After hearing candidates pitch ideas to teachers at union-run forums across the city over the past few weeks, senior union leaders apparently saw enough. They scratched plans to open up Wednesday’s union-wide Delegate Assembly meeting to comments and, instead, UFT political director Paul Eagan explained what laid ahead in the final stretch as the union prepared to make an endorsement.

The workload includes a lot more vetting, with viability as a crucial quality, Eagan explained, according to several people who attended last night’s meeting at 52 Broadway. Over the next four weeks, Eagen said his team of political consultants, which includes the firm Red Horse Strategies, will analyze fundraising and expenditures, who’s advising and consulting for the candidates, and lots of poll data.

There’s one more task, too. The union said it plans to meet with and interview Anthony Weiner, who formally announced his candidacy on Wednesday.

As usual, the Delegate Assembly meeting was closed to the press. But afterward, many delegates were eager to talk about their opportunity to play a role in the outcome of a monumental election.

“This mayoral race campaign is really important to me,” said Lucy Pagoada, teacher at the High School for Construction Trades, Engineering and Architecture in Queens. Pagoada said the Bloomberg administration had been “disastrous” for schools and she was “doing everything that I can to raise a lot of the consciousness at the teacher level in my school, talking to my neighbors, making sure I talk to my family, my friends, everyone who can vote.”

UFT representatives summarized the mayoral forums that took place in each of the boroughs, including who won straw polls taken of teachers before and after each event. John Liu won Queens, Bill Thompson won Brooklyn, and they split the Bronx, according to one delegate who was in the meeting. Several delegates said Thompson performed especially well in Staten Island, too.

Teachers said tehy felt that energized by the union’s ability to play an important role in the race, which it has not played in several election cycles.

“The union has a lot of power and we need to exercise that as a body,” said Pagoada. “As teachers, we have a lot of influence over students, over parents, over communities. And so if we are out there, like we are now, in this campaign, we’re definitely going to have a big impact.”

Delegates said dissatisfaction with Bloomberg helped fuel their motivation to have an impact.

“It feels at least like there’s a little bit of a turn in democracy right now,” said Michael Schirtzer, an active member of the Movement of Rank and File Educators, a minority caucus within the union. “We all have an opportunity to decide who the union’s going to endorse.”

Not everyone shared Schirtzer’s optimism, however. Norm Scott, a retired teacher and outspoken critic of the UFT’s leadership, chimed in with a prediction for who the UFT would ultimately endorse. He said the process laid out by Eagen was mainly theater.

“It’s going to be Thompson,” said Scott, referring to the former Board of Education president who appears to be a frontrunner after former UFT Preisident Randi Wengarten signed on to fundraise for his campaign. She will host a fundraiser just a week before the UFT is set to make its endorsement.

Schwirtzer, who ran against the UFT’s leadership as MORE’s vice presidential candidate this spring, dismissed Scott.

“I truly believe what Paul [Eagen] and the UFT says, that they haven’t chosen anybody yet,” he said.

Principals began making the commitment last week, but the number grew on Tuesday when letters explaining the policy change went out to ”Elementary and Middle School Families, Students, Teachers, Parent Coordinators, Counselors and Principals” who might be affected by it. Now, 15 principals of selective schools across the city have said they will not consider scores on tests that they say did not meet their expectations.

“We appreciate that officials at the New York City Department of Education seem open to hearing our concerns and we hope for the same response from the state,” the letter says.

The principals are part of a larger group who sent a letter to State Education Commissioner John King this week expressing concerns about the tests. They 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.

That letter had 50 signatories, including several principals from outside of New York City and one principal of a city charter school, St. Hope Leadership Academy.

Few of the principals who have sworn not to use test scores to screen students have made scores a major criterion in the past. Kelly McGuire, the principal of Lower Manhattan Middle School, said his school had previously used counted test scores as one of eight equal admission criteria. Now, only seven factors will count.

At schools where test scores have factored more heavily into admissions decisions, making the same pledge is less straightforward, East Side Community High School Principal Mark Federman said last week. Federman was one of the organizers of the letter-writing campaign.

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,” Federman said.

These principals have committed to changing their admissions process starting next year:

Rex Bobbish, of The Cinema School
Kourtney Boyd, of The School for the Urban Environment
Sonhando Estwick, of Tompkins Square Middle School
Mark Federman, of East Side Community School
Rosemarie Gaetani, of Simon Baruch Middle School
Stacy Goldstein, of School of the Future Middle School
Ramon Gonzalez, of The Laboratory School of Finance and Technology
Peter Karp, of Institute for Collaborative Education (ICE)
Herb Mack, of Urban Academy Laboratory High School
Kelly McGuire, of Lower Manhattan Middle School
George Morgan, of Technology, Arts and Science Studio (TASS) Middle School
Lisa Nelson, of Isaac Newton Middle School
Taeko Onishi, of Lyons Community School
John O’Reilly, of Arts & Letters
Jeanne Rotunda, of West Side Collaborative Middle School

And here’s the complete letter that the principals sent on Tuesday. (The letter to King is here.)

Randi Weingarten testifying in 2009 at a mayoral control hearing as UFT president.

Randi Weingarten is ramping up her support for Bill Thompson’s mayoral bid, just days before her successor at the United Federation of Teachers is due to make an endorsement of his own.

Weingarten, UFT president from 1998 to 2009 before moving on to head the union’s national organization, is helping to host a Thompson fundraiser at Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch’s home on June 12, according to an invitation that’s being circulated to drum up support from women voters. Tisch is Thompson’s campaign chair.

Weingarten is one of more than three dozen women named on the invitation under the headline “Women for Thompson.” (The invitation, which the Daily Politics first posted last week, is embedded below.)

