Why Does Bill De Blasio Get a Pass on Separate But Unequal Segregation in New York City Schools?

       NYC MAYORAL CONTROL, BREEDING SEGREGATION IN DOE SCHOOLS
Bill De Blasio inherited a public school system tremendously harmed by New York City's previous mayor, Mike Bloomberg. The latter, among his changes, had shut down dozens of schools and had them broken into small schools. This trend particularly happened at the high school level.

Yet, De Blasio has pushed hard in recent weeks for the renewal of mayoral control. With mayoral control he could have spent the previous three years reversing the damage that Bloomberg began. Instead, he continued it.

We see in rampant segregation in New York City schools the results of the changes that Bloomberg started and De Blasio continued. The New York Post yesterday posted an article on one parent who is suing the city for unequal resources. Some of the issues addressed in the story are the mere tip of the iceberg of the inequality issues in the city's high schools.

The disparity described in the article is regarding exclusive access certain physical education and disparate funds. An elite school in the former John Jay High School campus, Brooklyn Millenium High School, has access to a pool and $115,255 in a given year.  Park Slope Collegiate School and the other two schools in the campus do not have pool access and received $41,045 in the same year.

This echoes disparities easily evident in the 2017 New York City High School Directory. The pattern immediately becomes evident: small schools, particularly those with African-American and Latino populations have limited offerings. Few foreign language offerings. Limited sports activities. The schools do not offer Advance Placement courses. Instead, we see online instruction offerings. Continuing with Brooklyn, take for example, the Cultural Academy for the Arts and Sciences ine East Flatbush, at the former Tilden High School campus, which has a student body of 354. Only one language is offered as a foreign language. The description of Academics includes some topics that are more likely after school: "College Partnerships ... International Partnerships." Online learning gets mention in the first line, "Aventa/Fuel Education Blended On-Line Learning Courses." There are no AP courses.
Continuing with Brooklyn, Edward R. Murrow in Midwood with 3,885 students offers five foreign languages. There are 13 AP courses. This sample of offerings in the Academics section represents real classes not after-school programs: "Law Program, Psychology, INTEL, Journalism, Writer’s Institute, Film Review, Social History Electives, Shakespeare, Holocaust/African/Latin Literature."

Where is the outrage? Where is the coverage among the television network affilates?  Where are the hearings by the city council's education committee? It has gotten so bad that finally the New York Times in the last 12 months finally brought itself to address the issue. The Times recognizes that the segregation starts with Pre-K and that school choice has triggered this. De Blasio last month defended what has become the status quo. An education department spokesperson uses the word "diversity" to characterize the city system, instead of "segregated." Of course, no principled reversal of the Bloomberg destructive public school policies is in sight.

This shame of segregation is a scandal that De Blasio gets away with because his chancellor unresponsive to the public and the mayor and chancellor's rubber-stamping Panel For Educational Policy is an undemocratic institution. This is all the result of mayoral control. The media and political classes are silent abetters. 

Why Rahm Emanuel's Set-Back to "Chuy" Garcia is Such a Big Deal

First, just from the political angle, this is a humiliation for Rahm Emanuel, the Chicago mayor with mountainous hubris.

No Chicago mayoral candidate had to face a run-off since these rules were made in the 1980s. (The run-off rules were made in the context of Harold Washington and his victory in a three-way split of Washington, 37%, Jane Byrne, 33% and Richard M. Daley, 30% in the February 23, 1988 Democratic primary.)

Challenger Cook County Commissioner Jesus "Chuy" Garcia was able to dent Emanuel's momentum in yesterday's primary.
Emanuel: 45.4 %
Garcia: 33.9%

Emanuel and his business allies expected an easy victory. And the Emanuel campaign rolled in old friend and ally President Barack Obama to campaign for him. (Emanuel had been chief of staff in the early Obama White House.) Thursday, Obama made a speech at an ostensibly historical site (Pullman district) occasion, singling out Emanuel for special praise.

