On Monday, the Board will convene a forum in Queens on immigration and education to wrap up of their monthly meeting. The forum will discuss ways to increase opportunities for English language learners and undocumented students who were brought to the United States as children.

That has been part of the Board’s legislative agenda for the past two years. The bill, the New York Dream Act, would give undocumented students access to state financial aid through the $1 billion-funded Tuition Assistance Program, or TAP. It would also allow them to open tax-advantaged savings accounts with private banks.

The TAP funding in this year’s budget is up from $885 million in 2010-2011. The Fiscal Policy Institute, an independent research organization, has estimated that the state would need to spend an additional $17 million annually to afford tuition assistance for the roughly 4,500 undocumented seniors who graduate from New York high schools every year.

“There are hundreds of thousands of students in New York who have been condemned to a life of poverty simply because they were brought to the United States as children,” Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch said. ”Their immigration status is determined solely by the status of their parents, and they’re being denied opportunities that the rest of America takes for granted.”

The legislation, sponsored by Francisco Moya, is also a top priority for the Assembly, Speaker Sheldon Silver said this week. The Assembly intends to pass the bill on Tuesday, but not before it votes on a resolution to investigate sexual harassment and misconduct allegations by Assemblyman Vito Lopes, a process that could eventually lead to his expulsion. There is also the added

Whatever its fortunes in the Assembly are, the bill has little chance of moving in the Senate. Leaders Jeff Klein, a Democrat, and Dean Skelos, a Republican, have said they would only support a version of the legislation that didn’t require more funding for  TAP. Skelos has said he’d prefer to offer financial assistance through a private fund. 

While state education officials are in New York City, they’ll also be touring schools that were ravaged by Hurricane Sandy more than six months ago. On their public schedule for Monday are visits to P.S. 038 in Staten Island, Scholars’ Academy and Beach Channel Educational Campus, which houses five schools. GothamSchools wrote about the recovery efforts by one of those schools, Channel View School for Research, and its struggles to recoup what it lost in the storm’s aftermath:

In the storm’s aftermath, Channel View was displaced from its building for two months and has struggled to recover. Teachers’ and students’ homes were destroyed, parents lost their jobs, and ongoing work to rebuild the Rockaway Peninsula has made for a bleak backdrop in which to go to school.

Even four months after the school returned to its building, students and staff say that something is missing. In interviews, they struggled to identify what they had lost.

“It’s something that we can’t grasp, what the issue is,” said Jennifer Walter, the school’s guidance counselor. “But you can feel it.”

Selective middle schools consider students’ fourth-grade reading and math scores, and selective high schools look at students’ seventh-grade scores.

But after the first round of state tests tied to new standards known as the Common Core, about a dozen principals have announced — in an open letter to parents, students, educators, and others with an interest in education — that they are abandoning the use of test scores in admission, at least for now.

“We welcome rigor, high standards and accountability, but demand that these three crucial words and concepts not be thrown around loosely; and, even more importantly, we demand that they be implemented in a proper, respectful and effective way,” write the principals, who come from a range of selective schools in three boroughs. ”Therefore, we cannot grant these recent tests the value others claim they have until [our] concerns are addressed.”

The principals say they want the state’s tests to be shorter, open to public scrutiny, and more aligned to the Common Core, which emphasizes critical thinking and problem solving over recall and the completion of rote processes.

Mark Federman, principal of East Side Community School, said he helped draft the letter after being “shocked and appalled and just really saddened” that this year’s state tests did not match up to what he expected of the Common Core.

“The power that we have as principals and as schools is we decide how important [test scores] are,” he said. “It would be hypocritical for us to use them in admissions.”

The principals are also registering their criticism in a letter that Federman said would be sent soon to State Education Commissioner John King. Journalist Andrea Gabor first reported about both letters on her blog.

Like most of the principals who signed the letters, Rex Bobbish, principal of the Cinema School, a selective Bronx high school, has never made test scores the exclusive or even prime factor when selecting applicants. But he told GothamSchools that he always considers them, and in the past, he has assumed that very low scores meant that students would not be prepared for high school. Now, he said, he won’t make the same assumption.

“I will weigh students’ grades in core courses much more heavily than the state exams going forward,” he said. “That’s the pledge I made when I signed that letter.”

At schools where test scores have factored more heavily into admissions decisions, making the same pledge is less straightforward, Federman said. Still, he said, principals there could facilitate an important discussion about the role of test scores.

“If there’s a school and parents that are boycotting the test, and yet the school is using tests to let kids in, I think that’s a good conversation for that community to have,” he said.

Among the principals who have signed on to the pledge is Ramon Gonzalez of M.S. 223 in the South Bronx. Days after the state tests finished last month, Gonzalez told a crowd of policy makers — including AFT President Randi Weingarten, who has called for a one-year moratorium on stakes for Common Core exams — that the tests had distressed his teachers and students.

“They didn’t know it would be a test of endurance,” Gonzalez said about his students. “They thought it would be a test about what they knew.”

Bobbish said changing their schools’ admissions criteria represents a small step that principals can take against state tests’ increasing stakes, an issue that several mayoral candidates have pledged to address.

“There’s not really much we can do about it,” said Bobbish, who said he supports the Common Core standards but grew concerned after colleagues told him that the tests did not appear to be fully aligned to the standards. “We can’t control the whole world, but we can send a message by saying we really value a student’s long-term effort and what they do in teachers’ classrooms more than what their tests show.”

This story has been updated with comments from Mark Federman and to reflect the fact that the letter to John King has not yet been sent.

Katie Campos, the most experienced member of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s education team, is leaving to attend law school. (Credit: Buffalo ReformEd)

For the second time in six months, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s tiny team of education aides is undergoing transition.

The departure of Katie Campos, Cuomo’s P-12 assistant education secretary since 2011, comes as one of the governor’s major initiatives, his education reform commission, prepares to renew its operations.

Campos’s last day is technically today as she prepares to enter law school this fall. But a spokesman for Cuomo said she’s sticking around parttime — and unpaid — through the summer to oversee the commission, which convenes next week for a second and potentially more controversial phase of meetings.

Cuomo and a small circle of policy advisors, including Jim Malatras, set the governor’s education agenda. But the execution of that agenda is largely left to a deputy secretary and two assistants. Campos’s is the second departure in a year for the triumvirate, of which Campos, at 27, was the most experienced member.

David Wakelyn, Cuomo’s first deputy for education, left last April after eight months on the job. His post that was not filled for six months, until De’Shawn Wright took over. (Lonnie Threatte is assistant secretary on higher education.)

Wakelyn, who said he left because of the strain it placed on his family, said Campos earned a reputation as a workhorse who “worked on pretty much anything and everything.”

“Katie just has remarkable energy and brings fierce intelligence and passion to the work,” Wakelyn said.

Campos’s hire in June 2011 was viewed skeptically by many seasoned education officials and advocates, based on her age and background. After graduating from college three years earlier, Campos had worked for Democrats for Education Reform and the New York State Charter Schools Association. Campos also formed a parent-organizing group, Buffalo ReformEd, that pushed for a parent trigger law in her home city.

“She was a person who I had never met before in my life. She was very young and she came from a background that would suggest very education reform, very pro-charter,” said Tim Kremer, executive director of the New York State School Boards Association. “But once I got to know her, I was very impressed. She’s smart and very dedicated and accessible and she kept an open mind.”

Campos, who declined to comment about her departure, was seen as a key advisor on Cuomo’s ambitious education agenda. She was a point person to the commission’s members and the groups that were invited to testify at their meetings. She also helped develop the early learning, community schools, and extended learning grant programs that the commission recommended and the state is in the early stages of executing.

Campos also helped draft legislation designed to force local districts to negotiate, submit, and implement their teacher evaluation plans.

Cuomo has not yet selected a replacement for Campos. She’ll begin her volunteer stint next week when the Education Reform Commission meets in Albany to discuss the issue of merging and restructuring small school districts, a controversial policy that often means jobs loss.

School safety agents participated in a community-run training session in the Bronx earlier this year.

When Lynn Sanchez, a Bronx parent activist, challenged police and education officials to address persistent school climate problems during a public forum on school safety last year, she did not think they would say yes.

And yet just months later, Sanchez was sitting with safety agents during one of their training sessions — which, for the first time, community members and advocates were helping to lead.

She saw a long-standing vision of collaboration coming together in that room. “We have to make sure everyone is on same page — we have to include school safety officers, teachers, principals, paras, students, and parents — in order for a school climate to change,” Sanchez said.

The community-run training sessions represent a striking shift in the city’s strategy for preparing safety agents to work in schools, where their role has historically been fraught. While the Bloomberg administration has famously considered principals to be the CEOs of their schools, principals’ authority does not extend to safety agents, who since 1998 have been under the authority of the New York Police Department in an arrangement that advocates say breeds tension.

The quiet shakeup so far has taken place only in a corner of the Bronx, where community groups were able to persuade the police department to let them play a role in the training of 450 agents, and its future is far from certain. But students, educators, and advocates say they are confident that the approach could go a long way toward easing some of the tensions that have plagued city schools, and a small-scale expansion of the first round of trainings appears to be in the works.

A guidance counselor or handcuffs

The city’s 5,000 safety agents together make up one of the largest police forces in the country. They man metal detectors, patrol the halls, and provide security at school events. City officials say their presence has helped reduce crime in city schools.

Bronx Defenders Attorney Cara Suvall, who represents students in court, said safety agents are many students first contact with the criminal justice system, so there’s a lot at stake in the way agents respond to student behavior.

“The trainings they receive on how to de-escalate situations and change situations can very easily guide the situation one way or another,” she said. “It’s their reactions that can steer the misbehavior towards a guidance counselor or towards handcuffs.”

Advocates say safety agents too often reach for handcuffs even when school officials would rather handle discipline issues without getting the police involved.

And even as the number of arrests and summons issued in schools has fallen in the last year, students of color and students in the Bronx continue to make up a disproportionate number of those arrested or cited. While the Bronx enrolls only 21 percent of city students, 28 percent of arrests and 45 percent of summons took place in its schools.

It was against this backdrop that Sanchez challenged top NYPD and Department of Education officials at a local hearing on school safety to work with community members to put into action solutions that local parents, students, organizers, and lawyers had proposed.

“One by one the people on the panel said yes,” said Dinu Ahmed of the New Settlement Parent Action Committee, who helped community members organize the hearing.

The challenge gave rise to the Bronx School Justice Working Group, which includes several community groups, the NYPD, and the Department of Education. The working group has met regularly to discuss school climate issues, and the Department of Education invited members of the group to meet with several school principals in January. But the centerpiece of its work so far has been the school safety trainings.

Designed by New Settlement, the Children’s Defense Fund, and the Bronx Defenders, all nonprofits that work on school safety, the trainings have so far reached more than 10 percent of safety agents city-wide. Agents at the September and February trainings came fresh out of the NYPD’s 15-week introductory course and were then dispatched to schools around the city. Three other sessions held over spring break in March brought together new and veteran agents — including one longtime agent who had worked at a new agent’s high school when the new agent was a student.

