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A week after hundreds of its members who worked in schools were laid off, the DC-37 union is hosting a trial of the Department of Education.

The Coalition for Public Education, a local activist group, organized the trial, to be held Saturday at DC 37′s downtown headquarters, to air concerns about public education under mayoral control. Already more than 100 parents, teachers, students, and community members have signed up to testify, according to Akinlabi Mackall.

The event is meant to resemble Panel for Educational Policy meetings’ public comments segment, which frequently attract many people but rarely influence the panel’s decisions, said Mackall, the father of a public school graduate.

“The PEP and the mayor have pretty much turned a deaf ear to the voices of teachers and students,” he said. “We’ve seen people be very eloquent and very passionate, but then there’s just a rubber-stamp response.”

He said CPE would record the testimonies and present them to state lawmakers. The group will also use the complaints as a blueprint for organizing future meetings around issues that trial participants raise, he said.

Some of the same criticisms are likely to arise at a second education event being held Saturday 12 miles north, at Lehman College, where Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is convening a borough-wide education summit. (more…)

A picture taken by Civic Builders days after ground broke on construction in June 2010; The school was completed on Aug. 18 this year.

By the time Hyde Leadership Charter School expanded into high school grades three years ago, overcrowding at their co-located Department of Education building had become severe. Limited to two floors for over 700 students, classes were held in hallways and high school students complained of filthy conditions in the bathroom they had to share with elementary students.

“It was terrible,” said Dominic Batista, a junior. “It was like a jail.”

Rather than jockey for more space in an increasingly crowded public school system, the growing school took a road less traveled for a charter school in New York City. Keeping its elementary and middle school at P.S. 92, Hyde developed a private facility for its high school just down the road on Hunts Point Avenue in the south Bronx.

Today, the gleaming 30,000 square foot building was on display at an official ribbon-cutting ceremony with elected officials and community members. Inside the auditorium – which splits time as a gymnasium and cafeteria – Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. recalled how prostitutes and arson used to dominate this stretch of Hunts Point Avenue in the South Bronx. Hyde Leadership, he said, was an example of how the area, still the nation’s poorest congressional district, was turning a corner.

The facility was developed and is now managed by Civic Builders, the nonprofit real estate developer for charter schools. The group bought the property in 2010 with lending help from Goldman Sachs and the Low Income Investment Fund.

The price for giving up rent-free public space – about $1 million more per year – was worth it, said Celia Sosa, the school’s director.

(more…)

The Panel for Educational Policy has a new Bronx borough representative, and she’ll be a familiar face for many city officials.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. has appointed Monica Major to the board, Diaz’s office announced today. Major is the current vice president — and former president — of Community Education Council 11, one of the Bronx’s parent committees. She was also a member of the Parent Commission on Mayoral Control, a group that advocated last year for reducing the mayor’s power over the PEP, which acts as the citywide school board.

Major replaces Anna Santos, who has served as the Bronx representative since February 2009. Last year, Santos emerged as one of the city’s most outspoken critics on the board, alongside Manhattan representative Patrick Sullivan. It’s not clear why Santos is leaving.

Major is likely to continue the trend of opposition to many city policies that come up for approval. As part of the Parent Commission on Mayoral Control, Major proposed to reduce the number of mayoral appointees on the panel to three, and add six parent representatives to the board. Instead, the school governance legislation that Albany passed provided for eight mayoral appointees and one from each borough president, effectively guaranteeing that the board will approve city initiatives. (more…)

In the wake of new evidence that New York State’s standardized tests have become easier to pass, education officials and state legislators have focused on moving on and improving the exams. But Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. would like to revisit the past.

In a letter to Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, who chairs the State Senate’s education committee, Diaz demanded that Oppenheimer call State Education Commissioner Richard Mills in to testify at hearings about the exams. Mills oversaw the State Education Department for 14 years and retired in 2009.

“Many of the issues occurred under his watch and he has a responsibility to answer the many questions that these recent results have raised,” Diaz wrote.

Oppenheimer has already said she plans to hold hearings in Manhattan that will focus on the now-lowered passing rates and re-calibrated proficiency standards, but she told the New York Post that she doesn’t want to drag Mills to the witness stand.

“‘I see no value in it,” she said. “He did what was best back then.” (more…)

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. called on the citywide school board to postpone or vote down a contract that would pay an outside group to recruit new teachers, saying today that it “does not make any sense” with impending layoffs.

The contract, which the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on at tomorrow’s meeting, would pay The New Teacher Project a maximum of $4.9 million to recruit and train New York City Teaching Fellows. In a statement sent to reporters, Diaz said the money should be used to stave off layoffs rather than bring in new teachers. If Diaz’s appointee votes against the contract, she’ll likely be joined by panel member Patrick Sullivan, who criticized the contract in the Daily News.

But Department of Education officials have said that new teachers will be needed to fill vacancies in areas like science and special education regardless of layoffs. To meet this anticipated need, the roughly 450 Teaching Fellows who will enter the job market this summer will only be certified in either of those two subjects. (more…)

Principal Edward Tom unveiled the school's new library, which came after two years of lobbying for one.

When School Construction Authority officials first stepped foot in the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics to build a $1.1 million library, Principal Edward Tom had some specific instructions.