Emanuel developed a big war chest, $30 million, to maintain his spot as mayor.
But Emanuel had made many enemies among ordinary Chicagoans with his education and development policies. As this blog has noted, he closed dozens of schools, and created discord with his education department's sending students across gang lines. Some experts have attributed youth shootings to his school closure policies. 
He has been anti-democratic, displacing the democratic power of an elected school board with his cherry picked one, headed by his developer friend, Penny Pritzker.

Garcia's potent challenge to Emanuel is a delicious news for Chicago teachers and their allies. Garcia's showing can be credited in part to the work and endorsement of the Chicago Teachers Union. Labor Notes cited the CTU role, and reported the story as "Chicago Teachers Force Rahm into a Runoff".

Moreover, this could be the beginning of the end of Emanuel's career, and the end of a banner Democrat for media enablers to point to when pushing the education privatization/"reform" agenda.

Hypocritically, Top NYC DOE Admins Evade Evaluation, U.S. Anomaly

(Reactions follow article highlights) June 25, 2013, Wall Street Journal, Lisa Fleisher
New York City School Chiefs Get Informal Job Checks

Top School Administrators Haven't Been Subject to Formal Evaluations

Top administrators at the city's Department of Education haven't been subject to formal evaluations during the Bloomberg administration, a break from past practice and an unusual occurrence among school districts across the U.S. [Ed.: bolding, my detail]

The disclosure follows the culmination of a yearslong battle by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to implement tougher teacher and principal evaluations in the district.

Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, who has been on the job since April 2011, said formal job reviews weren't necessary because he informally evaluated his staff daily, and he was evaluated daily by the mayor. Teachers, he said, were in a different position.

"They're in front of the classroom and teaching our children, and we need to have a sense of how well they're doing," he said. "With us, we're not teaching children directly, we're setting policy. And I don't think it's hypocritical at all."

The Wall Street Journal filed a public records request in February 2012 seeking the senior-staff evaluations after the department successfully fought to release scores for individual teachers' performances based on students' test scores.

In a response dated June 11, the department's public-records officer said no evaluations had been created since at least 2001 for the following positions: chancellor, chief of staff, chief academic officer, senior deputy chancellor, chief schools officer, chief operating officer, chief financial officer, deputy chancellor and general counsel. Mr. Bloomberg has appointed three permanent chancellors.

Bloomberg spokeswoman Lauren Passalacqua said the mayor held his team accountable, unlike the system under the defunct Board of Education, whose members were elected, "when no one was held accountable for results."

"This is the entire point of mayoral control," she said in a statement. "Public accountability is one of the key drivers of the transformation of our schools, with graduation rates up 40%, dropout rates cut in half and more students meeting the toughest standards in city history."
. . .

Read rest of Fleisher's article at Wall Street Journal.
Blogger Jersey Jazzman makes the case well that Walcott's statements mean that he ought to take a salary cut:
If Dennis Wolcott's job is so trivial that he doesn't need formal evaluations, and if NYC's teachers are so important they must be formally evaluated, shouldn't all of their salaries reflect this reality?
Walcott, last I checked, makes over 200 grand a year. But the average NYC teacher pay is $73,751. I think Walcott makes an excellent case that this is exactly backwards: I mean, if his job doesn't require a formal evaluation, how can he possibly justify making more than a teacher, who must have a formal evaluation? - See more at Jersey Jazzman.
This double standard between school system administrators and teachers is another negative feature of mayoral control: class bias. Under mayoral control, NYC style, administrators can drive a school into the ground with ill management, while teachers are strongly disciplined over the smallest infraction or deviation from blind obeisance to the mayor's 10 year ego trip of school management.
This Orwellian double-speak we cannot let slide: "Public accountability is one of the key drivers of the transformation of our schools, with graduation rates up 40%, dropout rates cut in half and more students meeting the toughest standards in city history."

