GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

An audit by Comptroller John Liu’s office found that the Department of Education overpaid for food about .003 percent of the time two years ago.

Liu’s latest DOE audit looked at the way the Office of SchoolFood contracts and pays vendors for food that is served in schools — at about 850,000 meals annually, according to the city. It concludes that of the $113.9 million spent on school food in the 2009-2010 school year, more than $400,000 could be recouped because records showed the city had paid too much or because there was no record that the city had received any food at all.

The DOE is paying an 862 percent markup for fresh parsley and more than 400 percent the real cost of several other vegetables and herbs, according to a spreadsheet that Liu’s office compiled. The department is paying more than the real value for 76 kinds of food, according to the spreadsheet.

An even broader issue, according to the audit, is that department doesn’t always check when contractors says they require payment or have made deliveries.

“The DOE paid $113 million for which it got receipts, but never looked inside the bags to see if the groceries were there,” said Matthew Sweeney, a Liu spokesman, in a statement.

The audit urges the city to tighten controls over school food spending.

Last time Liu’s office released the results of a DOE audit, about the use of pre-kindergarten funds, department officials said they were submitting their response “under protest.” But Eric Goldstein, head of the Office of SchoolFood, signaled no such resistance in a letter accompanying the DOE’s response to today’s audit. (more…)

The city isn’t sending as many 4-year-olds to pre-kindergarten as it could, according to an audit by Comptroller John Liu.

Liu’s latest Department of Education audit looks at the way the city uses state funding for “universal pre-kindergarten” programs. The funds can be used to pay for half-day pre-K classes at public schools or through city or community-based preschool programs.

Even though many public schools maintain waiting lists for pre-kindergarten classes, especially where space is tight, many 4-year-olds are not enrolled in pre-K classes that could help prepare them for school. Every year, the audit calculates, the city returns an average of about $30 million in unused pre-K funding to the state.

“DOE’s failure to fully allocate all UPK funds means that children who could have received pre-kindergarten classes are not being served,” concludes the audit, which radiates evidence of tension between Liu’s office and the DOE.

The department submitted its response to the audit “under protest” and calling the audit’s focus “deliberately and stubbornly myopic, thereby rendering it of little, if any, worth.” If Liu’s office had looked at efforts to expand pre-K enrollment, the DOE argues, it would have found that the problem lies not with the department but in constricting state regulations.

An enormous challenge, the DOE and Liu’s office agree, is that the state will only pay for two and a half hours of pre-K per day for each child. (more…)

City students aren’t getting the physical education they’re supposed to, according to the latest Department of Education audit out of Comptroller John Liu’s office.

The audit — which follows others in recent weeks about the DOE’s space planning and handling of the Absent Teacher Reserve — concludes that the DOE is doing too little to monitor physical education compliance at individual schools.

According to state law, students in kindergarten through sixth grade must have at least two hours total of physical education each week, with daily instruction until third grade and at least three times weekly after that. But of the 31 elementary schools that auditors surveyed, only two appeared to be meeting the requirements for all students.

Some principals told Liu’s office that they didn’t know the state’s physical education requirements. Others said they lacked the space or personnel to offer as much physical education instruction as they would like, especially after budget cuts. And still others said they had felt pressure to curtail physical education in favor of academic subjects.

In their response to the audit, DOE officials said they would do more to make principals aware of the state’s physical education requirements and would create a formal plan for delivering physical education within the next year. But they emphasized that they do not monitor the amount of time that schools spend on any single subject. (more…)

The Department of Education’s annual assessments of how much space is available in each school building are not always correct.

That’s according to an audit being released today by Comptroller John Liu, who is in the midst of scrutinizing DOE data in a series of reports. Liu, who is weighing a 2013 mayoral run, launched the audits this spring after holding town hall meetings in which New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. Last week, he critiqued the DOE’s handling of the Absent Teacher Reserve, and he has at least three other schools audits in the works.

The newest audit examines the city’s “Blue Book,” which contains space estimates for each school building. The DOE and the School Construction Authority use the Blue Book to guide how many students can be placed in a school, and how many schools can fit into a building. Critics, including members of the City Council, say Blue Book numbers don’t always reflect reality — for example, suggesting that an additional class could fit into an art room — and that decisions based on them can leave schools crunched for space.

To evaluate the city’s success at ensuring accurate Blue Book data, Liu’s office analyzed entries for 23 schools and found that space assessments for 10 percent of all rooms were incorrect in a way that affected the school’s overall capacity.

“Proper space is essential for fostering a good learning environment, yet all too often the DOE is basing critical building decisions on its unreliable Blue Book, which bears too much resemblance to a house of cards,” Liu said in a statement. (more…)

Chart from Comptroller John Liu's audit of the Absent Teacher Reserve.

The Department of Education could potentially be doing more to help teachers whose positions have been eliminated find new jobs.

That’s one conclusion of an audit conducted by Comptroller John Liu of the DOE’s efforts to help members of the Absent Teacher Reserve, the pool of teachers whose jobs were lost to budget cuts, enrollment changes, or school closures. The audit concluded that the vast majority of ATRs — 95 percent — are working full-time in teaching jobs, but that the department doesn’t maintain data sufficient to conclude whether its efforts to help the teachers find permanent positions are paying off.

