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Mayor Bloomberg was greeted with boos as he tried to tie the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. to his own education policies Monday during a speech at the city’s largest celebration for the slain civil rights hero.

A small group of parents and students gathered outside the Brooklyn Academy of Music Opera House in Fort Greene to protest what they said were school policies that King would oppose if he were alive today. Once the 26th annual Brooklyn Tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. began inside BAM, the group joined with other activists and continued their protest inside.

The event featured live music and speeches from several elected officials, including Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke, and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn.

The protesters, who also included teachers from the Occupy the DOE group and activists from the Alliance for Quality Education, sat quietly through those speeches, but the jeers began raining down from the balcony levels as soon as Bloomberg was introduced.

Bloomberg didn’t hesitate to address his hecklers.

“For those of you who want to express yourself, there’s a time and a place for everything,” he said. “Just remember that we’re here to honor a man who valued education.” (more…)

Protesters opposing Department of Education proposals brandished hand puppets before the Panel for Educational Policy.

In the start of what has become an annual ritual, the Panel for Educational Policy Wednesday night listened to hours of rowdy public comments opposing the city’s policy of placing charter schools inside existing school buildings, then signed off on plans to do just that.

The panel gave the go-ahead to a Success Charter school co-location in Cobble Hill in Brooklyn, an affluent neighborhood where many parents and elected officials have said the school is not wanted.

Panel members Gbubemi Okotieuro, of Brooklyn, and Patrick Sullivan, of Manhattan, each raised issues about the co-location plan for the Success Charter school, which did not originally apply to open in the area.

Marc Sternberg, the Department of Education official in charge of new schools, said the department had determined the neighborhood had experienced an “explosion of kindergarten enrollment” and needed more elementary schools.

“It was made clear to us by SUNY that the charter school could be opened in District 15,” Sternberg said, referring to the state organization that authorizes charter schools, which approved the Success Academy school for nearby District 13 or 14.

Sullivan was the only panel member to vote against any of the plans, casting a “no” vote on the Cobble Hill c0-location and abstaining from several other votes.

The panel also approved plans to open a charter high school in the old Boys High School building and a second Success charter school in P.S. 59, both in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. It also signed off on a plan to expand Esperanza Preparatory Academy, a dual-language school in East Harlem that shares a building with a citywide gifted school, TAG Young Scholars, whose parents had opposed the change. (more…)

An ad for today's Occupy movement protests

The city stepped in this afternoon to stop Occupy Wall Street protests from derailing the school day.

Fueled by a message posted on the protest movement’s website, rumors spread earlier today that the schools would be dismissing students early. “National Day of Action” protests in Lower Manhattan, which have grown increasingly tense over the course of the day are timed to the movement’s two-month anniversary and come soon after a city crackdown. The protests are set to spread to subway stations across the city at 3 p.m. and to the steps of the Department of Education’s headquarters at 4:30 p.m.

City officials quickly acted to quash the early-dismissal rumors. On Twitter, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson and the DOE’s official account both sent messages assuring followers that the school day would proceed as planned. Wolfson said early dismissal was “never discussed.” And Chancellor Dennis Walcott emailed principals to tell them not to dismiss students early “as a result of any protests.”

“Rumors indicating that school will be closed early are false,” Walcott wrote in an email with the subject line “Today is a full school day.”

Middle schools, which have long been scheduled to dismiss students early because of parent-teacher conferences, did end classes early as planned.

Later this afternoon, two Occupy-affiliated protests are scheduled to converge at the DOE’s Tweed Headquarters, where a protest 10 days ago attracted a large crowd. (more…)

What would a protest be without a poster?

Hundreds of signs on display at the Save Our Schools March in Washington, D.C. on Saturday reflected the anger, passion and creativity of teachers who attended.

The posters had a wide range of targets, including Education Secretary Arne Duncan, charter schools, high-stakes testing, Republicans, and corporate influence in public education. Here’s a small selection of some of the best.

As city and union officials remain mired in budget negotiations, parents and education activists gathered at City Hall today with a new tool to battle against school cuts—scrolls of signatures that reached far beyond the steps.

They unrolled seven of the 50-foot-long lists, which they said contained of the names of 20,000 people who have signed a petition against the mayor’s proposed budget. That number included over 16,000 online signatures.

