Jan. 11, 2011

Claim: Bloomberg likes to contrast the graduation rate at the old Morris HS to graduation rates at the high schools currently housed in the building, as evidence of the success of his education policies.

Reality: The types of students enrolled at the old and new Morris campus are very different.  Of the students enrolled in the four schools currently housed in the Morris building, only 1.7% are in self-contained special education classes– revealing their higher level of need, compared to 14% of students enrolled in the old Morris HS in 2001-02.[1] Also, dividing up the building has caused its own problems; for example, according to a teacher at one of these schools, there is no longer any librarian and the library is completely unutilized: “Lots of books with no one tending to them or using them.”

Claim: In response to criticism that students at phase-out schools suffer a loss of resources and services, Deputy Chancellor Suransky has said that graduation rates actually improved at Morris HS in its final year: “… it was a school that used to take 700 kids into the ninth grade every year and graduate 70 four years later. And as it was phased out, in the second year of the phase out it graduated 120 kids …In the third year it graduated over 200 and in its last year it graduated 300.”[2]

Reality: According to state figures, only 121 students in the last class at Morris HS graduated and only 3% of them attended college.[3] Meanwhile, the student discharge rate soared to 55%, compared to 33% of the prior class, a pattern repeated in many of the phase-out schools.[4] Of the 21 schools closed by this administration between 2003 and 2009, 37% of the students in their final classes graduated on average, 20% dropped out, 33% were discharged, and 10% were still enrolled when the schools closed their doors. [5]

Claim: Bloomberg’s educational policies are helping more students leave school college- and career-ready.

Reality: The schools now housed in the Morris building have college readiness rates ranging from 0% (High School for Violin and Dance) and 2.9% (Bronx International High School), to 4.8% (School for Excellence) and 5.7% (Morris Academy for Collaborative Studies.)[6]

After a decade of school closures and other free-market policies, only 21% of NYC high school students overall and only 13% of Black and Latino HS students are college ready after four years. [7] 79% of NYC students entering community colleges need remediation, and the percent of high school graduates who require triple remediation in math, reading and writing has increased 47% since 2005.[8]

Claim: The Mayor’s educational policies are equitable and fair.

Reality:  Most of the schools closed in recent years and those proposed for closure this year enroll higher than average concentrations of English language learners, students who entered the schools overage, and/ or students with disabilities.[9] In fact, Mayor Bloomberg’s school closing policy is a shell game that displaces high-needs students from one school to another, without addressing their educational needs.

Claim: The new schools started during the Bloomberg administration are uniformly more successful.

Reality: More than half of the middle and high schools that DOE proposes closing this year were started during his administration. Many of the new schools have small percentages of the highest-needs students. However, when the new schools serve comparable populations of students in self-contained special education, their students tend to succeed at the same rate as the high schools that preceded Bloomberg.[10]

Claim: Under Bloomberg, student learning has increased and the achievement gap has narrowed.

Reality: As measured by scores on national exams, NYC is second to last in student progress compared to ten other cities since 2003, when Bloomberg’s policies were first put in place. And the achievement gap has not narrowed significantly between any racial or ethnic group.[11]

For nearly a decade, Bloomberg has had complete authority over our educational system.  Yet of last year’s eighth graders, who entered Kindergarten when he first took office in 2002, only 35% read and write at grade level. [12]

Truly, these are Bloomberg’s kids and Bloomberg’s responsibility.

NYC can’t afford any more of Bloomberg’s failed education policies.

Prepared by the Coalition for Educational Justice and Class Size Matters, January 2012.

Class Size Matters has released a detailed analysis of the trend in student achievement in NYC since 2003, when Mayor Bloomberg’s educational policies were first implemented, as measured by the NAEPs – the national assessment carried out every two years by the federal government in 4th and 8th grade English and math.

Despite the DOE’s claims of great progress when the latest NAEP scores were released in December, our analysis shows that NYC came out next to last among the ten large cities tested over this period, plus the large city category (all cities above 250,000 inhabitants) when the gains of our racial, ethnic and economic subgroups are averaged and compared to their peers elsewhere.  The only city to make less progress was Cleveland.