Breaking down stereotypes

One of the trainings’ main activities asks both safety agents and students to brainstorm conclusions to the sentence-starters “we are …” and “we are not …” in an effort to shatter stereotypes about the role school safety agents are supposed to play.

“Ideally we have the school safety agents speak about what they think the students see them as and what we shouldn’t see them as,” said Christopher Pagan, a sophomore at Mott Hall Bronx High School who has participated in the trainings. “They might say, we are safety, we are parents, we are caring. Some might say they’re not babysitters, they’re not social workers.”

Pagan, who so far has been the only student to participate in the trainings, said the value of the trainings is evident in his own changing perspective.

“I see past the badge, because I’ve met with the safety agents,” he said. “These people are not bad people.”

The activity underscored the fact that, at least in the eyes of the agents, most students don’t share Pagan’s perspective (Pagan said the same thing).

“[Agents] came up with all these things that they’re not,” said Ahmed, who remembered hearing “jerks” as one of the words to end the “we are not” prompt. “That comes from a place of, ‘We know how people see us sometimes.’ And then we asked, ‘Where do you think these ideas come from?’”

When the “Who I am” activity flipped and the focus turned to students, agents saw a list of responses compiled by teenagers in advance.

“Some of [the students] might say, ‘Smart, dedicated, not troubled, respectful,’” said Pagan, who led the student section at the trainings he attended. “We’re not gangsters, we’re not criminals. We’re not lawbreakers. We get characterized for a lot. So the point of this workshop is for the agent to get a sense of what we feel as students and what’s the tension we have on our backs.”

Breaking down stereotypes was just one part of the training. Facilitators also discussed the ways that a wide range of approaches to discipline, from suspensions to peer mediation, affect the school environment. And attorneys from the Bronx Defenders spoke with agents about the consequences faced by students who enter the criminal justice students at an early age, as well as the positive effect a skilled agent can have in a school.

“When [agents] are making a positive difference it’s because they get to know the students, know the problems before they happen, and are in a position to make referrals in the school,” Suvall said.

A productive conversation

Pagan said the trainings with agents felt like a conversation. “It’s a good opportunity because you sit there literally and you listen, and they listen — that’s what I love about this,” he said. “In these meetings, they listen. They want to hear your opinion.”

As for the agents, Ahmed said, “It felt like they were having a conversation about the work in a way they don’t always get to have.”

Agents said in surveys after the trainings that the experience was valuable. Many wrote that they were surprised to learn about the city’s school arrest and suspension rates and the relative costs to the city of paying for a year of prison versus a year of school. They also said they appreciated hearing from community members.

“It was good to hear from a non-school and police view,” one agent wrote.

Agents had criticism, too. Certain parts of the training, one agent wrote, needed to take into account “student retaliation towards school safety officers who are law enforcement and sometimes our hands are tied.”

But overall, the trainings were well received, according to Sanchez, who helped facilitate the trainings after getting the ball rolling back at the hearing in June. Sanchez is now running for city council in District 14.

“At the end of the day, we asked them, ‘Now, knowing everything that you know, what will you do differently?’” she said. “That was really powerful because a lot of them said, ‘We’ll talk to them differently. We’ll try to build a relationship with them.’”

In their written feedback, many agents asked for more community-run trainings. One wrote,“I think there should be some sort of workshop for SSAs and school administrators to work more with each other.”

Institutionalizing the experiment

For most of the year, it was unclear the trainings represented the beginning of a sea change in the relationship between police and schools or merely a blip in an otherwise tense climate. Now, mounting evidence suggests that the NYPD plans to continue including community members in safety agents’ training.

According to minutes from the most recent meeting of the Bronx School Justice Working Group, the NYPD plans to continue allowing community members to run trainings for new and veteran agents.

At the same meeting, the Department of Education expressed interest in having community members run part of a new Bronx-based summer training on restorative justice for principals and other administrators.

“This idea of having a training for principals and staff is carrying off the success of the School Safety Agents,” Ahmed said. “We’re thinking, how do we take this model and bring it to other people in the school community that can benefit from it?”

The department’s openness to expanding the model marks a shift in the department’s approach to the working group. Since organizing the principal roundtable early this year, the department had not joined in the school safety trainings, and while a department spokeswoman confirmed the department’s participation in the group, she referred all questions about it and the safety agent trainings to the NYPD.

Whether the city supports community involvement in school safety issues in the future is likely to depend on the next mayor and his or her picks for chancellor and police chief.

Most mayoral candidates have been silent on school discipline issues so far. Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who has indicated that he could enter the mayoral race as soon as next week, has said “the process to remove troublesome students” is a top priority, drawing criticism that discipline policies that he favors might be even more punitive than the Bloomberg administration’s.

But several Democratic candidates have signaled their support for changing the way that schools handle discipline given that black and Latino students are arrested in disproportionate numbers. Their statements have bolstered advocates’ optimism that the community-led trainings will continue.

“I want to make sure the [the trainings] are institutionalized,” said Jaime Koppel of the Children’s Defense Fund, who helped design and run the trainings. “Who knows what’s coming down the pike with a new mayor?”

Alexis Karteron, an attorney at the New York Civil Liberties Union, cautioned that elected officials shouldn’t see community involvement as a substitute for broader changes that the NYPD and Department of Education should make to the way safety agents are trained.

“It’s important for [agents] to hear from parents and community members, but ultimately it’s the responsibility of the city to make sure they’re trained well and able to be a positive force in schools,” Karteron said.

After an arbitrator ruled that the city’s plans to overhaul the schools using a process known as “turnaround” violated its contracts with the teachers and principals unions, the city filed suit, arguing that the issue wasn’t fit for arbitration in the first place. A judge quickly ruled against the city, and the school closure plans were halted for the year.

