Rupert Murdoch and Arne Duncan. (Images via Creative Commons)

The New York Post patted its own back today, hard, for helping the state renew the mayor’s control of the public schools. The surprising thing is that Secretary of Education Arne Duncan joined in, thanking the newspaper, owned by the ambitious Rupert Murdoch, for its “leadership” and “thoughtfulness.”

New York City newspapers have a proud tradition of waging campaigns both on and off the editorial page, and then congratulating themselves when they hit their marks. But having a cabinet member for a sitting president join the cheering is more unusual.

“I think that must be out of context, that Arne Duncan is giving the Post credit for mayoral control,” the president of the principals’ union, Ernest Logan, said when I called to ask his impression.

The news series the Post ran extolling mayoral control

Richard Colvin, who directs the Hechinger Institute for education journalism at Columbia University, said he found the whole news story baffling. “It reads like nothing I’ve ever seen. It reads like the worst kind of back-patting, self-congratulatory press release that has no perspective whatsoever,” he said.

Duncan’s quote does illustrate a strange alliance that fought hard for mayoral control’s renewal, Murdoch and the secretary of education among them. In addition to running a series of news articles highlighting victories of mayoral control in the past seven years, Murdoch’s Post also published an aggressive slew of editorials mocking anyone who stood in the path of a full-throttled renewal of the mayor’s power. (Remember Randi Weingarten, puppet master?)

Murdoch also played a behind-the-scenes role in his position as co-chairman of the Partnership for New York City, a lobbying group that represents business interests. (The other co-chair is Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs.) The group kept a low profile during the mayoral control fight, but worked behind the scenes to broker a compromise between groups fighting over the law, including the city teachers union and the Bloomberg administration.

Duncan fought for mayoral control, too, and he often did so in the pages of the Post. It was in that newspaper that he first entered the local fight, offering an exclusive interview previewing remarks he made the next day at the Sheraton, where the National Action Network was holding a conference on education. Duncan then sat down with the paper’s editorial board, where he criticized a cut to charter schools by the state. Later, he penned a letter to a civic group that got into the nitty-gritty policy question of whether or not to give school board members fixed terms. (Like the Bloomberg administration and the Post, Duncan opposed them.)

While the efforts of the newspaper and the secretary probably did play a role in renewing mayoral control, the accuracy of the stories that the Post ran is arguable. The paper called the city’s racial achievement gap “the incredible shrinking race gap,” yet a recent New York Times story, a story I wrote in the New York Sun, and analysis by academic researchers suggests much more modest language is in order. The paper also wrote story after story about turnaround schools — without once profiling the schools that have remained failures despite mayoral control.

Not to be a Grinch, or even to argue that “balance” could have solved the problem. But is a little editorial independence so much to ask for?

According to the Daily News’ Liz Benjamin, debate over the bill lasted for two hours and turned personal when critics of mayoral control attacked the bill’s supporters, Sens. Daniel Squadron and Frank Padavan. The Senate also passed four amendments that will create a parent training center, an arts council, yearly school safety meetings, and expanded oversight of principals by superintendents.

Jimmy Vielkind at Politicker reports that the dissenting senators were Bill Perkins, Ruben Diaz Sr., Shirley Huntley, Kevin Parker, Velmanette Montgomery, Eric Adams, Carl Kruger, and Tom Duane. Perkins and Diaz also voted against all four amendments.

Standing on the Senate floor, Diaz forecast how tomorrow’s editorials would receive his vote. “You read it, tomorrow they’re going to call me a monkey, they’re going to call me a clown, they’re going to call me stupid. They’re going to call me all kinds of things,” he said.

The NY Post, which has been mayoral control’s biggest cheerleader, is reporting the news with an exclamation point in its lede.

“Mayor Bloomberg is still the undisputed educator-in-chief of New York City public schools!”

In a statement just sent out by Mayor Bloomberg’s office, the mayor thanked the two senators for sponsoring the bill. “With the governance question resolved, we can now move full steam ahead with efforts to ensure that this school year is marked by more great progress,” the statement said. Included in the list of people the mayor thanked is “Majority Leader Espada,” who is one half of the two-senator team that staged a Senate coup in early June and led to the mayoral control law’s sunset.

The state Senate also passed a resolution by a voice vote that will create a task force to oversee mayoral control. With a total of seven members — four Democratic senators and three Republicans — the subcomittee will have the power to hold hearings, issue subpoenas, and write reports.

Bill de Blasio said the issue is “very personal” for him, citing his children, who attend public schools, and his service on a school board. “I think we need profound reform of mayoral control,” he said, but did not go into specifics.

“I’m offended at any effort to reduce the democratic participation of parents in our school system. I believe there’s a way to do mayoral control right. I think there are virtues in the system if there is transparency, if there are clear checks and balances, if there is a forum for actual debate, if there is a role for communities and for local residents and for parents.”

