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Phase 2? Does this mean Bloomberg and Paterson get yet another crack at ignoring the wishes of parents who don’t wish charters to invade the schools in which their children study?

Hey Maura,

Could you try to explain what Dunn could possibly mean by suggesting that releasing the application could compromise NY’s ability to compete in the second round?  As is often the case, I don’t get it.

Not to jump into speculation, there is a clear possibility that these “keeping under wraps” has nothing to do with compromising the ability to compete in the second round, but preventing committed groups from really “seeing” what the application will entail in favor of private charters and its political supporters at the expense of public education and transparency in the usage of tax dollars in NYS/NYC.

Here’s what the Regents and NYSED are afraid of: If they release their full RttT application, they stand a good chance of it being publicly shredded by scholars, policy analysts and critics who have years’ worth of documentation in their files – ready to be released at the drop of a hat – showing that a significant proportion of what NYSED and the Regents say about their “accomplishments” in the last decade, and abilities to make meaningful positive change for children, is complete and utter nonsense.

Let’s see. US DOE OIG audits from 2 decades ago and again from last year document that NYSED neither audits nor monitors how districts spend federal funds. A US DOE OIG audit from 2007 showed that NYSED gave Reading First grants to districts which shouldn’t have received them because their applications for the program were sub-standard. NYSED simply and arbitrarily added points to flunking district applications. Then a 2009 NYC Comptroller audit was issued documenting that a large chunk of the NYC DOE’s Reading First funds were wasted and a huge proportion may have been misappropriated. The NYC DOE’s Reading First application, of course, was one that NYSED shouldn’t have funded in the first place.

A 1991 audit from the NYS Comptroller showed that districts were inflating grades of their students’ Regents and RCT exams, and in some cases were downright cheating by changing wrong answers to right ones to make marginally failing papers into marginally passing ones. A 2009 audit from NYS Comptroller DiNapoli … showed exactly the same thing. Both audits reported that NYSED knew all about it … and did exactly nothing to correct the deplorable situation.

NYSED’s data re students passing RCT and Regents exams is, as they say in the IT field, GIGO – garbage in; garbage out. Since high school graduation relies on passing these tests … NYSED’s reported graduation data is GIGO squared and the real numbers are a closely held secret. Two decades of investigatory reports and audits have documented that NY’s overall enrollment, attendance, graduation and dropout data is … you guessed it: GIGO. In fact, a federal Single Audit from a few years ago said that NYSED neither audits nor verifies anything districts submit re Title 1 and IDEA (special ed.). Not financial data; not student-related data. Let’s call it all GIGO to the power of 3.

NYSED now claims it verifies a sample of schools’ reported Persistently Dangerous Schools numbers. But its verification protocol keeps verification processes entirely within schools. So if a school has a few rapes, but doesn’t record them in student discipline numbers, nobody from NYSED will be the wiser … because it doesn’t contact local police precincts to see what serious in-school crimes the cops have responded to and which schools have, conveniently, failed to report. NYSED started this alleged verification process after a NYS Comptroller audit showed that NYSED knowingly allowed schools to “massage” their numbers to avoid being branded as persistently dangerous, and in the process, let them get away with failing to report rapes, assaults, weapons crimes and other incidents which inarguably show that a school’s management is incompetent and school’s environment is hardly conducive to learning.

Then there’s the one district NYSED has the authority to operate, and has had for many years – Roosevelt, Long Island. Audit report after audit report says that the district, with NYSED-appointed officials, still can’t keep a credible set of books and that it sometimes spends grant funds for inappropriate purposes. Academically, it’s so bad that even with NYSED’s highly discredited tests and suspect test-scoring system, sources tell me that it’s about to take management of the Roosevelt high school away from the district it operates itself – and give it to some new outside board of NYSED-appointed “experts.” These will, undoubtedly, be the same “experts” whom NYSED made available to the NYSED-appointed superintendents there over the past decade, and who accomplished virtually nothing while spending huge sums in additional legislative appropriations.

NYSED and the Regents are, at best, the gang that couldn’t shoot straight. At worst, they’re the gang which set up and operated a school Medicaid claiming system that was so pervasively corrupt that the US Dept. of Justice recently forced NYS and NYSED to agree to the 3rd highest False Claims Act in the history of the United States, requiring NYS to pay back well over $ 1/2 billion on account of school Medicaid claims as phony as a $12 dollar bill. Should I mention that NYSED is currently subject to a Program Integrity Agreement as a result of that settlement – the same kind of Integrity Agreement that corporations are required to sign in order to avoid criminal prosecution – and will be for another 2-3 years. Enron, anyone?

Tisch, the rest of the Regents, and NYSED’s infamous officialdom make the old “Three Men in a Room” system of legislating, appropriating and deal-cutting look clean and transparent by comparison. What we have now is something closer to “Unknown Things … Under a Rock” deciding how our children will be educated, or mal-educated, and how $ billions of our hard-earned tax dollars will be spent, stolen, wasted or misappropriated, with an emphasis on the “wasted or misappropriated.”

A governmental entity which devises a grant application which – proclaimedly – is going to drastically change our public education system according to a plan which involves spending huge amounts of our tax dollars, and which effects the lives of our children, daily, and which insists on keeping the whole thing under wraps is nothing short of a disgrace.

I wasn’t aware that any governmental entity could operate under this heavy a veil of secrecy and I’m not at all sure it’s strictly legal. The one reliable thing we’ve heard from any of this crowd in the recent past is Tisch’s statement, uttered in a moment of weakness, no doubt, that NY has spent huge extra sums on education in the foreseeable past … and it hasn’t done one bit of good. Measured by NY’s NAEP and SAT scores, which NYSED doesn’t score and can’t manipulate, she was spot on. Allowing this bunch to apply in secret for huge amounts of new federal money, even if it’s legal, is a mistake of historic proportions when there’s been no public input, and with an out-of-control agency which is subject to virtually no public scrutiny. One thing the punditori establishment should be demanding, stridently, is that NYSED get nothing in RttT money until an Independent Inspector General, with wide authority and large budget, is established to keep what it’s doing with this money under a very large looking glass.

Those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it. Three good documents to read to start a study of NYSED’s actual and dismal, dismal, dismal recent history are: 1. New York State System of Internal Control Over American Recovery and Reinvestment Act Funds, United States Department of Education, Office of the Inspector General, Region II, http://www.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oig/auditreports/fy2010/a02j0006.pdf (11/10/2009); 2. Audit Report on the Department of Education’s Compliance with Reading First Program Spending Guidelines, Office of the NYC Comptroller, http://www.comptroller.nyc.gov/bureaus/audit/PDF_FILES/FK09_079A.pdf, October 26, 2009, and 3. State Education Department – Oversight of Scoring Practices on Regents Examinations, Office of the NYS Comptroller, http://osc.state.ny.us/audits/allaudits/093010/08s151.pdf, 11/19/2009.

We already reportedly spend more per pupil than any other state in the country. What we spend it on, according to audit after audit issued by the NYS Comptroller, the US DOE’s Inspector General and the NYC Comptroller, is quite another matter. And what we get for it is … spin, spin and then more spin.

Why anyone on earth should believe one word Tisch and NYSED utter about the RttT application is beyond me … and beyond the considerable body of scholars and commentators who have done their homework and now say without much hesitation that this emperor is buck naked. And doesn’t look very pretty when exposed to the hard light of day.

If and when the NYS application for RttT money is made public, the most likely result is that those in the know will be able to sit down … and have a very hearty laugh.