Weingarten worked closely with Thompson when he was president of the city’s Board of Education, from 1996 to 2001, and counts him as a personal friend. She has previously donated to his campaign, as have other education heavyweights who have personal ties to the candidate.

Weingarten is in South America visiting schools as part of her work with the American Federation of Teachers and did not respond to requests for comment. But a spokesman said, “She has great confidence in his character and abilities.”

The spokesman, Michael Powell, said Weingarten’s personal support should not be interpreted as a harbinger of the UFT’s endorsement. The UFT is scheduled to endorse a candidate one week after the women’s fundraiser, on June 19, when delegates will meet to cast their votes.

The union has gathered input from members by polling attendees of closed-door forums in each borough. Teachers are also meeting this afternoon at UFT headquarters to make their cases for the different candidates.

“The endorsement of the UFT is up to the members and that’s the way it should be,” Powell said. “That’s democracy.”

Asked if Weingarten’s support for Thompson would influence the union’s endorsement, President Michael Mulgrew said it would not. “The Delegate Assembly chooses who we endorse,” he said. Mulgrew gets to cast a vote of his own before the delegates vote.

The UFT already had one shot to endorse Thompson and passed, instead sitting out the 2009 election, which Bloomberg won. The decision not to make an endorsement came shortly after Weingarten left the UFT presidency.

Critics of the union who have complained that the Democratic candidates have focused too narrowly on issues important to the UFT, in part to win its endorsement, said they thought Weingarten’s role in the fundraiser was significant.

“All signs seems to be pointing to the fact that the union will be endorsing Thompson,” said Glen Weiner, acting executive director of StudentsFirstNY.

But one source with ties to labor in New York City, speaking anonymously, speculated that Weingarten’s public support could actually backfire, “since New York City labor leaders like to call the shots in their own backyards.”

Anthony Weiner points to a public school in the video he released today to announce his mayoral campaign.

New Yorkers know a lot of things about the latest entrant to the mayoral race — but not where he stands on hot-button education policy issues.

Anthony Weiner, who resigned from Congress in 2011 after a sexting scandal, launched his campaign with an video posted – apparently prematurely — early this morning. He becomes the sixth major Democratic candidate, landing in second place to City Council Speaker Christine Quinn in a poll released today.

Though his candidacy is seen as a long shot, Weiner is assured of media attention and is in a position to influence campaign trail conversation. In the campaign kickoff video, he cites high housing costs and a scarcity of jobs that offer benefits to paint a picture of himself as a champion of the middle class.

He also mentions education, saying, “Our schools aren’t what they should be.”

But Weiner’s vision for the city’s schools is not at all clear. He barely broached the topic of education in 2005, when he ran for mayor, and 2009, when he briefly considered running again.

A booklet of policy ideas that Weiner released last month and cites in the video released today skirts the major issues that are dividing candidates this year on education, including charter schools, school governance, and the role of testing. Weiner’s top priority, according to the book, which was a refreshed version of a similar document from 2009, is to “streamline the process for removing troublesome students from the classroom.”

That position could score points with families and educators who see school discipline as a major issue. But it also drew a protest outside of Weiner’s Park Avenue apartment building last month by students who said the approach to discipline would unfairly penalize students of color. The rally was organized in part by New Yorkers for Great Public Schools, the coalition that formed to oppose the Bloomberg administration’s school policies in the election.

Billy Easton, who heads one of the main groups in the coalition, said the group had invited Weiner to participate in its mayoral debate next week but that he had not yet responded. ”The big question we have for him on education is that his top priority is to increase suspensions and that is problematic,” Easton said.

Weiner’s extended time in the public eye has left a few other inklings of his education policy outlook. In 2008, just before legislators were set to revisit New York City’s school governance, he repeatedly expressed strong support for mayoral control, saying he wanted to see ”unfettered” mayoral control continue. That puts him at odds with some of his Democratic competitors, who have said recently that they would cede some control of the city school board in order to place checks and balances against the mayor’s power.

But he did say that he thought Bloomberg had misused his power. At a forum in 2009, Weiner called then-Chancellor Joel Klein a “non-educator” and said his mother, a 31-year teacher, had left the system out of frustration. He also criticized Klein for failing to make the school system transparent.

He also turned up to a major event in 2008 at the Brooklyn Museum that was thrown by the charter sector, signaling that he might be interested in trying to wrestle the “reform” mantle from Mayor Bloomberg, who at the time had only recently begun to discuss the possibility of a third term. At the time, Joe Williams, the executive director of Democrats for Education Reform, said Weiner had been a supporter of charter schools for a while and favored lifting the state cap on the number of charter schools, which happened the following year.

Weiner’s nascent campaign does have some school ties: His press secretary is Barbara Morgan, who was a spokeswoman for the city Department of Education for until a year ago. Most recently, she was the press secretary for New Jersey Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf.

Here’s what Weiner said when he turned up at a Queens forum on mayoral control in 2009:

Speaker Christine Quinn and Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson made the demand in a letter today to State Education Commissioner John King, and the full council is expected to pass a resolution Wednesday calling for the same change.

Test-makers use field testing to try out questions before they count, to see whether they are likely to provide useful results about student achievement in the future. Last month’s state reading and math tests, which were aligned to new standards known as the Common Core for the first time, included some field questions that did not factor into students’ scores. Now, 3,300 schools across the state are being told to administer hourlong, standalone field tests to some students next month.

That requirement has elicited consternation from families and educators who believe that students have already spent enough time taking tests for the year. Some of them plan to boycott the field tests, as a number did last year when field tests were given for the first time.

Quinn, who is vying for mayor, made ending field testing a commitment when she unveiled a comprehensive education plan earlier this year. Most other candidates have also decried what they say has been excessive attention to standardized testing.

