By Chris Lombardi

On Wednesday, the courtyard in front of the Lab School’s O. Henry Center on West 17th Street felt like an activist college campus. Small groups clumped, chatted, checked cell phones and yelled across the way: “Couldn’t have done it without you!” Many picked up the brightly colored banners draped across a table, like picket signs at a demonstration, grinning: “How’d you make all these so fast?”

Only the average age of the crowd, about 45, gave a clue that these were not students but parents, and the slogans offered a clue about why they were here. “Class Size Matters.” “Testing Isn’t Teaching.” “Don’t Punish Successful Schools.” All of these referred to specific policies of the Department of Education (DOE) and its chancellor, Joel Klein.

Soon thereafter, the rambunctious parents filed into the auditorium, where Klein was coming to speak. Some carried the most confrontational sign of all: “Who is Assessing DOE’s Performance?”

As DOE’s Children First initiative powered toward its fifth year, with its second reorganization in four years making quietly radical changes in school funding and governance, many parents in District 2, which stretches from Tribeca to the Upper West Side and includes Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, remain deeply skeptical about the rush of changes and the department’s priorities. In addition to questions about the new structure, parents in the district were concerned about the closure of many middle schools (especially in Chelsea), the fact that classes with more than 25 students plague more than half the district’s schools, and that District 2 is one of the only districts in the city whose enrollment is slated to escalate in the next 10 years.

At Wednesday’s meeting between Klein and 200 parents from District 2, called by the district’s Community Education Council (CEDC), parents came equipped with four pages of detailed questions, demanding that the DOE focus on reducing class size and providing more physical classroom seats, especially for middle school students. These parents, whose district includes many of the highest-achieving schools in the city, also questioned the new funding structure, demanding that the DOE not “punish successful schools.”

For his part, Klein stuck to an overview of quietly solid test scores, his department’s emphasis on restoring racial and demographic equity, and repeated assurances that “no school is losing.” He tried to assure parents that as the DOE worked to stem still-serious problems in low-performing schools, their schools, many of which are prized by out-of-district students, would not suffer, and essential services would not be lost even though the regional offices had been abolished. He refused, however, to offer specifics on many of the details of the newest changes.

Overall, the evening alternated between parents’ very specific concerns and Klein’s big-picture musings, punctuated by startling anecdotes like this: “In the state of Georgia, the way they build prisons, how many prisons to build? They look at how many kids score level 1 [out of 4] on third- and fourth-grade reading tests, and that number is how many prisons they need to build,” he said.

Klein also opened the meeting by congratulating the district for its flagship schools, from the traditionally high-performing Stuyvesant High School to the newer, cutting-edge Museum and Lab Schools. He then unfurled the newest citywide test results, showing solid gains in reading and math across the board, and reminded parents of other memorable changes since schools came under mayoral control in 2002, including a stable, if modest, upward slope for high school graduation rates.

“We now have schools like P.S. 33, where test scores jumped by 40 percent last year with new leadership. We’ve raised teachers’ salaries and created 200 small schools. We’ve created a school for Asperger’s, we have more autism schools—I created a charter school that’s a research center for autism.”

But when Klein said, “We reduced class size 8 percent,” citing a citywide figure, calls of “Not true!” rang out among the audience, many of whom were still holding their “Class Size Matters” signs and one of whom was Leonie Haimson, of the national nonprofit of the same name.

Tamara Rowe, president of the parent-teacher association (PTA) at Clinton Writers School at 320 W. 21st St., told Chelsea Now before the meeting that her school came under additional pressure after two other local schools phased out of the business of teaching children aged 6–8. (She was referring to the Museum School, whose last such cohort graduated in 2006 and P.S. 33/Chelsea Prep, who graduated its last group in 2005.) Last year, according to DOE figures, class size at her school averaged 33.

“Where are the creative ideas?” Rowe asked. “There are all these closed parochial schools in my area, which have all the facilities we need. And what about asking all those developers, with the new buildings, to contribute to a school construction fund?”

Michelle Farinet, of the Upper West Side, expressed her needs more simply. “More seats. You can’t teach kids—you can’t even reduce class sizes—if you don’t have the physical plant!’

And Miguel Acevedo, a Community Board 4 member whose daughter Brenda was in the last cohort of middle schoolers at the Museum School, dropped his intended question about middle school to add his voice to the chorus on class size and space, especially given the estimated 10,000 new residents to Chelsea over the next 10 years; according to the School Construction Authority’s own assessment, District 2 overall is slated to grow by 18 percent by 2015. “Ten thousand new apartments, and not a single new planned school!” Acevedo said to a round of applause.

