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.

“While their findings were quantitatively insignificant relative to the scale of our operations, several points raised were of interest and will provide us opportunities to further improve our operations,” Goldstein wrote.

He said the department already took many of the steps the audit urged but would look for other ways to ensure that prices paid for school food are fair and reasonable.

Today’s audit is part of an ongoing series of DOE audits that Liu initiated this spring after holding town hall meetings in which New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. Long considered a potential 2013 mayoral contender, Liu has seen his prospects in that race effectively collapse amid revelations about its fundraising practices.

Pricing is only one of the Office of SchoolFood’s concerns. In May, we reported that some food served in cafeterias does not meet the city’s own nutrition guidelines it set last year for bake sale snacks.

Here’s the audit that Liu’s office released today:

And here’s the DOE’s response:

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.

The city has long said that it would have no trouble using all of the state’s pre-K funds if only they could be used for full-day programs, which many parents prefer. But some programs offer additional time and services on top of what the state pays for, and Liu’s office concluded that the city does not make an effort to direct the extra pre-K funding to them.

Lobbying the state for permission to use pre-K funding for full-day programs is one of 10 recommendations the audit offers the city. In its response, the DOE accepts nine of the suggestions, arguing that many are already in place and rejecting only the idea that pre-K providers should be required to keep waiting lists of children they cannot accomodate.

The audit finds that the DOE hasn’t fully assessed public demand for pre-K programs or recruited new providers to offer programs where demand exceeds the number of available seats. Plus, the audit finds, the city doesn’t know which pre-K providers do the best job.

Assessing and rewarding quality is part of the city’s EarlyLearn initiative, a reauthorization process for early childhood programs that has just gotten underway.

The full audit is below, followed by the city’s response.

Audit of UPK

Audit of UPK, Response

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.

Counting the minutes is less important for subjects where students are assessed through standardized tests, Liu’s office countered, asserting not quite correctly that all academic subjects culminate in that kind of test. Because there is no across-the-board way to measure students’ fitness achievements, the audit argues, the city should check for compliance.

Liu’s office is not the first to suggest that city students should be getting more exercise. Indeed, city health officials in 2009 recommended that schools increase physical education instruction to cut down on childhood obesity and disease and boost academic achievement.

The city has started sending home fitness reports, called Fitnessgrams, to parents, and the head of the DOE’s Office of School Wellness Programs, Lori Rose Benson, told Insideschools in February that more elementary schools than ever had at least one physical education teacher: 92 percent, up from 75 percent in 2003.

Calls for an increased focus on fitness are likely to resonate with Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott, an avid runner who eschews sweets and wears a pedometer to count how many steps he takes each day.

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.

In a response, Kathleen Grimm, the DOE’s deputy chancellor in charge of space, counters that overall, estimates for the 23 schools were spot on: There are just as many seats available in the schools as the department said, even if there are some estimation errors within some of the schools.

But Liu’s office argues that looking at the big picture gives short shrift to inaccuracies in space assessments at the school level.

“DOE’s and SCA’s methodology only makes sense if the goal is to match total seats with total enrollment within the system,” the audit says. “As the data is used to make decisions regarding individual schools and groups of schools, the best reflection of the accuracy of the Blue Book is the error rate of each individual school.”

The audit makes several recommendations and the DOE has signed on to most. They include making principals more aware of how important it is for them to complete an annual space survey accurately, ensuring that errors in space estimates are corrected, and checking how rooms are used during visits to verify the information that principals report.

But the city rejected two of Liu’s recommendations: to create and publish information about space availability in schools and to use the Blue Book “more effectively” to identify schools that are overcrowded.

That’s because those things are already happening, DOE and SCA respond within the audit. “We do not believe the findings in the Audit Report remotely support the Comptroller’s implication that the SCA and DOE do not effectively use the Blue Book as a starting point to identify over-utilized schools,” they said.

“The Blue Book is one source of information that informs school construction and building decisions, and the Comptroller’s report acknowledges that the DOE appropriately uses the book in conjunction with other sources of information,” DOE spokeswoman Barbara Morgan said in a statement.

Liu’s full audit and the DOE’s full response are below.

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.

Two charts billboard the number of positions for which ATRs were eligible that instead were filled by new teachers. Last year, the audit documents, 1,796 new teachers were hired for positions that 273 ATRs could have filled, the charts show. The report estimates that the city could have saved $12.4 million if all 273 ATRs had filled the positions for which they were eligible, and the city hired 273 fewer new teachers.