Eric Gioia said the school governance system under Bloomberg and Klein has been holding kids accountable, but not adults. He said school should end at 5 p.m., not 3 p.m., and that children should begin school at the age of three, not five.

“I believe that we should have mayoral control, but I think for all that stuff you talked about, the smoke and mirrors and all that, that shouldn’t be a question because we should have independent outside audits of the school system. Transparency and accountability doesn’t mean testing the kids every two weeks — it means that the bureaucracy has to have transparency and accountability. And that is what we’re missing right now.”

Mark Green accused Bloomberg and Klein of “a father knows best, top-down approach,” to educational policy. “They’re ruining the value of the managerial accountability — that you want someone responsible sitting guard on one of the two great responsibilities of municipal government: law enforcement and education.”

“The best way to balance mayoral control, avoid mayoral dictatorship, and have someone who understands education, is to elect Billy Thompson the mayor of New York City.”

Norman Siegel called Klein “irresponsible and reckless,” for extending a contract to 2015, which would be well past the end of Bloomberg’s potential third term. “If mayoral control is defined by what Bloomberg and Klein have done since 2002, then I am opposed to mayoral control,” he said.

“With regard to test scores, it’s possible there’s a fraud going on here by Klein and the people at the DOE. I’m being told — and we’re doing research right now — is that the exams, in fact, instead of having 44 to pass, it’s been lowered to 28.”

Alex Zablocki, the lone Republican, said he did support mayoral control of schools. “I don’t believe it’s perfect, but as someone who’s 26 years old and left the public school system right before they turned over control to the mayor, I do remember a system, back then, that was filled with bureaucrats…and I believe that there was a lot of waste. With that said, that doesn’t mean that there’s not a lot of waste now.”

“We do need more parental control and more voice…Educators need more of a voice than ever. What’s happening right now in the department of education is people that run corporations trying to run a school like a corporation.”

Liz Benjamin of the Daily News is reporting that senators will interrupt their summer recess to vote next Thursday on the school governance bill passed last month by the Assembly. The early-August vote adheres to the timeline set out by Mayor Bloomberg and the UFT when the mayoral control deal was brokered late last week, after the Senate had already decamped for the summer.

But the school governance saga won’t end once the Senate passes the Assembly bill, which adds some checks to mayoral control. Benjamin reports:

The Senate is moving ahead with its votes on chapter amendments despite the fact that the Assembly, which passed its mayoral control reauthorization bill in June, has not yet agreed to do the same.

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver this morning reiterated that the only commitment he has given is to discuss the amendments with his majority members in when they return to Albany.

Outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who played a major role in the Senate negotiations, told GothamSchools last week that conversations with Silver led her to believe that the Assembly will pass the chapter amendments. “You know the Assembly will in good faith look at the chapter amendments,” she said.

Last Friday, Democratic state senators reached a deal with Mayor Bloomberg (that may or may not pass), essentially ending the drawn-out negotiations. Yet groups that were in the thick of the political fight just last week are intent on remaining active, even if the mayoral control debate has largely ended.

Learn NY, which was set up roughly a year ago by allies of the Bloomberg administration to campaign for mayoral control’s renewal, will continue to exist until the Senate passes a bill bringing mayoral control back. After that, the group’s future is uncertain.

Learn NY spokeswoman Julie Wood refused to comment in greater detail.

On the opposite side of the debate are groups like the Campaign for Better Schools, the 3Rs Coalition, and the Parent Commission on School Governance, all of which advocated for significant changes to the 2002 school governance law, but favored keeping mayoral control in place. Each them face their own existential questions.

“No determination about the future of the Campaign for Better Schools has been made,” said the campaign’s director Billy Easton, in an email today.

“There is no question that the groups who comprise the Campaign for Better Schools will continue working together and organizing for educational justice,” he wrote.

At least a portion of the campaign’s funding will end this Friday, when a $350,000 grant from the Donors’ Education Collaborative, known as DEC, is set to expire.

“The grant was given a little over a year ago to encourage debate around the issue of mayoral control,” said Norma Rollins, coordinator of DEC. Rollins added that all of the campaign’s lobbying efforts were funded separately.

Steven Bell, a member of the 3Rs Coalition, which has worked with the Parent Commission to lobby for increased parental involvement, said his group would continue lobbying regardless of whatever deal is brokered.  “Even after the legislature passes whatever they pass, we’ll probably continue working,” he said.

Leonie Haimson, a member of the Parent Commission, was more guarded about the organization’s future. “I think we’ll be putting out a statement later,” she said. “I don’t think we want to jump the gun at this point.”

