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The agenda items before the Panel for Educational Policy Wednesday night were relatively uncontroversial. But that didn’t dissuade the teachers union from staging a mass protest.

The protest was aimed at Mayor Bloomberg’s plan to remove half of teachers at 33 low-performing schools, which he announced during his State of the City speech last week. It began when more than 100 members of the United Federation of Teachers flooded the front rows of Brooklyn Technical High School’s auditorium, breaking into chants of “Save Our Schools!” and blasting whistles to delay the meeting’s start.

Michael Mendel, a union official, took the microphone to lambaste the panel, which has approved hundreds of school closure proposals since Bloomberg gained control of the city’s schools in 2003.

“You should be removed from office,” Mendel said. “You are a disgrace to public education.”

Then, in the middle of the public comment period, the group of teachers stood up and walked out en masse.

Plans to close and reopen struggling schools won’t start appearing on the panel’s agenda until next month. Last night, the agenda focused instead on proposals to move or expand schools, including Community Roots Charter School and the Academy of Young Writers. (more…)

Chancellor Dennis Walcott, in black, finishes mile 8 of the New York City Marathon in Brooklyn Sunday.

Some education types are hobbling after pounding the pavement for 26.2 miles in yesterday’s New York City Marathon.

Wearing supportive kneebands and number 1700 in honor of the number of schools he oversees, Chancellor Dennis Walcott ran his first marathon in less than four and a half hours. His unofficial time, 4:23:51, put him in the top third of male runners in his age group, 60 to 64.

Patrick Sullivan, a member of the Panel for Educational Policy who frequently opposes Walcott’s proposed policies, ran the marathon in 3:48:54, putting him in the top 27 percent of finishers in his age group, 45-50.

Diahann Malcolm, the physical education-teaching principal of Queens’ High School for Law Enforcement and Public Safety who tries to run the marathon every year, finished in 5:09:45.

And GothamSchools intern Jessica Campbell finished her first marathon in 5:20:16. (Congrats!)

Others got in on the action without breaking a sweat. Families from Community Roots Charter School sold homemade baked goods on Fourth Avenue in Brooklyn, a popular cheering spot near the eighth mile of the marathon route. (more…)

Reports that a Department of Education technology contractor improperly stole millions of dollars from the city are returning attention to the way the school system reviews contracts.

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. (more…)

On Wednesday, members of the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on several controversial Department of Education contracts totaling millions of dollars.

But the panel’s 13 members won’t be able to see the details of the contracts, which the DOE cannot finalize without their approval.

Department officials said this state of affairs is typical.

The DOE provides panel members with various parts of the contracts being drafted if available, but often contracts up for approval are still under negotiation when the panel members vote, DOE officials said.

Panel members who believe they received insufficient information about a deal may vote against it.

“No” is how Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s PEP appointee, said he plans to vote on Wednesday, when two high-profile contracts are up for approval: a $120 million two-year deal with Verizon Wireless, and contracts of roughly $1.5-3.5 million each over three years with six ”restart partners” — nonprofit Education Partnership Organizations set to take over operations at 14 struggling schools.

“They’re definitely putting the cart before the horse,” Sullivan said. “Approval is pretty much expected. They want the panel to approve in advance what they intend to do, and they will decide the details and specifics.” (more…)

Seven takeaways from last night’s marathon Panel for Educational Policy meeting, for those who don’t have time for 6,000-plus words, minute-to-minute updates, or actually traveling to Brooklyn Tech in the storm:

1. Bloomberg’s agenda was unsurprisingly approved: 10 schools will phase out, four new co-locations will occur. But on the panel, opposition now comes from more members than simply the Manhattan and Bronx appointees.

Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan borough president’s appointee, is no longer the sole voice of opposition on the panel. And while Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr.’s appointee has been making opposition known for a while now, the other borough representatives are beginning slowly to join.

Only mayoral appointees, for instance, voted in favor of proposals that would benefit the Success Charter Network schools run by CEO Eva Moskowitz, a former City Council member and perennial mayoral hopeful.

Besides ‘no’ votes, another manifestation of opposition to Bloomberg came in the form of a skirmish. From 9:53 p.m.:

Audience members told Anna that they saw Sullivan push Morales from behind. Then Tino Hernandez, the panel’s chair, and Deputy Chancellor Santiago Taveras got between them and escorted Sullivan back to his seat. Sullivan then told the audience that one of the mayoral appointees on the panel had approached him to “taunt” him, kicking off the clash. He proposed that the panel postpone their votes to another day on account of the bad weather, but this motion failed.

When the parents behind Anna saw the tussle begin, they started yelling: “Security! Where is security?” A few security guards did edge onto the stage but then backed away, Anna reports.

Sullivan told the Daily News that he was just tapping Morales on the back.

2. Families reached out across the closure aisle, sometimes poetically.

From Anna’s 9:12 p.m. report:

… some MCA [Metropolitan Corporate Academy, slated for closure] kids are rapping about racism and school closure. The charter school kids and parents are clapping the beat. (more…)

Members of the revived Panel for Educational Policy approved more than a dozen Department of Education contracts last night over the protests of colleagues who demanded that they be allowed to read the full documents.

Reconvened for the first time since mayoral control’s renewal, the panel now has the authority to approve contracts worth over one million dollars. It also reviews any contracts that were handed out without competitive bidding.

But the biggest change on panel last night was not a result of those contracts, $250 million of which sailed to approval with a nearly unanimous vote, including contracts with Octagon and the Future Technology Associates, which have come under criticism.

The main difference was that the person who has been the panel’s single active dissident, Patrick Sullivan, the representative from Manhattan, yesterday was joined in his protests by Anna Santos of the Bronx. Both objected to voting on the contracts because, they said, none of the panel members had read them in full. (more…)

Renewed mayoral control is only a few hours old, but Manhattan’s borough president has already announced his pick for the soon-to-be revived citywide school board.

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.” (more…)

City Council member Charles Barron outside Tweed Courthouse yesterday. (GothamSchools Flickr)

City Councilman Charles Barron tried to haul Schools Chancellor Joel Klein off to jail yesterday but left Tweed Courthouse empty-handed.

His attempted citizen’s arrest came during a rally yesterday to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s continued school control even after mayoral control legally expired last week. Midway through event, Barron took the microphone and ascended Tweed’s steps, some of the crowd following him.

“They are in there illegally,” he said when he got to the doors, which were closed. “They should have to leave. This is the people’s building now.” The doors had been open earlier during the event.

“This is a citizen’s arrest,” he declared, ostensibly because Klein did not vacate his offices after mayoral control technically ended. (In fact, the newly convened Board of Education voted the next day to rehire Klein as chancellor and give him the same authority he had before the mayoral control law expired.)

“Is the chancellor in there?” he asked the security guards on the other side of the glass doors. “No? Tell him I’m looking for him.”

Barron, who has called for Klein to be fired before, said a longtime community activist, Jitu Weusi, should be the chancellor. Weusi was a lead organizer of yesterday’s event, which attracted about 100 people from across the city. (View more pictures from the rally.) (more…)

The mayor and chancellor say a post-mayoral control world would be fraught with litigation. But it’s not clear who would be filing the lawsuits.

Some of the most obvious potential litigants said today that as long as Mayor Bloomberg follows the new law, they want to stay out of court. They say they will trust that Mayor Bloomberg plans to respect the current law’s expiration if a new city school board is convened on Wednesday. That board would have only two mayoral appointees.

“If the mayor acts in good faith on that measure, at least changing the structure on top, then I think its wrong to foresee any potential litigation,” said Udi Ofer, the policy director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has been agnostic on the principle of mayoral control.

But a DOE official said the city is worried most about litigation coming not from good-government groups but from individual teachers, principals, and vendors with gripes against the system.

“Every decision has a winner and a loser, and a loser would argue that the person who made the decision didn’t have the authority to do it,” the official said. For example, a teacher who was fired could argue that the principal who initiated his termination was not legally appointed, the official suggested. (more…)

The man who made sure the city’s school budget vote was legal used his own vote to say no to the proposed budget.

A key reason Patrick Sullivan opposed is that school officials still had not responded to a long list of budget questions he submitted two weeks ago, Sullivan told me. The questions, which are posted in full after the jump, reflect the difficulty of getting information from the department.

Here’s one of Sullivan’s questions:

Last time we had this exchange we were told DOE does not know how many charter students are in DOE facilities. But then at the Bronx meeting Kathleen Grimm said we do know. Can someone tell us please?

Sullivan is often the only member of the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, to speak out against the mayor’s policies. But he wasn’t the only panel member asking questions about the budget at this morning’s surprise school board meeting. Two other members appointed by borough presidents (Sullivan was appointed by Manhattan’s Scott Stringer) also asked question, but they ended up voting yes to the budget.

“The difference is that unless they provide this, I’m not going to support the budget,” Sullivan said.

Below the jump, the full list of questions Sullivan sent the DOE that remained unanswered today:

(more…)