Graduation rates are only up because the DOE is terrorizing any teacher that does not issue passing grades to everyone, the harassment being hostile observations and repeat letters in the file. Dropout rates are indeed up: Passalacqua is hoping that the WSJ does not follow up with an inquiry into what really happens with the numbers of students entering a high school at ninth grade and leaving school at the twelfth grade. In pre-Bloomberg years failing students would repeat a course and get it right before they graduated from high school. Now they just coast through with frivolous "credit recovery" to make up for not attending class or doing the coursework for ten months. (At least in Florida the authorities are considering eliminating the fradulent practice of credit recovery. --Oh, but wait, that's in Pasco County, where the superintendents must speak to school boards. Up in our northern big cities we apparently think less of government structures that feel more grassrootsey, concentrating all power in unaccountable mayors.)

And as always, the readers gave amusing quotes at Diane Ravitch's blog.

Where NYC mayoral candidates stand on the eve of UFT's presumed Thompson endorsement

Where the candidates stand, on the eve of the UFT's Wednesday, June 19, 2013 presumed announcement at the Delegate Assembly of an endorsement for Bill Thompson for New York City mayor. My takeaway is that Lhota, Quinn and Weiner would be the worst candidates, followed by Thompson, on education issues. But a union that threw up its hands in surrender to Ed. Commissioner John King and Governor Andrew Cuomo (see here, here and here), and then called the disaster a plus for teachers could err once again and throw its endorsement weight behind Thompson. The early clue was previous president Randi Weingarten's endorsement of Thompson; recent press reports echo the UFT for Thompson rumors.
See also NYC Public School Parents blog for their summation of last Friday's mayoral forum at Murry Bergtraum H.S. And see this link for Gotham Schools' interactive site on how th mayoral candidates stand on various issues of education governance and leadership.

	de Blasio	Lhota	Liu	Quinn	Thompson	Weiner
Believes in ending Mayoral Control and has put forth a vision for democratic governance of our schools.	No	No	No *has agreed to give up some appointed PEP seats	No	No	No
Believes there must be a change to current policing policies in our schools that moves authority over school safety officers from the NYPD and to school communities.	No	No	Yes	No	Yes	No
Has publicly committed to reducing class size.	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No
Believes charter schools should not be given space in public school buildings and/or believes in a moratorium on charter school co-locations and/or has called for current co-located charters to pay rent.	Yes	No	Yes	No	No	No
Believes in a moratorium on school closings and/ or has stated that school closings as a policy is flawed.	Yes	No	Yes	No	Yes	Unclear
Believes teacher evaluation should be tied to student test scores and/or supports merit-based pay for teachers.	No public statement	Yes	Not as currently implemented	No	Doesn’t want to “take anything off the table”	No public statement
Has publicly stated he/she will provide a new contract with retroactive pay for municipal union members who have worked without a contract.	No	No	Yes	No	No	No

UPDATED: Karen Lewis Responds to Attack on Schools With Political Mobilization; and the UFT is Endorsing Thompson?

UPDATED: Surprise, Surprise: Randy Mastro and Al D'Amato, top Thompson campaign contribution bundlers

At the 18:12 minute point in the Chicago Teachers Union video on researchers' work and teacher testimonials on a closing school --autopsy of an executed school, Karen Lewis, CTU president, moves onto the ball onto the sphere of political action: "CTU releases school closings study, ramps up political activities", April 16, 2013.
More recently, she noted that in the 2011 mayoral election by which Rahm Emanuel became elected to mayor's office, thereby enabling him to control the school board, Emanuel was elected with only 22 percent of the eligible voters ("CTU Kicks Off Effort To 'Change The Political Landscape," video, May 23).

“Brothers and sisters, mayoral control is a disaster,” said Karen Lewis, president of the CTU. “We must change the political landscape in Chicago.”

She then went on to say that the Union will start getting involved in politics, in registering voters and getting involved in political education including recruiting real grassroots candidates for elective office, in Chicago and in the Illinois state legislature in Springfield. The media have read in a more pointed fashion, with several headlines like this, "CTU hosts voter registration drive, aims to have Mayor Emanuel ousted in 2015 over school closings," and "The 2015 Mayoral Campaign Begins Tonight: CTU trains registrars in effort to unseat Mayor Rahm Emanuel."
Given the CORE-lead CTU of the last three years, we can anticipate that CTU political action will be on CTU terms, on teacher advocacy, that keeps in mind teachers' interests and stances.