The resolution suggests that if field testing must be done, the tests should be administered outside of school hours and students should be compensated for taking them.

State education officials declined to comment on the letter or resolution. But they have said repeatedly in the past that field testing is essential to producing high-quality tests for New York State. And while they told the New York Times this week that they would prefer to eliminate standalone field tests like those being administered next month, doing so would require expensive changes to the way the regular state tests are produced.

If the state does begin using online exams that are being produced for a coalition of states that include New York, as officials have said they intend, the change could obviate concerns about field testing. The PARCC assessments are scheduled to be available to states in 2015, the penultimate year of the state’s $32 million contract with Pearson to run New York’s testing program.

Pearson, which is requiring the field tests, recently made a series of embarrassing errors in grading a New York City test that has jeopardized one of its city contracts.

The company is also offering graduating high school seniors the chance to be paid to field test an exam, according to the weekly email message that the city Department of Education sends to principals. That message told principals that because the exam was not being produced for use in New York City, “you and your staff should not recruit or encourage students to participate in this activity.”

The letter and resolution are below:

Dr. John B. King, Jr.
Commissioner
NYS Education Department
89 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12234

Hon. Merryl H. Tisch
Chancellor
NYS Board of Regents
89 Washington Avenue
Albany, NY 12234

Dear Commissioner King and Chancellor Tisch:

As Speaker of the New York City Council and Chair of the Council’s Education Committee, respectively, we are committed to ensuring that all children in New York City have the opportunity to maximize the time they spend learning. It is for that reason that we are asking you to immediately stop the administration of stand-alone field tests.

We have heard from parents and teachers across the city who are concerned about stand-alone field tests. To begin with, many families and educators are increasingly frustrated with the national emphasis on standardized testing. They believe that it puts unnecessary pressure on their children and prevents schools from adopting rich, whole child curricula that include social studies, science, physical education, and the arts. Field tests add to this frustration.

It is imperative that we have a strong, reliable system in place to measure student progress and assess learning. We also understand that the state ELA and math exams are federally mandated. Stand-alone field tests, however, are not. Field tests disrupt instruction and cause students to lose valuable class time. And while they create another source of anxiety for some students, many students know that these tests “don’t count” and therefore do not give the exams their full focus. As a result, stand-alone field tests do not provide a reliable source of data, as the New York State Education Department noted when they needed to recalibrate the 2009 state exam scores and confirmed in yesterday’s New York Times.

As you most likely know, Pearson recently made two different scoring errors on New York City’s gifted and talented admission test. Those errors were only the most recent incident to cause New York City’s families to lose trust in Pearson. Stand-alone field tests compound that lack of trust, as parents are frustrated that their children lose out on learning time while serving as guinea pigs for a for-profit company.

For all of the above reasons, we ask you to cease the administration of stand-alone field testing, effective immediately. If there is sound pedagogical reason to test additional questions, Pearson should pay to create multiple versions of the April state exams, as the NYS Education Department suggested in theTimes yesterday, or should compensate students to take field tests outside of school hours.
Stand-alone field testing is bad for the students of New York, and we hope you will immediately end their administration.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
Christine C. Quinn, Speaker

Robert Jackson
Chair, Education Committee

And the resolution:

Preconsidered Res. No.

Resolution calling on the New York State Department of Education to immediately stop all stand-alone field testing for students.

By the Speaker (Council Member Quinn) and Council Member Jackson

Whereas, New York State’s school children just completed mandatory standardized testing at the end of April; and

Whereas, These standardized tests are used to measure students in a variety of ways and are sometimes referred to as “high stakes” tests because, for example, they determine whether a student passes to the next grade and are used to determine admission to a particular school; and

Whereas, New York State recently adopted the federal government’s more rigorous “Common Core” standards, which will be fully implemented in 2015; and

Whereas, To prepare for the implementation, this year’s tests were tougher than any in the recent past and State education officials expect scores to drop as a result; and

Whereas, Many parents, educators and students have expressed heightened anxiety due to the use of more stringent standards and increased reliance on test scores to measure academic performance, including of students, schools and teachers; and

Whereas, As the State and its school districts work on how to administer these standards, it is proposing to administer “field tests”, which help check the methodology, design and legitimacy of future tests; and

Whereas, Field testing can be implemented by embedding questions into regular exams or by staging “stand-alone” tests that are used exclusively to help formulate future tests; and

Whereas, The results of field test questions or stand-alone tests  are not used to measure students or teachers in any manner; and

Whereas, The tests that were administered in April included field test questions that were embedded in the exam; and

Whereas, However, in New York State many districts, including New York City, are planning to administer stand-alone field tests for English and math in June, near the last days of the school year; and

Whereas, Many parents and advocates believe these tests would add further stress to students who just finished such demanding exams while taking away from in-class instruction time; and

Whereas, Furthermore, numerous parents, advocates and educators believe that test preparation already narrows the curriculum by forcing teachers to prepare students for the test and that in addition, these field tests would detract from responsibilities and opportunities for teachers to engage with their students and families in a meaningful way as they prepare to end the school year; and

Whereas, Stand-alone tests are neither mandated nor necessary and their validity is questionable because if students know the tests do not carry any consequences they may not be motivated to perform well; and

Whereas, If using the field questions that were embedded in the April exams is insufficient, the State should explore alternatives such as conducting field tests outside of school time while compensating the test takers, as is done for adults; now, therefore, be it

Resolved, That the Council of the City of New York calls on the New York State Department of Education to immediately stop all stand-alone field testing for students.

The agreement was struck between the city and New York Communities for Change and New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, which filed suit over the city’s timeline for replacing the toxin-containing light fixtures in July 2011. A mediator stepped in to try to broker a compromise last month.

A year and a half ago, the city said 754 school buildings had the problematic light fixtures, and until recently, officials had said they would clear them all by 2021.

