GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

A $35 business proposition — among other offenses — cost a city teacher $10,000.

Fay Inovlotska paid two students $35 earlier this year to hand out flyers promoting a daycare center with which she was associated, according to a report today from the city’s Conflicts of Interest Board. That behavior violated rules prohibiting city employees from using their positions for personal gain, COIB concluded.

Inovlotska — who earned just over $80,000 from the city last year, according to payroll data collected by the transparency website SeeThroughNY — agreed to pay a $10,000 fine to the Department of Education for the behavior “and other conduct,” according to COIB’s press release.

Exactly what the other conduct was isn’t specified in COIB’s announcement. But Inovlotska’s case came to COIB from the office of Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon, who looks into allegations of fraud and corruption in the DOE. Condon publicizes only a fraction of SCI’s reports, even when allegations are substantiated.

The only way to see unpublicized reports that Condon has forwarded to the DOE or to the ethics board is to file a Freedom of Information Law request, which we have done.

SCI has published just seven investigation reports this year, down from 15 in 2010, 12 in 2009, 19 in 2008, and a high of 26 in 2007. (more…)

The special education data system that has teachers and parents frustrated carries a $79 million price tag — and wasn’t even tailor-made for the city schools.

That’s according to a report by Ruth Ford and Adrienne Day about the Department of Education’s contracting practices in the current issue of City Limits, the magazine of the nonprofit Community Service Society of New York.

The year-old Special Education Student Information System, or SESIS, was meant to make information about students with disabilities more accessible. But its rollout has been bumpy, with school staff and union officials complaining that using the system is burdensome.

Tracing SESIS’s origins, the City Limits report characterizes the system as “neither an unbridled success nor a total failure” but rather a symptom of the DOE’s reliance on private contractors to solve local problems — a practice that DOE officials said could soon see greater quality control.

From the article:

The DOE put out a request for proposals for a new system and got several bids. The Virginia-based consulting company Maximus won the contract. (more…)

Santos Crespo, a local president for the DC-37 labor union, on the last day of work for nearly 700 school aides last month.

The union that represents school aides is suing to roll back layoffs of nearly 650 members that took place last month.

Lawyers for District Council 37, which includes school aides and parent coordinators, plan to file a lawsuit over the layoffs on Wednesday, according to a press release the union just sent out.

The suit will argue that the Department of Education acted in bad faith during its negotiations with DC-37 over the jobs, declining to consider other ways to save money or considering whether the City Council and principals might pitch in with their funds. It will also argue that the DOE violated state law by conducting layoffs that disproportionately affected schools with many poor students.

Principals chose to cut school aide positions over the summer as they hammered out slimmed-down budgets for this year, and the layoffs took place in October after charged negotiations between DC-37 and the city failed. (more…)

The press conference where Joel Klein's resignation was announced

When Chancellor Joel Klein suddenly announced his resignation a year ago tomorrow, speculation immediately mountedthat he had been pushed out.

But Klein insisted that he had chosen to leave the Department of Education and said Mayor Bloomberg had asked him to stay on.

Now, new details tucked into a New York Magazine profile of Rupert Murdoch’s daughter Elisabeth seem to confirm that Bloomberg set the timeline for Klein’s departure — and suggest that Klein’s decision to head to Murdoch’s News Corporation was hastily made.

From the article:

On Sunday morning, November 7, 2010, Michael Bloomberg called Klein and told him that he would be announcing that Klein was resigning that week. Klein and the mayor had been discussing Klein’s departure from Tweed Courthouse for months—but Klein was still taken aback at the timing of the decision. He had been in informal talks with several Wall Street firms, but nothing had materialized. Without a job lined up, he “panicked,” according to a person familiar with the matter. So Klein called Rupert. (more…)

Seth Diamond, commissioner of the Department of Homeless Services and Kathleen Grimm, DOE deputy chancellor, testify before a city council hearing on education barriers facing homeless youth.