# # #

THE STUDY IN CONTRASTS: UFT, JOINING IN THE POWER GLOVE WITH "EDUCATION REFORMERS"
Lewis' and the CTU's stance will stand in contrast to the dominant faction of the United Federation of Teachers, which at the May 22 delegate assembly, had reps from various boroughs ringing the bells for former comptroller and School Board President Bill Thompson.
The choice is problematic on so many levels. He is partially himself to the education reformers' agenda, committing himself to continue parts of the Bloomberg legacy, such as charter school co-locations. And the central role of New York State Regent Merryl Tisch in his campaign is disturbing. Diane Ravitch has called Tisch the doyenne of high-stakes testing. Is it any wonder that so many Teachers College (Columbia University) students protested her award this month?
Note that the Gotham Schools site reported May 15 that Thompson with his education platform is seeking to not merely continue some Bloomberg initiatives, such as lengthening the school day, but expanding other ones:

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.

The article continues:

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.)

Note that Thompson dodges the charter school issue:

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.)

Endorsing Bill Thompson for mayor? No, our union should instead be educating its members on the differences between the candidates. The UFT should be warning against voting for Thompson.
(For on overview of the candidates, see Dana Rubinstein of Capital New York's "How different are the mayoral candidates from Bloomberg on education, actually?"
UPDATES - WEINER POSITION - QUINN: THOMPSON A MOSAIC OF THE BLOOMBERG PROGRAM:
Anthony Weiner, former Queens Congressman and new entrant to the mayor's race, has staked himself to the right, asserting that city employees need to pay more of their health insurance costs. Christine Quinn, city council president, will drop out of tomorrow's education debate hosted by New Yorkers for Great Public Schools. Weiner will participate in the debate.
If Merryl Tisch's support for Thompson is not reason alone to give teachers pause enough for supporting Thompson (with money and as a top campaign advisor), there is the news that former Senator Alphonse D'Amato (Republican and stalwart ally of president Ronald Reagan) is financially supporting Thompson as well. This last point produced the ironic situation whereby front-runner Christine Quinn makes the reasonable critique in the race --ironic, as she is, with good reason, universally seen as the Bloomberg fourth-term candidate. As the New York Times reports:

“The last thing Democrats are looking for in a mayor of New York is someone who is ‘proud’ to have Al D’Amato’s support,” the e-mail said, citing a statement Mr. Thompson made to The New York Times.

Note the new New York Times interactive chart on campaign contributions to the mayoral candidates. Apparently, Randy Mastro (former Rudy Giuliani deputy mayor) and Al D'Amato are the number one and two campaign bundlers for the Thompson campaign. The site also links to a map with campaign contributions. The top fund-raiser in Manhattan, particularly in the ultra-wealthy Upper East Side district: Christine Quinn.
A Quinn campaign spokesperson continued the attack on Thompson, on points progressive teacher unionists should concur with:

On Wednesday, her campaign spokesman also belittled Mr. Thompson’s proposals on education, calling them “a mosaic of things that Christine C. Quinn has already proposed or done.”

It is important for the UFT to make a principled stand. With Weiner's entry into the race the anti-Quinn vote is further divided, potentially giving the Quinn a boost after her recent fall in the polls. Going with Thompson --simply to get a seat at the table with an insider power man-- is wrong-minded and incredibly short-sighted.