But two weeks ago, after 11 students and a teacher were taken to the hospital after a light fixture containing the chemicals began emitting smoke at a Harlem school, the city announced that it would accelerate the timeline. The announcement also followed a dispute over the light fixtures in a Brooklyn building where a charter school replaced its lights without city permission while schools the district operates continued to have the old fixtures.

“The city’s new timeline for PCB light removal is considerably more reasonable than the previous plan of 10 years,” NYCC member and parent Celia Green said in a statement. “Parents like me will rest easier with the knowledge that at long last the city has made the removal of PCB lights from our kids’ schools a priority.”

City officials had said their capacity to clear schools of PCB lights has been constrained both by money and by the fact that PCB abatement can happen only when schools are not occupied by students. This summer, under the agreement, 200 buildings will be cleared of PCB-containing light fixtures.

“Though this issue has evoked strong sentiments from all involved and was the subject of a major litigation, attorneys from both sides sat down together and, with the assistance of the magistrate judge, engaged in very detailed, productive discussions to find the right solution,” said Michael Cardozo, the city’s top lawyer, in a statement. “This outcome demonstrates the city’s commitment to a smart and beneficial outcome.”

The city had pegged the cost of the 10-year schedule at $1 billion. When the city’s budget is adopted in June, it is likely to reflect the costs of the new timeline, officials said.

Until now, only Kentucky has administered state assessments aligned with the new standards, and the results were frightening: sharp declines across the state in the percentage of students who were classified as proficient at grade level in both English Language Arts and mathematics. In Kentucky, proficiency rates fell by approximately 30 percentage points from 2011 to 2012, although the number varied across demographic subgroups.

These declines reflect the distance between prior expectations for what children should know, and the new, higher expectations, which have upped the ante considerably, asking students to display mastery of skills and content previously taught two or three grades later in the state curriculum. No one knows whether the implementation of the Common Core standards will result in improved learning for students, but that’s the premise.

What does this mean for New York City? It’s a question of great interest as the city girds itself for a campaign to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has held sway over the city’s public schools for a dozen years. Test scores and other quantitative indicators — though of limited value for informing fine-grained decisions about students, teachers and schools — can serve as a site for taking stock of where we are, and where we might wish to be.

I’ve made some projections of New York City’s likely performance on the new state assessments, based on what happened in Kentucky. I’d like to say that I used a fancy, proprietary statistical algorithm to do this, but that would be a fib. Instead, I used the statistical software of choice of highly regarded Harvard economists: Microsoft Excel.

Figure 1 below shows proficiency rates in English Language Arts in New York City; the 2012 values are actual values, and the 2013 ones are my projections. If we were to look solely at the 2012 numbers, the picture would be mixed, but positive. Overall, 47 percent of students in the tested grades in New York City were classified as proficient in English. To be sure, there are still substantial differences across demographic groups, with just under 40 percent of black and Latino students reaching the threshold for proficiency, compared to just over two-thirds of whites and Asians. And students with disabilities, and those who are new to English, have very low rates of proficiency in English — 16 percent and 12 percent, respectively.

But things look far worse in the projections for 2013. Whereas 47 percent of students in grades 3-8 were proficient in English Language Arts in 2012, only 22 percent are projected to be proficient based on the new Common Core-aligned assessments. Declines are projected across the board, but are especially striking for the groups that were already low in 2012. The proficiency rates for black and Latino students, approaching 40 percent in 2012, are projected to drop to 15 percent and 16 percent, respectively, in 2013. Just five percent of students with disabilities and three percent of English Language Learners are projected to be classified as proficient on the new 2013 assessments.

The story for mathematics is largely the same. Because a higher percentage of students in New York City and across the state were classified as proficient in math than in English in 2012, the declines are not as steep, but are still startling. Overall proficiency at grade level in math across New York City is projected to fall from 60 percent in 2012 to 31 percent in 2013. Gaps among groups are preserved in my projections: Only 20 percent of black students and 24 percent of Latino students are projected to be proficient in math. Only one in 10 students with disabilities, and one in seven English language learners, is projected to meet the higher standards inscribed in the 2013 Common Core-aligned math assessment.

In many respects, the projected drop in proficiency associated with the adoption of the new standards parallels the yawning gap between high-school graduation rates and college readiness in New York City. Over the past decade, high-school graduation rates in the Big Apple have soared, with the four-year graduation rate for students entering ninth grade in 2007 reaching 66 percent. As Figure 2 shows, this growth has been observed across the board, with graduation rates of approximately 60 percent for black and Latino youth. English language learners have a reported graduation rate of 45 percent in this cohort, and 31 percent of the students with disabilities graduated in four years.

But just as the old standards for what students need to know to succeed in life after high school may have been too lax, a high-school diploma is also a minimum threshold. And even with state requirements for course-taking and Regents’ exams, the meaning of a high-school diploma in New York City and elsewhere is ambiguous. The New York State Board of Regents has adopted what it refers to as an “aspirational” performance measure that is more stringent than the minimum requirements for a high-school diploma in New York state, adding the criterion of performance on the high school Regents exams at a level that predicts a smooth entry into college without remedial coursework.

Figure 2 also shows the percentage of New York City’s entering cohort of ninth-graders in 2007 who met the Regents college-readiness standard. Whereas 65 percent of the members of this cohort graduated from high school within four years, just 21 percent met the college readiness standard. Moreover, the system’s apparent success with black and Latino students evaporates, with just one in nine of these youth leaving high school in four years ready for college. English language learners and students with disabilities have the lowest college readiness rates of all: just 7 percent of students new to English graduate from high school ready for college, according to the state’s aspirational measure, and a shocking 1 percent of students with disabilities do so.