But the city appealed again, and today, the state’s Appellate Court ruled again that the city’s arguments were without merit. “The arbitrator neither exceeded his powers … nor violated public policy in resolving the merits of the parties’ disputes,” read the ruling by the panel of judges.

The city technically could have one more shot at appealing the decision, by trying to get the state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, to hear the case. But their chances of success, which were slim to begin with, are even slimmer now. And city officials said they have concluded there is nothing to be gained by pressing on.

“The Department of Education believed it was in students’ best interest to close these seriously underperforming schools,” said Erin Hughes, a Department of Education spokeswoman. “However, at this point, we have complied with the arbitrator’s order and have moved forward, so further appeal is unnecessary.”

Hughes said the department was focusing instead on “opening competitive, challenging new schools in the fall.” The 24 schools all remain open now, although the department plans to begin phasing a few of them out over the summer because of continued low performance. Other schools that had been on the turnaround list, however, are getting new programs designed to attract stronger students.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement that the ruling, and the end of the year-and-a-half-long turnaround saga, validated the union’s position once and for all.

“Instead of helping these 24 struggling schools, the mayor and the [Department of Education] tried to unfairly force hundreds of good teachers out of their positions,” he said. “This is the second court and the third independent voice that has told the mayor that his approach was wrong.”

Perhaps the candidates who showed up to Wednesday’s mayoral forum in a Harlem school auditorium thought they’d get a break when they saw who was asking the questions: a couple of high school kids.

But Michael Cummings and Alize-Jazel Smith, seniors at Democracy Prep Charter High School, turned out to be tough moderators. They shushed Bill Thompson when he spoke out of turn, politely interrupted Comptroller John Liu when his time was up, and pushed candidates to answer the questions they were asked if they had strayed off topic — as one candidate did often.

“So, Mr. McMillan, just to be specific,” said Cummings, referring to Jimmy McMillan, the perennial also-ran candidate of the Rent Is Too Damn High party. “Do you support or do you not support co-location inside school buildings for public schools and charter schools?”

McMillan, last seen running for governor against Andrew Cuomo in 2010, used up his two minutes suggesting he would decentralize the school system, upgrade technology, and replace school curriculum — but not actually answering the question.

“If they benefit from learning, yes,” McMillan said of co-locations. “But if it doesn’t, no.”

In addition to education, the forum also covered issues about public safety, housing, and jobs. It was organized and hosted by Democracy Builders, a parent advocacy group that is part of the Democracy Prep Public Schools, and the crowd consisted mostly of students from the charter school network.

McMillan, Liu, and Thompson were joined on stage by Sal Albanese after two other candidates — Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Adolfo Carrión, Jr. — canceled their appearances. Liu and Thompson arrived late because they had been at a teachers union forum in Brooklyn.

Several Democracy Prep charter schools share space in public school buildings through co-location, a controversial practice that several candidates have vowed to stop. Speaking for the first time directly with charter school students, the candidates were encouraging but did not abandon their positions.

“I think it’s a disservice to the students, whether they be in schools that were already in that school building or whether they be in the schools that are entering that building,” Liu said about co-location.

Liu left early, but Thompson arrived in time for a “lightning round,” where Smith asked the candidates yes or no questions. Thompson at one point complained that the format wasn’t allowing him to articulate his views..

“The only thing I need to say to everybody is, in the lightening round the questions aren’t simple yes, nos,” Thompson said after Smith asked him if standardized testing was an effective measure of student learning. “They’re very involved, so when you talk about issues of co-location, when you talk about standardized testing — does standardized testing count? — sure. Is it the only measure of student achievement? Absolutely not.”

Jimmy McMillanVID00876 from GothamSchools on Vimeo.

Michael Allegretti, a vice president at the Manhattan Institute, advises mayoral candidate Adolfo Carrión, Jr., on education.

GothamSchools is profiling the education policy advisors to each mayoral candidate. 

Candidate: Adolfo Carrión, Jr.

Education policy advisor: Michael Allegretti, vice president of programs for the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research

For the last two years, Michael Allegretti has overseen policy research at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank that champions school choice and the need for accountability.

Allegretti, who ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2010, has also stayed active in politics, first by urging former Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión, Jr., to run for mayor and now advising Carrión on education policy and other other issues.

Allegretti, who is not paid by Carrión’s campaign, said there is still confusion among the mainstream media about where Carrión stands on education issues, and that’s probably because he was a Democrat for more than 20 years before entering the race as an independent candidate.

“He is a strong school reformer,” Allegretti said. “He believes that right now the charter sector has made gains, and obviously it hasn’t succeeded at everything, but the experiment in charter education needs to be expanded so we can use best practices from it to improve the traditional public school system.”

Allegretti — whose mother was a city public school teacher, first in Harlem and then in the South Bronx — grew up in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn and attended P.S. 185 through the fourth grade. He graduated from Boston College and later from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government in 2006. He’s worked at Partnership for New York City and The Climate Group and in 2010, he ran for Congress as a Republican in New York’s 13th district.

Now he works with Manhattan Institute policy researchers such as Marcus Winters, author of “Teaching Matters,” which examines how to recruit, retain and reward good teachers. And he helps Carrión’s fledgling campaign choose which education policy issues to emphasize.

“We help guide the debate toward more choice, more accountability, better curriculum and help avoid some of these ‘red herring’ arguments that by simply lowering class size, we’ll have better outcomes,” Allegretti said. “Well, the evidence isn’t there.”

He added that Carrión has also sought the advice of Seth Andrew at Democracy Prep Public Schools, a network of charter schools; Richard Kahn at Urban Assembly, which operates district schools; and James Merriman at the New York City Charter School Center.