The gains in NYC have been particularly minimal among White, Hispanic, and non-free lunch students, all of whom dropped in their relative position compared to these same subgroups in other cities – falling especially sharply at the 8th grade level.  White students made the smallest gains compared to their peers in other cities in both 8th grade reading and math; Hispanics in 8th grade math.  In fact, Asians were the only NYC subgroup to increase their relative ranking at any level, compared to their peers in other cities.

The performance of non-poor students has been particularly disastrous.  NYC is only city in which our non-poor students scored lower in 2011 than in 2003 in any category. The proficiency levels of NYC non-poor students also dropped sharply in both 8th grade reading and math.  (This is the one point extracted from our analysis in today’s Daily News, though the article fails to attribute its source. The article also featured the DOE’s claim to have improved results for non-poor students; though this group also made fewer gains than their peers in many other cities over this period.)

What else do our findings suggest? Clearly, mayoral control is no panacea, as the two cities that have made the least progress since 2003 on the NAEPs, NYC and Cleveland, both feature this governance system.  Moreover, the administration’s free-market strategies of high-stakes accountability, school report cards, “fair student funding”, principal empowerment, and the closing of more than one hundred schools & the opening of more than 400 new schools and charters, while allowing class sizes to increase, have not worked to increase student achievement compared to cities elsewhere.

Our power point, with lots of user-friendly graphs to illustrate our findings, is posted here and below  Our presentation also contains rebuttals of specific claims made by DOE about the city’s NAEP results.

One of the reasons he denied our request is that he determined that the payments of more than $100 million owed by the charter schools  would not necessarily be used by the DOE to benefit our kids in any way or restore the egregious budget cuts their schools have suffered, so it was difficult to prove irreparable harm.

Nevertheless in his decision, he fired a shot across the bow to DOE & the charter school industry, saying that they should not take this as any sort of signal that when the case comes to trial, he will necessarily rule in their favor.

Below is the press statement we put out with the NYC Parents Union.  Happy New Year to all!
_____________________________________

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 3, 2012

Contacts:
Mona Davids, NYC Parents Union, (917) 340-8987
Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, (917) 435-9329

Statement on Charter Rent Lawsuit Ruling

On December 28, State Supreme Court Judge Paul Feinman confirmed the need for a trial to determine whether or not charter schools co-located in public school buildings should be paying for space and services to the New York City Department of Education (“DOE”).

The case, New York City Parents Union, et al v. The Board of Education of the City School District of the City of New York, et al, and Harlem Success Academy Charter School 1, et al, was a request for a preliminary injunction which would have required the agency to immediately collect back rent and payment for services from all charter schools co-located in public school buildings.

While denying the injunction request, Judge Feinman highlighted the fact that the practice of not paying rent existed since 2003 and, inexplicably, had not been challenged.  He warned the DOE and the charter schools with the following statement:

… the court’s finding that a preliminary injunction is not warranted at this stage of the proceeding should not be misinterpreted as a finding that the court has evaluated the merits of the parties’ contrasting reading of Education Law ∳2853(4)(3) and favors the BOE’s interpretation. Indeed, in planning its future budgets, neither the BOE nor Intervenor-Defendants should rely on this decision as standing for the proposition that the court accepts their reading of Education Law that if the BOE “gives” the charter school space there is no duty to pay “costs”.

Mona Davids, President of the New York City Parents Union, is pleased with Judge Feinman’s ruling and urges all co-located charter schools to heed this warning and include truthful facility costs in their budgets.  “Cases like this are why we exist.  We plan to take this issue to trial and win back the hundreds of millions of dollars due to all of the public school children in the City of New York as a result of preferential treatment of the co-located charter schools.  Charter schools that co-locate should pay rent since they are receiving the same dollars per child that charter schools with their own space receive, and, worse, co-located charter schools are limiting the space usage options of the public schools where they are co-located.”

Arthur Z. Schwartz, President of the public interest law firm, Advocates for Justice, representing the New York City Parents Union and parent plaintiffs, stated that:

“While we are disappointed that the Judge did not see the loss of $100 million to the school system as irreparable, his decision did no more, in that vein, than acknowledge the DOE’s statement that if it got $100 million it might not spend it on lowering class size.  Key to this decision is the Judge’s warning to the DOE and the charter schools that they should take the possibility of co-located charter schools having to pay rent into account when they set up next year’s budget. We look forward to a final decision on the merits before the next school year.”