Two different narratives are associated with the patterns described in these two figures. The first is, “More work needs to be done. Overall, the system is not yet succeeding for all students, and troubling gaps among groups remain. But these numbers show progress — things were worse prior to the implementation of the Bloomberg-era reforms. The progress is evidence that the reforms are working, and we should stay the course in the future.”

The second is, “You’re darn right the system isn’t succeeding for all students, and these gaps are deplorable. And this is after more than a decade of market-based reforms relying heavily on the invisible hand of the market to drive innovation and sustain success. If this is the best that we have to show for more than a decade of Bloomberg-era reforms, we need a different strategy. Let’s replace the invisible hand of the market with a helping hand devoted to building the capacity of schools and teachers to educate students more successfully.”

Me, I’m going with Door #2.

This post also appears on Eye on Education, Aaron Pallas’s Hechinger Report blog.

Banks, a former principal who is now the president and CEO of the Eagle Academy Foundation, is not running for mayor. But he hopes to influence the candidates who are.

Banks was one of four people to appear on a panel this morning to discuss ways to bring schools and the business community together to improve student achievement and the city. The panel was moderated by NY1′s Errol Louis and convened by Morty Ballen, the CEO of Explore Schools, a network of four charter schools in Central Brooklyn.

Ballen said he organized the panel, titled “Achieving the Brooklyn Dream,” because he wanted to spur a public conversation about educational inequities in the borough. The borough was recently named “the coolest place on the planet” by GQ Magazine, he said, ”yet at the same time our borough’s students aren’t all getting what they need to be part of the American dream that’s taking place right here.”

The borough has higher-than-average unemployment and child poverty rates, and fewer students than average meet the state’s math and literacy proficiency standards. ”Poverty does present some real barriers to learning,” Ballen said, contradicting an idea that was once dogma in the charter school world. “It’s not an excuse but it’s something that needs to be acknowledged.”

But he said the K-12 education sector, higher education, and the business community could do far more to support high-need students.

“One of the things we’re doing terribly in the business world is we’re not going into communities where we know there is a great talent,” said Carlo Scissura, a panelist who was on District 20′s Board of Education before Mayor Bloomberg took control of the city’s schools. “Unless you’re in one of these great schools the talent is not coming out.”

As the head of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce, Scissura advocates for local businesses. He also pressures them to take on interns to expose students to the challenges and culture of the workplace.

He said he tells business leaders who are worried about the burden of managing interns, “Give the kid work to do, and you will be surprised by the amount of great talent that is sitting across Brooklyn in housing projects.”

An added benefit of working with students, Scissura said, is that then business leaders can say with authority what schools are teaching well and what skills they are not developing in students, instead of simply complaining that schools are not producing graduates who are ready for the workforce.

Banks, too, said stronger ties should be built between schools and business. He proposed helping teachers spend time during the summer at technology companies and other cutting-edge businesses so they could “get a deeper sense of what are the skills that are needed” in the contemporary workplace.

“Very few [teachers] have spent time in tech companies,” he said. “That’s just the reality.”

The proposal raised some eyebrows. ”I don’t think we need to be asking our teachers to know what the latest trend is,” said Karen Gould, the president of Brooklyn College, who also sat on the panel. She argued that exposure to other workplaces would be useful for teachers only insofar as it helps them develop students who have the intellectual agility to learn new skills as their field evolves.

Still, when Banks said he would put together a white paper to advise mayoral candidates about issues in education he considers critical, including the relationship between schools and business,Gould quickly volunteered to help him.

So did Ballen. After the panel, he said the white paper would likely be the next step in a discussion that he said he was “baffled” had taken a backseat to other issues, such as controversial space-sharing arrangements, for mayoral candidates.

“Why isn’t this being talked about?” Ballen said. “There’s an absence of leadership right now to point to what our students really need. The fact that that’s not happening we should be more alarmed about.”

New York City teachers aren’t eligible for the stipends, in part because they still lack an evaluation system to identify them according to a four-tiered ratings scale. But the state is relying heavily on a highly-regarded city-based mentoring organization to implement the program in selected higher education institutions.

Under Cuomo’s “Master Teacher Program,” 250 teachers from schools located in four upstate regions — North Country, Mid-Hudson, Central New York and Western New York — will be selected to receive a total of $60,000 in extra pay over four years. In exchange, the teachers will be trained at State University of New York education colleges and tasked with mentoring new teachers in the science and math subjects.

Recruiting and rewarding top teachers to work in high-demand subject areas was one of the recommendations put forth by Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission last year. Cuomo also secured $11 million in the 2013-2014 state budget to develop the program, which is scheduled to expand to more districts.

“As part of the state’s work to transform our education system and put students first, we are committed to investing in great teachers to educate our students and create a highly-trained workforce to drive our future economy,” Cuomo said in a statement. “This program will reward those teachers who work harder to make the difference and whose students perform better as a result.”

Only middle and high school math and science teachers can submit applications, which will be available starting on July 1. They also must have at least four years of experience and receive “highly effective” ratings on their 2012-2103 evaluations in order to qualify for the stipend.

Teachers in New York City, the only district in the state without a teacher evaluation system in place this year, aren’t eligible to apply for the stipends.

The program is getting a big boost from a New York City-based mentorship program, Math for America, whose model is being adopted at four upstate SUNY schools — Plattsburgh, Buffalo State, New Paltz and Cortland.

The SUNY schools will also rely on Math for America’s staff to help train the initial cohort of master teachers, and develop the curriculum that will be used for future cohorts. Eventually — and if the program receives funding in future state budgets — training will be entirely turned over to the higher education institutions.

The stipend program is different from a “merit pay” system, which are controversial with teachers unions because of concerns that it breeds unhealthy competition by pitting one teacher against another. Research has also shown that students do not learn more when given teachers who are paid for performance.