“Unless you’re stupid or ignorant, you understand that 20,000 of your constituents have signed this, and don’t want you to make these cuts. If you ignore that, you shouldn’t be in office,” said Council Member Robert Jackson, chair of the council’s education committee.

During the rally, UFT President Michael Mulgrew accused Mayor Bloomberg of “playing political games” with the city’s children. “We will not sit idly by as you attack our schools and the services we need,” he said.

Charter school parents won’t be the only ones taking to the streets tomorrow. Protests are also planned against planned teacher layoffs, a charter school co-location, and low funding for struggling schools.

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio is organizing a “Parent Day of Action” against the city’s 4,100 planned teacher layoffs. Yesterday, de Blasio launched a website featuring videos of parents speaking out against the cuts. Tomorrow, starting in Brooklyn during the morning commute, de Blasio will be joined by parent volunteers to collect anti-layoff testimonials from other New Yorkers at sites throughout the city. The testimonials will be posted in real time to de Blasio’s Twitter and YouTube pages and to his own parent advocacy site, according to spokesman Matthew Wing.

In Manhattan, parents and teachers in the Brandeis High School campus are rallying at 5:30 p.m. against the potential addition of a charter school, Upper West Success Academy. The rally precedes a public hearing about the co-location, which would bring an elementary school into a building that so far has only middle and high school students. The hearing is sure to draw supporters of Upper West Success, one of few schools in Eva Moskowitz’s Success Charter Network that is not named in the UFT-NAACP lawsuit.

And in the Bronx, student activists are planning a half-hour march at the end of their school day to demand that the city use federal funds to help more low-performing schools. The students, from the Urban Youth Collaborative and other groups, are walking to Banana Kelly High School, which the city announced earlier this month would receive new funding and supports, from Samuel Gompers High School, which was not included in the city’s “restart” plans.

Attending one (or more) of tomorrow’s events? Send pictures and comments to tips@gothamschools.org.

Khem Irby, a parent and education council member, said the city had to accept responsibility for the decline in scores.

A group of parents angered by the massive drop in city test scores stormed a Panel for Educational Policy meeting, bringing it to a halt.

As soon as the Monday evening meeting at Murry Bergtraum High School began, members of the Coalition for Educational Justice — a organization of parents and activists who largely oppose Mayor Bloomberg’s education policies — demanded to speak. Told they would have to wait until the public comment period at the end of the meeting, parents being yelling, drowning out panel members who left their seats and retreated backstage.

“You dumbed down the tests and the fact is, our kids are not being prepared for college and the world of work,” Ocynthia Williams, one of the coalition’s parent leaders, said into a bull horn. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg’s school critics are joining up today to protest how little has changed since the mayoral control technically ended last week.

All spring, local activists who oppose mayoral control have been urging people to contact their lawmakers. But after the mayoral control law expired and Bloomberg packed the new Board of Education with his appointees anyway, it became clear that a more powerful protest was needed, according to Jitu Weusi, a longtime activist from Brooklyn.

A protest being held at 5 p.m. today outside Tweed Courthouse, education department headquarters, will highlight widespread opposition to “the mayoral control dictatorship,” Weusi said. He told me that community activists from all five boroughs have signed onto the event.

City Councilman Charles Barron, who has called for Schools Chancellor Joel Klein to be fired, helped organize a planning meeting last week that about 40 people attended, Weusi said. (more…)

Hundreds of Bronx teachers turned out on Friday to protest the high school principal they say is responsible for a 70 percent teacher turnover rate. In record time over the weekend, the Bronx division of the United Federation of Teachers produced a video about the event, which it coordinated.

Teachers charge that in the four years since Iris Blige has been principal of Fordham High School for the arts, a small school that opened in 2002, the school has run through nine assistant principals, four business managers, and more than 100 teachers. (This data point is in clear view on a protester’s poster in the video.) Blige replaced the founding principal, Sal Mazzola, who was removed after two years in charge because of poor performance, according to the school’s Insideschools review.

Fordham High School for the Arts' teacher turnover figures from its 2006-2007 state report card

According to the school’s most recent state report card, more than a quarter of all teachers left the school after the 2005-2006 school year, and the previous year the school lost more than half of all relatively new teachers. The UFT says turnover has only accelerated since then, with more than 70 percent of teachers leaving during the 2007-2008 school year.