PUBLISHED: January 12, 2005 | By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN | New York Times

chools Chancellor Joel I. Klein flatly denied yesterday that he would hire private managers to run city schools, but he did not rule out a wide role for outside groups in advising and supporting networks of schools.

The Education Department for months had discussed hiring private managers to do everything from recruiting and training teachers to offering an array of support services. Such a move would be a sharp departure from the traditional structure and already has drawn the opposition of labor unions.

Mr. Klein, at a meeting yesterday morning, responded to questions from the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council, a citywide group, about whether Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg will announce another major restructuring of the school bureaucracy in his State of the City address on Wednesday.

“I don’t comment on rumors and speculation,” Mr. Klein said. “Lots of people have their agenda. I just want to tell you that as long as I am the chancellor of the public school system that the city of New York public schools will remain public schools. ”

But even as Mr. Klein sought to tamp down the talk of private management, a coalition of elected officials, labor unions and parent, community and political groups met to coordinate efforts to block any such move by the administration.

The mayor’s overarching goal is to improve student achievement, and yesterday he insisted that the city school system was improving even as New York State reported that more city schools had been branded as failing under the federal No Child Left Behind law. “I’m a little suspect about the data,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a separate news conference, adding, “The bottom line is our school system is nowhere near where we want it to be.”

Dozens of private groups are already working in the nearly 200 small schools created in recent years, generally paid by grants of about $100,000 a year from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

As those grants begin to expire, the city has been considering ways to continue the arrangement. But officials said that under state law, the city could not delegate the hiring of principals to outsiders. Without that authority, the groups technically would not be managers.

A Daily News columnist wrote this week that in his address, Mr. Bloomberg would announce a major push to turn over more management functions to private companies. But City Hall has been tight-lipped, with one official saying only that the speech had yet to be finalized.

Still, opponents mobilized at a meeting yesterday called by the Working Families Party. The group included the city teachers’ union; the principals’ union; and assistant principals; District Council 37, which represents other school employees; and an array of community organizations and elected officials.

The group discussed several strategies, including a possible lawsuit.

In a statement, Randi Weingarten, the president of the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said she welcomed the chancellor’s comments. “For the good of the public schools and the 1.1 million students our teachers educate every day, I hope we can take the chancellor at his word,” she said.

In 2003, Mr. Bloomberg regrouped the city’s 32 community school districts into 10 regions. And last year, he removed 321 schools from the regions, freeing them from the oversight of superintendents after their principals agreed to meet performance targets.

Mr. Klein yesterday left open the possibility of an increase in the number of such schools, known as empowerment schools. “I believe the impact of the empowerment initiative has been very, very powerful,” he said.

Tim Johnson, the chairman of the Chancellor’s Advisory Council, pressed Mr. Klein about the possibility of hiring private managers, and asked about the chancellor’s recent hiring of Christopher Cerf, a former president of Edison Schools Inc., the for-profit school operator, as a deputy chancellor.

“The thinking is that since he has come from the private world, I think it’s logical to think that the doors to privatization are now wide open,” Mr. Johnson said.

Mr. Klein recited Mr. Cerf’s extensive résumé — top in his law class at Columbia Law School, a clerk to Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, a colleague of Mr. Klein’s in the White House Counsel’s Office under President Clinton.

“His portfolio here is not — is dealing with human resources and external affairs,” Mr. Klein said. “And I can assure you that what I said at the outset is true, the public schools of New York will remain public.”

Mr. Johnson continued to press. “So when you say public schools will remain public, you are telling us today that you will not contract out the management of public schools?”

Mr. Klein replied, “I will not contract out the management.”