Standing outside of 250 Broadway, where a dozen of the city’s senators met and others listened in by phone, Democratic conference leader John Sampson said, “One thing you can say today is, we have an agreement with respect to school governance.”

Senators cautioned that the deal’s language has yet to be finalized on paper, but what they described mirrors an earlier agreement that fell apart last week. Today’s agreement would add extra checks to a mayoral control bill passed by the Assembly, including a parent training center based out of CUNY, an increased supervisory role for superintendents, and a new citywide arts panel. According to a statement released by Sen. Carl Kruger’s office, the deal also includes the creation of a Senate subcommittee to oversee the Department of Education.

“All’s well that ends well,” said outgoing UFT president Randi Weingarten, who said that she has been acting as a “go-between” for the two sides, spending Thursday night on the phone helping to broker today’s deal.

A spokeswoman for the mayor’s office, Dawn Walker, released a statement saying:

The agreement “preserves the accountability and authority necessary to ensure that the gains we’ve made — in math and reading scores, graduation rates and school safety — continue. At the same time, the agreement addresses concerns that have been raised by legislators in a way that makes sense.”

Sens. Sampson and Pedro Espada were vague about when they would return to Albany to pass the Assembly’s mayoral control bill. Espada said it would happen “before children start school in September.” But Walker’s statement sets the date as the first week of August.

When the senators do return, it’s expected that they will pass the Assembly’s mayoral control bill, as well as the chapter amendment they agreed to today. Weingarten said that when the Assembly returns for session, Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver would introduce the amendment.

As usual, not everyone is on board. Throughout the afternoon, senators sent conflicting messages as to whether they had actually reached a deal with the mayor. Sens. Hiram Monserrate and Ruben Diaz Sr. left the meeting, telling the waiting press that a deal would be reached either today or tomorrow.

“The four amigos are divided today,” Diaz said in Spanish to a group of reporters. “It’s a done deal, but we’re not all in agreement.”

“We’re not exactly home yet,” Monserrate said.

Minutes later, Sens. Espada and Sampson emerged to announce that an agreement had been reached.

Sen. Bill Perkins told the Daily News’ Liz Benjamin that the issue of police presence in schools had not been addressed to his satisfaction. “I’m looking for something stronger,” he told Benjamin, who says she will believe there’s a deal when it passes the Senate.

“It’s a done deal, but we’re not all in agreement,” Diaz said in Spanish to a group of reporters. “The four amigos are divided today.”

Diaz added that he expects a final deal to be released today or tomorrow. No agreement has yet been put to paper.

The Senate’s leading Democrats, John Sampson and Malcolm Smith, are holding the meeting to try to persuade Democrats critical of mayoral control to come on board an agreement struck with the Bloomberg administration yesterday. The agreement would add extra checks to a mayoral control bill passed by the Assembly, including a citywide parent training center based out of CUNY and a new citywide arts panel.

Twelve other senators are still in the meeting, and others are participating by telephone, Anna reports.

Bloomberg administration officials are paying close attention to the talks, which they hope will put a final end to a debate that has been going on for seven months now. The debate hit a serious road bump when mayoral control expired June 30 without any new law passed to replace it, reverting the city back to the pre-2002 school governance law and forcing a hasty meeting of a reconvened Board of Education.

Even if no law is passed, administration officials are planning to move forward with enacting the plan’s major parts, including a citywide parent training center, a source said today. The idea is to send a strong signal to senators that the administration takes the agreement seriously.

UPDATE: Anna reports that Perkins just came out of the meeting looking more staid than usual. He said there will be a deal, and Senate Democratic leaders are about to make a group statement.

Asked if discussions were heated — which we heard from at least one senator who’s not in the room but was calling in for the latest — Perkins said they were “thorough.”

UPDATE 2: Sens. Espada and Sampson just walked out. “We have reached an agreement with respect to school governance,” Espada said, Anna reports. He said the “language has not been finalized,” but that he intends to return to Albany “before our children go to school in September.”

The persuasion effort is happening at 250 Broadway in Lower Manhattan, according to Sen. Jose Serrano of the Bronx.

Serrano said he is happy with the deal struck yesterday by Sens. John Sampson and Malcolm Smith and would like to go to Albany as soon as possible to seal it.

“I’d like to go right now!” he said in a phone interview. “Everyone wants to talk about they want to be in their districts for the summer, that’s when all of the events are happening, the street festivals and the family days. My thinking is, the sooner we get this done, the sooner we can start scheduling things here in the district.”

But other senators might be wary. The deal includes a component Serrano favored, a new panel on arts education that would be a subdivision of the citywide school board, acting as a “watchdog” and performing audits on whether arts education is really happening in classrooms.

