GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

The former chair of the City Council education committee, Eva Moskowitz, talked to the current chair, Robert Jackson, before today's hearing on charter schools. Moskowitz runs a charter school network, while Jackson said he is skeptical of charter schools. (GothamSchools, Flickr)

City Council members today moved to regulate the process of placing charter schools in public school buildings, introducing a resolution that they said would avoid conflicts between families at neighborhood schools and new charter schools placed inside of them.

Right now, Department of Education officials offer some charter schools space in public school buildings on their own, but the space-sharing arrangements are sometimes contentious. (Charter schools receive public funding, but operate outside of the DOE watch and are not guaranteed space in public school buildings.)

The Council resolution would force the department to follow some kind of a regular procedure — probably involving a requirement to work with members of a neighborhood — before it could place a charter school in a public building.

“Make community stakeholders part of that process,” City Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo, of the Bronx, said. “You fail miserably at including the people that have to deal with the fallout of the decisions that you make.”

Council Member Jessica Lappin of Manhattan, who chairs the council’s work on public land use issues, said that charter schools should be placed in the same way that new traditional public schools are placed. “I have worked very hard to bring community members, principals, and the Department of Education together so that we can resolve the issues that inevitably arise,” Lappin said. Why, she asked, shouldn’t charter schools be placed in the same way?

Testifying before the council, Department of Education officials said they agree that they need to improve the way that they bring in new schools, but they declined to support the resolution that would force them to follow a new procedure when doing it. (more…)

The New York Post‘s relentless shilling for the renewal of Mayor Bloomberg’s control of the New York City schools continued today with the claim that Mayor Mike doesn’t get adequate credit for his accomplishments in involving parents in the schools.  Carl Campanile’s article identifies a number of accomplishments, including the institution of parent coordinators at each school;  the creation of the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy;  making parent involvement part of the system of accountability for principals and schools;  and increasing the quantity and quality of information about schools available to parents.  Ironically, on the same day, Meredith Kolodner filed a story in the Daily News on the problems that parents and other stakeholders are having obtaining information on the performance of various programs and on decisions regarding future plans.

My colleague Joyce Levy Epstein, Director of the Center on School, Family and Community Partnerships at Johns Hopkins University, has developed a typology of six different types of parent involvement.  The framework includes: (more…)

On charter schools:

• Nearly 40,000 applications were filed for the city’s 8,500 charter school spots. (Post)
• The Daily News and the Post rail against the UFT’s interference in the DOE’s charter school plans. 
• A Harlem resident says her zoned school is violent, so it should become a charter school. (Post)
• Eli Broad says the new school building he paid for should become a charter school. (L.A. Times)
• Suburban school districts haven’t gotten into charter schools the way cities have. (Washington Post)

Mayoral control:

• Recaps of the Education Equality Project convention’s explosive lunch session. (Post, GothamSchools)
• Joel Klein and D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty visited two East Harlem schools. (Times, GothamSchools)
• Parents say getting information about schools hasn’t gotten easier under mayoral control. (Daily News)
• The DOE says it has made lots of new information available to parents. (Post)
• Chancellor Klein is rebutting the comptroller’s allegations that the DOE has spent profligately. (Post)
• In letters, Post readers weigh in on whether the city’s version of mayoral control should go national.
• Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told school board members that their role isn’t obsolete. (EdWeek)

And everything else:

• Some wealthy New Yorkers are suddenly planning to enroll their kids in public schools. (Times)
• Tips for families considering a move based on school zones. (Times)
• Merryl Tisch, the new state Board of Regents chancellor, gets the Times‘ Saturday profile treatment.
• Marcia Lyles is in the final round of a Delaware superintendent search. (Wilmington News-Journal)
• The Administration for Children’s Services is cutting funds from its day care programs. (WNYC)
• A few city schools are testing out the Wii Fit as an alternative to regular gym classes. (Post)
• A former teacher’s aide at a Queens school is suing an 8-year-old who ran in the hall. (Post)
• In Scarsdale, schools are trying to teach empathy. (Times)
• The Wall Street Journal says Democrats are suppressing evidence that D.C.’s voucher program works. 

