When the City Council Education Committee held a hearing last week on the implementation of the new school governance law, it was the first time that student views on the law were heard by the Council.

High school senior Ben Shanahan and I testified on behalf on the New York City Student Union. Our message was simple: the changes in our schools’ governance have been made without any student input, they do not recognize the need for student input, and do not provide an outlet for student opinion. (While I believe in student voice on all levels, I am mainly referring to high school students in this post).

The law focuses on increasing the power of parents and superintendents in the context of mayoral control. A new citywide Council on English Language Learners was added to the existing citywide councils on special ed and high schools. The special ed and high school councils were set up by the mayor and have now been made official under the education law. Each of these councils have between 12 and 15 members. Generally nine or ten of those members are parents, and two or three are people who have knowledge or experience in the field. The final member is a high school senior: the only non-voting member on the council. (more…)

A week after the State Senate re-newed the law granting Mayor Bloomberg control of the city’s public schools, the mayor announced today his appointees to the Panel for Educational Policy, the oversight board that replaced the old Board of Education. The PEP is made up of eight mayoral appointees and one appointee from each borough president’s office. The panel is charged with approving educational policies proposed by the chancellor and voting on the Department of Education budget (and some contracts); but it has had no real decision-making power.

Mayoral appointees serve at the pleasure of the mayor and there are no term limits. Four of the eight appointees are “repeats” - Philip Berry,  David Chang, Tino Hernandez, and Richard Menschel. Only two of the four new members are public school parents: Joe Chan, president of the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and Linda Lausell Bryant, executive director of Inwood House, a nonprofit that supports families and teen parents. (more…)

In an announcement today at PS 171 in East Harlem, the mayor proposed ending “social promotion” for all students. His new promotion policy would require all students in grades 3-8 to score at least a “Level 2″ on state reading and math exams to move onto the next grade. (Exams are scored on a 1-4 scale where 4 is the highest.)

Five years ago, Mayor Bloomberg “rammed through” a controversial 3rd-grade promotion policy by summarily dismissing members of the Panel on Educational Policy (PEP) who opposed his plan. After the policy went into effect in 2004, it was later adopted for 5th, 7th, and 8th-graders, as well. Now, Bloomberg wants to extend the policy to include the 4th and 6th grades, so that it applies to all grades in which students take state-mandated standardized exams. (more…)

It’s official. The anticipated State Senate vote re-authorizing  mayoral control of the New York City schools took place this afternoon; senators voted 47-8  in favor of the legislation, according to  news sources. A few vocal opponents argued against its passage  up to the end, according to the Daily News . The News reported that Senator Shirley Hunter, a “an outspoken critic of mayoral control,” had harsh words for some of her fellow senators whom she said struck a deal with Mayor Bloomberg.

GothamSchools.org, which has been following the mayoral control muddle closely, has a good round-up of news coverage.  It also notes  that the Senate approved the four amendments to the State Assembly bill that will “create a parent training center, an arts council, yearly school safety meetings, and expanded oversight of principals by superintendents.” The amendments fall far short of the checks and balances on the mayor’s power that many parent advocates, including Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters,  have lobbied for.

Today the The New York Post reports that state Democrats in Albany are ready to pass legislation extending mayoral control of New York City public schools, but  The New York Times reports that the bill passed by the Assembly will not sail through the Senate.

Meanwhile, here in Manhattan, parents who would like to protest mayoral control will converge on Tweed Courthouse at 5 p.m. today. The New York Coalition for Neighborhood School Control and the Parent Commission  on School Governance are co-sponsoring the rally.

This morning at 11 am, a coalition of students, civic leaders and advocacy groups plan to release a ‘white paper’ and report card on the incidence of bullying and bias-based harassment in the city’s schools. Student leaders from the Sikh Coalition and other organizations will speak, as will representatives of the New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York City Bar Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Rights Committee, which collaborated on the project, and City Council members Robert Jackson and John Liu.

The report card asks whether the Department of Education has made sufficient progress implementing the anti-bullying Chancellor’s Regulation (number A-832), announced by the Mayor and the Chancellor in September 2008. More than 1,100 students and teachers contributed to the report-card assessment. Notably, three of every four New York City middle- and high-school students report bullying in their schools.

This afternoon at 4:30, vocal opponents of mayoral control plan to celebrate its demise, also at Tweed. Event organizers say they’ll serve eviction papers at midnight to oust Chancellor Klein and his staffers; DOE spokesman David Cantor denounced the proposed gathering as “tribal” in an email response. Of course, everything depends on whether Albany legislators actually manage to meet – forced to do so by a judge’s order — and hinges on new Democratic leader John Sampson’s desire to spend more time evaluating mayoral control.

The New York State Senate may be scheduled to reconvene at 3 pm today, but if recent experience is any guide, there’s no certainty that actual work will get done on behalf of the State’s citizens. Most pressing for many New York City residents, of course, is the law that maintains mayoral control of the schools, set to expire at midnight tomorrow, June 30.