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters and a public school parent, said: “It is ironic that Judge Feinman did not order a preliminary injunction because he was not sure that the DOE would spend the additional funds on restoring budget cuts to schools, reducing class size, enhancing instruction or in any way that would benefit our children.  But I find the judge’s decision very hopeful; the paragraph quoted above in particular.

“When the case comes to trial, we are optimistic that the judge will look carefully at the law and the facts of the case, and determine that from now on, co-located charter schools must pay their fair share of the costs of taking up valuable space in public school buildings and utilizing the services of city employees, as the law requires.  The gears of justice may grind slowly, but they do grind.”

More information about the NYC Parents Union is at http://www.nycparentsunion.org/
More information about Class Size Matters is at www.classsizematters.org
For a fact sheet about the case, see http://tinyurl.com/6vaednn
To download the decision, go to:  http://tinyurl.com/8xx8wrd

December 2011

Dear supporter,

In the past year, some of the richest and most powerful men in America – including Bill Gates, Arne Duncan and Michael Bloomberg – have come out in favor of increasing class sizes, claiming that this would be good for our kids – even in NYC and other large urban districts where students who have the greatest need for smaller classes are crammed into classes of 28, 30 or more.

It has not escaped notice that several of these men, (not the 1%, but the .00001% in terms of their wealth), send their own children to private schools where classes are capped at 16 students or less, yet they seem able to blithely ignore this contradiction.

I am sad to report that their musings are not hypothetical.  Class sizes are increasing throughout the nation, and here in NYC, are now the biggest in over a decade in many grades.  This fall, there were over seven thousand classrooms which violated the union contractual levels. These sharp increases have  occurred despite the fact that the state’s highest court ruled that our students were deprived of their constitutional right to an adequate education, due in large part to excessive class sizes.

This is a worsening crisis that must be stopped.

Class Size Matters is working hard, every day, to counter the distortions and lies being spread by the oligarchs running our schools, and fighting to see that the city does not continue to violate our children’s rights.  We will be filing complaints on behalf of parents and asking for the state to hold hearings on the unconscionable increases in class size that have occurred.  You can be sure we will not rest until NYC and the state comply with their moral – and legal – obligations to our children.  Please consider contributing now, by clicking here, to help us fight this battle.

Already this fall, we have made presentations before ten community district education councils and many other parent and community groups, to draw attention to the worsening class size crisis, and to demonstrate the ways in which the city has misused state funds that should have gone towards reducing class size. As a result of these appearances, six councils so far have passed resolutions protesting the increase in class sizes, the DOE has received over 100 emails as part of the public comment process, and we have engaged countless parents and community members in the conversation about this critical issue.

Here are just some of our other activities and accomplishments in 2011:

• In February, we helped start a new national organization, Parents Across America, to provide parents with critical information about the damaging corporate agenda, including school closings, privatization, and an overemphasis on high-stakes testing, imposed against the will of parents and community members, and to promote positive and progressive change.  PAA already has more than 12 chapters and affiliates nationwide.

• In response to a report we had co-authored, the State Comptroller released an audit in March showing that NYC had underreported its dropout rate, leaving out 15 to 20 percent of students who were erroneously categorized as being “discharged”.  As a result, the City Council passed a law that for the first time will require the DOE to release detailed reporting on the thousands of students who disappear off school registers each year without a diploma, but who are not counted as dropouts.

• Throughout the spring and summer, we helped organize and participated in numerous rallies and press conferences to protest looming budget cuts and proposed layoffs of school aides and teachers, as well as the DOE’s unconscionable $120 million no-bid contract to Verizon during a citywide strike of their workers.

• In July, we filed a lawsuit against the city’s providing free space to charter schools inside public school buildings – which causes yet more overcrowding and which we believe violates state law. Though we have not yet received a ruling, we are hopeful that the court will decide to protect the rights of public school children, so that they are no longer squeezed and pushed aside in their own buildings.·

• In August, we spearheaded a successful campaign to persuade the NY State Comptroller to block a no-bid contract to Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation that could have jeopardized confidential student information.

