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United Federation of Teachers President Michael Mulgrew said the mayor should not have to lay off teachers given that Wall Street rebounded this year.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story mischaracterized the size of the rally. Thousands of people attended this afternoon’s rally, according to multiple people who attended and other press accounts. Protesters came from multiple locations and then converged near Wall Street.

Thousands of teachers joined elected officials in a symbolic march from City Hall to Wall Street this afternoon to protest Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget cuts.

“You took the money from us, now we’re going to where you sent the money,” said Rev. Al Sharpton, who helped lead the march along with national teachers union president Randi Weingarten and half a dozen City Council members.

The march was designed to dramatize the argument that opponents of Bloomberg are making in response to his budget, which calls for laying off more than 4,000 teachers. In a year when Wall Street’s recovery contributed to a citywide surplus, they ask, why are teachers being laid off?

“I never expected to come home to see New York act like Wisconsin,” Weingarten told the screaming crowd.

Bloomberg has blamed the draconian budget on state cuts and pointed out that the surplus this year is not large enough to plug projected gaps next year — an assessment the Independent Budget Office seconded in a recent analysis. (more…)

Community Education Council 14 President Tessa Wilson said the city should extend the delay of this year's bungled parent council elections.

A day after this year’s troubled parent council elections were postponed by one week, some of their leading critics say the election process is completely on hold.

Yesterday, a group of parents filed a lawsuit asking for a restraining order to halt the elections. Chancellor Dennis Walcott immediately responded by saying he would postpone elections for a week.

After a meeting this afternoon between city lawyers and the lawyers representing the parents who sued over the election proceedings, the elections are now on hold “indefinitely,” according to Chris Owens, executive director of Advocates for Justice, the law firm that filed the suit.

The DOE disputed the account, saying that nothing has changed since yesterday.

“We continue to have discussions with interested parties regarding this matter, but we have not made any further changes to the process and we have a responsibility to ensure that Council members begin their terms on July 1st,” said Deirdrea Miller, a DOE spokeswoman, in a statement.

At a press conference today, elected officials called for the elections to be delayed further, contending that a week was too little time to undo the damage and that the Department of Education has neglected the parent councils, called Community Education Councils.

“The DOE doesn’t care to get it right,” said Public Advocate Bill de Blasio. “The CECs never get the support they deserve.” (more…)

Under pressure from elected officials and organized parents, the Department of Education is delaying elections for district parent councils until next week.

For weeks, parent leaders have been simmering with anger over problems in the city’s handling of elections for district Community Education Councils. They have charged that the city did too little to recruit candidates, turned away some eligible parents, and hid the names of candidates behind password protection.

The criticism escalated today, as Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio announced plans for a press conference Tuesday to demand that the city halt the elections, which they called “deeply flawed and undemocratic.” At the same time, a group of parents, spearheaded by Mona Davids of the New York City Parents Union, filed today for a restraining order to halt the elections.

This afternoon, the city announced it would delay the election proceedings by a week. “After reviewing concerns raised by parents and public officials about this year’s Citywide and Community Education Council elections, I have concluded that the process could and should have been handled better,” Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in a statement. (more…)

Following complaints from parents about this year’s council elections, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer is calling on the city to postpone the elections for a second time.

Calling the process “badly flawed,” Stringer said that a series of mistakes made by the Department of Education’s Office of Family Information and Action had undermined parents’ confidence in the elections for members of the Community Education Councils. In a letter sent to Chancellor Dennis Walcott, Stringer asked that the city redo the elections.

Walcott responded that the elections would take place, as planned, on May 7.

“I cannot stress enough the importance of parent involvement in our schools and the Office for Family Information and Action will take all necessary steps to ensure that all of our parents have an opportunity to cast a vote in the CEC elections by May 7th,” the chancellor said in a statement. (more…)

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer presents his report on overcrowding in Manhattan schools.

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer called today for an overhaul of the city’s process for matching student demand to building space, charging that the city’s current process is causing “chaos and uncertainty” for parents and students.

Standing outside of the Upper West Side’s P.S. 334, Stringer reported that more than four out of 10 Manhattan schools are either overcrowded or are losing classroom space as the city tries to cram more students into a finite number of school buildings.

The report details what are by now familiar complaints about overcrowding in Manhattan schools, which have seen their population of young students boom in recent years without a corresponding addition of seats.

But the bulk of remarks from Stringer and other elected officials this afternoon criticized the city for bumping schools from building to building, cramming students into classrooms and making decisions without giving confused parents adequate notice or opportunity to comment. (more…)

A longed-for new elementary school for Greenwich Village families may open in an unexpected location — a new building on a greatly expanded New York University campus.

NYU has committed to building a new 600-seat public elementary school as part of its plan to add 6 million square feet of space to its campus, the university announced today. The school offers a bright bargaining chip to NYU in its battle to expand its campus by 40 percent without alienating the neighboring community. Parents in the Village have complained about overstuffed classrooms and long wait-lists for neighborhood kindergarten seats.

But Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who has been a fierce critic of how the city has handled Manhattan’s school crowding problems, said he is confident that the plan is more than just an attractive ploy.

“The school is now off the table,” Stringer said. “It’s happening.”

Still, many of the details — including where exactly the school will be located, when construction will start or even if the university’s broader plan will be approved — remain up in the air. (more…)

The city’s teachers union and the NAACP filed suit against the Department of Education today, claiming that the city lost the right to close 19 schools when it violated the law that governs school closures.

Those who have read the law — or the “carefully crafted multi-tiered public process,” as the lawsuit states —can testify that it is not a simple one to follow.

Part of the mayoral control legislation that barely made it through the state legislature last summer calls for the city to hold hearings at each of the public schools slated for closure, for “stakeholders” to be consulted, and for the city to study and report on the effects closing schools would have on their surrounding communities. All of this had to be completed a certain number of days before the citywide schoolboard, the Panel for Educational Policy, voted on the closings. (more…)

I got my first phone call from Dick Riley very soon after I started covering education at U.S. News & World Report. “Elizabeth, Dick Riley. I’m going to win you a Pulitzer Prize some day,” he said in his gravelly between-you-and-me voice, before adding that he worked for Kaplan, the test prep company.

Maybe he’ll finally come through in his new role: press secretary to new teachers union president Michael Mulgrew. Mulgrew made the announcement today, marking his first public decision since taking over for Randi Weingarten. (Though he did outline his priorities this summer — save the schools budget! get a contract!) The appointment undoes a decision Weingarten made several months ago, to appoint longtime deputy press secretary Ron Davis to the top press spot.

But Mulgrew is not straying too far from his predecessor; Riley also served as Weingarten’s press secretary when she first became UFT president 10 years ago. Appointing him is a smart choice if Mulgrew wants to build his own version of Weingarten’s tight relationships with reporters — and get his name in the papers as much as she did. Riley returns phone calls in seconds and loves to have friendly chat with reporters. Other jobs he’s held include working for Mayor Ed Koch’s press shop, running press at the old Board of Education, and (until today) serving as press secretary to Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer.

Davis, a former newspaperman who joined the union’s press shop many years ago and remained deputy press secretary for many years as person after person was appointed press secretary over his head, will stay inside the union, Mulgrew told me on the phone today. “Ron is a valued employee. He’s still here. I need to talk to him before I say exactly what it is, but it’s something very good,” Mulgrew said. “We’re fine.”

Next question: What other staffing changes has Mulgrew made without fanfare? In several conversations today, sources pointed out the delicate position he’s in: He has to prove himself as a boss, so he’s got to build a staff that’s his. But he’s also a union boss, and so kicking out people who aren’t his is tricky. We’ll be watching.

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…)

The Manhattan and Brooklyn borough presidents are turning back on a tacit alliance with Mayor Bloomberg on school governance, demanding that the newly reconstituted Board of Education become emboldened and that the city reconstitute community school boards.

The presidents made the request in a letter to Deputy Mayor and Board of Education President Dennis Walcott today, asking for a Board of Education meeting as early as this August. They wrote:

The political situation in Albany remains unsettled, and while the Senate may return in the fall, experience has sadly shown us that even weeks of negotiation can prove fruitless. We must prepare for the possibility that the stalemate will continue and the Board as presently constituted will be the governing authority of the system and its more than one million children for some months.

The acknowledgment comes 22 days after the Board of Education first met in a scripted eight-minute session during which a majority vote called for the board not to meet again until September.

A third borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr. of the Bronx, endorsed the letter today in a statement, saying he wants to take the challenge a step further:

I would be willing to take their recommendations a step further and demand that the Board of Education meet as soon as possible to vote on each of the issues they have raised.

The three borough presidents alone cannot dictate what the Board of Education does, as they have only 3 of 7 votes. A meeting “as soon as possible” might also be hampered by the fact that Diaz’s appointee, Dolores Fernandez, is on vacation through Aug. 9, according to an e-mail she wrote to GothamSchools. Two other board members were appointed by Mayor Bloomberg, and the other two, appointees of the Staten Island and Queens borough presidents, include Walcott, a deputy mayor, and an ally of the mayor’s.

The full letter from Markowitz and Stringer is here, including a seven-point plan for how to reconstitute the pre-2002 school governance law.

UPDATE: I just spoke to Stringer, who disputed my characterization that he ever had an alliance with Bloomberg. “We never had an alliance,” he said. “We agreed on an approach, and we may all agree with this approach in 24 hours.”

Stringer, a former Assembly member, also predicted that the pre-2002 governance structure could last for “at least a year.” Lawmakers are not scheduled to return to session until January 1, 2010, but major bills like New York City school governance often take an entire session to negotiate. (more…)