Instead, the stipends are meant to recognize top teachers and compensate them for work beyond their normal schoolday  responsibilities.

City principals who heard Chancellor Dennis Walcott deliver a stemwinding political speech on Saturday will get an extra day of summer vacation to make up for it.

This year, for the first time, the Department of Education told principals that they could take a day off during the summer to compensate for attending the citywide principals conference, held Saturday at Brooklyn Technical High School.

“To encourage attendance, any principal who attends the conference will receive one compensation day that can be used between June 27 and August 30,” the department’s weekly bulletin to principals said for at least the last two weeks.

The tradeoff isn’t sitting right with some, including UFT President Michael Mulgrew, whose union frequently battles the department to ensure that teachers are paid for time they spend working outside of the regular school day. Mulgrew cited the prohibition on city workers participating in political activity on the job.

“You’re using taxpayer dollars to pay New York City workers to come in and listen to you do a political rant,” Mulgrew said. ”It’s at least inappropriate, but it really borders on questionable ethics.”

The Department of Education’s top spokesman, Andrew Kirtzman, rejected Mulgrew’s criticism.

“Mr. Mulgrew needs a truth commission of his own,” Kirtzman said, referring to Mulgrew’s call last week for a commission to investigate the Bloomberg administration’s education achievement claims. “Contrary to his assertion, the purpose of the speech was to urge that politics — and specifically the competition for his endorsement — not interfere with the progress of the city’s schools.”

The principals conference, which 1,200 principals and department officials attended, was the third that the city has held. Erin Hughes, a department spokeswoman, said attendance was about the same as last year, when principals were not compensated for attending and officials’ message focused on the nitty-gritty details of implementing new standards and teacher evaluations. The year before that, department officials brought in David Coleman, architect of the Common Core, to pump principals up about the new standards.

This year, department officials took a turn toward the political. Walcott’s speech took direct aim at mayoral candidates who have been calling for changes to the Bloomberg administration’s school policies — a call that the New York Times supported in an editorial today.

“To dismantle the reforms of the last decade would be a disaster for our children and this city,” Walcott said, before citing what he said had been improvements in the school system and student achievement. “We cannot turn back the clock on our students.”

The chancellor received only a tepid response from the audience, which spilled into the balcony of Brooklyn Tech’s cavernous auditorium. He drew a smattering of applause when pointing to powers that principals have now that they did not have before Bloomberg took office, such as the right to select teachers who want to work in their schools. But the audience sat quietly through much of the speech, and some members even laughed when he proclaimed that he proclaimed that he doesn’t “involve myself in politics.”

The largest applause of the morning came when Walcott promised to deliver school budgets on Friday, which he said would be the earliest time in recent memory that principals would know how much they can spend next year.

Walcott’s speech made up only a small portion of the day. Deputy Chancellor Shael Polakow-Suransky immediately followed the chancellor to remind principals that even as the city becomes wrapped up in politics, hard work remains to be done in schools every day. Students spoke about overcoming setbacks; Colorado State Sen. Mike Johnston described his path from high school principal to politician influencing teacher evaluation, tenure, and training across his state; and every attendee took home a copy of Paul Tough’s 2012 book “How Children Succeed,” which looks at the “soft skills” that students must develop if they are to thrive in college and careers.

After the speeches, principals scattered among dozens of workshops that they had signed up in advance to attend. Workshops focused on teacher effectiveness, strategies for working with English language learners, and curriculum, among other topics.

The workshops were appropriate to compensate principals for participating in over the weekend, Mulgrew said. But he said the principals conference had fallen short of its purported goal.

“The chancellor is supposed to be discussing the educational strategies for next year,” Mulgrew said. “I guess he doesn’t have one.”

“Every time it rains, like last week, the first words my son asks me” is if the house will flood, said Maryrose Spiteri. “He panics.”

Spiteri was part of a small group of parents and teachers from P.S. 38 on Staten Island who met in the school’s library this morning with three Regents: Chancellor Merryl Tisch, Buffalo’s Robert Bennett, and Staten Island’s Christine Cea. Principal Everlidys Robles estimated that 85 percent of her families “were devastated” by the storm and that 40 students — about 12 percent — had not returned.

The parents sat in chairs in a compact circle, where behind them a slideshow of events during the school’s recovery, which included visits from U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Mets shortstop David Wright, was projected onto a wall. On a table nearby was newspaper clippings about the damage to Staten Island and binders of assignments from students who wrote about the experiences.

One kindergartner, in a persuasive writing assignment, called on Mayor Bloomberg to build more houses for people who lost their homes. Another student wrote about getting rescued from his home. “In the morning a boat came and took us to the shelter,” he wrote.

Tisch asked the parents to share their personal experiences as well and, in a series of emotional testimonies, they did so. One parent, Kim Fish, said her family was split up for 10 hours during and after the storm.

Another mother, Diane Cruz, said she left her children, including a son who has autism, at home with a relative while running an errand for supplies at a Duane Reade as the storm got underway. She wouldn’t see them again until the next day.

“For 13 hours, I didn’t know if my kids made it out alive,” Cruz said. In a moment of levity, she recalled how they were reunited. “All of a sudden, I see my kids go by in a boat,” she said.

Many of the parents said that where other first responders had failed to help them, P.S. 38 and its staff provided assistance. The school was operating again on Nov. 2, and teachers had organized food pantries and toy drives to support the families who had lost everything. Cruz, who was displaced and lived in New Jersey after the storm, said that she heard from neighbors that teachers knocked on her front door to check on the family.

“We didn’t get help from anyone else,” Cruz said.