• We pushed for a new law, passed by the City Council this fall, that will require improved reporting on school overcrowding, including whether students have access to art rooms, science labs, and space for their mandated services, as well as gymnasiums and auditoriums.

• We continue to operate two of the city’s largest electronic education list services, with more than 4000 subscribers combined.  We also post regular news and commentary from parents on the NYC Public School Parents blog, at www.nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com, which was named one of the three best education blogs in the city and has received nearly one million hits since 2009.

• In 2011, Class Size Matters was quoted more than 100 times, including in the NY Times, Daily News, NY Post, Wall St. Journal, Education Week, metro, AM-NY,  El Diario, Los Angeles Times, DNA-info, Daily Kos, Business Week, Gotham Gazette, and GothamSchools, as well as on CNN, Fox-News, MSNBC, NY1, WCBS-TV, Channel 7 News, WPIX-TV, China Radio International, and numerous national and local public radio shows, on issues ranging from parental empowerment, high stakes testing, teacher evaluation, and school overcrowding.

But reducing class size remains our primary mission and focus.  Though the NY State Legislature passed a law in 2007 requiring the city to reduce class size in all grades in return for receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in additional state aid, the city has ignored its commitments to our children.

Please join our campaign for smaller classes, to help ensure that NYC children someday soon receive the help and attention that they deserve.

Just click here, to make a tax-deductible contribution, or if you prefer, send a check, made out to Class Size Matters, 124 Waverly Pl., New York, NY 10011.

Special offer: For $100 and over, enjoy a complimentary 11-oz CSM Logo mug!

Thanks so much, and happy holidays to your family!

Leonie Haimson, Executive Director

Resolutions were approved by CEC District 1; CEC District 5, CEC District 20, CEC District 21, CEC District 22, and CEC District 30;  CEC District 2 wrote a letter.

Below are the comments submitted by  Class Size Matters. Here is the DOE formal response.

From: Leonie Haimson [mailto:leonie@att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2011 5:35 PM
To: contractsforexcellence@schools.nyc.gov
Cc: leonie@worldnet.att.net; John B. King Jr.

Among the many flaws in DOE’s public process this year:

1-    The public comment page at http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/funding/c4e/Public+Comment+2011-2012 had no information about a deadline for public comment; see attached htm page which was saved on 11/22/011. None of the flyers cited a deadline either. (see attached)

2-    The location of the D15 CEC meeting listed on the page is incorrect; the meeting took place at 284 Baltic St. in Brooklyn not 131 Livingston Street.

3-    Two of the CEC meetings, for D13 and D17,  were scheduled for Nov. 29, after the deadline for public comment was past.

4-    There was no public outreach on the part of DOE about these meetings, aside from a notice on the C4E webpage, which violate requirements in the law about robust public notification.

5-    The DOE’s power point presentations were obscure and confusing, and included no information about the city’s approved CSR plan and/or its targets and goals.

6-    The DOE  officials who gave these presentations read from a misleading script that said,  “Contracts for Excellence is not about class size reduction but about targeting needy students”; yet it was about both class size and needy students, since the C4E law required NYC to reduce class size as its sole legal obligation in terms of results.

7-     The DOE officials who gave the presentations improperly said they would not answer questions, but that attendees who had questions should email them to DOE instead.

8-    The entire process of public comment took place too late in the year, in November, after most of the funds have been already spent.

9-    There were no borough hearings, as required by state law, and as many as six CEC presentations were held the same evening, making it impossible for informed and concerned advocates to attend.

In all, the public process has been a mockery of what the state law intended, and instead has shut parents out of any meaningful role in the development of the city’s C4E and class size reduction plan.

The results  in terms of the plan itself and the results have been disastrous:

1-    DOE has not allocated a single penny centrally to class size reduction – despite the fact that the city’s only mandated, measurable goal was to reduce class size.

2-    Rather than reduce class size, class sizes have risen each year for the past four, and in the early grades are the largest in eleven years.

3-    Even those schools that were below the C4E goals in 2007 (D1, D4, D5, D13, D15 and several more) are now above the goals; this could not possibly be what the law was designed to achieve.

4-    The city’s plan has merely left a certain proportion of the funding to principals to allocate to one of the six allowed categories, and then provided them inadequate supervision and support to ensure that they used the funds appropriately.