Other senators have been more vehement critics of mayoral control and demanded stronger checks against the mayor’s authority over the public schools. A group led by Sen. Bill Perkins of Manhattan railed against the mayor yesterday. Sen. Eric Adams of Brooklyn declared that senators would not “knuckle over” to pressure.

“We are going to be the bad guys,” Adams said. “It doesn’t matter what you think of us. It matters what the parents think of us.”

Update: Sen. Carl Kruger’s chief of staff, Jason Kopell, just told Anna that the meeting could last for hours. “When they get together, they can be there for hours. It’s a good group that is very vocal and they give each other the opportunity to talk,” he said.

Hashed out by Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott and the two top Senate Democrats, Malcolm Smith and John Sampson, the agreement is several steps away from being finalized. The rest of the Senate’s Democratic conference will have to sign onto the agreement — and so will the state Assembly. Even more difficult, for the deal to become law before the next school year, both houses of the legislature will have to return to Albany this summer to pass legislation.

The Assembly already passed a bill renewing mayoral control of the public schools, with some tweaks, before the end of its regular session. The bill enjoyed the support of the Bloomberg administration, but senate Democrats, once they solidified their thin majority, pushed back against signing onto an identical copy. They pushed for extra tweaks including  a way to guarantee parent involvement in the public schools.

At the heart of last night’s deal is the parent training center, which, according to the deal, will be housed at CUNY. Even this decision has not been without controversy. Initially, senators advocated for the center to be lodged at NYU’s Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, but the mayor and schools chancellor Klein objected, centering their concerns on a retired scholar, Debbie Meier, who has criticized Bloomberg’s education policies and has office at the Center.

The Center’s director, Pedro Noguera, said he wasn’t sure if Meier was the real reason the parent training center is going to CUNY. “NYU didn’t like being in the middle of a controversy,” Noguera said, adding that high-level administrators at the University were “all very sensitive about alienating the mayor.”

As for why Klein and Bloomberg opposed the placement: “I think they might be scared of a center in a place they feel they can’t control,” Noguera said. Bloomberg administration sources have said that CUNY was chosen because senators wanted a center with arms in all five boroughs.

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.”

Adams said Mayor Bloomberg had “misunderstood” his opposition. Saying that the senators would not “knuckle over,” he added, “We’re solid in our communities, you can do what you want.”

Nursing bruises from the city’s editorial boards, the group spent as much time chastising absent editors as it did railing against no-bid contracts, the subject of Diaz’s speech.

“We are going to be the bad guys,” Adams said. “It doesn’t matter what you think of us. It matters what the parents think of us.”

In the end, it wasn’t that the mayor’s office couldn’t strike a deal with the largest group criticizing mayoral control, the Campaign for Better Schools, or with the city teachers’ union, which had pushed for checks early on. All three parties signed onto a deal together earlier this week, writing down a Memorandum of Understanding that would have put in place parent-training centers that senators said they wanted to add.

But Senate Democrats ultimately did not go along with the deal.

“It’s not like we couldn’t agree on terms. It’s like they couldn’t agree on terms amongst themselves,” an exhausted and depressed city official, speaking on background, said in an interview today.

“They clearly were saying one thing to us yesterday and doing something different,” said teachers union president Randi Weingarten. “That was very frustrating.”

Union, campaign, and city officials began their discussions Tuesday after senators walked away from a deal that would have brought to a vote a version of the bill passed by the Assembly preserving mayoral control with some tweaks. Sens. John Sampson and Malcolm Smith, two of the Senate Democrats’ four leaders, and Sen. Daniel Squadron, a Bloomberg ally who had to split early due to a prior engagement, his wedding, made the deal, but once Squadron left for his honeymoon, the Democrats declined to bring the bill to a vote.

At a loss, City Hall officials decided to meet with Easton and the main lobbyist for the state teachers’ union, Stephen Allinger. Easton had been pushing for a separate bill that would have taken more power away from the mayor. But he recently had pivoted to pushing for a compromise that would have guaranteed funding for parent training centers across the boroughs.

In the Senate’s library, a group including Micah Lasher, the Department of Education’s lobbyist; Allinger, and Easton crafted a deal that would have provided the parent training centers, as Easton and the union wanted — but would have done so through a written Memorandum of Understanding, rather than an amendment to the law, in keeping with Bloomberg’s desire, and with the reality that the Assembly, which would have to agree to amendments to make them law, has already adjourned for summer.

The memo’s language was nearly identical to that in an amendment introduced by Smith, the city official said. The only major change was that instead of having New York University run the initiative, that responsibility would go to CUNY, along with the $1.6 million a year to fund it. The city thought that arrangement would prevent abuse, and legislators liked that the funding wouldn’t stay in Manhattan, the source said.

Democratic senators told the group that they would go along with the agreement, Weingarten said. But when Sampson emerged from session last night at 10:30, he infuriated city officials by declaring, “This is not one-tenth of what I need,” according to the city source.