Despite improvements, the city is still falling short at protecting homeless students from disruptions to their education, advocates told members of the City Council today.

Education committee chair Robert Jackson said he convened a hearing on obstacles facing homeless students in part to follow up on the story, reported by the Daily News last year, of a high school student who was unable to take a required Regents exam because she had to spend the day with her family going through the city’s shelter intake process. Since then, the Department of Homeless Services revised its policy to excuse children from most of the lengthy intake process.

“We’re pleased that this harmful policy was changed,” Jackson said. But he said, “This is but one example of the hardships faced by homeless students. DHS’s placement of families in shelters outside of their original community, combined with the [Department of Education]‘s busing restrictions, lead to many students in shelters having to transfer schools, thereby disrupting their education.”

DOE and DHS officials said they are increasingly collaborating to help students classified as homeless, who have quadrupled since 2008 to more than 65,000 and who make up a significant portion of students who are chronically absent from school. But the officials said they could do more to help more support students’ legal right to remain enrolled at their “school of origin,” the school they were enrolled in before becoming homeless.

DOE Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm said the DOE has counted 50,000 students in temporary housing, 20,000 of them in shelters. “Our number indicates about 65 percent remain in their school of origin,” she said. “We have no idea why parents move a child from a school, and maybe that’s something we could address.”

Advocates said the answer could be found in the city’s policies about school transportation and placement.

“Unfortunately, specific practices at DOE and DHS all but guarantee educational instability for a large swath of homeless students,” testified Jared Stein, the assistant director of New York State Technical and Education Assistance Center for Homeless Students, an advocacy group that helps school districts work with homeless students.  (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…)

The City Council’s education committee has given a great deal of scrutiny to schools the Department of Education wants to close. Now it’s turning its attention to the new schools the department wants to open.

Today, the committee held an oversight hearing about the DOE’s new school creation process, which has resulted in more than 400 new schools in the last nine years.

The process to open a charter school is set in law, but how new district schools come to exist is more obscure, Robert Jackson, the committee’s chair, said during the hearing.

“Some charge that there’s been two many new schools opened in too short a time, with too little planning and preparation and too much emphasis on quantity over quality,” he said.

Of the 500 district and charter schools that have opened since 2002, just six have closed because of poor performance, said Marc Sternberg, the DOE deputy chancellor in charge of new schools. He said the schools’ success stems in large part from the department’s selection process for school models and principals.

That process has gotten more stringent this year. Prospective school leaders will have to complete a rigid, three-month-long series of assignments, and at three points, some will be culled from the pool. (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…)

When it comes to new “common core” standards, theoretical language is giving way to hands-on practice.

The curriculum standards, accepted by 48 states, are being rolled out citywide this year after being piloted in 100 schools last year. Today, every teacher in the city is expected to get training on them.

Chancellor Dennis Walcott sat in on a training session this morning at Brooklyn’s PS 124, which took part in the pilot last year. But at many schools, today is likely to be the first time that teachers learn just how the common core standards are poised to change their jobs.

Some principals put together their own plans for today, but they can also draw on four 90-minute lessons the city devised. One session asks teachers to evaluate student work from their own school to see if it meets the new standards. In another, they will practice assessing teachers according to a new evaluation rubric. A third lesson focuses on connecting two overarching citywide goals: strengthening student work and teacher practice. And a fourth lesson asks teachers to examine student work from a school that adopted the new standards last year. The lessons are part of the Department of Education’s online “Common Core Library” of resources.

In a letter to principals last week announcing the lesson plans, Walcott laid out a timeline for schools’ common core-related accomplishments. This fall, he wrote, teams of teachers at each school should identify students’ shortcomings. In the winter, teachers should ask all students to complete two common core-aligned “tasks,” one in reading and one in math. Through it all, principals should be giving teachers frequent feedback based on classroom observations, Walcott wrote.

Walcott’s letter to principals is below: (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…)