“I told them not to think about high school libraries,” Tom said at a ribbon cutting ceremony held at the school today. “I told them: ‘Think Starbucks.’”

That directive, and SCA’s apparent willingness to oblige, have made their mark. Along with having couches and frosted glass, the library’s walls are cappuccino-colored, the floor tiles look like they were dipped in half-and-half, and the bookshelves and chairs are a dark mocha.

Funded by donations from Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. ($660,000), and City Councilwoman Helen Foster ($440,000), the library is also outfitted with desktop computers, printers, and a SMART Board. The one thing it’s missing — a librarian — is in the planning stages, a school official said. (more…)

Dolores Fernandez, the Bronx's appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, appearing on BronxTalk.

Graduates of the city’s public high schools are falling so behind in reading and math that a community college remediation program doubled in size between 1998 and 2008, the college’s former president said this week.

Dolores Fernandez, who resigned from Hostos Community College last year is now serving as the Bronx borough president’s appointee to the re-formed Board of Education, made the remarks in an interview on a Bronx television news program, BronxTalk.

“I would have loved for the New York City public schools to put my remediation programs out of business, because that would mean that every kid graduating out of the schools could read, write, and do math,” Fernandez said.

Fernandez said that a hiking up of standards at CUNY’s four-year colleges played some part in the growth of Hostos’s remediation program. “But then you still have the regular group of kids who just are coming to us in need of a GED diploma, because they haven’t graduated from the public schools, and when we get them, we’re basically teaching them reading, writing, and math — I mean, basic levels,” she said.

The gloomy picture challenges Bloomberg’s own claims about the public schools, which state figures show now graduate far more students since 2002. But Fernandez said she does not trust these figures as a fair picture of what is really happening, especially for the poor Latino community she served at Hostos Community College.

You can watch the interview in the full two parts below.

UPDATE: Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob points out in the comments section that a growing remediation program does not mean that more city students are struggling. His argument:

the size of the program doesn’t tell you anything about the percentage of graduates who required remediation, because the number of public school graduates enrolling at CUNY community colleges has risen dramatically in recent years–70% between 2002 and 2008. Among Hispanic public school graduates, enrollment doubled over that same time period.

With this many more students enrolling, of course the remediation program would expand, even if the percentage of graduates needing remediation fell. And, in fact, that percentage has fallen across all CUNY community colleges, from 82 percent in 2002 to 74 percent in 2008. Among all CUNY colleges, the remediation rate for public school graduates has fallen from 58% to 51%.

(more…)

Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott, center with his head bowed, was elected president of the new Board of Education.

This piece was reported by Philissa Cramer and Anna Phillips.

The mayor’s top education aide is the new president of the Board of Education, Joel Klein remains chancellor, and Mayor Bloomberg is vowing to stay the course of his reforms to the public schools — even though mayoral control expired at midnight yesterday.

“We’re trying to continue on as though mayoral control was approved,” Bloomberg said at a City Hall press conference this afternoon.

The actions occurred at a speedy meeting of the new Board of Education, which was hastily put together early this morning during a meeting at Gracie Mansion. (Read our live-blog of the meeting here.) Seven new Board members, appointed by the city’s borough presidents and the mayor, voted unanimously to keep Klein as schools chancellor. They also elected Dennis Walcott, Bloomberg’s deputy mayor for education, as its president.

Despite the meeting’s air-tight pace and agenda (it lasted only nine minutes and allowed no public comment period), there were small signs of dissent. The appointee of the Bronx borough president, Dolores Fernandez, abstained from votes to make Walcott president and to endorse a revised version of mayoral control that passed the Assembly two weeks ago.

In an interview after the meeting, Fernandez said she abstained from voting because she was caught off-guard by the quick, seemingly pre-determined pace of the meeting. Ruben Diaz Jr., the Bronx borough president, said the meeting was scripted, but Fernandez wasn’t looped into the plan. Diaz added that he might request that the Board convene again before September 10, the date members this afternoon set for their next meeting. (more…)

Courtesy of the Bronx borough president's office

No one can accuse Bronx borough president Ruben Diaz Jr. of being unprepared for the possibility that mayoral control will expire tonight. Diaz just named his potential appointee to the theoretical Board of Education.

That person is Dr. Dolores Fernandez, a professor of urban education at CUNY’s Graduate Center who retired as president of Hostos Community College in 2008.

Fernandez’s appointment will become effective at midnight tonight if the 2002 mayoral control law expires and the Senate does not pass a law to replace it.

Diaz said in a statement today that he is “a supporter of some form of mayoral control.” Asked if Diaz would recommend that his appointee to the board vote to retain Joel Klein as chancellor, John DeSio, a spokesman for the borough president, would not comment yesterday. “He has mixed opinions on the chancellor,” DeSio said.

Fernandez could not immediately be reached for comment. In a release put out by Diaz’s office, she said:

“For me, it is an honor to be thought of by Borough President Diaz to represent The Bronx on the Board of Education. I look forward to serving our borough, and its children, in an admirable and professional way.”

Between 1988 and 1990, Fernandez was deputy chancellor for instruction and development for the Board of Education. She served under chancellor Richard Green, the system’s first black chancellor, who died suddenly a year into his tenure of an asthma attack, leaving the school system in disarray. Fernandez has a Master’s in Education and a professional diploma in Educational Administration.

The full press release follows. (more…)