“He’s surrounded himself with people who are at the forefront of education reform, doing the work on the ground,” Allegretti said. “My service to him is try to make some of these introductions, and make sure he has the best research in front of him to inform his position.”

Justice Sonia Sotomayor left the stage to answer parents’ questions after speaking at the Department of Education’s

To make sure that all attendees of the city’s annual conference for families of English language learners today could go home with an autographed copy of her book, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor signed 3,000 copies of her book in two days.

She was able to write the book, she told parents at the conference, because her mother – who didn’t speak English — taught her to value words. “My mother loved reading. Seeing her read inspired my brother and me to read,” Sotomayor said in her speech.

The Department of Education’s annual conference is designed to help immigrant families navigate the city’s education system and support their children’s learning at home. Sotomayor’s address, as well as the workshops that followed, was translated into nine languages, just a fraction of the 180 languages spoken by students in the city’s public schools.

Mirza Flore, who immigrated to the United States eight months ago and speaks only Spanish, said the hardest part of navigating the city’s schools is helping her son with homework in a language she doesn’t speak. He attends P.S. 104 in Far Rockaway.

Flore said she used to tell her son “not now” when he tried to talk to her as she cooked dinner. But after attending the conference, she said, she would use the time to supervise homework or ask her son to teach her something he learned during the day, one of many specific strategies Sotomayor suggested in her speech.

The Department of Education’s Division of Students with Disabilities and English Language Learners, which runs the conference each year in collaboration with other divisions of the department, invited Sotomayor to give the keynote. “Education is a difficult system to navigate if you don’t speak English,” said David Pena, a department spokesman. “[Sotomayor] has a perfect story for what we’re trying to do today.”

In her speech, Sotomayor went beyond platitudes about reading and writing. Parents who immigrate to the United States sometimes don’t know what their children should read, Sotomayor said, recalling what it felt like in college not to have read the books her peers grew up with.

As an undergraduate, she said, she once tried to explain to a friend how out of place she sometimes felt at Princeton. The friend said “You must feel like Alice in Wonderland,” and Sotomayor responded, “Alice who?”

“I bet half the audience probably hasn’t read Alice in Wonderland,” she said today. She suggested that parents ask librarians what their children should read, or schedule a meeting with their children’s’ teachers to discuss reading choices. “Like my mother, you may not know what kids your books should be reading. But you can help them find out,” Sotomayor said.

To get kids writing, she said, “Write notes to your children. Ask them to leave you notes about what they plan to do.”

Flora Yala, a parent at P.S./M.S. 218, said she came to the conference to learn more about resources available for her children and others at their school. “Sometimes things get lost through word-of-mouth,” she said in Spanish. “We want to hear it directly.”

Many parents said they heard about the event, which took place at the Javits Center in Manhattan, from the parent coordinators or social workers at their children’s schools. Some came in groups after dropping their children off at school, then left the conference in time for dismissal.

“Many times you listen, listen, and you end up wanting to know more,” said Nadia Reyes, another parent at P.S./M.S. 218. Yala and Reyes are part of a group of parents from District 9 in the Bronx who made t-shirts especially for the event. They gave one to Sotomayor when she stepped off the stage and, trailed by Secret Service agents, answered questions directly from parents.

When a parent asked why there weren’t more educational resources available for the Haitian community, Sotomayor emphasized the role parents can play in shaping education policy. “Organize your community. … Go beat down the door of that lovely chancellor,” she said, “The success of your community is how loud its voice can be.”

Sotomayor tied the practical advice in her talk back to her experience in the Bronx — an experience many parents said sounded very familiar — to her experience as a Supreme Court justice, which by definition isn’t one to which may people can relate.

“Nobody actually teaches you how to be a parent,” she said. “Justice [John Paul] Stevens once said to me when I was insecure about being a justice, ‘Sonia, nobody’s born a justice.’ Well, no one is born a mother or father.”

Parents said Sotomayor’s story about the impact her mother made on her life’s trajectory would stick with them.

“She was poor,” said Rosalie Mendez, the PTA president at P.S. 253 in Queens. “It surprised me all her mother was able to do for her.”

Mayoral candidate Bill Thompson presented his education policy platform in a speech Wednesday at NYU.

When former comptroller Bill Thompson took the stage at the United Federation of Teachers conference on Saturday, he joined fellow mayoral candidates in criticizing Mayor Bloomberg’s education record.

But Thompson, the former president of the city’s Board of Education who ran against Bloomberg is 2009, took a more measured approach when putting together his formal education platform. He outlined the platform today in a policy speech at New York University, becoming the first candidate to set out a complete education agenda.

Thompson’s platform — which skimmed over some important issues — reflects ample criticism of Bloomberg administration education policies. He reiterated a commitment to avoid school closures, promised to “lead with teachers” rather than threaten them, vowed to involve parents in policy making, and pledged to reduce schools’ emphasis on testing.

But it also signals that Thompson would expand, not end, many of Bloomberg’s school policies.

He said he would replicate some of the small schools that Bloomberg has opened, continue the city’s nascent efforts to link high schools with industry partners, and revise — not abandon — the Department of Education’s method of evaluating schools. He would also carry on some of Bloomberg’s recent initiatives, such as extending the school day and making classroom instruction more challenging.

A Bloomberg administration spokeswoman, Lauren Passalacqua, criticized Thompson’s change in tone.

“While we’re pleased to see Mr. Thompson embrace so many of the initiatives our administration has implemented, it’s unfortunate that he wasn’t willing to deliver the same message at the UFT’s annual conference on Saturday,” she said. “Leadership involves speaking hard truths to voters, not telling different audiences and special interests what they want to hear.”

