GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Steven Taveras holds up a card indicating that he was the first student selected for Believe Southside Charter High School.

Last week, most eighth graders in the city found out which high school had accepted them. Tonight, hundreds of eighth graders in Brooklyn learned whether they would be lucky enough to have a charter high school choice for this fall as well.

I joined hundreds of the hopeful eighth graders for an admission lottery trifecta held in Greenpoint tonight, the first time charter schools could legally conduct their lotteries. The students had all applied for one or more of the schools in the brand-new Believe High Schools Network. The first school in that network, Williamsburg Charter High School, opened in 2004, and two more, Believe Northside and Believe Southside, are set to open this fall. Before the lottery, WCS founding principal Eddie Calderon-Melendez told me that over 700 students had submitted applications for the 500 available spots, some applying to two or even all three of the schools.

“I can feel how nervous you are,” said City Council member Diana Reyna, who ceremonially drew the first names in the lottery, to a chorus of agreement. “My heart is racing as much as yours.”

The first two names drawn were for students who weren’t present. But when Steven Taveras heard his name called to be the first student selected for Believe Southside, he leapt from his seat and bounded to the front of the auditorium, where he was immediately pulled into a round of handshakes and photographs.

A few minutes later, the IS 318 student was still beaming, but he said he wasn’t sure why he’d be giving up his seat at nearby Progress High School. “Mommy picked everything,” his mother, Maria Taveras, interjected. (more…)

The worst examples of overspending on DOE contracts, according to Comptroller William Thompson.

Department of Education contracts routinely cost the city far more than initially estimated, according to an analysis that City Comptroller William Thompson issued just before today’s City Council hearing. The under-estimations could be costing taxpayers a fortune in the price of things like Xerox machines and cafeteria equipment, whose prices could be negotiated at much lower rates if the city could accurately predict just how much schools would end up using them.

One out of every five DOE contracts that ended in the last two years went over its estimated cost by at least 25 percent, according to Thompson’s analysis. In the most egregious overrun, a contract with Xerox Corporation to lease copy machines to schools ended up costing the taxpayers more than $67 million. It had been estimated at a cost of $1 million.

In a crossly worded letter sent to Chancellor Joel Klein today, Thompson, a mayoral candidate who has been highlighting public school issues as part of his criticism of Mayor Bloomberg, called the overruns part of a “troubling pattern of mismanagement” at the department.

Department of Education officials strongly disputed Thompson’s accusations and his figures in an interview and in testimony to the City Council today. The contracts at issue, called “requirements” contracts, can stretch above their estimated costs because they never actually set a total amount of services to be provided. Instead, they set a certain price for the service — say, renting a copy machine, or of placing a classified ad — and let the number of times the department will buy the service stay open-ended. (more…)

Last week, the City Council’s education committee examined next year’s Department of Education budget, and next week it is scheduled to look into the explosive issue of charter school expansion. For today, however, the committee is turning its attention to the technical but no less important issue of how the DOE enters into business contracts.

The DOE hires external vendors to perform a variety of services, from managing admissions processes to constructing data systems. Some of the department’s contracts, such as one with the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to redo the system’s bus lines two years ago, have been criticized for being expensive and being entered into without a competitive bidding process. In January 2008, the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, announced he would open an audit of the department’s no-bid contracts, which at that point totaled more than $300 million. The results of that audit have not been released.

Tired of waiting for DiNapoli, a handful of enterprising Columbia University journalism students launched NYCPublicEyes.org, a Web site that they’re calling “an experiment in open-source investigative journalism” to get more details about the DOE’s contracting practices. So far they’ve posted a list of no-bid contracts the DOE has entered into, which they obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Law request. They’re also updating their blog as they learn more: The most recent post is about how two offices that technically are supposed to monitor DOE spending, the Public Advocate’s Office and the Comptroller’s Office, gave the students two different lists of no-bid DOE contracts. My guess is that NYCPublicEyes, like GothamSchools, will be reporting about today’s hearing.

The New York City Department of Education produces an annual progress report for every school in the city for which there exists sufficient test data.  The DOE website gives a good description of the reports.  The DOE also makes available an Excel workbook with all of the results for the year 2007-08.

I compared the results for the 46 charter schools with the 1,307 traditional schools.  Here is the workbook with my additional calculations and results.

Some conclusions: (more…)

• A former chancellor is paying for the Education Equality Project, Juan Gonzalez reports. (Daily News)
• Arne Duncan loves mayoral control and wants to see the it spread. (GothamSchools, AP, Post)
• Seventy-eight percent of Leadership Academy graduates are working as principals. (Post)
• A Queens principal praises mayoral control for freeing him up to spend, hire, and fire as he wishes. (Post)
• An e-mail trail says the DOE favored a real estate developer’s school plan over other options. (Post)
• More anger over the 7,500 students who didn’t get a high school seat. (NY1)
• The Post says the teachers union’s to blame for no state money for charter schools. 
• The federal government could soon give states credit for 5-year high school graduates. (Education Week)
• More minorities are enrolling at, but not integrating, suburban schools. (USA Today, CNN)
• Arne Duncan speaks out on the stimulus. (Washington Post)