Along with other state education officials, Tisch initially visited schools shortly after the storm struck. She said today that she saw impressive improvement but added that the parents’ emotional recollections highlighted the daily challenges that still exist.

“For the people living in it day-to-day, I think at some point you get very frustrated with the pace of the progress,” Tisch said. “I think the emotion is just that it was a real lifetime event for real families in real time and they’re still living in it.”

Tisch also put teachers — and students — on the spot to describe their experiences with last month’s state tests. The Regents have drawn criticism for allowing state tests to be tied to new standards known as the Common Core soon after the state adopted the standards. But Tisch said she had also heard encouraging responses to her own questions about the year’s tests.

“I think it is extraordinary when you talk to the teachers and the children to see that they felt prepared and ready for the task, which is not to say that they will have the highest scores,” Tisch said. “But it is to say that they implementation of Common Core — no matter the circumstance, and this was a very complicated circumstance — is something that is on the mind of educators and school systems throughout the state.”

While Tisch was on Staten Island, State Education Commissioner John King toured two Sandy-affected school buildings in Queens, including the Channel View campus. The group reconvened this afternoon for an abbreviated policy meeting and a forum on immigration and education, as part of a push this week for legislative relief for students who were brought to the country illegally as children.

In light of recent hate crimes, City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Christine Quinn announced that she and Chancellor Dennis Walcott would be asking schools to take at least one measure to focus students on anti-bullying education before the end of this school year.

New York City schools are being asked to add one more lesson to the packed weeks before the end of the school year: about bullying.

In light of recent bias-motivated violence, including the murder of a 32-year-old gay man in the West Village this weekend, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Chancellor Dennis Walcott said all schools would be asked to hold at least one event before the end of the school year to educate students about hate crimes and bullying.

“I don’t know why it feels like we’ve taken a step backwards but that is the case,” Quinn said. “What we’re going to do is push forward and make sure we do the organizing, education, and public safety work we need to do to make sure we don’t go backwards.”

Quinn, who is vying to be the city’s first openly gay mayor and used to be the director of the New York City Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project, reached out to Walcott to help implement the “emergency additions” to the city’s expectations for schools.

The Department of Education currently has a Respect for All week — the fourth annual event was in February — where schools are asked to use programs and curriculum to teach students to respect diversity and prevent bullying and harassment.

Between now and the end of the school year, Quinn said, schools will be asked to do at least one thing “to focus the student body against bullying.” Some examples of things schools could do include holding assemblies, spending class time talking about the issue or a school library highlighting certain books and holding reading circles, Quinn said. Each school can decide what type of action to take since they know their community better than the council and DOE, she added.

Walcott, who has spent recent days criticizing mayoral candidates for challenging the Bloomberg administration’s school policies, briefly attended Quinn’s press conference at City Hall before heading to Staten Island for another event. He said he met with the school staff and family of D’aja Robinson, the 14-year-old from Queens who was shot and killed by a stray bullet on a bus Saturday night. Police do not consider that killing to have been a hate crime.

Quinn said she’s focusing on schools to educate children about discrimination before they become adults and so that they can educate their parents.

Other organizations supporting the announcement include the United Federation of Teachers and the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators.

In the self portrait, her wild, curly blonde hair is tousled to one side of her face, the two sharp arrows from her lip ring poke out the left corner of her mouth and her eyebrows arch upward in a look of skepticism.

Samantha Morales said drawing this picture was the hardest thing she’s ever done.

“I was backing out of it so many times because in the picture I had curly hair, and it was really hard to draw,” she said. “But it made me learn not to give up on anything.”

Morales is a student at ROADS Charter School 2 in the Bronx, a charter transfer school that enrolls 15- to 17-year-olds who are overage and under-credited and have either been homeless, in jail, in foster care or child protective services, or who have dropped out of high school.

ROADS, which stands for Reinventing Options for Adolescents who Deserve Success, opened last fall in the South Bronx and in East New York at a time when many charter schools face criticism for not serving the high-need students that ROADS accepts. The New York City Charter School Center, which is in the midst of a campaign to improve public perception of charter schools, will show off the students’ artwork at its headquarters today at 6 p.m.

The art project — which also asked students to complete the statements ”I was … I am … I will be …” in writing — is just one of the many strategies that ROADS is using to help its students overcome past struggles to aspire toward goals such as graduating, going to college, and building a career.

“We’re trying to do something other schools can’t do with these kids,” said ROADS algebra teacher Abbas Manjee, who used to teach at a district transfer school on the Upper West Side.

The school has adopted instructional approaches that accommodate students’ persistent attendance issues; built a robust staff of non-teachers whose job is to support students; and rethought the traditional school schedule to maximize the social and emotional support that students receive.

Principal Seth Litt, who was born and raised in the Bronx and used to be the principal of a nearby middle school, said striking the balance between support and high expectations is sometimes challenging. Unusual among transfer schools, ROADS accepts students who have zero high school credits, and the average student comes in reading at a fifth-grade level and doing math at a fourth-grade level.

“Our students for the most part are struggling learners, and they’re overage,” he said. “The clock is ticking really loudly for them.”

The wide range of students’ skills is one reason ROADS uses outcomes-based grading. Instead of considering students successful if they have simply proceeded through a textbook from beginning to end, each class has 10 outcomes, a stepladder of learning objectives that students must master to pass the class. Litt said the arrangement allows for more individualized learning and for teachers to intervene early on when they see students aren’t understanding a certain concept. It also helps with students who miss class a lot.

“Just because they’re at ROADS doesn’t mean that, especially in their first year, that all the things in their lives have changed,” Litt said.

Examples of that sensitivity were apparent in Manjee’s algebra class one recent day. He had two different assignments for students on his SMART Board, labeled “If you were present Friday” and “If you were absent Friday.”