Noguera on BBA Report: Ed. "Reforms" in NYC, Other Cities a Wake-Up Call to Mayoral Candidates

The mayoral candidates are all clinging to mayoral control. Other questions remain in how the candidates stand on other educational policy questions.
Columbia University professor Pedro Noguera issued a press release announcing his outfit's study debunking claims as to various mayors' educational successes. The bold-italices are mine. This is a very important report, for it contains information on three "reform"-spotlighted school systems that debunks many tenets of education "reform".
Pedro Noguera, Top Expert: Report on Failure of Education "Reform" a Wake-up Call for Mayoral Candidates
NY, NY— In response to a new report called “Market-Oriented Reforms’ Rhetoric Trumps Reality,” Pedro Noguera, a leading education expert and co-chair of the Broader, Bolder Approach to Education (BBA), released the following statement:
“This report is a wake up call for the public and New York City mayoral candidates. Mayor Bloomberg’s focus on high-stakes testing, school closings, and an expansion of charter schools has failed to produce gains that were promised and needed for the district’s students or schools. In some cases, the approach taken has actually weakened the quality of public education in our poorest neighborhoods. The implementation of the common core assessments without adequately preparing teachers and schools to deliver the standards is just the most recent example of the flawed approach under the current administration.
Policies like mass school closures create a vicious cycle: transferring low-income and minority students from schools deemed “failing” destabilizes other schools that often end up targeted for closure as well. In NY City, the poorest students of color have disproportionately been affected by this policy. The evidence shows that instead of receiving adequate support, many schools have been set up for failure. . . . .
The next mayor must move in a different direction in order to transcend the failures of Mayor Bloomberg's agenda. Real reform requires that we provide high quality support to the neediest students and the public schools that educate them. That takes a greater investment and emphasis on the supports that are necessary to insure equal opportunities. It also requires a focus on staffing high need schools with highly skilled teachers, targeted professional development, and the resources needed (e.g. social workers, counselors, etc.) to help schools provide an excellent education to all students.”
* * *
The BBA report was written by Elaine Weiss and Don Long. It section on New York City opens:

New York City: Nine years of market-based reforms failed to improve test scores or narrow achievement gaps
In March, 2012, Mayor Bloomberg repeated his claim that the achievement gap between white/Asian students and black/Latino students in New York City public schools had been halved between 2003 and 2011 (American University 2012). Actually, averaged across state reading and math test scores in the fourth and eighth grades, the achievement gap had stagnated; it was virtually identical in 2011 (25.8 percentage points or 0.73 of standard deviation) to its 2003 level (26.2 percentage points or 0.74 of standard deviation), and not statistically significantly different. 50 Indeed, Columbia University professor Aaron Pallas, who calculated the actual size of the reduction in the gap (of 1 percent), pointed out, “The careful reader will note that the mayor has thus overstated the cut in the achievement gap by a factor of 50” (Pallas 2012b).51 Another study that compared NAEP test score gains from 2003 to 2011 averaged across reading and math in fourth and eighth grades found New York City to be second to last, ahead only of Cleveland, among the 10 TUDA districts, as illustrated in Figure L, with a gain of only 4.3 points (Haimson 2012). The average large district gained 8.8 points over this period, with Atlanta gaining the most—15.3 points.

[Note 50:
The author explains why and how he converted what had begun as Standard Deviation differences into percentile change differences: “Given the mayor’s penchant for reducing complex phenomena to a single number … I have summarized the shrinkage in the achievement gap on the NAEP and New York State assessments as the percentage reduction in the gap. (For the technically-minded, this involved calculating group differences in citywide standard-deviation units, weighted by the size of the four racial/ethnic groups, for each grade and subject area, and then averaging those group differences, in both 2011 and 2003. The ratio of the 2011 group difference to the 2003 group difference indicates the extent of the change in the achievement gap over that eight-year period.)
“So here it is: Looking across ELA and math scores on state exams for New York City students in grades three through eight in 2003, the achievement gap separating black and Latino students from white and Asian students was .74 of a standard deviation. In 2011, the achievement gap was .73 of a standard deviation. This represents a 1 percent reduction in the magnitude of the achievement gap. The careful reader will note that the mayor has thus overstated the cut in the achievement gap by a factor of 50.” (Pallas 2012b)
Note 51:
Pallas also noted that, when NAEP scores were used to assess the validity of the same claim, the gap grew by 3 percent.
Note 52:
Assessments of gains (or losses) in test scores could also take into account the starting point for a city or district as, of course, those with higher starting scores have less room to grow. It is not possible, in this context, to compare starting NAEP scores of every large city, or even a smaller subset of them, and such an analysis also requires more than simple comparison to be valid, since many other factors should be taken into account. For the purposes of this report, the goal is to compare promised, and asserted, gains, against those actually realized, so only these basic comparisons are employed.]