Under the principle of “mutual consent,” adopted in the 2005 teachers contract, teachers gave up the right to claim positions without principals’ approval, and the city gave up the right to place teachers unilaterally into open positions. The change gave principals more control of their staffs but also created the ATR pool.

In a response appended to the audit, the DOE’s deputy chancellor in charge of human capital, David Weiner, says the charts signal that the comptroller would prefer that the city abandon mutual consent in favor of forced placement.

The audit’s “analysis regards teachers not as individual professionals with unique strengths and/or weaknesses as candidates for teaching jobs in unique schools, but rather as fungible, replaceable parts,” Weiner wrote. He echoed language in the 2009 “Widget Effect” report by The New Teacher Project, which has urged the city to save money by terminating teachers in the ATR pool.

A spokesman for Liu said the charts are merely food for thought in a 20-page audit intended to spur the department to gather and crunch more data about the ATR pool.

“There may be cost-effective ways for placing ATR teachers that the DOE may not have considered,” said Matt Sweeney, a Liu spokesman. “One of the audit functions is to provide the agency as much information as possible that it may have overlooked.”

Other interesting data points uncovered in the audit: the DOE sometimes assigns ATRs back to the schools where they originally worked, despite a policy prohibiting that practice; no formal review took place before the DOE decided to eliminate salary subsidies for principals who hired teachers from the ATR pool; and more than 300 teachers in the pool as of March 1 had landed there after settling or being cleared of misconduct charges, likely many after the city rushed to close the “rubber rooms” several months earlier.

Teachers union president Michael Mulgrew said the audit vindicated the union, which has always said that teachers in the ATR pool were pulling their weight within the system.

“[Ex-]Chancellor [Joel] Klein’s constant public pronouncement that this was costing the city $100 million was fraudulent and that’s the nicest way that I can say it,” he said.

Mulgrew said the biggest force keeping teachers in the ATR pool is the fact that DOE charges principals for the real salaries of their teachers, creating a disincentive to hire senior teachers when newer ones are available.

The ATR audit is one of several audits that Liu undertook into the DOE after a series of town-hall meetings where New Yorkers suggested topics for investigation. At least three other DOE audits are expected to be released this month, according to Crain’s New York.

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. The 77-school-strong New Visions network of schools has started to use DataCation, one of several educator-generated systems designed to make up for ARIS’s shortcomings. DataCation built a tool for New Visions schools based on the network’s early-warning system for college readiness, according to the first of four reports evaluating the system.

Susan Fairchild, New Visions’ director of data analysis and applied research, said New Visions chose to put the college readiness data on Datacation because the system is “a little more bottom-up” and “quickly responsive.”

“Our mandate is to serve our schools as quickly as we can,” she said. Using the DOE’s data tools, she said, school staff “said by the time they got the data they were stale.”

But Fairchild said ARIS can be useful, too. “Schools that are able to use both of the systems together are doing themselves a big favor,” she said.

The comptroller’s office declined to comment on its survey because the investigation into ARIS remains open. The complete survey is below.

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.

“We will comply with the Comptroller’s audit and provide all necessary information,” said DOE spokeswoman Deidrea Miller in an email.

A spokesman for the comptroller’s office said that there are currently 12 audits underway of Department of Education operations.

Comptroller Liu’s press release:

LIU: PUBLIC DEMANDS AUDITS OF DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION TECH PROGRAMS

Suggestions Come From Recent Town Hall Audit Tour

NEW YORK, NY – City Comptroller John C. Liu today announced he has launched audits of two controversial technology programs run by the Department of Education (DOE). These audits represent a small sample of the many requests for audits of DOE operations that the Comptroller received at his “Audit Town Hall” meetings held in all five boroughs earlier this year.

“We conducted these Audit Town Halls to hear from the public, the customers who are supposed to be served by government,” said Comptroller Liu. “That New Yorkers are not shy about speaking their minds helps us do our job better, and in the end improves city government.”

“People came to the Audit Town Halls with a lot of questions about how the Department of Education spends their tax dollars,” said Deputy Comptroller for Audit H. Tina Kim. “We’ve seen before how the City’s IT projects can run up exorbitant fees when they’re not properly monitored.”