Thompson and his fellow Democratic candidates are locked in a fierce race for the teachers union’s coveted endorsement, which will come in mid-June.

UFT President Michael Mulgrew said today that he was satisfied overall with Thompson’s proposal and thought city teachers would find much to support in it. He pointed to Thompson’s pledges to expand early childhood education, enhance teacher mentoring programs, and direct resources to students in low-income communities as examples.

“Clearly he understands the need to get children in a right place for them to be ready to learn,” Mulgrew said about Thompson.

Mulgrew also praised Thompson’s proposal for restructuring the Panel for Educational Policy, the board that must approve the mayor’s proposals for school closures, co-locations, and education spending and contracts. Currently, Bloomberg appoints a majority of the 13-person committee and can withdraw his appointees at any time. Thompson said he would seek to appoint only six of the panel’s 13 members, a position that he first staked out at the UFT’s conference on Saturday.

“You have to present real educational policy that will move things forward,” Thompson said today. Referring to his stint as Board of Education president, he said, “I can convince a majority of the board. That’s not going to be a problem. I’ve done it before.”

Other candidates, including Comptroller John Liu, have said they would push for fixed terms for panel members, granting them some measure of independence. But no one else has said they would decline to appoint a majority of members, weakening a key measure of mayoral control.

The UFT has asked legislators to reduce the mayor’s appointees to just five. Mulgrew said Thompson was “getting closer” in the number of nominees he would appoint and he didn’t think Liu — who has also proposed limiting appointees to a pool of nominated candidates — has gone far enough.

Thompson also sided with the union — and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, a fellow candidate — on the question of whether a new teacher evaluation system should include a “sunset clause.” Bloomberg rejected a deal in December, citing the union’s request for an expiration date.

But a number of items on Thompson’s platform would be extensions of Bloomberg’s policies. He said he would replicate schools such as Pathways in Technology High School and the Academy of Software Engineering that give New York City students direct paths to jobs.

Some of Thompson’s proposals could even run afoul of the union, depending on how they are implemented. He said he would “hold teachers accountable for what happens in their schools and classrooms” in part by using test scores, as is required under state law, and would launch a citywide initiative for longer school hours and school years. He said he would also work to pay “our most effective teachers” more to teach in high-need schools.

Thompson did not say how he would define effectiveness, taking a pass on a crucial issue that the next mayor will have to resolve. He also did not explain how he would pay for his costly proposals, other than by cutting “the excessive amounts of hundreds of millions of dollars” that the Department of Education has awarded in contracts to private vendors. (Public Advocate Bill de Blasio has so far been the only candidate to say he would raise taxes to support schools.)

And Thompson did not mention the divisive issue of charter schools at all, except to say that he would hold them to the same standards as district schools. (Because the schools are publicly funded but privately managed and authorized by state entities, the mayor has little sway over city charter schools’ operation.)

“In order to call New York the education city we need to build on the progress we’ve seen over the last decade in ensuring every student is taught by a great teacher and providing every family access to a quality school, regardless of their income or zip code,” said Glen Weiner, the interim executive director fo StudentsFirstNY. “Sadly, Mr. Thompson was silent on how he’d advance these issues.”

Mulgrew, too, said Thompson had more explaining to do. He said Thompson’s pledge to fix the Department of Education’s school progress reports — which Thompson called “a step in the right direction” — needed details.

Thompson’s full education platform is below:

BILL THOMPSON’S VISION FOR IMPROVING NEW YORK CITY PUBLIC SCHOOLS

Deliver Services to Students Ages Five and Under. Launch a new initiative to deliver comprehensive services to students ages five and under. Paired with an expansion of pre-k services, the initiative will provide support for kindergarten success and work with families to understand the comprehensive support that young students need to be successful in school. The initiative will identify – very early on – who needs additional help and we will provide it.

Launch a Comprehensive, Connected Pre-K to College and Career System. Create a pre-K to career- and college-ready system, where students are not repeating the same work and where each lesson and each year builds on the last. This comprehensive, connected approach will help us make sure we start kids off on the right track and keep them there.

Launch a New Education Innovation Grant. Create a mini-grant system for the most innovative schools, especially when it comes to career and college readiness. When educators do something well, we will give them the opportunity and resources to do even more of it.

Create a New Class-to-Job Pipeline. Use the success at schools such as Pathways In Technology as a model.  Expand that model to more schools – at least one in every borough. We will identify and partner with business leaders in medicine, biotechnology and engineering to give New York City students a direct path to a good job.

Create Multiple Pathways to Graduation. Open more schools like the Academy for Software Engineering, where students don’t just learn how to write computer code or engineer programs, they learn how to be innovators in their own right.  Students can do what they love in the city that they love.

Stop School Closures. Close schools always as the last option, not the first. Students in every school deserve the same chance of success as students in every other school. Thompson will stop school closures and introduce a comprehensive system to support struggling schools.

Support Longer School Hours and School Years. It means more time for teacher collaboration. More time to challenge students with new subjects. And more time to identify and help kids – at a young age – who are struggling.

Connect After-School Programs to Classroom Curriculum. We’re already paying for after-school programs. Now we need to connect these after-school opportunities to the lessons being taught in the classroom. This means children will have more time on task. And teachers will have more time to supervise their students.

Expand Gifted and Talented Slots and Locations. Expand and re-craft our Gifted and Talented program, not just in terms of the number of seats but the way we admit students.  The capacity of our Gifted and Talent program – and every school initiative – should be equal to the potential of our students. There should be a Gifted and Talented program in every community.