5-    The DOE has undercut efforts from principals by cutting school budgets four years in a row, even when the state funding was increasing, which in itself violates the requirement in the C4E law that the funds be used to supplement rather than supplant.

6-    DOE has also undermined principals’ efforts to reduce class size by sending them more students when their schools registers as underutilized; through a formula that pegs class sizes to at least 28 in 4^th-8^th grades and 30 in HS, rather than the goals in the city’s adopted class size plan.

7-    DOE has not accounted for $182 million in C4E funds, but instead claims that these funds were allocated to schools as part of “maintenance of effort” without any evidence of how they have been spent.

8-    The largest allocation in district-wide initiatives after team-teaching strategies is “dedicated instruction,” categorized as “additional time on task” but it is not clear how that is being defined and what is being offered in addition to what was already provided.

9-    The city is also spending funds to subsidize the Leadership Academy, which in multiple studies has proven to be a complete failure.*  The Contracts for Excellence program was instead designed to be used for reforms that have been proven to work.

10- There are two new spending categories this year, “maintain class size” and “minimize class size growth”; though neither one can be defined as class size reduction.

11- In any case, schools have not reduced class size; in every single district in the city and in nearly every school, class sizes have risen sharply since 2008 (see #2 and #3) and thousands of teaching positions have been eliminated.

13- Instead, DOE has treated the C4E funds as a slush fund, and used these dollars to replace its own financial support to schools.

14- The city has consistently disinvested in the classroom, while spending excessive amounts on out of classroom positions, more consultants, bureaucrats, and an expanding contract budget that equals $4.5 billion this year, with an increase of  18%.

The result has been a total abrogation of city’s responsibility to our children and their legal obligation under the law.  For more, see the attached power point.

I urge you the DOE to revise its plan based on the comments above and re-allocate every possible dollar towards hiring additional teachers and reducing class size.

* See Damon Clark, Paco Martorell and Jonah Rockoff, School Principals and School Performance, Calder Institute, 2009; and Sabatino Pasquale, Jr, The effect of the New York City Leadership Academy on student outcomes in New York City schools, 2009, which concludes: “The results offer no evidence that participation in the Leadership Academy is an effective means of preparing principals for successful leadership.”

The deadline for comment on the city’s defective Contracts for Excellence plan is tomorrow night, Wednesday, Nov. 23. 

Class sizes are now the largest they have been since eleven years in grades K-3, and are larger than they were when the state’s highest court said our children were denied their constitutional right to an adequate education in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, as a result of excessive class sizes.   In addition, we believe that there is $180 million missing from the city’s CFE plan, compared to the $531 million allocated by the state for this purpose.

We now have powerpoints showing  the rise in class size in your district’s schools, as well as other information  how the city has failed our children.  (If you don’t see your district, just email me at info@classsizematters.org and we will send it to you.)

Already four different Community Education Councils have passed resolutions, protesting the sharp increase in class sizes and DOE’s violations of law: District 1 in Manhattan, Districts 20 and 21 in Brooklyn, and District 30 in Queens.  Some of these call for City Council hearings and others for State hearings on the matter.  If you would like a sample resolution for your CEC or PTA, let me know; the one just passed by CEC 21 is here; CEC 1 is here.

Again, the deadline for comment is tomorrow night Wednesday, Nov. 23, and DOE is supposed to send all public comments to the State Education department along with its proposed C4E plan. It is important that the state Commissioner know how dissatisfied parents are with the Bloomberg administration’s dereliction of duty to our children.

A sample email is below; feel free to change it in any way you would like. Do it for your child, and do it for all NYC public school children.

And then have a happy Thanksgiving.

________________________

To: contractsforexcellence@schools.nyc.gov

As a parent, I would like to protest that class sizes have now increased four years in a row, citywide and in my child’s school, despite the fact that the city was mandated to reduce class size in all grades starting in 2007.  This is the final year of the city’s five year class size reduction plan, and class sizes in the early grades are now the largest in eleven years.

DOE has failed to allocate a single penny specifically towards class size reduction and instead has cut repeatedly cut school budgets, even when they received millions more from the state in C4E funding and overall education aid.  The city’s refusal to reduce class size has severely damaged my child’s opportunity to learn.

