Post a comment about the budget cuts at your school on our interactive comment map. more »
GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools
musical bureaucrats
January 16, 2009
DOE reorganization: Fewer officials to report to chancellor
The same person who will lead the Department of Education’s review of special education masterminded the internal reorganization that’s currently underway at the department.
DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.
With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.
One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. The charter schools office is going to Eric Nadelstern, the system’s new “chief schools officer.” The groups that have supported career and technical education and small learning communities within larger schools will report to Marcia Lyles, who leads the department’s teaching and learning division. And the “systems planning” personnel, who work on creating, siting, and closing schools, will now fall under the supervision of Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for finance and administration.
Still reporting directly to the chancellor, in addition to Grimm, Lyles, and Nadelstern, are accountability czar James Liebman; Christopher Cerf, the deputy chancellor who supervises human resources and communications; and Chief Operating Officer Photeine Anagnostopolous. Cantor said the new organization is not set in stone but he does not expect “seismic change.”
-
January 17th, 2009 9:39 am
Why are we doing another report, another review, another re-organization? I thought the last review, report and re-organization had produced the results we wanted? The press releases from the DOE tout these reviews, reports and re-organizations as successful. Do we need to mess with success? Oh, oh….. am I we wrong? Did I misinterpret those reviews, reports and reorganizations? Holy smokes, I drank the kool-aid.
There have been so many reviews and reports in the last three years: The Council on Great City Schools, The Hehir Report, a report from the Public Advocate, parent surveys such as the one by the Citywide Council on Special Education and surveys by the DOE. We don’t know enough yet? Or is it really about money? Money that some see as wasted on kids who can’t learn, can’t read, can’t see, can’t go to Harvard and won’t fit the mold? -
January 18th, 2009 7:35 am
Of course it’s about money. And it’s about years and years and years of dysfunction. Why is every decision viewed with suspicion and scorn? Why can’t we appreciate that this is terribly difficult work with a school system so large and such a history of failure? Money isn’t wasted because it’s not the right kids; money is wasted because it would be going directly into classrooms if the system could be run more efficiently.
-
January 18th, 2009 9:02 am
AS I reported at the ednotes blog:
Not mentioned is the reorganization of the Office of Instructional technology by folding it into the Office of Accountability under James Leibman so the people who are supposed to train teachers to deliver services to the kids are now being used to support ARIS training. There is a tech gap for poor urban kids and under the Klein DOE that has grown considerably larger. -
January 18th, 2009 10:39 am
Kids aren’t efficient. They change, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day. The same student could be gifted in one area and need remediation in another. No human is perfect…or efficient. That’s why we trust robotics to build cars yet have humans do the final check.
My scorn is only for those who would refuse a student these chances.
And, if as the DOE claims, all of the prior re-organizations, re-structuring and re-jiggering of the system has produced improved results, why not repeat these success until they become the norm in a system?The philosophy of school efficiency is early twentieth century, based on Ford’s assembly line of manufacturing. We know that schools that move students along an assembly line are not working, ergo, are not efficient. The DOE has broken up these assembly line schools into smaller and more flexible units. These schools, some of which are co-located in single buildings, require multiple managers with redundancies in services: secretaries, school support staff, telephone lines, etc. In a business setting that would not be efficient. In a human setting, they are considered necessary for good results.
No one can criticise better management, nor should they unfairly criticise the manager. However, if the manger’s dicta are wrong, there is appropriate criticism. The laws are clear about kids with disabilities: equal access and an appropriate education. If students are denied access to programs, such as the smaller schools, they are denied access to the education these schools supply, to the teachers who might know them better and provide them with supports, to a chance at success.
Since past actions have indicated a lack of understanding by the DOE about the laws which provide these students with access to a free and appropriate public education, I do not see that it is smart on my part to accept at face value any excited announcement about another reorganization.
-
January 19th, 2009 10:21 am
I didn’t say schools should be efficient. I’m for spending whatever it takes to close the achievement gap, including having a lot of small schools even if it’s more expensive than factory-model schooling (which I find, generally, detestable, having been there).
I said the SYSTEM needs to be more efficient. Fewer administrators means less overhead, more dollars being funneled to schools. And if the Chancellor believes that he has assembled a more qualified/competent cadre of principals and wants to “devolve authority” to the school leaders, then it makes all the more sense to continue to trim and streamline at the top.
-
January 19th, 2009 11:31 am
A quote from the article of Jan. 16: “the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.”
A new level of reporting… pushing the leader of the organization further away from the people who may implement policies. I thought the goal was to reduce layers of edu-crats.Your questions: “Why is every decision viewed with suspicion and scorn? Why can’t we appreciate that this is terribly difficult work with a school system so large and such a history of failure?” Won’t this new layer only add to an already large system? I know that no one can know everything, but I doubt very much that further layers add to knowledge or efficiency.
While I have to check on this, I understand that up to 95% of a school’s budget is already allocated by the Central office (i.e, Title One funds, salaries, etc) by the time it is dispersed to the schools. That oercentage, or less, doesn’t leave much room to play with for principals and leaders at the schools. Yet, we hear about adding another layer at Central and we are expected to say, “Wow, they are really taking care of the education of our children.”
-
January 19th, 2009 11:33 am
sorry for the spelling mistake it should read percentage, not oercentage…..I was typing while irritated….
Leave a Reply
Mapping the Budget Cuts
Copyright Notice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
7 Comments
Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack