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Garth Harries

The top Department of Education official who is set to review the city’s special education system is adding another job to his plate: He’s joining a national program designed to produce top-notch urban superintendents.

Garth Harries, who until the end of this month is the chief executive of the DOE’s portfolio department, is one of 12 people accepted into this year’s Broad Superintendents Academy class. The academy, which is based on business executive training programs, is run by the Broad Foundation, which also gives out the annual Broad Prize for Urban Education. New York City won the Broad Prize in 2007.

As a Broad fellow, Harries will stay on at the DOE but will leave the city for six multi-day retreats throughout the year. He’ll also have regular homework assignments. (Already, Helen Zelon at Insideschools has chimed in with concern about just how much Harries can cram into his calendar.) We asked Harries for a statement, and got this response from Chancellor Joel Klein instead:

Garth’s selection reflects the extraordinary work he’s done in New York and his potential to be a great superintendent in the future.

The Broad Academy says it expects its graduates to seek superintendencies, but of the DOE officials who have gone through the program, most still work in the city. (more…)

The same person who will lead the Department of Education’s review of special education masterminded the internal reorganization that’s currently underway at the department.

DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.

With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.

One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. (more…)

In his daily school-reform-report e-mail today, Whitney Tilson, the hedge fund manager by day, education entrepreneur by night, defends Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf, the subject of a 2007 investigation that just came to light last week. The investigation concluded that Cerf had stretched conflict-of-interest lines by soliciting a charitable donation from a Department of Education vendor while he as deputy chancellor. But Cerf later took back the solicitation, and no actions were taken against him.

Tilson describes the investigation into Cerf as a trying experience that turned Cerf’s life “upside down” — all for naught, because it ultimately found no evidence of wrongdoing. His take-away is that “truly no good deed goes unpunished” in the education world, which is characterized by “madness,” he says. The full e-mail is below the jump. (more…)

Regarding this morning’s news, here’s the 11-page investigation, in PDF form.

Note: This post has been updated with a Scribd embed, rather than a Drop.io file, after the web site Drop.io closed.
Christopher Cerf Conflict of Interest Investigation

A page from the investigators' heavily redacted report.

The big news of the day is this story in today’s Daily News and Times, about Christopher Cerf, a deputy schools chancellor who is one of Joel Klein’s closest aides. The News reports that investigators last year concluded that Cerf had violated city law, by improperly using his position to extract a $60,000 donation from a company on contract with the city at the time, Edison Schools. The donation would have gone to a charity on whose board Cerf sat and which he told investigators he was trying to save. Ultimately, after being questioned by investigators, Cerf decided not to pursue the donation.

The violation is noteworthy, especially given the other conflict-of-interest imbroglio Cerf was wrapped up in at the time: After coming under fire for holding substantial stock in the same company, Edison, which he had been president of before coming to the department, Cerf released his holdings in the stock — but only 24 hours before being publicly questioned about it.

But it will become even more noteworthy in the days ahead because of this: The report was never publicly released. (more…)

The nonprofit pro-mayoral control advocacy group that was originally titled MASS, for Mayoral Accountability for Student Success, is now called Learn NY, and its official first day of existence is today. The group has close ties with the Bloomberg administration, but it is not being funded by the mayor, officials said in a background press conference with reporters this morning.

Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters has already done impressive digging into the group’s media strategy. A spokesperson for the group confirmed to me today that the blog commenter Haimson noticed voicing his passion for mayoral control is indeed on the payroll of Learn NY. Brian Keeler, an online-media specialist who ran unsuccessfully for state senate in 2006 with the help of a following he built at Daily Kos, has been posting positive comments on this blog, Leonie’s, and others. He is also an employee of the Web design firm that built Learn NY’s Web site and will write a regular blog on the site, the spokesperson, Julie Wood, said.

Something that will surely be asked — especially by critics of mayoral control and the Bloomberg administration, including Haimson — is how much of a “MASS” organization Learn NY really is. (more…)