Support the Common Core. We should use it to shift the testing paradigm. Critical concepts will drive lesson planning. And those concepts can be reiterated in the games younger students play, across different subjects and in after-school programs.  Teachers will have freedom to convey those concepts.

Create a Real Career Ladder for Educators. Identify our strongest, most-effective teachers, especially in math and science, and put them to work guiding first-time teachers. These teachers can take on additional leadership functions at the school level.

Expand Master Teachers. Place senior level teachers in schools across the City and help guide curriculum creation and professional development.  As many as possible – especially those in traditionally tough neighborhoods – should benefit from having senior-level teachers guiding younger educators.

Reinvest in College Readiness. Work with CUNY to expand the College Now program, so kids have access to college-level coursework before they even leave public schools.  Students are challenged by higher-level coursework early in their academic life.

Drive Real Accountability. School evaluations should tell parents about the whole school, not just a single classroom. How engaged are the teachers? What’s the culture like at the school? Is there a strong PTA structure? That way, parents can make informed decisions about which school is right for their children.

Hold Charter Schools to the Same Standards as Public Schools. Hold Charters to the same standards as public schools. Schools should be centers for learning and innovation. And if any school – public or charter – isn’t meeting that standard, Thompson will take action.

Clear, Fair Metrics for Teacher Accountability. Hold teachers accountable for what happens in their schools and classrooms. We need to incorporate scores, professional observation, parent and peer feedback and more. Instead of simply threatening teachers, Thompson will lead with them 

Put Effective Teachers in Tough Neighborhoods. Create an incentive program to reward teachers who take on these challenges. Putting our most effective teachers into the toughest neighborhoods and the toughest schools will give them that chance.

Give Parents a Voice in Education Policy. Appoint parent representatives to the Education Panel. People on the Education Panel will support Thompson’s policies because they are the right policies. Not because he appoints them.

In one case, a special education teacher, Faith Walters, used names of 15 former students without permission in a book she published in 2011. The letter doesn’t name the book, but it appears to fit the description of a poetry book that sells on paperback for $15.99 on Amazon. The name of the author of the 67-page book is also Faith Walters and she describes herself as a New York City special education teacher.

In the book’s description, Walters said she was inspired by an experience she had when she first started teaching:

The memory of my first day of teaching will forever be in my mind of having an almost fatal experience of losing one of my eyes because of a flying chair that hit the wall just as I opened the classroom door of 15 students who appeared to be very angry and fearful.

“By publishing a book containing your students’ names, you disclosed confidential information” that violated the city charter, the letter says.

Walters wasn’t fined, in part because she told the board that her publisher has revised subsequent copies so that only the students’ initials are printed.

In the other case, a principal used one of her school aides as a personal driver to transport her son from his school to I.S. 340 (North Star Academy), where she worked, according to the board. The principal, Jean Williams, asked the aide to pick up her son on three occasions during the 2011-2012 school year.

“By using your position to as the Principal of North Star Academy to have your subordinate perform a purely personal  task on your behalf, you used your City position as a supervisor to obtain a personal benefit,” the letter said. Williams was not fined.

Aides are often used to fill several roles in a school, but their primary purpose is “to help the teachers get prepared to teach,” according to a job description on their union’s web site. They are also asked to monitor hallways and school yards during recess to “help keep schools safe for kids.”

Paid about $14 per hour, aides are among the lowest paid employees in a school. In 2011, the city laid off 438 aides — five percent of its workforce — to close a budget gap.

The letters are posted below.

COIB Public Warning Letter  — Faith Walters by GothamSchools.org‘s profile on Scribd” href=”/profiles/show/7995812-gothamschools-org”>GothamSchools.org

COIB Public Warning Letter — Jean Williams

But in the aftermath of a federal corruption dragnet that has brought down several lawmakers, any glimmer of hope that education could get some attention seems to have vanished.

“With this legislative session, with all the corruption, I would be surprised if anything gets passed,” said Mona Davids, who runs the New York City Parents Union, a parent advocacy group. State Sen. Velmanette Montgomery, of Brooklyn, sponsored a bill to end mayoral control that Davids lobbied for. The bill’s long odds grew even longer after Montgomery’s named surfaced last week as one of seven lawmakers recorded in the home of former Senator Shirley Huntley, who was cooperating with investigators to reduce a prison sentence. Huntley was sentenced to a year and a day in prison for embezzling funds from a charity she ran.

Davids said she believed Montgomery, who has not been charged, has done nothing wrong. Still, she said she doubted the bill could proceed before the session ends on June 30. “It’s May, but it’s over,” Davids said.

Davids’ pessimism reflects a growing sentiment in Albany that began shortly after the legislature passed the budget, when the first corruption cases surfaced. Since then, four lawmakers have been arrested on corruption charges as part of a federal investigation that seems to broaden by the week. As a result, even Cuomo’s agenda — which include a women’s equality act, publicly-funded campaign finance, and bringing casinos to New York — is in doubt.

Lobbyists, legislative aides, and advocates said in interviews this week that it’s not unusual for education to be placed on the back burner after the budget gets passed, though they said the recent events have further doomed the outlook.

Education was a top priority in 2010, when the state needed to pass laws to qualify for the federal Race to the Top grant, but since then, “most of the action has been around the state budget,” said Joe Williams, executive director of Democrats for Education Reform. “Once the budget passes, that’s it.”

Williams said it’s been like that for the last two years, in response to steep budget cuts to education spending that have chilled lobbying efforts.

Occasionally though, hot-button issues do arise and get placed onto Governor Andrew Cuomo’s agenda. That was the case last year, when one of the last bills passed by the legislature before going home for the summer was a law to shield teacher evaluation ratings from public view.

This year appears was different, sources said.