AUDIT 1: Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS)

Based on a suggestion received at the Manhattan Town Hall, the Comptrollers’ Office has started an audit of the DOE’s Achievement Reporting and Innovation System (ARIS). In 2007 the DOE hired IBM to develop ARIS, an $80 million data collection system to track students’ academic records in unprecedented detail. Wireless Generation, an IBM subcontractor, is credited with leading ARIS’ development.

AUDIT 2: iZone

New Yorkers at both the Manhattan and Bronx Town Halls also asked the Comptroller to audit the DOE’s “iZone” project that was intended to increase the use of innovative technologies in classrooms.  Early reactions to iZone’s efforts have been mixed. In the coming months, Comptroller Liu will announce additional audits of City agencies that were suggested by residents of the five boroughs.

The Comptroller’s Audit Town Halls were attended by 530 New Yorkers who offered 190 ideas for audits.

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.

In its response, the DOE called Thompson’s report “bizarre,” and said the class size reduction program the comptroller had audited was no longer in existence.

“Accordingly, we reject the Comptroller’s findings, and suggest that in the future he stick to auditing the administration of programs that actually exist,” the statement read.

Though it was repealed in 2007 after a successful lawsuit required the state to give the city’s schools more money, the Early Grade Class Size Reduction program hasn’t entirely disappeared. Under the new funding program, known as Contracts for Excellence, the city agreed to continue “to be committed to reducing class size in early grades (i.e., grades K-3) via the Early Grade Class Size Reduction program.”

The DOE and Thompson diverge in their interpretations of that sentence. According to Thompson, the city agreed to spend the money to reduce class size. But DOE auditor general, Brian Fleischer, whose job it is to oversee regulatory compliance, said that the money is not ear marked and that the city only agreed to ensure that new classrooms that were created in previous years were not lost to budget cuts, not that new ones be created.

“We were free to spend it however we chose,” he said.

Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, said she was asking the state to withhold Contracts for Excellence funds until the city committed to spend money to reduce class sizes.

Thompson’s report also states that the DOE gave $21 million to schools that didn’t have enough space to add classrooms, and that roughly $18 million went to schools that had enough space, but didn’t create new classes.

Fleischer said Thompson’s methodology was flawed because he used enrollment information from January of 2008, after schools’ populations were largely settled, while the DOE had made funding allocations based on projections.

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. “DOE does not keep track of the monitors assigned to visit schools and the submission of checklists,” the audit states. It adds that, in many instances, monitors respond to checklist questions that they couldn’t possibly know the answers to — citing a case of a monitor who arrived after the test had begun, but marked “yes” that the tests had been safely stored.

The DOE today shot back, saying that the comptroller’s auditors had not actually witnessed the process they were supposed to be investigating. According to the DOE, of 17 tests the auditors witnessed, none was being monitored.

“They didn’t follow all the procedures because they were not at the schools as monitors; they were there to assist the Comptroller’s auditors,” said spokesman David Cantor in a statement. (Cantor had been ejected from the comptroller’s press conference.) “The Comptroller also recommends several improvements to the monitoring process that the DOE already implemented in time for the 2009 tests, which he could have seen for himself if he hadn’t declined the DOE’s invitations to do so.”

The audit also highlights the fact that the city no longer uses a particular strategy to detect cheating: erasure analysis, which counts the number of times each student erased a wrong answer and bubbled in a correct one. “The old Board of Education abandoned this practice in 2001 because they determined it was a waste of money,” Cantor said.

But Thompson said erasure analysis should be reinstated. The education department said today it would take Thompson’s suggestion “under consideration.” Currently, the DOE only does a complete review of test scores if it receives allegations of improprieties.

In his audit, Thompson’s auditors performed erasure analysis on a sampling of tests, finding two fourth-grade students whose tests had “an excessive pattern of erasures.” The DOE’s statement said that the audit’s concerns over the two tests were “baseless,” and that the two students had accidentally filled in the wrong row of bubbles.

The department found 13 instances of cheating between 2006 and 2008, according to the audit.

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.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg’s re-election campaign sniped at the report even before Thompson formally released it, issuing a statement from Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg’s spokesman, calling the report “phony” and a politicization of the comptroller’s office. School officials joined in the attack, saying in interviews that the audit actually validates their reported graduation rate, despite Thompson’s political remarks.