• The Times recaps yesterday’s visits by Adrian Fenty and Joe Biden to the city to talk schools.
• Meanwhile, Weingarten urged NY teachers to “take a fresh look” at “divisive issues.”
• Aaron Pallas fact-checks the fact sheet put out by the Education Equality Project.
• An AFT affiliate helped organize teachers at three Chicago charter schools.
• Norm says teachers can stay satisfied by working on social justice activism.
• Boston is hiring Teach for America members despite layoffs. (Via Joanne Jacobs)
• Noticing a report that Roxbury Prep gives 200 first-round interviews every year.
• The D.C. voucher program gives students a leg up in reading, but math is about even. (Full study.)
• How to become a teacher: a collection of resources for those who want to.
• The Denver schools chief interviews Alan Bersin, who paved the way for Klein, Rhee.
• Aldeman predicts that states’ reports on how they evaluate teachers will be embarrassing.
• Asking if sending your kids to fancy private school hurts public schools. (Via Corey.)

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty, and others in an East Harlem classroom yesterday. (Anna Phillips/GothamSchools)

I didn’t post all day yesterday because I was on the move, following Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and Washington, D.C., Mayor Adrian Fenty on a school visit in East Harlem in the morning, checking in on Vice President Joe Biden’s speech in Midtown in the afternoon, and chatting with charter school operators from New Jersey at a bar late into the evening.

I’ll have plenty of reports next week, but for now I want to share one exchange I observed during the morning school visit that’s missing from Javier Hernandez’s account in today’s Times. In the same class where Fenty described eating hot dogs with President Obama, Klein asked the children to name their favorite thing about their school. Their answers: Gym, art, music, assembly, “choice time” when they play games every Friday, and “cook shop,” where the class simulates a restaurant. 

Klein then revealed his own favorite thing about the school: ”You have great teachers, a great principal, and great students, and that really matters.” Then the two school leaders and their retinue moved on.

I have a story up about the growing pressure on the Department of Education to change the way it gives out contracts.

One of the main defenses school officials give is that the city rules that govern contracts for all other agencies, from the NYPD to the parks department, are just too cumbersome for the school system, which needs to have the chance to either cut off a contract at a moment’s notice — or hand one away with extreme speed:

David Ross, the department’s head of contracting, told City Council members Wednesday that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein awarded Alvarez & Marsal the contract without any competitive bidding because he felt a time crunch. “The chancellor had an interest in completely making extensive changes to the school system and operations,” Ross said. “It was felt that it was just not practical or possible to do an RFP or competitive process and make the reforms and changes that were needed in the schools.”

He said that Alvarez & Marsal “had the advantage” because they had already begun working with the school system under a contract with the Fund for Public Schools, which used private philanthropic donations to start off work with the firm. “They were already there. They had done a lot of the work,” Ross said. “So the inertia behind them was already very significant.”

On day two of the convention he is jointly throwing with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, the Rev. Al Sharpton ceded his time on a panel to a City Council member who promptly called on Mayor Bloomberg to fire Klein. The panel’s members were a collection of allies of Klein’s, including two mayors who support mayoral control of schools, but Council Member Charles Barron called the system “dictatorial” and “autocratic” and said that in New York City it has actually made the public schools worse.

Barron also criticized Klein, who stood about 50 feet away from him waiting to join the panel, saying that the chancellor lacks any pedagogical expertise. “He definitely should go,” Barron told me after his remarks. “He shouldn’t ever have been hired.”

Sharpton said he asked Barron to speak because he wanted the event, which was sponsored by his National Action Network along with the Education Equality Project he started with Klein, to offer views from both sides of the debate on mayoral control. “If EEP is going to be anything, we’re going to hear all views,” Sharpton said. “The main thing is to change the conversation.” Sharpton yesterday told the New York Times that he supports revising mayoral control. (more…)

City Council Member Melinda Katz introduced a resolution asking the state to change the law so that the Department of Education is required to follow city contracting rules. (Via Azi's Flickr)

Comptroller Bill Thompson attracted lots of press Wednesday by accusing the Department of Education of “runaway spending” on contracts. But another, less sexy development could have a much greater impact.