“Without such information, we believe that DOE is significantly hindered in its ability to evaluate the success of its efforts in helping ATR teachers find permanent positions,” the report concludes.

The audit is not meant to dictate policy and is intended only to draw attention to what the report said was an information gap within the DOE on the ATR pool.

But an unwritten conclusion also seems to be that the city is wasting money by hiring new teachers when ATRs are licensed to do the job. (more…)

Three months after announcing that he would take a taxpayer’s suggestion and audit the Department of Education’s online data system, Comptroller John Liu is asking the system’s most frequent users for feedback.

Liu announced in March that he would audit the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System, the department’s data warehouse known as ARIS, which has attracted no shortage of critics for its $81 million price tag and early glitches. In June, Liu’s office distributed a satisfaction survey to some ARIS users, including teachers.

“As part of the audit, we are evaluating whether the system meets users’ needs,” read an email containing the survey sent June 14 by Vince Liquori, director of financial audit in the comptroller’s office. A high school teacher who received the survey sent it to GothamSchools after the deadline to complete it, June 24, had passed.

The 21-question survey asks respondents for details about how they use ARIS and whether they think they system is helping them boost student achievement. The survey also includes a free-response section for respondents to list what they like and dislike about the system and identify which of its features they would change.

The survey comes as ARIS continues to contend against lower-budget competitors for teachers’ attention. (more…)

City Comptroller John Liu announced today that he is launching audits of two of the Department of Education’s most ambitious technology programs developed under former Chancellor Joel Klein.

The comptroller’s office plans to examine the Innovation Zone, or iZone — a $50 million initiative the Department of Education is touting as a strategy to improve schools during budget-conscious times. Funded through a combination of Race to the Top winnings, private donations and $10 million in tax dollars, the iZone is paying for experiments in online learning, staffing, and school time in 80 schools this year.

Liu also plans to audit ARIS — the Achievement Reporting and Innovation System — an $81 million online data warehouse that debuted in 2008 and eventually overcame some of its early glitches. ARIS began as a contract with IBM, but soon became a project of Wireless Generation, a company that was recently purchased by News Corporation. The city plans to pilot a second phase of the database, known as ARIS Local, in some schools this spring.

Both projects have their skeptics and supporters, but it was mainly the former who attended Liu’s townhall meetings, where participants suggested that the comptroller investigate whether both of these programs were accomplishing their goals. (more…)

Comptroller Bill Thompson chose the first day of school to stoke long burning disputes over whether the Bloomberg administration has reduced class sizes as much as it promised to.

Thompson accused the Department of Education of redirecting or misspending millions of dollars that he says the department promised to use to reduce class sizes. The audit, which is based on data collected in 2008, states that $48 million of the nearly $180 million set aside for Early Grade Class Size Reduction funding was not used to create new classrooms.

Thompson, a mayoral hopeful, said the DOE has been living in a “childish neverland.”

“To use this money for other things [than class size reduction] is to defeat the purpose,” he said.

Class sizes have risen in the last year despite several programs — either foisted upon the administration or willingly adopted — that aimed to reduce them. The administration has repeatedly portrayed class size as too costly a reform to be realistic. In May, Chancellor Joel Klein warned that average class sizes would increase this year as the size of the teaching force declines.

The dispute centers around whether or not the city committed a set amount of money to be used to reduce class sizes for grades K-3. (more…)

For the second day in a row, the city’s comptroller has released an audit questioning the validity of the city’s education data. And for the second day in a row, political jockeying initially overshadowed the report’s content.

At a press conference this morning, Comptroller Bill Thompson, who is running for mayor, said the audit of testing oversight revealed that the Department of Education had allowed “an environment ripe for cheating.” ”We found that the Department of Education has engaged in sloppy and unprofessional practices that encourage cheating and data manipulation,” he said.

But the report did not find new instances of cheating.

The audit focuses on the role played by testing monitors in overseeing the math and English Language Arts, or ELA, tests given to elementary school students in 2008. These monitors, employed by the DOE, make unannounced visits to schools on testing days to ensure that protocols are being followed. Thompson’s audit deems the monitoring system “inadequate.”

The report suggests that the DOE is not thoroughly monitoring its monitors. (more…)

The accelerating 2009 mayoral campaign is distracting from real information inside an audit of city graduation rates released by the city comptroller’s office today. In fact, the audit is neither as damning as Bill Thompson Jr., the comptroller and mayoral hopeful, is claiming — nor as unequivocally rosy as the Bloomberg administration says.

Thompson said the audit suggests that principals and teachers responded to pressure to raise graduation rates by falsifying student records. “The New York City Department of Education has become the Enron of American education, showing the gains and hiding the losses,” he said at a press conference today.

But the audit found no evidence of tampering. Thompson’s declaration about fudging numbers came in remarks to reporters, not the official audit. “Is it just about sloppy bookkeeping or sloppy record-keeping? I don’t think so,” he said. He added, “This is a case where you can read between the lines.”

The audit also concludes that only 2 out of 206 randomly selected graduates, or 1%, did not deserve their diplomas. That’s quite different than the 10% figure being widely reported. Auditors initially challenged 19 graduates, or 10%, but threw out the concerns about 17 of them after school officials provided documents showing they earned their diplomas. And 11 of the 19 had overall grade averages of 80% or better, according to the audit. (more…)