In fact, the audit does raise questions about the way schools decide who to graduate and, especially, the records they keep to document the process.

The audit sheds light on a process called “annualization,” which allows schools to override one failed course grade with a pass grade achieved in a second semester. The process varies from school to school, according to the audit. The audit reports that one Bronx high school requires students to score 75% or higher in the second semester in order to override the first semester failing grade, while another requires just a 65% grade.

Many schools also keep weak records of changes to students’ grades, which the audit found are common. Four of 10 schools that the comptroller’s office visited could not produce the official reports tracking grade-changes, telling auditors that they threw the forms out. And of 274 students whose transcripts the comptroller sampled, 90, or 33%, had had at least one change made. “The changes generally reflected improvements in students’ grades; some of them resulted in students passing classes that they were previously recorded as having failed,” the audit said.

The comptroller’s office also found questionable changes made to transcripts. One graduate, for instance, had seven grade changes made to his transcript on two days during the month he graduated, June 2007. The audit says:

“Five of the changes involved adding five grades of ‘CR’ for Spanish 1 through 5, all supposedly earned during the spring 2007 term. Another sampled student’s transcript was updated in June 2007, shortly before graduation, to change two failing grades of 55 to 65, one for a class taken in the fall of 2006 term and one for a class taken in the spring 2007 term.”

Another accusation Thompson made tonight on NY1 bears clarification. He accused schools of giving students multiple credits for passing just a single course. A student might pass English 101, for instance, and then get three credits for that course — as if they had also passed English 102 and English 103. But their transcript would also report that the student failed English 102.

The accusation is muted by documents provided by the Department of Education, which show that schools included in the audit mostly gave multiple credits for gym, band, and advisory courses. When an English course was coded twice, the course was “non-sequential,” and one course occurred during summer school. Calling the courses 101, 102, and 103 as if they follow a sequence seems unfair.

Read the full audit here.

CORRECTION: The original version of this post incorrectly summarized the kinds of courses for which the audit found students received multiple credits. I’ve uploaded a full spreadsheet detailing all 39 cases identified by the audit here. The Department of Education provided the spreadsheet.

Parents of children with special needs can argue that their children are not receiving enough services at independent hearings where both the parent and the Department of Education testify. Hearing officers either determine that the current services are adequate — or order the city to do more.

The audit is a result of a lawsuit filed by the nonprofit group Advocates for Children, which often represents parents in these hearings, in 2003. The lawsuit accused the city of not following through with hearing officers’ orders, which range from demanding that children receive extra tutoring to mandating a special program for helping children with autism.

An agreement that settled the suit out of court required regular audits of the Department of Education’s efforts to improve responses. The audit released today, the first in a series required by the settlement, found that school officials failed to meet a pre-determined goal. If the failure is repeated in follow-up audits, it could send Advocates for Children and the city to court.

Officials were supposed to respond to about three-quarters of orders in a timely fashion, but the department only implemented 52%, of them, or 270 out of 558, the audit found. The audit covered a period from June through October of 2008. Certain categories of orders were more often neglected, including teachers to assist preschool students with disabilities (84% unimplemented) and tutoring (64% unimplemented).

The city disputed the audit’s conclusion, saying it relied on a faulty method for deciding what “compliance” means. “It would be a mistake to conclude from this Report that there is some large-scale failure of the DOE to provide services to disabled students or to make payments to the providers of such services,” Jeffrey Dantowitz, a senior counsel to the city’s law department, said in a statement.

The full report is below, followed by Dantowitz’s full statement:

And Dantowitz’s full statement:

While we have great respect for the Independent  Auditor, we sharply disagree with its methodology for determining  DOE’s compliance with the terms of the settlement agreement, by which it imposed  many obligations on DOE that were neither contemplated by the parties nor  required by the terms of the settlement agreement. Thus, the figures  reported are largely a result of this incorrect methodology and not a  reflection of DOE’s true performance. In addition, the areas highlighted by AFC actually concern the timeliness of payments to be made to providers  and not the actual delivery of their services. In most of these cases, the DOE paid for the provision of the required services, although perhaps not within the timetable unilaterally set by the Independent Auditor. Thus, it would be a mistake to conclude from this Report that there is some large-scale failure of the DOE to provide services to disabled students or to make payments to the providers of such services. – Jeffrey  Dantowitz, Senior Counsel, General Litigation Division, NYC Law  Department