The report continues:

The gap failed to shrink partly because white fourth-graders gained three times as much ground as their black peers between 2005 and 2011, as shown in Figure M. Indeed, this gap grew by 6 percentage points during those years, versus a slight decrease in the same gap in large, urban districts overall. The income-based gap for that age grew by even more, also bucking both national and urban trends during the period.
Bloomberg made similarly exaggerated claims regarding the city’s public school students’ “proficiency” on state test scores. When the New York State Department of Education recalibrated the scores, however, the gains vanished, and the proportion of students passing the state reading test fell from 68.8 percent to 42.4 percent, and from “an astonishing 81.8 percent to a disappointing 54 percent in mathematics” (Ravitch 2010). Again, NAEP scores confirm unimpressive gains. Between 2003 and 2011, average NAEP math scores in New York City public schools rose 8 points in fourth grade and 6 points in eighth grade between 2003 and 2011, gains similar to those in the nation as a whole, and half the size, at the eighth-grade level, of gains in other large, urban districts that did not engage in similar reforms (NCES 2011a).53
As Figure N illustrates, New York’s eighth-grade students improved at rates similar to those of their urban counterparts in reading; between 2005 and 2011, the city’s white students gained just two points (versus three in large, urban districts on average), while the city’s black students gained seven points (versus five in large, urban districts on average). These gains slightly narrowed the black-white gap in the city, but not enough to counter growing gaps in other subjects and grades.
One definite bright spot in the New York City data come from graduation rates, which increased sharply under Bloomberg and Klein’s leadership, according to data tracked by the city. While just under half (46.5 percent) of the cohort of 2001 (class of 2005) graduated in four years, that share rose to just over 60 percent for the cohort of 2007 (class of 2011) (NYC DOE 2012). The most recent nationally collected data for New York City found similar gains, though the different method of calculating national data produced a lower overall percentage: 56.9 percent of the class of 2008 graduated, an increase of 11 percentage points from 46 percent for the class of 2005 (NCES 2005a and 2010a). It is unclear, however, what impact, if any, the Bloomberg/Klein reforms had on graduation rates. The National Center for Education Statistics tracks graduation rates for the 100 largest urban districts (some of which, such as Montgomery County, Md., are not cities). The 11 percentage-point average increase in New York City’s high school graduation rate from the classes of 2005 to 2008 is consistent with the 12 percentage-point increase in graduation rates for the 100 largest urban districts in the same period, and it still left New York City well below the 65 percent average class of 2008 graduation rate for those districts (NCES 2010b). It is also important to be aware of critical caveats pertinent generally to claims regarding high school graduation rates. Due to differences in definitions, graduation requirements, and data collection and calculation methods, such data are problematic, especially when used to make comparisons over time or across states and districts. For example, New York includes GED completers in its definition of a high school graduate, whereas the U.S. Department of Education does not, which is likely one factor in the difference between city and federal recorded rates. Researchers have also found that administrative data are often “jumpy” across the years for reasons that they do not fully understand (Roy and Mishel 2008). Other issues include disproportionate “discharges” by race that may inflate graduation rates by “pushing at risk students out of school” and not counting them as dropouts (Jennings and Haimson 2009).

