Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Christine Quinn, Robert Jackson and UFT president Randy Weingarten reached agreement on compromise to the Mayor's third major school reorganization plan.

Under the agreement, schools wont lose money during the next school year. That had been a major danger in the Bloomberg-Klein plan -- that the effect would be actual reductions in money available even as billions more are added the the education budget.

In addition the UFT appears to have won concessions that may mitigate the incentive built into the reorganization which will encourage principals to shed higher paid senior teachers. Other crucial areas: class size, parent engagement, middle school reform etc. appear to be adjourned to later with precatory language. Community leaders who were at the announcement included: Director of the New York Immigration Coalition Chung-Wha Hong, NY ACORN Director Bertha Lewis, and Irania Sanchez representing the Coalition for Economic Justice and Make the Road by Walking. They were the ones clustered around the Working Families Party which, along with the UFT, put considerable resources into the anti-reorganization effort. .

Consistent with the long Bloomberg-Klein hostility to parent groups, it appears that no leader of a Parent Association was present. The press announcment is here while press accounts from the New York Times and Daily News are here and here.

Do you know the story of Russian Minister Gregori Potemkin? To shield Catherine the Great from seeing the poverty of Russian village life, the story goes, he constructed movie-set style phony villages. Mayor Bloomberg has taken a leaf from Prince Potemkin and has staged a phony press event to puff-up pretend support for his disastrous mismanagement plan for our public schools. He produced a swath of supporters for the press on Monday, largely people who work for him as employees or contractors. Lo! And Behold!. If you pay them, they’ll agree with you.

Julie Bosman, writing in Tuesday’s NY Times noted the concentration of contractors, as did Carrie Melago of the Daily news. Will they bill or have these courtiers already billed NYC for their time? Since public funds are paying for this, wouldn’t Central Casting has been cheaper?

Part of the problem with the Mayor’s plan to play 52 pick-up with the schools is that it was sprung on parents, teachers and principals with no prior consultation. When Deputy Mayor Wolcott and Chancellor Klein say they’ve spoken with teachers or parents – they mean just that – they’ve not been listening at all. Another part of the problem is that the plan is bad.

People involved in school issues have revolted against this reorganization. See District 1 parents here and high school parents here , the NYC Council here For a critique from the UFT’s blog edwize, which is especially informed and well reasoned, in my view, try here or the Educational Priorities Panel take here .

Can you get free from the burdens of work and seder preparation on Monday morning? The Drum Major Institute is sponsoring a most-of-the-day talk-fest on New York City and the Middle-class.

Featured speakers include form Gov. Mario Cuomo, Mayoral-possibles Rep. Anthony Weiner and Comptroller William Thompson, Just-re-elected UFT President Randi Weingarten and NYC Finance Commissioner Martha Stark and Bronx Beep Adolfo Carrion Jr. You can read more about it here.

I personally had to move heaven and earth to clear the morning and will have to seder-prep all weekend, but I'm going.

Monday April 2, 2007 8:00 a.m.-2:00 p.m.
Baruch College Conference Center, Newman Vertical Campus
55 Lexington Avenue at 24th Street, 14th Floor

Try calling, emailing DMI to RSVP.
See you there.

Mayor Bloomberg, in his State of the City address, in January, proposed a top-to-bottom reorganization of the NYC public schools. Because the plan had been drafted in secret by Mr. Bloomberg, Mr. Klein and their multi-million dollar no-bid contractors, when it was first announced, no one could understand it at all. At the post-speech hearing of the NYC Council Education Committee, Advocate Gotbaum, Speaker Quinn, and Chairman Jackson (among a host of others were shocked that such far-reaching changes would be imposed with no consultation whatsoever with stakeholders or electeds.

I suppose it's not so odd, but the schools that Mr. Klein and Mr. Bloomberg want to impose on our children are entirely unlike those which their children attended. Both Spence and Ms. Porters sport small classes and individualized teaching.

As Mr. Bloomberg's proposal has become clearer over the last few weeks, it has drawn concerted opposition from the NYC Council, parents, teachers, the Working Families Party, ACORN and many others. If you care about public education not at all and intend to stop reading now, take away my overall judgment as a parent and somewhat informed observer: The Bloomberg/Klein proposals will destabilize every school and will facilitate the looting of the education budget by contractors. The educational theory upon which this chaotic re-shuffle is based seems to me to be -- every child, teacher and school is fungible with every other.
It seems to me the only thing Mr. Klein learned about schools, he learned in law school. Children are, to him, widgets. In later posts, I'll write about the movement to stop Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein, but below, an attempt to set out some of the mismanagement principles of their erratic proposal.

Tuesday, I went to Albany with the Chancellor’s Parents’ Advisory Council (C-PAC?), the UFT and the Principal’s Union to lobby legislators on behalf of smaller classes for public school children about which I will I write more later.

In the course of the day, we got a funny lesson in the manners and mores of the legislature.

The Senate and Assembly were set to vote on members of the Board of Regents, the group which hires the Education Commission. As a practical matter, the positions are in the gift of Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, since Assembly Democrats make up the majority of the combined body. As they went to vote for the new members of this crucial body, none of the Senators and Assembly members I spoke to knew who Mr. Silver intended to nominate (elect). After the vote, none of those I spoke to knew anything about those for whom they voted.

