Last night I had a hell of a time getting home from 23rd Street at 9PM because there was a police investigation at Jay Street/Metro Tech (the new name of Jay Street/Borough Hall).

The F-train I was on turned into an A, which then skipped Jay Street for Hoyt-Schermerhorn. I ended up taking the G train to Seventh Avenue. The entire trip took more than an hour.

That aside, there are going to be more subway service changes this weekend that may effect your quality of life and the Brooklyn Paper has a partial list.

You can also go to the MTA website for their list of service advisories.

Brought to you by the Feldman Family from their local weather tower.

By now you probably know that there’s going to be a new school’s chancellor and her name is Cathleen P. Black.

She’s got quite a resume—for a publishing executive that is. When it comes to education or education policy she hasn’t done much. But Mayor Bloomberg seems to think she’ll be a good leader of the Department of Education, a position one would think requires some knowledge of education.

Think again.

According to the NY Times, “she’s a tough-minded chief executive who never left her employees guessing what she wanted.”

She wrote a book called Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and Life) published in 2007. Here from the publisher’s book jacket blurb: “She is the wise, funny mentor that every woman dreams of having. She was a pioneer in advertising sales at a time when women didn’t sell; served as president and publisher of the fledgling USA Today; and, in her current position as the president of Hearst Magazines, persuaded Oprah to launch a magazine. In 2006 she was named one of Fortune’s “50 Most Powerful Women in American Business” for the seventh consecutive year. Now, in the exuberant, down-to-earth voice that is her trademark, Cathie explains how she achieved “the 360° life”—a blend of professional accomplishment and personal contentment—and how any woman can seize opportunity in the workplace.”

As noted above, Black was the chairwoman of Hearst Publishing and one-time chief at USA Today, and will be the first woman to head the NYC school system, which serves 1.1 million students in over 1,600 schools.

Interestingly she nor her children ever attended public school. Born on the Southside of Chicago, she went to Catholic school and her children attended boarding schools.

Not only has Bloomberg hired an education novice to head up the largest school system in the US, he’s hired someone who’s probably never been inside a public school either.

But lets give her a chance…it’s a tough job and someone’s got to do it. I withdraw this comment I was just being glib.

This just in: Joel Klein, the NYC education chancellor, is leaving government to work for News Corp. Cathleen P. Black, the chairwoman of Heart Magazines (and former editor of USA Today) will run the NYC Department of Education.

Huh?

What is Bloomberg thinking? Why does he always choose people with no experience in education to run the city’s Department of Education?

When Joel Klein was tapped for the job by Bloomberg, he also had no background in education. He was chief executive of Bertelsmann and head of the antitrust division at the Department of Justice. He came on board in 2002 after Bloomberg got the state to give him control of the Board of Education.

Apparently Klein has been wanting to leave for some time. At the press conference he said that he  signed on for two terms. Then he  told the mayor he’d see him through the election. He plans to leave at the end of 2010.

Seems that Bloomberg thinks that schools should be run like businesses. Maybe that’s why he keeps selecting businesspeople to run it.

Over at Inside Schools, a NYC public schools website, the headline reads: Cathy Who? Folks are scratching their heads about Bloomberg’s selection of Black.

Clearly, she has an impressive resume: she began her career in the advertising department of Ms. magazine and went on to be the first female publisher of New York magazine and the president and chairman of Hearst magazines. She is on the boards of Coca Cola, IBM, and Harlem Village Academy, a charter school. But what in that resume prepares her to run the New York City schools?

“She is friendly, vivacious and smart,” someone who knows her told me. “She has a good feel for talent. She is a good people person and she is good at massaging egos.”

Did Bloomberg appoint her to repair the Department of Education’s frayed relations with parents, community groups, and the teachers’ union? That’s only speculation, but it seems like a possibility. Because she lacks education credentials, Black, 66, can only be approved with a waiver from the state education department. But it seems unlikely that the mayor would present her as his choice at a press conference if he had not spoken to the state first.

Big News: State Supreme Court Justice Marcy S. Friedman issued a ruling today in favor of Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB) and other neighborhood groups, criticizing the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) for “what appears to be yet another failure of transparency” in its approval of Bruce Ratner’s Atlantic Yards project.

Justice Friedman granted the motion by DDDB and the other petitioners for reargument of her March 10, 2010 position. She held that the December 2009 Master Development Agreement should have been provided to the Court and having now reviewed that agreement, Justice Friedman found that the ESDC did not properly consider the full 25-year schedule.

HERE’S THE GIST: Justice Friedman has sent the case back to the Empire State Develope Corp (ESDC) for reconsideration, requiring the ESDC to provide a “detailed, reasoned basis for [its] findings.”

Needless to say the folks at Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn are thrilled. Says Candace Carponter, Esq, chair of DDDB’s Legal Committee:

“We are thrilled with the Court’s decision. It has laid bare the pattern of lies and deception by ESDC and Forest City Ratner that underlie this project.  We have always contended that the project will take decades to complete, if ever and the supposed public benefits of affordable housing and open space would never happen.  Instead we are faced with decades of developer created blight in an area that may never be redeveloped due to ESDC’s and FCRC’s malfeasance.”

Does it really matter what the high school building looks like?

In New York City, the quality and condition of educational facilities vary from school to school. They can be attractive and impressive like Stuyvesant, The Frank Sinatra School of the Arts and NEST or small and depressing like The Lab School. Some schools occupy one floor in a large, old school building.

Should any of this factor into the decision? It’s easy to get swayed by the attractiveness of a school setting. Or turned off by a neighborhood or a rundown building. But these things can be misleading. Here’s an excerpt from a column on  Inside Schools called the High School Hustle about this very matter:

It’s hard to overlook the amenities – or the lack of them – when searching for a New York City Public high school.  Who wouldn’t be wowed by Stuyvesant’s swimming pool, Frank Sinatra’s rooftop garden or The Harbor School’s fish tanks and stunning campus? At the same time, some of the best and most coveted high schools in the city can have drab, crowded classrooms in serious need of renovation…

Illustration by Kevin Kocses: www.kevinkocses.carbonmade.com

Tonight is the  inaugural meeting of the Galapagos Futurist (and Kite Flying) Society at Galapagos Art Space. They will present futurist Dr. Dickson Despommier, of the Colbert Report, Good Magazine and The Vertical Farm, who will discuss the future of urban vertical farming.

At the New York Post you can watch a video of the heroic Park Slope shopkeeper who fought off robbers in his shop, New Star Tobacco Shop on Fifth Avenue and St. Marks Place.

Morning murder on Avenue U: Sheepshead Bites

Property owners meeting: Gerritsen Beach

Johnson Avenue reminder: NY Shitty

Sage becomes Rachel Salon: Pardon Me for Asking

Student dies in St. George fall: Brooklyn Eagle

New drips for Seventh Avenue building: Here is Park Slope

Raccoon terror alert = red: Effed in Park Slope

Harry Houdini is buried in Ridgewood: Bushwick BK

Filmmaker piles up accolades: Bushwick BK

Abstract Rhytym: Dumbo NYC

What did you do with that extra hour?: The Local (Ft. Greene)

On Veteran’s Day, November 11 at 8PM: Brooklyn Reading Works at the Old Stone House presents Writing War: Fiction and Memoir by Veterans of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan with Matt Gallagher, author of Kaboom, Embracing the Suck in a Savage Little War, Juri Jurjevics, Roy Scranton, Philip Klay and Jacob Siegel.

The Old Stone House, the site of the Battle of Brooklyn, one of the bloodiest battles of the Revolutionary War, is an appropriate setting for this literary event, which will highlight writing by those who know war first hand. All of these writers have transformed their experience of the violence, the chaos, the devastation, pain, fear and even hilarity of war—in Vietnam, Iraq, or Afghanistan—into honest and searing prose. As Roy Scranton writes in an essay published in the New York Times that chronicles his path from youth to soldier to civilian writer in New York City  “The prior four years of my life hung over my days like the eerie and unshakable tingle of a half-remembered dream — “my time in the Army” — and the sense of chronic disconnection was getting to me. I walked between two worlds: the New York around me and the Army in my head.”

Cuomo’s urban agenda: Atlantic Yards Report

C-rated restaurants hiding their grades: NY Post

Phones apps aim to fight harassment: NY Times

Pols to be towed for unpaid fines: NY Daily News

Tupper Thomas fights back at critic: Brooklyn Paper

Vito rails against his enemies: Brooklyn Paper