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annals of transparency
January 6, 2009
Last year, fewer reports about wrongdoing by DOE employees
The city office that investigates the Department of Education today released a statistical summary of its last year’s work, showing that it completed more investigations in 2008 than in any other recent year.
According to the report (pdf), the Office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation substantiated 327 cases out of 725 started, reflecting a slight uptick in both the number of cases opened and the number of complaints substantiated.
But the office issued only 17 press releases about its investigations. That’s down by more than a third from 2007, when the office issued 26 press releases. And with an increase in the number of cases substantiated, it turns out that SCI made the conclusions of its investigations public less than 5.5 percent of the time in 2008. Nearly 95 percent of substantiated cases never saw the light of day.
Those cases will become publicly available only if somebody knows about an investigation and files a legal request to find out its conclusion, which was how a year-old investigation about a top DOE official made the news last month.
At that time, a spokeswoman for SCI told Elizabeth that the man who oversees the office, Richard Condon, alone makes the decision about which investigations to publicize. I’m going to see if I can find out more about how he makes the determination about what should go public.
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January 6th, 2009 6:15 pm
Let’s say that there are 100,000 teachers, administrators, counselors, etc. in the DoE. (I’ve often heard this number mentioned, and it’s an easy round number to play with.) This means that for every thousand staff members, there were 7+ investigations and 3+ cases of wrong-doing in 2008. Scary! What’s shocking is how much fraud, cheating, and sexual misconduct must have been happening and not prosecuted before the Office of the Special Commissioner of Education stepped up its investigative efforts. Makes me wonder whether if there’s still much more misconduct to un-cover.
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January 10th, 2009 10:35 pm
The cases that go public are the ones that are considered newsworthy like an arrest or serious misconduct. Most of the substantiated cases are for minor infractions that shouldn’t even be investigated by Condon but referded to the Chancelor’s investigators but if you notice the chart the complaints go up. This is because Condon comes from the Police Department with the mantality based on making complaints like summons and arrests go up from the previous year.
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January 11th, 2009 12:22 pm
Carol: you write “Most of the substantiated cases are for minor infractions that shouldn’t even be investigated by Condon but referded to the Chancelor’s investigators.” How do you know this is the case, if these cases are never reported to the public?
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January 11th, 2009 8:58 pm
A well trusted source plus the fact that principals, mostly new, do not know what has to be reported and what doesn’t have to be reported and some of the doesn’t have to be reported complaints wind up having Condon’s investigators show up at schools.
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January 11th, 2009 10:10 pm
Right now, only the Chancellor sees these reports, so unless your source is Klein himself, I’m not sure how accurate this is — and even if so, I wouldn’t necessarily trust him. Last year, there were over 300 substantiated cases of malfeisance or corruption among DOE employees, and less than 6% of these cases were reported to the public. This is not a healthy situation — nor one that speaks to the transparency of the DOE or the Special Commissioner’s office.
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January 12th, 2009 8:11 pm
Not so. A lot of people see the reports and if Klein accepts the reccomendation of Condon then Klein fowards the reports to his Administrative Trials Unit who in turn have hearings and file charges if serious enough or foward the report to the principal who in turn has a meeting with the teacher and his UFT representative who review the report. A LOT of people see the report.
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