GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

With the Democratic primary a few weeks away, the battle over a West Harlem senate seat — turned charter school proxy war — is heating up.

On NY1 last night, Senator Bill Perkins and challenger Basil Smikle debated Perkins’ support for charter schools. Perkins accused Smikle of being too cozy with charter school supporters (“We all know that it’s the hedge fund charter movement that has initiated his candidacy, with the support of course of the New York Post,” he said). And Smikle fought back, charging Perkins with intentionally pitting charter school parents against district school parents.

More interesting than the back and forth is how Perkins is now describing his relationship to charter schools. Months ago, Perkins’ line was that he had been an early supporter of charter schools — he spoke on NBC’s Morning Joe about founding a charter school — but that the reality had not lived up to his expectations. Rather than acting as incubators for new teaching methods traditional public schools could adopt, charter schools had become rouge, unregulated agents, he maintained.

Now, Perkins’ explanation for his position has evolved. Replacing the narrative of charter schools not doing what they were intended to do is one about how his April hearing on charter schools directly impacted and improved the state’s charter school law. (more…)

Comptroller Bill Thompson released his overcrowding report outside of P.S. 290, a school that is over capacity.

One day before the Democratic primary, mayoral hopeful Bill Thompson is making Mayor Bloomberg’s oversight of the city’s public schools his campaign’s defining issue.

Thompson, the city’s comptroller, issued a report yesterday rehashing arguments made by the mayor’s critics throughout his time in office. It criticized the mayor for not spending enough money on school construction, despite evidence that the city’s school-age population had swelled in certain districts.

The report, called “Unprepared for Overcrowding,” looks at the 2010-2014 capital plan the City Council approved this summer and singles out roughly two dozen school districts, the majority of them in the Bronx and Queens, where it predicts schools will remain overcrowded after 2014.

State Senator Liz Krueger, who was part of a gaggle of local elected officials who stood next to Thompson during the announcement, thanked the comptroller “for stating the obvious.” (more…)