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The chart plots a dot for every school that received state money to create new classrooms. The dot represents the amount of money the school received, and the amount that the school's average class size changed. (Data via the Department of Education)

We’ve already reported that average class sizes citywide did not decline last year, despite an infusion of money meant to reduce them. New data suggest the same relationship happens at the school level: Even schools that reported spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on class-size reduction efforts, such as creating new classrooms, did not necessarily see a drop in average class sizes.

Rather, while some schools that reported investing in new classrooms did end up reducing class sizes on average, others actually saw their average class size go up. The data, provided by the Department of Education following a tug-of-war that you might recall, are summarized in the graph above and in a searchable file available here.

The major challenge, according to the schools official who compiled the data, Tania Shinkawa, is not that principals didn’t spend the money as they were supposed to, but that even that pot of money didn’t guarantee that they could lower class sizes across the board.

Take Bronx elementary school PS 57, which reported that it spent $190,000 to open new classes. Let’s be generous and say that the money could pay for three additional teachers. That could go a long way toward reducing class sizes in three grade levels. But would it necessarily lower the entire school’s average class size?

No. (more…)

United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten isn’t in a fighting mood. Last week, she made a splash when she first said charter schools can be incubators for good ideas in school reform. Yesterday, she offered an olive branch to one of her chief adversaries, the charter school operator Eva Moskowitz. And today, she issued a statement calling Mayor Bloomberg’s proposed budget “thoughtful and responsible.”

The proposed budget might still be harmful to schools, Weingarten implies in the statement:

Our schools have already absorbed cuts upwards of 10% over the last two years, and teachers are already doing more with less every day to provide a safe, nurturing environment for their students. Important after school programs such as tutoring and academic intervention services have already been affected. Additional cutbacks have the potential to dramatically alter the landscape, and attrition may mean jumps in class size.

Weingarten also argues against the creation of a new pension tier that would provide reduced benefits for employees hired in the future, something Bloomberg has been pushing to cut city costs. Earlier this spring, the UFT announced that it had identified ways for the city to save millions of dollars that would make a new pension tier unnecessary.

Weingarten’s complete statement is after the jump. (more…)

School principals and reporters will be briefed on the Department of Education’s financial situation tomorrow — and the outlook is likely to include “huge, gigantic cuts,” according to a City Council source. The briefing will come one day before Mayor Bloomberg is scheduled to release his 2010 budget proposal.

An April 8 memo from the city’s budget director asked the DOE to cut 1.5 percent from its proposed operating budget through layoffs or attrition. The cuts will come on top of $251 million that the mayor proposed slashing from the DOE when he first released a 2010 budget plan, in January. The DOE has already revised its budget down $1.9 billion in the last year, down over 10 percent. This new 1.5 percent cut would chop off about $260 million more.

The city cuts will be much more manageable thanks to an influx of federal stimulus dollars to the city schools. But a City Council source said that, as currently proposed, they will still be dramatic.

“There’s huge, gigantic cuts proposed in the city’s school budget, and unless there’s some miraculous turnaround in the economic forecast, I don’t think anyone expects an increase in city funds going to schools,” the source said. (more…)

We reported yesterday that charter schools, which were disappointed by an unexpected freeze in their budgets for next year, are going to be getting some relief, thanks to a plan by Governor David Paterson and State Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith. But that $30 million figure turns out to be the highest possible amount, not the guaranteed amount. Smith yesterday vowed to send “up to” $30 million to charter schools.

Charter school supporters are downplaying the distinction and keeping a thankful tone toward Paterson and Smith. But it means that the schools, which are publicly funded but operate outside of the regular district system, will remain in limbo for at least a few more days as to how much money they can actually expect to get. It’s also not yet clear how the pot will be distributed between charter schools.

Peter Murphy, of the statewide lobbying group for charter schools, which played a role in brokering the deal with Smith and Paterson, said that he’s satisfied with the fund, even if it will be smaller than $30 million. “Were assuming ‘up to’ doesn’t mean half, but it may not mean the full thirty,” he said on the telephone this morning. “Sure we would have liked the whole thing, but school districts aren’t happy with their small increase, either.”