Democratic Sen. Shirley Huntley told Beth Fertig at WNYC why she refused to cooperate:

Queens Democrat Shirley Huntley told WNYC they wanted to send a message.

… Senator Huntley said she didn’t appreciate how the teachers union and other parties got involved.  “When I’m pressured I do nothing, ” she said, calling the phone calls “obnoxious” and adding, “There was no need for the pressure.”

That same offer is no longer on the table after last night’s blow-up, the city official said today, adding that the situation in Albany is the most chaotic he has ever seen.

Weingarten said the lack of an agreement made for a “very dangerous” period in time:

“Are there going to be riots on the street? No, of course not. But you have a situation where you have a bill that’s ready to roll in terms of changes to governance; at the same time you have a governance system that was used last 7 or 8 years ago, and is very outdated or outmoded, doesn’t answer the question of what happens to community boards or CEC’s — so it’s a very chaotic period of time.”

Her recommendation? “We need to take a big time out, and take a big sigh, and start again on Monday,” she said.

But senators have left Albany and do not intend to return until the end of the summer. They will return only if Gov. Paterson calls them back. On his weekly radio show today, Bloomberg said Paterson should use state troopers to retrieve the legislators.

CLARIFICATION: Billy Easton, the director of the Campaign for Better Schools, disputed part of this story today. “I did not and never have lobbied against the Better Schools Act,” he said. We have deleted the sentence containing that information.

Listen to the segment in its entirety right here: 07-17-09-worrs

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’”.

Instead, the Department of Education is planning to continue the Community Education Councils — despite the fact that they no longer legally exist. These parent councils replaced school boards in 2003 and, with the law’s expiration, have been legally stripped of their authority and responsibilities.

Chancellor Joel Klein, who was voted back into office unanimously today by the new Board of Education, sent a memo to principals today outlining his plans for the CECs. He said he is urging the CECs to continue meeting “at least until September when we hope to have more clarity.”

“If the Councils decide not to continue their work, we’ve asked them to notify us immediately,” Klein wrote.

The decision to create of a Board of Education and vote in a chancellor while leaving the rest of the power structure as it was under mayoral control has divided the system into old and new. The school system’s top half is in compliance with pre-2002 law, while its lower quarters legally don’t exist.

DOE officials say they cannot bring back school boards because the law does not allow for an election until May of 2010. Sources who have worked under the old system said in interviews that they disagree. They contend that the chancellor could appoint interim trustees to fill school board seats, or he could go to court and ask that CECs be converted into school boards.

According to the DOE’s own internal memo, without school boards, the city’s superintendents cannot obtain legal contracts. Although Klein can select and pay superintendents, under the pre-2002 school governance law, superintendents can only sign a contract with school boards.

From there, the situation only becomes more confusing because the existing superintendents will have no legal authority to hire or fire teachers.

Asked whether superintendents will have any control, DOE spokeswoman Melody Meyer said, “We’re trying to figure that out.”

Administrative assistants to the CECs will continue to be paid.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of the nonprofit group Class Size Matters and a member of the Parent Commission on School Governance, said keeping the CECs in operation was a good idea.

“At this point they’re the only legitimate voice of parents out there,” she said. “Whether they have legal status or not makes no difference to me because whatever legal status they have had in the past has been ignored.”

The CEC for District 1 has already taken matters into its own hands. CEC president Lisa Donlan said the council met this morning and passed a resolution requesting that the DOE appoint its current members to a community school board.

Klein “says he can’t appoint trustees, so that’s why we made the resolution,” Donlan said. “We’re trying to avoid that legal pitfall of inaction. Do I know if it’s illegal? No. We did this completely based on our interpretations of the situation we’re in now.”

Chances are that CECs will not be reincarnated as community school boards. “There’s no provision for that type of thing,” Meyer said.

No mention whatsoever of mayoral control’s expiration.

Here’s the weekly newsletter:

Control of Tweed Courthouse, the Department of Education's headquarters, is in question as mayoral control expires.

In the past week, we have interviewed dozens of people and undertaken headache-inducing reviews of state education law.

That reporting informs the following guide to what will happen if — or, as seems increasingly likely, when — the 2002 mayoral control law expires tonight at midnight:

1. The borough presidents and the mayor would convene a new city Board of Education. The current law says that, starting June 30, 2009 (which technically is today),

The board of education of the city school district of the city of New York is hereby continued. Such board of education shall consist of seven members, a member to be appointed by each borough president of the city of New York and two by the mayor.

One borough president has already appointed his member; others say their appointments are on the way. But it’s not entirely clear that Mayor Bloomberg will go along with creating a new Board of Education. If he does, he will appoint two members, too. If not, the governance structure of the city school could land in court.

