city, rather than state, agency, which would bring it under a slate of good governance regulations about public notification of policy changes; opening the school system to audits by the city comptroller and public advocate; and requiring that schools contracts get publicly vetted.

Transforming the Department of Education into a city agency would also allow the City Council to make laws about the public schools that the DOE would be accountable for implementing. Like others recommending changes to mayoral control, NYCLU is saying that the city’s Independent Budget Office should get the right to receive and review DOE data, but the group adds the idea that the department needs an “inspector general” who would investigate systemic wrongdoing. (more…)

Last week one state politician said he would revamp mayoral control by changing who makes decisions about school policy. Two others said they are proposing legislation that would take a different approach to reforming school governance, by clarifying the constraints under which current decision-makers must operate.

Two state politicians, Assemblyman Rory Lancman and Sen. Daniel Squadron of Brooklyn, announced last week that they have introduced legislation that would require the city Department of Education to be treated just like any other city agency when it comes to budgeting, oversight by the comptroller and public advocate, and public notification about policy changes. Currently, the department occupies a no-man’s-land between city and state authority, a position that has allowed the DOE to escape some of the scrutiny regularly applied to other city agencies and to avoid following laws passed by the City Council.

Lancman and Squadron say their bill is not meant as a comprehensive way to address the school governance question, which lawmakers must tackle by the end of next month. Instead, they say, it’s meant to close a big loophole in the law that has been open since 2002, when the state gave control of the city schools to Mayor Bloomberg. The loophole allowed the nonprofit organization that raises money for the DOE, the Fund for Public Schools, to avoid disclosing its donors, saying that disclosure rules apply only to groups working with city agencies. The DOE has also used the loophole to justify its decision not to follow state law that says elected parent councils must be consulted before the department can close schools.

Lancman told me he doesn’t expect the bill to become law, in part because it addresses only one component of the school governance question. The final school governance bill will deal with other issues including the makeup of the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, and how much input parents should have in DOE decisions. Lancman told me he sponsored a partial bill to raise awareness about the particular issue of whether the DOE should be a city agency. “This legislation is a vehicle for driving this issue into the final bill,” he said.

Lancman and Squadron’s bill would firmly establish the DOE as a city agency. (more…)

Remember that Daily News story last January about the kindergartner who threw a tantrum at school and then ended up getting sent to a psychiatric ward? Well, the New York Civil Liberties Union believes that there are more cases like it, and it is now filing a lawsuit against the NYPD, which manages school cops, to find out exactly how many more cases there are.

Here’s one piece of information included in the lawsuit (PDF) that is one of the NYCLU’s reasons for being suspicious:

Upon information and belief as many as 25 of the 76 child adolescent visits in January 2008 to a Staten Island Comprehensive Psychiatric Emergency Program were referred by schools.

NYCLU requested records that would list all times that city school students were sent by the NYPD to psychiatric hospitals. The NYPD — big shocker here for anyone who’s ever tried to use the Freedom of Information Act to squeeze documents relating to public school students — refused to give the records. The lawsuit is a challenge demanding the records. It will be interesting to see what the NYCLU finds.

Another notable nugget from the mayoral control forum Friday came from Udi Ofer, the advocacy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. NYCLU hasn’t taken a position on the most basic question of mayoral control (should the mayor have control or should there be a school board), but the organization seems very likely to push for adding checks and balances to the Department of Education’s authority.

Echoing concerns that I wrote about last week, Ofer said a central problem lies in the Department of Education’s peculiar position between being a state agency subject to state oversight and a city agency subject to city oversight. He gave two examples of how the dilemma plays out. The first is that the DOE, by his account, refuses to follow both the state and city versions of a law called the Administrative Procedures Act, which forces government agencies to, among other things, allow some finite public comment period before enacting new regulations.

Here’s his explanation (and below it I’ll put his second example, the mayor’s refusal to enact the City Council’s Dignity in all Schools Act):

(more…)