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 .

While the actual budget outcomes are not really known yet, some of the winners are: Long Island school districts got lots more money, Westchester school districts didn't. Indeed, when the Assembly voted on the Education budget, all Westchester Assembly Members (mostly Democrats) voted "No". Monday's NY Times features a good story by Danny Hakim and David Herzenhorn which lays out how LI won and Westchester lost. The victorious statements of the Alliance For Quality Education & Campaign for Fiscal Equity are after the jump.

In addition, advocates of smaller class size in New York City (including me) were successful, it appears in that some language requiring smaller classes made it through the final budget. UPDATE: I ran into UFT Lobby and political people Monday morning who were jubilant and absolutely certain that the class-size language would result in actually smaller classes. NYC will have to build classroom space to accommodate the new classes. There are, unhappily, no fixed targets for class size reduction, so this battle may have to be fought over and over again.

Queens Assembly Member Rory I. Lacmann, who, with Education Chair Cathy Nolan, led the charge on behalf of smaller class size, reports as follows:

" Over Mayor Bloomberg’s fierce resistance, NYC will be required to reduce its overcrowded class sizes under the budget passed today by the state legislature (A.4307-C), a priority of the Assembly throughout the budget negotiations. Specifically, NYC is required to execute a plan to reduce class size over five years, to be enforced by the New York State Commissioner of Education."

Does this mean that your children and mine will actually get smaller classes?

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.

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.

At Queens Borough Hall in Kew Gardens, Thursday night, public school advocates, parents, principals and politicians gathered to support the school spending plan proposed by Gov. Eliot Spitzer. The meeting, sponsored by the Alliance for Quality Education, the NAACP, the UFT and New Yorkers For Smaller Classes, featured AQE director Billy Easton and Campaign for Fiscal Equity dirctor Geri Palast who have been at so many meeting together they finish each others sentences.

The task at hand: focus the crowd to pressure Queens GOP Senators Maltese and Padavan to support the Spitzer scheme (which I'll describe below).

The key issue: class size. I think that the reason that Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Klein don't care about it, and refuse to spend money on it is that they see our children as objects to be processed by the schools not as individuals, each with her or his own needs. Assemby members Nolan and Lancman have introduced a bill to require our Mayor to reduce class size.

The big news: GOP Senator Maltese will support the class size limits. Almost losing his re-election, seems to have woken him up. Senator Padavan is rumored to be supporting the class size intitiative as well.

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.

Those of you with children in New York City's public schools may have been watching Mayor Bloomberg's current school-bus-fiasco with a sense that it's deja-vu all over again.

The Mayor hired a no-bid private consultant for $17 million or more to save money. The consultant told him to reorganize school buses so as to save $12 million. (So far a loss of $5 million, even if these pretend savings were real). No people in the public school community were consulted. Instead, they are notified in an incoherent manner. Chaos ensued. Courtly, elegantly dressed Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott was called out to defend a totally irrational program change. The Mayor sneered at protesting parents and, in time-honored fashion, fled to Israel. See, for example, the front-page story from Friday's Daily News and Gail Robinson's good round-up in the Gotham Gazette.

The reason why Mr. Bloomberg's constant and irratic reorganizations are always wrong is that he imposes them from above. Chancellor Klein and some consultants and aides with no experience in public education cook up a scheme. The Mayor okays it and they're off -- playing 52-pick-up again with thousands of schools, hundreds of thousands of employees and more than 1 million children. Check out the NY Times story of a few days ago concerning the departure of one of the last remaining actual educators from the Klein coterie Rose Albanese DePinto.

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.

Steve Harrison, the Democrat running against Vito Fossella, the corrupt buddy of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove, is calling for increased funding for building schools. Anyone who has a kid in NYC schools knows that more schools are critical for our children's education.

From the Staten Island Advance:

Harrison calls on U.S. to increase spending on school construction

Dem congressional hopeful says more funds are needed to reduce size of classes

Thursday, October 05, 2006
By GLENN NYBACK
ADVANCE STAFF WRITER

The federal government ought to spend more money on building schools in order to reduce class sizes and implement education initiatives outlined in the No Child Left Behind Act, Democratic congressional candidate Stephen Harrison said yesterday.

Flanked by representatives of the United Federation of Teachers and Democratic elected officials, Harrison said too many schools on Staten Island are overcrowded, creating poor learning environments for children forced to compete for attention from their teachers...

Fossella, Harrison said, "doesn't pass the test" and received a failing grade from the National Education Association based on his performance in enhancing education...