One of them, CUNY Law School Professor Natalie Gomez-Velez is, in my view, an excellent choice: smart, focused, funny, light on her feet in debate; we schmoozed with her after her election. She represents the Bronx on the Panel on Education Policy and used to work for the Brennan Center.

The other is someone none of the elected officials I spoke with had ever heard of.

Parents of public school children, like me, and those concerned with quality education (or the lack of it) should be looking with both significant hope and anxiety at the education budget proposals made by Gov. Spitzer. If enacted, the proposed budget will, over the next few years, increase funds dramatically. If that money is spent wisely, it will overcome the years of underfunding which have afflicted NYC schools (and those of lower income school districts across NYS). Of course the anxiety comes from the fact that we know that government is capable of wasting money on a grand scale. (Consider the still unbuilt 2nd Ave. Subway).

Advocates for adequate school funding, including groups which I like and support respect, have signed on Gov. Spitzer’s proposals hook, line and sinker. One in particular, the Alliance for Quality Education , a coalition of community groups which has, for years, been a steady lobbying force statewide, has been leading the charge to gather support for the Spitzer proposal.

AQE, the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the NAACP and New Yorkers For Smaller Class Size others are holding two forums (fora?) this Thursday, March 8, 2007 (in the Bronx and in Queens.) . The sharp-eyed will notice that the Queens event features Assembly Education Chair Cathy Nolan and Senate Minority Leader Malcolm Smith both of whom can play keys roles in getting the Spitzer education budget passed and in making sure safeguards are in place to ensure the new money is spent carefully. Directions after the break.I am definitely going, -- even if it means taping by favorite TV programs. You should consider coming, too.

The furor over the sudden, chaotic changes in bus routes for New York City’s school children continues unabated. Now Mayor Bloomberg is lashing out at his critics, including several City Council members and the Public Advocate. While kids all over the city are getting to school late, nobody is asking a very important question:

Why are so many of these kids taking buses to school anyway?

According to the Queens Courier, five-year-old kindergartener Salma Youssef has to travel over four miles to get to school. Is there an elementary school nearer to her home in Astoria? In fact, according to the NYC Department of Education website, there are at least half a dozen, so why isn’t she going to one of them? The scramble to send very young children to schools far from their own homes is one of the stupidest aspects of our pathetic excuse for a school system.

It’s one thing to grant a waiver for a child to go to a school that may not be in his or her official district, if the other school is just as easy to get to. But how many thousands of New York City children are being bused

On Monday at noon, George Pataki will finally, blessedly, get out of the way. This state can then at long last breathe a sigh of relief and get back to actual governance.

He is not, however, going away entirely, caught up as he is in the desire to cast wider the nets of his failure by running for President. On the one hand, that's a remarkable leap of faith on his part; on the other, one has to be strangely fascinated by the fact that he believes in himself so strongly that this quest of his hasn't been aborted by the incredulous derision it inspires.

George Pataki leaves behind a state that neither loves nor hates him. If he inspires any reaction, arguably, it's boredom, the kind you get from an uncle whom you like at some level, but who can't stop yapping about golf. Your relief when this uncle finally leaves your Thanksgiving dinner is precisely what New Yorkers are feeling as the Pataki era draws to a close. Pataki is Calvin Coolidge, without the excitement.

Pataki's legacy is, in fairness, mixed. He preserved more open space than any of his predecessors. He championed the cleanup of the Hudson. Until he started running for President, he supported gay rights and a woman's right to choose. He also cut taxes, especially in his first term, and took some steps to shrink state government, notably the sale of the World Trade Center in 2001. He even managed to deliver an on-time budget two years in a row. By the low standards set by contemporary republicans, he was not as bad as he could have been, which, I suppose, translates into a gentleman's C, politically speaking.

When Vice-Chancellor Adelaide L. Sanford said it yesterday at the Drum Major Institute, it sounded like a wise crack but it wasn't. She said

"Is the Robin Hood System Ok?" implying that richer districts are being robbed to fund poorer ones. Regent Sanford won't abide by that framing;

"It's not Robin Hood, the truth of the matter is you rob the hood" (As quoted by DMI's Elana Levin.)

What Ms. Stanford was referring to is a difficult debate about how to fairly fund public education in New York State. Should the $5.7 Billion due NYC schools out of the CFE litigation (and perhaps a comparable amount state-wide) be taken from wealthier New Yorkers so as to improve the schools of poorer people? Ms. Sanford and I had both attended a Baruch College debate of the "Robin Hood" solution where educrats, progressive politicians and political scientists seemed to agree that no one was going to take money from the rich. Will everything change from day one? I personally doubt it because, to mangle Fred Douglas, powerful interests will give up nothing without a demand.

Education funding in NYS is boring and opaque for a reason: poor people pay for the schools of the rich. New York State's funding formula for schools rewards wealthy communities with lower tax rates and higher per-pupil expenditures (and, as a result, better schools) than poorer commmunities. This result, odd from a public policy point of view but completely understandable as an expression of raw political power, means that poor people pay much higher taxes for much worse schools.

My daughter has started Middle School and, of course, there is the usual beginning of the year paperwork. A friend noticed on the form for school lunch programs a particularly embarrassing typo. The form at the very top of the front page tells us the form is brought to us from the:

“Department of Eduction [sic] of the City of New York”

Well, I could easily make the obvious joke about the state of eduction in our fine city…