Covered extensively in the Times, Post, News and at Gotham Schools, Gotham Gazette, and other local media, the mayoral control fight has taken on the tinge of French farce: How long can the public bickering and back-room wheeling-dealing continue? How many leaders and activists can line up for, and against, the mayor’s control of the schools? Can New York City go “Soviet,” to quote the Mayor, if the law’s not renewed? And — we hesitate to ask aloud — what about the kids?

Pro- and anti-control factions rallied and vented yesterday in Harlem. Will all the politics and posturing make a difference? Will Albany legislators wake up today and decide their duties outweigh their power struggles? Will New York’s statehouse denizens cease to be a laughing-stock and step up to their responsibilities?

With less than two days to go, the answers are anyone’s guess. The conflict is red meat for the local press, local pols, and pundits and activists on all sides. We still want to know, what about the city’s kids?

In Albany, the State Assembly’s Education Committee has passed a revised version of mayoral control which may be voted on by the entire Assembly as early as tomorrow. Over at the Senate,  Hiram Montserrate, the indicted former City Council member who last week defected to the Albany Republicans, has returned to the Democratic fold, for a Senate-splitting 31-31 tie between the parties.

Meanwhile, the mayoral control endorsements continue, at the Times, the Post, and the Daily News. Even UFT president Randi Weingarten, one-time opponent of mayoral control, has come around to the Bloomberg-Klein point of view.

Locally, the city’s budget has won ‘handshake’ approval by the City Council — with no guarantee that schools’ funds will not be hit again. It’s thought that more than 2,000 school employees will find themselves out of work in 2009-2010 — cuts that reach beyond school offices into the classroom, affecting teachers and paraprofessionals.

Our most recent poll drew over 1,300 responses, along with a wealth of impassioned comments. Overall, the Mayor’s grade leaves a lot of room for improvement: More than half of respondents graded Mayor Bloomberg’s education policies as an F (28 percent) or a D (24 percent). Good thing he’s not looking for a ’social promotion’ in the next election.

This week, we want to know your thoughts on the nitty-gritty of the mayoral control bill. Even if the legislators in Albany are stalled in a contest of dueling egos, New York City parents can and should speak their minds.

Weigh in with your opinion, and in the meantime, read what some of our readers had to say about last week’s question: (more…)

The action in Albany continues as a national embarrassment (although some states have it worse). Apparently, hell hath no fury like a billionaire scorned.

Meanwhile, New York City’s Sheldon Silver steps out of the famous Albany backroom to offer a bill on mayoral control of the city’s schools, with the support of education committee chair Catherine Nolan of Queens.

Silver’s bill adds some oversights on school closures, contracts and budgeting, and aims to restore a measure of power to the flaccid Panel for Education Policy and the now-dormant district superintendants. School closures would entail 6-month prior notice, with a public hearing 45 days ahead of any planned closure, and provisions are in place to assure audits by both the Independent Budget Office and the Comptroller. The audits would encompass both financial matters and performance-assessment data, including test scores, graduation rates, and other measures that determine the success — and survival — of individual schools and principals.

Silver’s bill would also restore local superintendants to the city’s school districts — but the PEP would still serve at the Mayor’s pleasure, lacking the security of fixed terms. Approved by the Assembly, it moves next to the Senate for consideration.

And in the Senate? We can only hope they’re not still looking for the light switch and wrangling over the keys.

The New York State legislature, never considered a paragon of governmental efficiency, has outdone itself this week with yesterday’s leadership “coup” by a Republican-led coalition. (It’s alarming to consider that the education of more than a million children is in the hands of politicians apparently more committed to theatrics than substance.) Speculation is rampant on what this particular flip means for mayoral control. If the legislature doesn’t act, mayoral control will ’sunset’ on June 30 and the schools could legally revert to the pre-control model, an outcome Bloomberg, Klein and all of Tweed deride as a return to “the bad old days.”

Meanwhile, the Times features a poll citing wide discontent with Mayor Bloomberg — while carefully acknowledging his strong position as a free-spending incumbent, now $20 million into his re-election campaign. While it’s best to be cautious about extrapolating widely from a poll of only 683 respondents, it’s worth noting that two-thirds of New Yorkers polled favor term limits — but that three-fourths don’t care much about whether Bloomberg spends up to $80 million on his third-term campaign. Asked whether the city was headed in the right direction or not, 51 percent said the city was “on the wrong track.” More than half of respondents were dissatisfied with the public schools, down from a Bloomberg-tenure high of 72 percent in a 2004 poll.

Readers continue to vote and comment on our own poll on the mayor’s performance as head of schools. We will wrap up the results on Friday, and post a new - but related - question.

Given the increasing public conversation about the pros and cons of mayoral control – and the fact that the law is due to expire on June 30, unless Albany lawmakers approve a new (and improved?) version — we’d like to hear from you: How do you rate our mayor on education?

The schools grade our kids; the DOE grades the schools; it’s your turn, now, to turn the tables and grade the graders. How’s he doing? (a la Ed Koch.)