“I’m building schools as fast as I can,” Klein finally protested. “It’s easier to do in the outer boroughs—you know the pressures of Manhattan real estate.” As for all those Catholic schools, he said, he’s met repeatedly with officials of several dioceses. “For a Jewish boy, I’m spending a lot of time in church…. The next stop, someone said, is go to Rome and see the Pope. I’m considering it.”

Klein did acknowledge the huge stresses on middle schools, pointing to the City Council’s Task Force on Middle Schools and new initiatives in the works, and spoke of the consequences of failure within that age group.

He also talked about the plight of black students in the New York City public school system, referring throughout the evening to the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education, which ordered the desegregation of schools, “I went to law school because of Brown and [Justice] Thurgood Marshall, for whom my wife served as a law clerk…. We have failed woefully at offering these students equal opportunity.”

“We did a study last year—I ordered it —that found 140,000 young men between the ages of 16 and 21, most of them African-American, have dropped out of school or headed that way, with the ones still in school three or four years behind. The average black student at 17 is at the same level as the average 13-year-old white student. It’s a colossal failure.”

The DOE’s Children First initiative, from its beginnings in 2002, was an effort to change that, he said. And according to Clara Hemphill, author of “New York City’s Best Public Schools” (Teacher’s College Press) and founder of InsideSchools.org, a citywide guide to the maze of city schools sponsored by the nonprofit Advocates for Children, some changes have indeed been dramatic.

Before 2002, Hemphill said, “there were a handful of adequate schools in affluent neighborhoods—and then there was everybody else.” With the consolidation of the old school districts into regions, she said, “I was very impressed with the progress smaller schools in low-income districts were making. For the first time ever, schools in the south Bronx had the same access to resources and teacher training as the Upper West Side, and Bedford-Stuyvesant as Park Slope.”

Klein struck similar themes when answering questions about the DOE’s new reorganization, which includes sweeping changes just announced in January. Under the new phase the regional offices have been abolished, their supervisory role reduced, and more schools urged to join the 250 or so “empowerment schools,” in which principals control their own budgets. The changes have proved controversial, with veteran administrators like deputy chancellor Carmen Farina retiring, instead of staying to see where the wind blows next. Many questioned whether “school support organizations,” promoted in place of the regions, would actually work, or whether the removal of superintendents was actually the way to go in a system in flux.

“Up to now, most of the principals in the empowerment zone are pretty happy to have more authority, since they were getting ineffectual supervision before,” said Hemphill. “But now we have a huge number of very young principals, under 30, with only two or three years of experience in the schools. Now they have to deal with planning and budgeting, and many of them are in difficult schools…. A good superintendent can be a life raft.”

To Klein, this second phase was a natural extension of the earlier phase of Children First, especially in its new funding scheme, known as Fair Student Funding (FSF). Under FSF, schools are paid a fixed amount per student—with added funding for special education and English-language learners—instead of being given a fixed number of teachers whose salaries are automatically covered. Klein painted this as a combination of smart business practices and social justice, especially given the continued gaps between the city’s low- and middle-income students.

None of the new funding plan sat well with District 2’s Community Education Council (CEDC). “They do get more funding for a child who’s special-ed, tested lower or is not proficient in English, but where does that leave the rest?” said councilmember Arielle Hart prior to the meeting, whose three children all attend Uptown’s P.S. 6. And with the new hiring formulas, she said, “they’re budgeting it so that there’s a greater incentive to have junior teachers teaching.” Others expressed their fears that the complex funding formulas, designed to reduce inequity, would just shift it elsewhere, even after Klein said repeatedly, “No school is losing funding. Not one.”

The meeting ended with most of the policy questions unanswered, and Klein reminding the parents how lucky they were.

“The schools in District 2: My office gets calls every single day, from places as far away a Sweden, who are dying to get into your schools.”

The chancellor left quickly at 8:30 p.m., along with his security detail and Robert Wilson, the district’s newly hired CEO. Councilmembers clustered around its new part-time superintendent, Daria Rigney. And parents returned to their buzzy, college-activist selves, trading their frustration at what felt to them like a chancellor on automatic pilot.

“Everything’s already decided,” Hart told Chelsea Now. “All those parent surveys and everything? It’s just to keep us quiet.”