[optional: My child is in  [ fill in name]  school, in district  [fill in number], with  a class size of x in [fill in] grade. ]

The state should immediately force the city to revise its Contract for Excellence proposal, by allocating the $180 million missing from the plan that the state provided, and use it to hire more teachers.  The state should also implement a corrective action plan that would require the city exercise proper oversight and start reducing class size, instead of continuing to slash school budgets, eliminating thousands of teaching positions and wasting precious education dollars on failed programs that do not help our children learn, like more testing, technology, consultants and bureaucrats.

Otherwise, the state as well as the city will have failed to do its duty by NYC’s children.

Yours sincerely,

Your name, child’s school and district

Email address

showing increases in class size and other violations in DOE’s Contract for Excellence plans citywide and by district

On Nov. 15, the city released this  year’s class size  data by school, district and borough (click here).

Sure enough as we had feared, class sizes increased for the fourth year in a row, and in grades K-3, class sizes are  the largest they have been in eleven years.

Check out the links below the citywide presentation for class sizes in your district’s schools.

(this page last updated on November 22, 2011)

Citywide-final

District 1 updated

District 2 updated

District 3 updated

District 4 updated

District 5 updated

District 6 updated

District 7 updated

District 8 updated

District 10 updated

District 11 updated

District 12 updated

District 13 updated

District 14 updated

District 15 updated

District 16 updated

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District 20 updated

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District 30 updated

District 31 updated

District 32 updated

Testimony of Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters

Before the NYC Council Technology and Contracts Committees

On the NYC Department of Education’s wasteful and corrupt technology contracts

October 31, 2011

Thank you, Council members and Chairs Cabrera & Mealy, for holding these important hearings today.  My name is Leonie Haimson, and I am the Executive Director of a citywide parent advocacy group called Class Size Matters.

In August of 2009, the NY State Legislature passed new legislation on school governance that was supposed to ensure more transparency and accountability in the NYC Department of Education’s contracting.   This was in response to a general recognition that DOE’ s contracting process was out of control.   Indeed, an audit from the State Comptroller in May 2009 had revealed  that the number and amount of no-bid DOE contracts had mushroomed to 291 between July 2005 and June 2008, amounting to $340 million, and that in many cases the DOE had “failed to properly document” the reason why these contracts had been awarded.  Moreover, 59 percent of the contracts had start dates prior to the internal DOE committee meeting at which the contract was approved. [1] The state legislature included a provision in the new governance law that would require that from then on, DOE contracts be vetted through a public hearing and a vote of the Panel for Educational Policy.

I am sad to say that this legislation has utterly failed.  Though the Panel for Educational Policy is required to vote on all DOE contracts, they have acted as a rubber stamp, and have approved every single contract put forward by the chancellor, no matter how wasteful or potentially corrupt.

The first test of the new governance law took place on September 14, 2009.  At that meeting, a $54 million, four year extension of a no-bid contract with Future Technology Associates was on the PEP. This company  had recently been the subject of three columns by Juan Gonzalez, investigative reporter for the Daily News.

His first column, published on July 22, 2009, pointed out that though the extension of FTA’s contract was no longer officially no-bid, the bid requirements appeared to have been tailored by DOE specifically for the company, despite the fact that FTA had no real address except for mail drops in Florida and Brooklyn and no other apparent clients besides DOE.[2] The second column, published on July 29, pointed out that the average pay of each of the FTA consultants was more than the chancellor’s salary at $250,000 per year, and the annual cost of the contract had ballooned from $2.5 million to $15.7 million.[3] The third column detailed how FTA had brought in foreign workers under temporary visas, and was paying them one fourth of what they charged DOE for their labor. [4]

All this information pointed strongly to the existence of either mismanagement or corruption on the part of DOE, and millions of dollars wasted.  And yet, remarkably, the PEP approved a new $54 million contract with FTA with few questions asked, except from panel member, Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan Borough president appointee.  Sullivan pointed out that the contract was “actually four separate projects that were inappropriately bundled together,” apparently to “appease FTA or otherwise protect their incumbency.”  Here is Sullivan’s account from that time, as posted on our NYC Public School Parent blog:

Despite the clear language of the law requiring the PEP to “approve contracts,” DOE has refused to provide the actual contracts. Instead, we were supposed to make do with DOE-crafted summaries. I explained how the summaries did not accurately explain what we were buying, how were paying for it and how much it was going to cost. After much back and forth I said “you will give us the contracts yes or no?” [DOE Chief Operating Officer Photo Anagnostopoulos] eventually agreed. Four mayoral appointees then admonished me, citing the risks of violating vendor confidentiality, the dangers of trying to micromanage the operations of the DOE, the vast complexity of the contracts and perhaps most remarkably, our fiduciary duty to the vendors! “We don’t need to see the contracts” they insisted. I wish the mayor’s appointees were as equally energetic in looking after the interests of the public school children as they were with the interests of DOE contractors….

He went on:

“I could not get a straight answer from DOE on why the system was outsourced to expensive consultants …. I was told the system required the latest software skills in order to function, skills not available amongst DOE employees, but the only skills listed in the RFP were decades-old mainframe skills. ..I voted against the FTA contract and requested the work be re-bid in separate pieces as I suggested above. The contract was approved 11-2.[5]

As the NY Times reported at the time,

“It had been derided as a committee of puppets, a rubber-stamp board with no clear power or purpose. So when word came from Albany over the summer that the Panel for Educational Policy would have greater power over the New York City schools, some thought things might be different. The old days, however, did not seem far behind at the panel’s first meeting of the school year on Monday: The “ayes” were nearly unanimous, and friction was virtually nonexistent.”[6]

Here is NY1’s account:

… said panel member Patrick Sullivan. “I think there as we saw tonight there were a number of irregularities in the materials that they presented and yet all the resolutions and all of the contracts were passed overwhelmingly, so there has been no real change in the balance of power.” …On Monday, the 13 members easily passed 15 different contracts… “I think it was fine. I mean, these were all necessary contracts, there is no question about it,” said [Chancellor] Klein. [7][emphasis added].

While Chancellor Klein called the FTA contract “necessary,” and the mayoral majority of PEP members approved it without question, the suspicious information revealed in the Gonzalez columns was more than enough to trigger an investigation by the Special Commissioner of Investigation, Richard Condon.

Two years later, in September 2011, Condon’s report was finally released.  He had indeed found fraud and corruption, including the fact that this was an “inside job”.  A high level DOE official, Judith Hederman, executive director of the DOE’s Division of Financial Operations, was personally involved with Jonathan Krohe, co-owner of FTA, and had provided him with confidential information to aid him in his fraudulent scheme. [8]

Condon found that FTA stole at least $6.5 million of taxpayer funds, through setting up subsidiary companies overseas which paid employees $10 an hour, while billing DOE for over $100 per hour.  The FTA owners had repeatedly lied, while stealing millions and wining and dining city employees, and even charged their Mets season tickets to the contract, without a single DOE official apparently registering any concern, as the bill got bigger and bigger.[9] In his report, Condon concluded:

“The DOE cannot allow consultants to have free reign over DOE projects that cost millions of dollars. DOE officials who are charged with oversight of the projects must be held accountable for failing to supervise them…”

Many other wasteful and possibly corrupt contracts have been approved and extended by the PEP since the FTA contract was extended, including the recent Verizon contract.  In that case, Verizon had already been implicated in another scandal, in which a DOE consultant named Ross Lanham in charge of wiring schools for the internet had stolen $3.6 million dollars through a false billing scheme, again by setting up a fake sub-contracting company.

Special Investigator Condon found that Verizon had “profited… from Lanham’s scheme” and “had agreed to Lanham’s demand that Verizon use subcontractor Custom Computer Specialists (“CCS”) at a higher cost to the DOE than Verizon would have charged for the same service..”  He concluded that Verizon had “facilitated this fraud” and “concealed from the DOE and law enforcement that they got millions of dollars in contracts through Lanham only after agreeing to hire CCS as a subcontractor.”[10]

In justifying a new contract with Verizon, DOE said that “Verizon is in discussion … regarding repaying of the overcharges.” Yet the company has to this day refused to pay back any of the excessive profit it took, and in a letter to the PEP dated August 16, 2011, Jim Gerace, the NY Regional President of Verizon, falsely stated that the Condon report had cleared the company of all wrongdoing. [11]

Nevertheless, on August 16, 2011, the PEP approved a new $120 million Verizon contract by an 8 to 4 vote; with the Mayor’s appointees again unanimously voting yes.