“We have to adapt to their lives if we expect them to adapt to the system that we’ve created for them,” Manjee said. “And right now the system we’ve created for them doesn’t work for them. If they want to agree with these things that we set up as a society, we need to meet them halfway.” 

In another algebra class, students wearing headphones sat at computers watching a 28-minute video of a math lesson recorded by their teacher Emily Buxbaum. She said she originally created the videos so that students who were absent could catch up on lessons they missed, but it turned out it was helpful for all students to learn at their own pace and pause and replay something when they didn’t understand it.

In an English class a couple doors down on the one-hallway school, which shares space with two other transfer schools, teacher Melissa Giroux showed students a video clip of CNN’s Anderson Cooper hosting a debate about whether women should fight in combat. Posing questions such as “What makes an argument successful?” Giroux asked students to identify each debater’s claim, evidence, and reasoning.

The lesson echoes one of the real-life lessons that Manjee said the school tries to teach students.

“Instead of getting louder than your opponent … you want to beat your opponent with knowledge and not a Jerry Springer-style battle where the loudest person wins,” he said.

There are 13 teachers at ROADS and seven additional people called “team advisors” who act as case workers and help students communicate with child welfare services and their probation officers.

“They’re like our second parents. They really motivate us,” said Elisha Owens, 16, said about the advisors.

“They’re like older brothers and sisters,” said Anthony Reddick, 17. Morales piped in, “Like therapists!”

“They always find a way to give you the time of day,” Owens said.

“Teachers shouldn’t even be stressing about that stuff anyway,” Morales said. “They should just be…”

“Teachers,” Reddick said, finishing Morales’ sentence.

“Yeah, exactly,” Morales said.

But the extra staff doesn’t mean that teachers aren’t involved in their students’ lives. Manjee is helping to pilot a new program where each teacher will be assigned to four sets of students and get a whole day every two weeks to take them out of school on field trips. The trips are about establishing a personal connection with students outside the classroom and so that the roles of teachers and counselors don’t become too separated, Manjee said.

“The kids figured out that if we split up so many of these roles, people aren’t doing a good job of communicating and no one can hold me accountable for anything,” he said.

For many students, school staff said, their school is holding them accountable for their grades and behavior for the first time. Lakota Leijon, the director of students services who has worked as a social worker, recounted one of the first times that her students saw her angry. A group of them had misbehaved and Litt wanted to send them home as punishment, but Leijon said no.

“Send them home to what? To play video games? They’ll probably hang out on the corner. I said, ‘No, they need to stay,’” she said. “I need them to start learning what it feels like when someone who’s been believing in you, who’s been your number one advocate, when you’ve let them down.”

Leijon’s faith in her students makes her give them, what she calls, “real talk.”

“A lot of students thought if they don’t pass [ROADS] that’s ok, I’ll just get my GED,” she said, referring to the exam that can be taken to demonstrate high school equivalency. “I said guys, a GED is four years of high school crammed into a two-day test. If you’re at a fourth-grade reading level, you’re not going to pass.”

It’s this kind of honesty that students at ROADS appreciate after being passed at each grade level, but knowing they weren’t really learning anything, Litt said.

“They’re not going to get angry if someone says you need support that isn’t high school work,” the principal said. “They’re tired of people lying to them and giving them work that just keeps them busy in class.”

Getting through to students can require some reframing for teachers. Lisa Barnshaw, the art teacher who assigned the self-portrait art project, said Morales had gotten so frustrated with her drawing, which was divided into a grid, that she was talking the whole time in class and not working on it. Then one day, Barnshaw sat down with Morales and offered to do one square of the drawing.

“I extended the edge of each line into the next box. And she looked at me and was like, okay, thanks, I think I got it and then took off,” Barnshaw said. “I always had that mentality I’m not going to put my hands on a student’s artwork, but if what they need is just a little bit of a boost, I’m willing to make compromises if it’s going to help make that kid be successful.”

Morales spent nine hours over two days to finish her project.

“They thought they couldn’t do something. They worked hard at it, and they got it done. It’s such a huge microcosm for their lives,” Barnshaw said.

While the students have made a lot of progress this year, Litt said he recognizes that they and the school have major challenges ahead.

“It’s a transition from community and culture to making sure our students compete with students anywhere. I’m very proud of where we are right now. It took a lot of work from a lot of adults and a lot of trust from students,” he said. “We have to maintain what we’ve done this year and just make sure we’re adding on to it … We have to demand and support students to be academically excellent.”

This evening, Morales and a few other ROADS students will be speaking at the art show. She’ll be delivering a spoken word poem that recounts her path to ROADS after being suspended for fighting at her previous school.

“The things you’ll hear from us, you’d never hear from a teenager,” said Morales, who transferred from a performing arts high school in Harlem. “But I just want people to see that we are kids willing to make a change, we are kids that want to be the future for our country. … We don’t want to be the same statistic of a high school dropout.”

Samantha Morales’s poem

Things i seened at my age are unimaginable
the memories that flash back in my head are unforgetable.
Boogie down bronx, 17 years young,
alcoholic parents, getting bullied wasnt fun.
High school days was the highlight of my life.
Did wrong things ended up in fights.
Suspension was crazy, they said i needed a new start,
things will get better if i believed in my art.
Wasn’t feeling the vibe at first ,
first day of school of course thinking the worst.
Thinking – kids like me , No way im out
One more slip up , im a drop out without a doubt.
But I knew I couldnt label myself as that, thats not me.
I needed to be able to successed.
Im a dancer , Im a leader
So yes , definately Roads was the answer.
I came across on not judging so fast, got to focus on the future
not on the past.
And at last , people that believed in me ; teachers i can talk to and tell me i can achieve -
Cuz its a hard knocks life and life will get rough -
I just hope you see what ROADS done for us.