2. The Board of Education members would elect a president among themselves and begin receiving salaries. State law requires that the president of the board be paid $20,000 a year and other members receive $15,000.

3. The Board of Education would select a chancellor. Chancellor Joel Klein’s contract, which is simply a letter from Mayor Bloomberg dated November 2002, would expire with mayoral control. Under the pre-2002 law,

The office of chancellor of the city district is hereby continued. It shall be filled by a person employed by the city board by contract for a term not to exceed by more than one year the term of office of the city board authorizing such contract, subject to removal for cause. The chancellor shall receive a salary to be fixed by the city board within the budgetary allocation therefor.

All but one borough president has suggested he or she would recommend keeping Klein, so it’s fair to assume that Klein would remain chancellor, should he accept the offer. He’d just have a new contract (and maybe a new salary).

4. The Board would figure out how to make money flow. Now and under the pre-2002 law, the Board of Education has final say over the city school system’s purse strings. But the simple act of letting mayoral control expire would alter the school budget, and so a reconstituted Board of Education could end up having to approve a new budget for next year.

The board could also decide that it wanted to re-approve — or revise — the current school budget. It would also have to make sure to approve (or vote down) any looming contracts.

Bloomberg administration officials argue that a system vaulted back to the pre-2002 law would cost more money to operate. They estimate the costs of running the community school districts as they used to function is $340 million. Some of that is currently covered in superintendent salaries, which constitute about $5 million of the city budget right now, not including benefits. But other parts are not.

The $110,000 in salaries for Board of Education members would also be an added cost; members of the current Board of Education, known as the Panel for Educational Policy, do not receive salaries.

Other sources said that costs would be minimal. They said there’s no reason the community superintendents could not continue to exist on their current budgets. The 2002 law did not get rid of the community school districts, and it listed much of the same responsibilities for superintendents as had existed before 2002. (In practice, the Bloomberg administration assigned superintendents other roles.)

5. Community school boards would form. According to the old law, elections for school board members cannot be held until May of 2010. There are several ways to jump-start community school boards sooner. In one scenario, the chancellor would appoint interim members, known as trustees, to take the place of the 32 school boards that existed up until 2003. This was routinely done before mayoral control when school boards had vacant seats or were deemed dysfunctional.

Department of Education officials interpret the law differently. In a memo outlining what will happen if mayoral control expires, officials said that the chancellor cannot name trustees unless a board member has violated a law. A school official also pointed out that the concept of trustees seems to be absent from the state education law.

Another scenario would have the DOE go to court to get a ruling permitting the Community Education Councils to function as the school boards once did.

The school boards become even thornier if elections are held. In an e-mail to a parent today, obtained by GothamSchools, the executive director of the city’s Board of Elections, Marcus Cederqvist, said that the Department of Justice might have to give a “pre-clearance” before elections could occur. DOJ requires pre-clearances for changes in election procedures.

6. District superintendents would be appointed. The city currently has 32 community superintendents, but under the pre-2002 law, the superintendents would have to hold a contract with the community school boards.

The Department of Education has argued that the impossibility of convening school boards would make community superintendents unlawful. But others familiar with the pre-2002 situation said that superintendents could easily be re-appointed.

They said this could happen in one of two ways. Either the community school boards would select superintendents — likely the ones already in place — or the chancellor could go over the head of the boards and appoint superintendents himself.

These superintendents would have hiring and firing power and would oversee the opening of summer school tomorrow.

A compromise would find a middle ground between the bill introduced by state Senator Frank Padavan, with the support of Mayor Bloomberg, and the one introduced by Senator John Sampson, the Democratic leader in the state Senate, who favors adding checks to the mayor’s power. But it would still mean the June 30 deadline would pass without a new school governance law to replace it.

That’s because in order to become law, both houses of the legislature have to vote for the same bill. But a compromise bill would be different from the one the Assembly passed two weeks ago.

“Our point is that schools will open up as usual tomorrow, even if mayoral control expires,” said the spokesman, Shomwa Shamapande. “Let’s get the legislation right and make sure parents have a voice.”

Shamapande would not disclose details of the talks he said are underway, saying he does not want to jeopardize the effort. I asked him if he is confident the talks will produce a compromise. “We’re hopeful. I’m not going to go with confident,” he said.

No other lawmakers returned calls immediately to confirm the talks.

Meanwhile, members of the Parent Commission on School Governance, which advocated for more parental involvement in the city’s public schools, are also calling in with optimism. Patricia Connelly, a member of the commission who is in Albany today, said that the commission’s favored bill picked up two new Senate co-sponsors yesterday, Eric Adams and Toby Ann Stavisky. The bill already had three co-sponsors: Ruth Hassell-Thompson, Velmanette Montgomery, and John Sampson, the acting Democratic leader. UPDATE: Shirley Huntley is the bill’s main sponsor. I neglected to mention her before.

Parent commission members are also hoping that the Senate passes a bill with stronger checks to the mayor’s power — even if that means mayoral control expires for some time period. “Are you kidding, of course! I’d rather have it expire than have the Padavan-Silver bill pass,” said Leonie Haimson, a member of the commission who is also in Albany. “There’s no debate on that one.”

UPDATE: Another set of parent leaders, including the group Time Out From Testing, the Center for Immigrant Families, and the president of a Manhattan parent council, are also saying the impasse creates an opportunity to check the mayor’s power over the school system. The parents say they want a “true partnership” with the mayor, rather than a dictatorship where he runs the public schools unilaterally.

Here’s a statement they sent out today:

Parent leaders today called attention to the  tremendous potential provided by the sunsetting of the mayoral control law that dictates the terms of governance for the New York City school system.

Jane Hirschmann, chair of Time Out From Testing, said, “This is a golden opportunity to return public education to the public. For seven years we have had a dictatorship, an administration that is not accountable to anyone – most especially to parents, children, teachers and taxpayers. Parents have been sold a bill of goods about test scores, graduation rates, dropout rates, bus schedules, and school safety. Children have themselves become test scores, subjected to a never-ending schedule of  interim assessments, test prep and high stakes exams that control curriculum and instruction.”

For taxpayers , the past seven years have been a disaster with no bid contracts totaling several hundreds of millions of dollars that have been a bonanza for private companies such as McGraw Hill and IBM.

Perla Placencia from the Center for Immigrant Families remarked, “Building a meaningful partnership among parents, schools, and communities toward achieving high-quality education for all our children is fundamentally inconsistent with the top-down and undemocratic system of mayoral control of our schools.”  Tina Pack, parent leader who has 6 school-aged children, added:  “We need to recognize parents as our children’s first educators and make sure that we build a system that maximizes the critical role they play, together with educators, in our children’s growth and learning.”

Lisa Donlan, President of CEC1, said, “This is a great opportunity to give parents, teachers and communities shared decision making power at the district level by allowing the CECs to act as interim community school boards and to re-empower district superintendents to support schools in their districts.”

“Parents are calling for a true partnership, not a dictatorship, revealed through a board that is fairly constituted with power spread among parent representatives, elected officials (including the mayor) and outside experts–a board where the Mayor does not have the majority of votes or appointments. We need transparency, most particularly a mechanism that provides oversight of contracts and educational data such as test scores, graduation rates and teacher turnover,” added Hirschmann.

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.

BRONX BOROUGH PRESIDENT RUBEN DIAZ, JR ANNOUNCES HIS APPOINTMENT FOR THE BOARD OF EDUCATION

Dr. Dolores Fernandez will be the Bronx representative on the newly reconstituted Board of Education, effective following the sunset of mayoral control on July 1.

Today, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., announced the appointment of Dr. Dolores Fernandez as the Bronx representative on the newly reconstituted Board of Education, effective following the sunset of mayoral control on July 1.

A resident of City Island, Dr. Fernandez had served as the president of Hostos Community College from 1998 until her retirement this year. She currently serves as a professor of urban education at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center in Manhattan.

“Though I am a supporter of some form of mayoral control, and I am disappointed that the current law was allowed to expire, the business of our children is too important to wait for Albany to act. Dr. Fernandez is a highly qualified, well respected educator with a long resume of accomplishments, and she will be a strong voice for the over one million public school children of the City. I am proud to appoint Dr. Fernandez to the Board of Education, and I look forward to working closely with her to craft an ambitious education agenda for the students of The Bronx and all five boroughs,” said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr.

“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,” said Dr. Fernandez.

In addition to her work at Hostos Community College, Dr. Fernandez served as deputy chancellor for instruction and development for the Board of Education under Chancellor Richard R. Green from 1988-1990. Dr. Fernandez also served as director of education and deputy commissioner for program services for the New York State Division for Youth under Governor Mario Cuomo. An educator since 1978, Dr. Fernandez has also served as a teacher in Queens District 29, as well as the Long Island communities of Long Beach and Hempstead, during her career.

Dr. Fernandez graduated cum laude from Nassau Community College, earned a B.S. in Education from The State University of New York (SUNY) at Old Westbury, and received a Master’s in Education, as well as a professional Diploma in Educational Administration, from Long Island University (LIU) – C.W. Post College. She then earned her Professional Diploma in Reading and her Ph.D., in Language and Cognition from Hofstra University.

Mayor Bloomberg appeared via satellite at a press conference in Albany today. I watched via webcast.