“A lot got addressed in the budget,” a legislative source said. “There is no clear issue.”

This year’s budget included funding for grant programs that Cuomo championed through his education reform commission, including money for extended day, community schools, universal prekindergarten, and early college high schools.

Those were relatively easy compared to an amendment to the teacher evaluation law that Cuomo pushed for. The amendment inserted a financial penalty for districts that aren’t implementing their approved plans according to the law’s intent.

“Nobody wanted to touch this thing,” a source close to the negotiations said. “The union on one side, Bloomberg on the other. Both have strong advocates, but at the end of the day, they were sort of forced to figure out a solution.”

The unions are still hoping for traction on some of the bills they’ve proposed. The state teachers union’s big push is the “Truth-about-testing Act,” which would require the State Education Department to audit the costs of the state’s testing program. The two sponsors of that bill, Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan and Sen. George Latimer, did not respond to requests for comment.

At the city level, the United Federation of Teachers is hoping to push longstanding priorities on its agenda, including changes to the mayoral control (it isn’t supporting Montgomery’s bill), place a temporary ban on school closings, and require local approval for school siting plans. It also is backing a bill that would eliminate the waiver option available to New York City chancellor candidates with no education experience.

The legislative session closed early this week due to a holiday. Speaking at a press conference to announce support for a bill to improve working conditions for farmers in the state, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said he still had big plans for the rest of the session, beginning with the introduction of the DREAM Act next week and reforms to policing tactics known as stop-and-frisk.

“I would hope that we can stay focused on the kind of legislation I’m talking about,” said Silver.

Shubert Jacobs, principal of the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, spoke at a press conference today on the steps of City Hall to announce the number of students who applied to — and were turned away by — city charter schools this year.

Students who were turned away from city charter schools this year could fill some of the city’s grandest landmarks, according to the New York City Charter School Center’s final tally of charter school applications.

According to the center, more than 69,000 students applied for 18,600 seats at the city’s soon-to-be 183 charter schools for next year. After filling their seats in lotteries last month, the schools had to turn away more than 50,000 students, the center said today, noting that this year’s wait lists contain more students than Yankees Stadium or the Great Lawn in Central Park could hold.

The center held a press conference today on the steps of City Hall to tout the numbers, which reflected a slight increase in the number of families applying to charter schools since last year as 24 new schools prepare to open this fall.

Citywide, the number of students applying to charter schools is rising less quickly than the number of seats in charter schools, so the odds of admission actually rose this year. But that wasn’t true at every school.

“Our demand is always high, but this year it’s higher than ever before,” said Shubert Jacobs, principal of Bronx Charter School for Better Learning, which he said had received 1,500 applications for 50 seats. The mother of two children at the school, Nadine Graham, appeared at the press conference and said her family was “truly fortunate” to have won spots in the school’s lottery.

Charter school wait lists are both politically significant and hard to pin down. The charter sector points to the size of wait lists as evidence that the public wants more charter schools. But charter school advocates in other districts have come under fire for counting students who apply to multiple schools twice on districtwide wait lists.

The city’s numbers count individual students, not applications (there were 181,600 of them, according to the center, mostly submitted online). But even so, because applicants are automatically added to wait lists if they are not selected in schools’ lotteries, it is unclear how many students on wait lists are unhappy with the schools they end up attending.

The tally announcement came days after several Democratic candidates for mayor said at the teachers union’s spring conference that they would not support raising the limit on the number of charter schools that can operate. The limit was last lifted in 2010 after a bruising legislative battle and now stands at 214 for New York City, which this fall will have 183 charter schools in operation.

Department of Education Senior Deputy Chancellor Marc Sternberg said the latest application numbers showed that the candidates are out of touch with families in the city want.

“While some want to turn back the clock to when New York had only a handful of public charter schools, these record application numbers show parents overwhelmingly demand them,” Sternberg said. “We believe in giving them those choices.”

James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center, which recently launched an ad campaign aimed at building support for charter schools, said the press conference highlighted three independent charter schools in part because mayoral candidates have aimed their fiercest criticism at networks that manage multiple charter schools.

In addition to criticizing charter schools, leading Democratic candidates have also taken aim recently at high-stakes testing and policies that curb teachers’ creativity in the classroom.

In his comments, Jacobs touted his school’s low student attrition rate, the fact that it allows teachers to write their own lessons, and its emphasis on measures of student learning other than state test scores.

With the race for City Hall the most contested the city has seen in years, education voters have a lot of options. But keeping track of the major candidates’ views on complex education policy issues can be a challenge.

That’s why we created “The Next Education Mayor,” a special feature that tracks mayoral candidates’ statements on important education policy issues during the 2013 campaign season. It launches today with over 150 opinions from all nine leading candidates and will be continually updated through November’s mayoral election.

Click on candidates to learn about their background and see all of their positions in one place. Or navigate by issues to see who’s saying what about charter schools, accountability, high school admissions, and other issues. On the right side, you’ll find links to the latest installments of our ongoing reporting about the mayoral election.

“The Next Education Mayor” is a living feature. Campaigns had a chance to review the opinions we collected and submitted a few new ones in the last couple of days. As candidates release more complete education platforms, and take stands on controversial topics where they’ve remained silent up to now, we’ll be adding their opinions. We’ll also add new topics as they become part of the campaign conversation. And when candidates’ views flip-flop over time, we’ll keep a record of that, too.

While we’ve taken on the responsibility of keeping track of candidates’ education statements, we’d appreciate assistance from our readers. Let us know if you see content in “The Next Education Mayor” that needs refining — and please tell us what issues you’d like candidates to take a stand on that they haven’t already. We have lots more education election coverage coming up.