The report says that New York City's "gains" were dependent upon unsustainable spending increases:

New York City: Reforms hinged on likely unsustainable spending increases
New York City has long been among the U.S. school districts with the highest per-pupil spending; it spent $19,597 per pupil in 2010, the most recent year for which data are available (U.S. Census Bureau 2012, 104). During Bloomberg and Klein’s control of the schools, spending increased at a far greater rate in New York City than it did, on average, across the 100 largest U.S. school districts tracked by the National Center for Education Statistics. In real dollar terms, New York City’s per-pupil education spending nearly doubled between the start of Bloomberg and Klein’s control of the district (2002–2003) and the 2008–2009 school year. The city spent $11,361 per-child in real dollars in 2002–2003 and over $22,000 by 2008–2009. As Figure S illustrates, this increase far surpassed that of the other reform cities and the 100 largest U.S. school districts overall (NCES 2010a).68 On average, including New York City (and the other two reform cities studied here), per-pupil spending in large school districts rose from $7,923 in 2001 to $12,572, a 59 percent increase. As demonstrated earlier, the added spending has not translated into improved student outcomes. New York City has, on average, achieved less than other large, urban districts whose students’ outcomes are reported, while outspending and out-reforming them. Nonetheless, in April, 2012, Klein and Rhee announced that their StudentsFirst New York chapter would spend $10 million a year for the next five years to sustain the reform model put in place by Mayor Bloomberg after he leaves office following the 2013 mayoral election (Fleisher 2012b).
New York City has also benefited far more in absolute dollars than any other urban district from private donations to its schools and education programs (Saltman 2010, 9).69 Under Mayor Bloomberg, the city created a Fund for Public Schools, which is described as “dedicated to improving NYC’s public schools by attracting private investment in school reform and encouraging greater involvement by all New Yorkers in the education of our children” (Fund for Public Schools 2012). Four foundations, including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and two corporations have each given $1 million or more, The Broad Foundation donated between half a million and a million dollars, another 19 forprofit and nonprofit groups have given between $100,000 and $499,999 each, and dozens more have provided smaller sums (Fund for Public Schools 2010). While reforms hew closely to the policy priorities of the larger donors, such as the Gates and Broad foundations, the Independent Budget Office’s analysis illustrates how little total outside donations account for in the system’s overall budget (IBO 2012a). Donors’ impact is thus hugely disproportionate, relative to that of the taxpaying public.

For the complete report, including the illustrations, inline references and end notes please go to the report Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality: The impacts of test-based teacher evaluations, school closures, and increased charter school access on student outcomes in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C. itself.

Weingarten, Tisch gave in '13 to Bill Thompson for mayor; Mulgrew for mayoral control in 2002, 2009 and supports it in 2013

Uh oh, what a combination: William Thompson as New York City mayor, supporter of mayoral control; plus Michael Mulgrew as United Federation of Teachers president, supporter of mayoral control, as you can see at this November 2009 conference video, sitting to the right of New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch, and supported it at last month's UFT Delegate Assembly. He has the chutzpah to say that mayoral control's 2009 form gave parents a "stronger voice."
-->>This week, you have the chance to change the latter part of this equation: replace Mulgrew with Julie Cavanagh of the MORE caucus as UFT president.

And now we see that Thompson has received four figure donations from Randi Weingarten and Merryl Tisch.

Credit Geoff Decker, Gotham Schools for scooping this story:

Bill Thompson lags behind his Democratic rivals in fundraising, but he’s out in front in one area of interest: support from high-profile education officials.

As he has ramped up his fund-raising efforts in recent months, Thompson has raked in thousands of dollars in donations from notable public figures in education, including American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten, New York State Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch and, most recently, Matthew Goldstein, chancellor of the City University of New York, filings show.

Weingarten, who worked closely with Thompson when the pair overlapped during previous city education posts more than a decade ago, gave $2,000 to his campaign in two installments on Jan. 10 and Jan. 11. Tisch contributed $4,950 — the maximum allowed by the city’s campaign finance laws — to Thompson’s six-month haul ending in January, which totaled more than $1 million.

In his latest three-month filing, which totaled $322,000 and ended last week, Thompson took in $500 from Goldstein, records show. Goldstein, who along with Weingarten sits on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission, gave the maximum $4,950 to Republican candidate Joe Lhota, a member of CUNY’s Board of Trustees.

Click to http://gothamschools.org/2013/03/19/bill-thompson-bid-gets-help-from-high-profile-education-figures/ for the rest of the story.