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Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr. delivered a speech in Spanish against no-bid contracts. (GothamSchools)

The circus around the State Senate intensified today as half a dozen senators gathered to complain that Mayor Bloomberg would not meet them at the bargaining table. Immediately afterward, senators confirmed that negotiations are, in fact, ongoing.

“We will not be dictated to, we will be negotiated with,” said Senator Bill Perkins, a persistent critic of mayoral control. Joining Perkins on the steps of City Hall were Sens. Shirley Huntley, Hiram Monserrate, Pedro Espada, Eric Adams, Ruben Diaz Sr., and City Councilman Robert Jackson. All of the senators were among those who supported a failed bill that would have curtailed mayoral control.

After the press conference, Monserrate acknowledged to reporters that negotiations were already in progress. “We’re at the table,” he said. “There are some meetings occurring.”

Those meetings, which began on Monday after mayoral control talks fell apart last week, are being held by Democratic conference leader John Sampson’s staff and deputy schools chancellor Christopher Cerf.

Senators would not discuss the details of the negotiations today, but they reiterated their support for increased parent involvement, funding for art programs, and fixed terms for citywide school board members. A source close to the discussions described the talks as “fragile.” (more…)

Listen to the segment in its entirety right here: 

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Michael Barbaro reports on the choice words Mayor Bloomberg had for the state Senate, which has adjourned for the summer without restoring mayoral control, on his weekly radio show today:

A fuming Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said that state troopers should “drag” senators back to Albany — by force, if necessary – if they leave for the summer without voting on a bill to preserve his control of New York City’s schools.

During his weekly radio show, an incredulous Mr. Bloomberg – who seemed to question the intelligence of individual senators by name – said that those holding up the legislation “want to ruin the schools.”

“You wonder what goes through their heads,” he said, adding that the time for negotiations over mayoral control had passed. “It’s over. It’s stopped. You just can’t do that.”

Liz Benjamin has more:

“This is what he should do,” Bloomberg said of Paterson, noting that he has been “defending” the governor throughout the Senate stalemate. “Giving them the summer off is as we say in Gallic, ‘Meshugenah’”.

The Senate session scheduled for, well, right now, has been stalled by both parties, which have retreated to discuss what to do about mayoral control, according to Politicker.

Throughout the week, Democratic lawmakers have offered conflicting clues to the bill’s fate, and their forecasts soured after meeting with two of Mayor Bloomberg’s deputy mayors last night.

Senator John Sampson, the Democratic conference leader, told a Daily News reporter that he has “no idea” what will happen with mayoral control today. Senator Carl Kruger, never one for subtlety, told Politicker that the Assembly’s school governance bill, which preserves the bulk of the 2002 law, is “DOA.”

Senate Democrats have said they would vote for the Assembly’s bill, provided that Bloomberg and Senate Republicans agree to pass one of the chapter amendments proposed by Sens. Shirley Huntley, Bill Perkins, Martin Dilan, and Malcolm Smith. And there’s the rub: the mayor and Republican senators oppose all of the bills. (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…)

This is the memo Governor Paterson sent out listing the order of business for today’s special Senate session. He’s called the items “basically non-controversial.” Mayoral control is No. 3, and Paterson plans to introduce a copy of the bill the Assembly passed last week — the one that Mayor Bloomberg supports, without too many “tweaks.”

The session starts at 3 p.m., but of course, in order to vote, the senators have to know who’s in charge. And they still don’t.

(Postscript: Here’s why people don’t like the Wicks Law.)

The full agenda: (more…)

As the fate of New York’s school governance legislation shifts to the Senate, groups advocating for language that would curb the mayor’s power are left to weigh their options.

Initially, many hoped that the bill passed in the Assembly would contain fixed terms for members of the Panel for Educational Policy, or would prevent the mayor from appointing the majority of the panel’s members. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s bill that sailed through the Assembly on Wednesday did neither.

Yet groups like the Parent Commission and the Campaign for Better Schools remain optimistic that the bill that is eventually enacted will look different.

Some opponents believe that they’ve oddly benefited from the Senate meltdown. With the Senate Republicans saying they’ll support Silver’s bill, Democrats there could perceive going along with the Speaker’s bill as capitulation, the opponents reason. Instead, opponents hope Democrats will seek to distance themselves from the Republican position by offering amendments to the bill. (more…)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Teachers union president Randi Weingarten and Chancellor Joel Klein agreed yesterday that this week’s surprise state Senate flip leaves the fate of mayoral control up in the air. Weingarten and Klein made the remarks at a roundtable discussion here in Washington, D.C., that I attended.

Klein said the problem with the Republican coup is the possible gridlock it creates. If Senate Democrats challenge the GOP takeover in court, an ensuing legal battle could prevent any legislation from passing, Klein said. And if the legal battle dragged on through June 30, the date at which the current school law sunsets, that would send the city schools back to their pre-2002 structure — a situation many of the fiercest critics of the law have said they do not want.

Klein’s uneasiness with this week’s takeover challenges the argument that a Republican Senate is a boon to the effort to renew mayoral control. “Uncertainty is a bad thing,” Klein said.

For her part, Weingarten said that two days ago she would have predicted a reasonable compromise on a mayoral control law by the end of the month. But she said that the news from the Senate upended her confidence.

The roundtable discussion was organized by the journal Democracy, and it also included D.C. Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee and Peter Edelman, of the Georgetown Law Center and a signatory of the Broader, Bolder statement on how to improve American schools.

The state Senate ground to a standstill on the question of who should control the city’s public schools this week, but a consensus among members of the Assembly looks like it will be easier to come by — and it could come soon.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told New York City members this week that he will hold the Assembly Democrats’ first conference on the issue next week, according to a member who was there, Mark Weprin of Queens. The conference will kick off formal talks within the Democratic conference about whether to reauthorize, revise, or scrap the 2002 law that granted control of the city’s public schools to the mayor.

Several Assembly members are already putting together legislation on the subject, much of it influenced by the constellation of advocacy groups that are bombarding Albany this week. A slew of Assembly members are standing behind recommendations put out by the Campaign for Better Schools, while bills in line with the recommendations of Betsy Gotbaum’s commission on school governance and the Parent Commission on School Governance are said to be on the way. Assemblyman Alan Maisel of Brooklyn today introduced a bill, backed by the city principals’ union, that would beef up the power of superintendents.

But the conference would be the first chance for Democrats to try to work out a consensus on the issue. The bills currently in circulation clash with each other on several points. More importantly, they also clash with the position of the powerful speaker, Silver, who supports giving the mayor a majority of appointees on the citywide school board. (more…)

Charter school supporters say they are on the brink of a victory in their battle to restore about $1,000 per student in funds that lawmakers tugged out of next year’s state budget. They expect that Malcolm Smith, the State Senate majority leader, will restore the funds to charter schools through a last-minute appropriation of Senate funds.

“We’re hoping that Senator Smith will be able to, through his good offices, get our funding restored,” said James Merriman, the executive director of the New York City Center for Charter School Excellence.

The message comes after charter schools spent the last two days badgering Smith, whom they had counted as a strong ally. One Queens school that says it is slated to face a $600,000 cut held a rally, while others sent in form letters to Smith declaring, “We thought you were a supporter of charter schools. This budget betrays that support.” Charter lobbyists also rushed out e-mails urging “parents, trustees, and supporters” to call Governor Paterson and Smith asking for help.

But the charter lobbyists reversed their position on Tuesday afternoon, sending out an e-mail declaring that the efforts had paid off. The full text of their letter is below the jump.

A spokeswoman for Smith did not return a phone call immediately today.

Merriman said he can’t 100 percent guarantee that Smith will fill the funding gaps. “He hasn’t told me, but we’re certainly hoping that he will do everything he can,” he said. (more…)

In another development that does not bode well for the Bloomberg administration’s ability to get what it wants out of Albany on school issues, a state senator is signaling her opposition to the mayor’s plan to convert floundering Catholic schools into charter schools. The senator, Suzi Oppenheimer, who is the new chair of the senate’s education committee, volunteered her opinion in a video interview published today by the Journal News, a Westchester paper. The key remark:

By the way, I think in the last couple weeks we’ve seen that the mayor of New York City has been talking about taking the closed parochial schools and turning them into charter schools. I think what needs to be done is they need to remain regular public schools. Because we’ve set aside millions, billions, in order to create, build schools, but we’re finding it difficult to build them fast enough.

And here are school that could be utilized for the public system, save us money for not having to build those schools. That’s the direction that I would like to move the mayor’s idea about what to do with closed schools.

Liz Benjamin, who noticed the interview first, notes that Bloomberg gave money to Oppenheimer’s opponent in the senate race, a Republican, and that Oppenheimer enjoys the support of the state teachers union, which sometimes opposes charter schools.

In the interview, Oppenheimer said she doesn’t oppose charter schools — in fact, she likes their ability to innovate — but she does object to the way they are funded, which she said can deprive traditional public schools of per-capita dollars if their students leave to go to a charter school.