That’s the fact that momentum is growing to force the department to follow the same contracting rules as other city agencies, in the form of endorsements from a list of advocates, including one office that rarely butts into policy debates, and a new City Council resolution calling on a change in the state law that allows the DOE to duck the usual regulations.

Agencies from the NYPD to the parks department cannot hand taxpayer dollars over to an outside contractor without first following the rules of a citywide office called the Procurement Policy Board. The DOE is the only city agency that does not have to follow the board’s rules, which do everything from forcing public hearings on contracts above a certain price to imposing strict guidelines on what contracts have to be bid competitively.

The DOE’s exception was born well before the 2002 mayoral control law gave the mayor authority over the schools, but it has gotten more attention under the new structure, which makes school contracts harder to track. While the old Board of Education reviewed all contracts above a certain size before they were signed and held public hearings where citizens could respond to the contracts, the Department of Education has presented only a small number of contracts before the new version of the board, the Panel for Educational Policy.

The result is that hundreds of contracts have been offered without competitive bidding — and without a public hearing to discuss what the contracts include.

A group of Columbia Journalism students has reported that the DOE also makes it difficult to find contracts once they’ve been signed. The department does not maintain reading rooms for the public to review contract documents, against the requirements of the Freedom of Information Law, and many contracts simply aren’t available for review, they reported. Asked about the concerns at a City Council hearing Wednesday, school officials said they would look into them.

A Public Airing

The lack of PEP hearings is despite language in the state law that gives the panel the power to “approve contracts that would significantly impact the provision of educational services or programming within the district.” (Read a PDF of the law here.)

Patrick Sullivan, a PEP representative from Manhattan who is a critic of the Bloomberg administration, told me that he has seen only labor contracts come before the PEP, never a goods-and-services contract. Sullivan said that he recently asked the department to submit a new $79 million contract with a firm called MAXIMUS to manage special education data for a PEP vote.

The department’s general counsel, Michael Best, denied Sullivan’s request in an e-mail message that I obtained, though he did offer to share some information about the contract — after the meeting had happened. Best wrote:

If you really want to see the contract, we do not have an electronic version to send around, but if you were willing to come down to tweed we can arrange to let you take a look at it.

Sullivan, who was appointed by the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, said he was not satisfied. “If the PEP had to vote on the contracts, then there would be some accountability there. Then we would be holding Klein accountable for the spending,” he said. “Because they refuse to allow any of those, and they just spend whatever they want and whenever they want, they’re refusing to comply with the accountability requirements of the law.”

A spokeswoman for the department, Ann Forte, said of the contract, “We do not believe Panel approval was required.”

City Council members would urge state lawmakers to make that change under a resolution introduced this week by Council member (and comptroller candidate) Melinda Katz. “It is amazing to me that there would be allowed any exception to what any city agency must do,” Katz said at a hearing Wednesday, announcing the resolution.

School officials yesterday declined to follow an invitation from Katz to self-impose the restrictions other agencies follow. They said the department’s exception is important because it allows the system’s 1,400-odd schools to buy things like copy machines and textbooks on their own, without having to navigate a maze of regulations. “They need the flexibility, within accountability guidelines, to actually make the purchases necessary for their students,” the department’s chief operating officer, Photo Anagnostopoulos, said.

Best, the department’s general counsel, said other mayoral agencies must get every contract they write reviewed by a chief contracting officer. That would be very difficult in a system of 1,500 schools, he said.

Katz and other advocates said Wednesday that the exception means the department’s contracts fly under the radar of proper oversight.

George Sweeting, the deputy director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, added his endorsement to the resolution, in a move he said was unusual for the IBO, which usually stays out of policy debates.

“The PPB rules are intended to improve transparency, avoid excessive costs, and reduce the potential for favoritism that can result in the absence of competitive bidding,” Sweeting said in prepared testimony. “It is difficult to understand how those rules are considered useful when other city agencies procure goods and services, but unnecessary or too cumbersome for the DOE.”