School budgets have been cut repeatedly to the bone over the last four years. Our schools have lost valuable programs and staff, and class sizes have risen to the highest level in over a decade. A quarter of our elementary schools are so overcrowded they had waiting lists for Kindergarten. And yet the private contracts have continued to mushroom under Chancellor Walcott’s direction, as documented by a recent article in City Hall News:

“Spending on outside contracts at DOE has risen over the years, especially as the department ramps up its ambitious technology initiative, which aims to have 300,000 students at 75 schools using online learning tools within five years. The department’s contract budget is $4.5 billion this fiscal year, a 19 percent increase over the previous year. But as spending has increased, so have theft and waste.”[12]

As Patrick Sullivan has stated, the situation has only gotten worse under Chancellor Walcott:

“The DOE now routinely asks for approval well before the contracts are even drafted making proper due diligence impossible. Mayoral bloc appointees rubber stamp the contracts regardless of issues uncovered.  … The measures taken by Walcott and Hernandez have dramatically undermined the approval authority provided to the PEP under state law.”[13]

But none of these scandals compare to the potential for fraud, waste and abuse in the future, as the DOE plans to spend $1 billion on new technological enhancements, including hi-definition video and high-speed internet, to facilitate the rapid expansion of online learning and testing to more than 400 schools.  As the Center for Reinventing Education states, this expensive project represents a large scale experiment on our children, without backing in research:

“….NYC school district leaders are taking risks with the iZone, implementing new models, committing deeply to a defined set of principles that challenge core assumptions about what a school should look like, and moving to scale very quickly. How and when they will know if they got the big bet right is a question district leaders will have to ask so that students are not subjected for too long to programs and schools that don’t work. [14]

And without proper oversight in place, there is also the potential that hundreds of millions of dollars stolen of taxpayer dollars in the years to come.

Mayoral control was widely justified as a result of a handful of Community School Boards that had embezzled funds or had hired relatives or friends to positions in schools.  Never mind that years before the adoption of mayoral control in 2002, these boards had already lost any power to hire staff or spend funds. [15] In any case, the profligacy, waste and fraud that has occurred in recent years under mayoral control have now far surpassed any two-bit corruption in past eras of NYC history.

Chancellors Klein, Walcott and other DOE officials have failed in their fiduciary responsibilities to taxpayers and our children; as have most of the members of the PEP.  But in a system of mayoral control, Mayor Bloomberg is the one individual ultimately responsible, by hiring incompetent and heedless administrators, and failing to ensure that there are robust mechanisms in place to prevent the theft of millions of dollars from our children’s schools, and from their futures.

Here is more background information in the form of a powerpoint; here is a sample resolution for your CEC or PTA to consider.

Comments are due Nov. 23 to Contractsforexcellence@schools.nyc.gov.

We will be giving presentations at the District 2 CEC on October 26 at PS 116 at 7 PM; District 3 CEC on November 2 at the Joan of Arc Building on 93^rd St., District 22 CEC on November 3 at PS 139, at the CEC 11 PTA breakfast at 9 AM on November 8, and at CEC 5 at PS 125 on November 10.

Please join us!

Here is a letter that the UFT, Class Size Matters, the NAACP and AQE wrote to Commissioner King about all the flaws in the public process this year.

Posted here is the powerpoint presentation I gave  in Queens last week, (here it is as a pdf) laying out the ongoing increases in class size that are damaging our children’s opportunity to learn, and the city’s numerous violations of law in terms of process and the dismal results, despite more than $2 billion in state C4E funds since 2007.

If you’d like a similar presentation for your CEC or PTA with district or school specific class size data over time, please let us  know by emailing info@classsizematters.org

The room at American University was standing room only.  I learned that Robin became involved in class size issue when her daughter was in a class of 29 in Kindergarten in a Tucson public school;  I became involved the very same year, when my daughter was in a class of 29 in 1st grade in a NYC public school.

As our chart and power point reveal, while the research, public support and the positive effects of smaller classes on teaching and learning are clear, the opposite can be said of the federal government’s ” Race to the Top” program  and the administration’s proposals to renew and revise NCLB.