As Governor Paterson said he will give the state Senate a last chance to operate at 7 o’clock tonight, Mayor Bloomberg outlined his plan for what happens if mayoral control expires at midnight. The plan was, by his own admission, murky and short on details.

First, he said, “the lawyers take over in New York City”:

Every decision – from personnel decisions to policy decisions — will be subject to litigation and uncertainty. That’s no ways to run a school system. It will be like a nightmare flashback to the days when politics ruled the schools and our children suffered the consequences.

Critics of mayoral control and people who are familiar with the pre-2002 school system have disputed this characterization, saying chaos would not ensue if mayoral control expires.

Governor Paterson echoed Bloomberg’s concerns, saying that if mayoral control expires the city’s public schools will descend into “total chaos.”

Bloomberg, speaking via satellite from City Hall at a press conference in Albany, said he will work to “shield the system from the chaos the Senate is experiencing and is planning to inflict on city schoolchildren”:

Make no mistake about it: We will not allow our schools to be padlocked or summer school to be canceled. Summer school starts tomorrow, no ifs ands or buts. The kids that are going to summer school need help. And we are going to provide it.

We’ll keep things running to the best of our ability and deal with questions as they arise, that is our responsibility. But we are going into uncharted territory, and there’s no crystal ball. Our job will be to try to shield new york children and their parents from the chaos to the best of our ability and continue to press the Senate for action.

The NYCLU and Sikh community members demanded protection against discrimination at a press conference this morning. They said their push could be helped if mayoral control is revised.

Mayor Bloomberg refused to take questions on mayoral control at a press conference this morning, and two school-related groups staged protests outside City Hall and Tweed Courthouse without addressing the 2002 law directly.

That’s despite the fact that mayoral control is set to expire in 12 hours if the state Senate doesn’t pass legislation today. With the Senate still locked in a court battle, chances of a resolution look dimmer by the minute — and a reconstituted Board of Education looks more and more likely.

Bloomberg said he will address the small matter of the deadlocked legislature at 12:30 today, at a press conference where he will virtually appear next to Governor Paterson, who is in Albany.

Meanwhile, a group including the New York Civil Liberties Union and Sikh community members demanded more protection from discrimination this morning, in a protest outside the Department of Education’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters. The group accused the DOE of not enforcing a regulation that is supposed to protect children from discriminating against each other in school.

Donna Lieberman, executive director of the NYCLU, said the issue relates directly to mayoral control. The NYCLU has argued the current mayoral control law wrongly insulates the school system from following city law. “The refusal of the DOE to protect kids has to be looked at in the context of mayoral control,” Lieberman told our Anna Phillips, who is at City Hall this morning. (The Assembly’s version of a revised mayoral control law does not clarify whether the Department of Education must follow city law, as NYCLU advocated.)

Another group stood outside City Hall this morning to urge City Council members to make two Muslim holy days into public school holidays. The council’s education committee voted to make that change last week.

UPDATE: Mayor Bloomberg signaled he opposes making the holidays into school holidays, Azi reports at Politicker:

“One of the problems you have with a diverse city is if you close the schools for every single holiday, there won’t be any school,” Bloomberg said. “And so we have to understand that we’re going to close for those holidays where there is a very large number of kids who practice the particular religion that has the holiday and we’ll try to make accommodations” for others.

Bloomberg went on to say, “We just cannot continue to give days off from school for every single holiday. Educating our kids requires time in the classroom and that’s the most important thing to us, more than anything else.”

A group is planning to celebrate the end of mayoral control with a party in the park next to the Department of Education’s Manhattan headquarters, beginning at the perhaps-premature hour of 4:30 p.m. The law does not expire until midnight.

The event’s organizer, Nicola DeMarco, told me he expects between 25 and 50 people to join him at the party, which will conclude at midnight when the group tries to symbolically evict Schools Chancellor Joel Klein from Tweed Courthouse.

DeMarco has been teaching in the city since 1994 and is currently assigned to a teacher reassignment center, sometimes called “the rubber room.” He said the main point of the event is for teachers and parents to share their experiences living under mayoral control. “We’ve all been impacted by the scorch-and-burn policy to raise test scores,” he said.

Below is the press announcement that I received (from multiple people) yesterday:

Teachers, Principals, Guidance Counselors, paraprofessionals, secretaries, parents, families and community members will be gathering to celebrate the end of Bloomberg and Klein’s control of the New York City Schools beginning at 4:30 P.M. Tuesday June 30, 2009 in the park on the east side of 52 Chambers Street in Manhattan. At the stroke of midnight, June 30, we will serve eviction papers on Joel Klein to remove himself and his cronies from 52 Chambers Street, The “Boss Tweed Courthouse” immediately.

For more information of this celebration, call Nicola DeMarco at 917-374-5220 or 718-884-2069 or email at nickdmarco@hotmail.com