The Speed Imperative

City Council members also pointed to the department’s $16 million contract with Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm that re-arranged the school system’s bureaucracy. The contract attracted attention because it was awarded without any bidding and because it led to the 2007 scandal where a midyear rerouting of school bus lines left many children stranded in the cold. The department has said the bus routing was a mistake but defends the rest of Alvarez & Marsal’s work, which it says saved the city $170 million.

David Ross, the department’s head of contracting, told City Council members Wednesday that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein awarded Alvarez & Marsal the contract without any competitive bidding because he felt a time crunch. “The chancellor had an interest in completely making extensive changes to the school system and operations,” Ross said. “It was felt that it was just not practical or possible to do an RFP or competitive process and make the reforms and changes that were needed in the schools.”

He said that Alvarez & Marsal “had the advantage” because they had already begun working with the school system under a contract with the Fund for Public Schools, which used private philanthropic donations to start off work with the firm. “They were already there. They had done a lot of the work,” Ross said. “So the inertia behind them was already very significant.”

School officials repeatedly called the Alvarez & Marsal contract unique. In an interview yesterday, Ross told me that the department handed out $28 million in no-bid contracts in 2008, a number he said is low compared to years past. In testimony to the City Council, Anagnostopoulos said the so-called “exceptions” contracts were all less than $5 million in value, and 85 percent of them were with community-based organizations that run pre-kindergarten classes.

• The DOE is dropping its bid to replace three schools with charter schools. (GothamSchools, Times, Post)
• Al Sharpton and Joel Klein kicked off the Education Equality Project convention. (GothamSchools, Times)
• Arne Duncan was to surprised to learn about the state’s scheduled cuts to charter school funding. (Post)
• The Post says it’s with Duncan: Charter schools should get more state funds because parents want them.
• Duncan told the Post that poor children should have access to public boarding schools. 
• Merryl Tisch says the federal “Race to the Top” fund should be used to toughen state tests. (Post)
• The head of the state teachers union, Dick Iannuzzi, says unions are “embracing reform.” (Buffalo News)
• The city will build a new high school in Maspeth, Queens, even though some there didn’t want it. (Times)
• Manhattan’s Millennium High School is overcrowding itself to deal with budget cuts. (Downtown Express)
• A Chinatown school has a librarian, but no library. (Downtown Express)
• The DOE’s contracting rules shut out small businesses. (NY1)
• There won’t be enough room at PS 3 and PS 41 for students zoned for them. (The Villager)
• A Manhattan teacher was cleared of sex abuse allegations. (Daily News)
• Jay Mathews says charter schools, not vouchers, are the way of the future. (Washington Post)

In honor of the Educational Equality Project conference this week—you remember the Educational Equality Project, don’t you?  The unholy alliance between Rev. Al Sharpton and Chancellor Joel Klein, funded by a $500,000 tax-deductible gift from former Chancellor Harold Levy’s Connecticut-based hedge fund to Sharpton’s National Action Network that was laundered through Education Reform Now, a non-profit linked to Education Reform Now Advocacy Inc. (a lobbying group), and Democrats for Education Reform (a political action committee)?  Throw in how the gift helped to offset Sharpton’s personal and organizational IRS tax woes—a $1 million settlement last July—and Levy’s lobbying City Hall on a range of horseracing initiatives worth hundreds of millions to his company and its partners, and you have the making of a John Grisham novel.  All that’s missing is a few hookers.  

The Educational Equality Project, which has garnered signatories from a large number of prominent politicians and education leaders, recently launched its website.  At the top of the page is a rotating list of “facts,” backed by a list of “all the facts,” with links to references that presumably document or support the facts.  skoolboy decided to fact-check some of the facts.  Are they fact or fiction?

Barely half of African-American and Latino students graduate from high school, while nearly 80% of white students do.

Toss-Up:  These figures are accurate if we limit consideration to on-time graduation rates.  Chris Swanson of Editorial Projects in Education reports a Cumulative Promotion Index, an estimate of the four-year graduation rate, of 58% for Hispanics and 55% for African-Americans in the class of 2005.  These rates would likely increase if we extended the possible time to completion to five or six years. (more…)