The worst examples of overspending on DOE contracts, according to Comptroller William Thompson.

Department of Education contracts routinely cost the city far more than initially estimated, according to an analysis that City Comptroller William Thompson issued just before today’s City Council hearing. The under-estimations could be costing taxpayers a fortune in the price of things like Xerox machines and cafeteria equipment, whose prices could be negotiated at much lower rates if the city could accurately predict just how much schools would end up using them.

One out of every five DOE contracts that ended in the last two years went over its estimated cost by at least 25 percent, according to Thompson’s analysis. In the most egregious overrun, a contract with Xerox Corporation to lease copy machines to schools ended up costing the taxpayers more than $67 million. It had been estimated at a cost of $1 million.

In a crossly worded letter sent to Chancellor Joel Klein today, Thompson, a mayoral candidate who has been highlighting public school issues as part of his criticism of Mayor Bloomberg, called the overruns part of a “troubling pattern of mismanagement” at the department.

Department of Education officials strongly disputed Thompson’s accusations and his figures in an interview and in testimony to the City Council today. The contracts at issue, called “requirements” contracts, can stretch above their estimated costs because they never actually set a total amount of services to be provided. Instead, they set a certain price for the service — say, renting a copy machine, or of placing a classified ad — and let the number of times the department will buy the service stay open-ended. (more…)

Some advocates are saying that the state budget betrays the hard-won Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement, which declared the city schools need more money.

But union president Randi Weingarten, a supporter of the case and the groups that filed it, is taking a different point of view. In a statement she just released, she declares that the state budget “reaffirms Albany’s commitment” to the lawsuit. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity, she says, “was deferred but not denied.”

The state budget erases two years of increases in funding that would have grown to more than $5 billion by 2011, postponing them until the future. Only 37.5% of the funds promised over a four-year period have been doled out so far. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity’s executive director, Geri Palast, has repeatedly said that state lawmakers should give the city a “down payment” of funds for next year.

Here’s her full statement: (more…)

Lowering class size by just a fraction of the degree sought by class-size reduction advocates would require a tremendous expansion of the Department of Education’s budget, Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf just testified at today’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control in the Bronx.

Recent DOE analysis concluded that a reduction in class of 10% — from an average of 25 to 22.5, for example — would cost $800 million a year in extra operating funds to pay for new teachers, Cerf said. Constructing the extra classrooms needed would be an additional tens of billions of dollars in capital funds, he said.

The city last year received $150 million from the state in funds earmarked to reduce average class sizes in a set of needy schools.

The company that won the contract.

Here’s a story from yesterday’s New York Post that escaped our attention: Yoav Gonen reports that the Department of Education handed a $1.6 million contract to a vendor that wasn’t the lowest bidder — and whose services include a $315/hour consultant fee.

The contract went to the management consulting company Accenture, which you might recognize as one of several million companies whose spokesman is Tiger Woods. Accenture is promising to save the city school system $21 million in the next year by lowering the cost of books, equipment like overhead projectors, and software. The trick, according to schools spokeswoman Marge Feinberg, is bulk-purchasing of a variety the DOE previously could not accomplish. So whereas right now schools get about a 2% discount on books of the sort you’d buy at Barnes & Noble (as opposed to textbooks), when Accenture is done the discount will shoot to 35%, Feinberg said.

In the past, a contract with a different management consulting company that promised to save the school system money drew criticism for inflating its savings projections. Estimates of the cost-savings from the contract, with the firm Alvarez & Marsal, dropped over time, though the updated numbers remained far above the fee the company charged, about $16 million.

This contract is also attracting heat. The Post story quotes both a losing vendor and Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum criticizing the department. But of course, won’t know whether these savings really materialize until next year.

Mayor Bloomberg presenting a budget update in November.

In response to GothamSchools’ survey about how schools plan to handle the budget cuts, several principals are saying they can’t begin to speculate about what they’ll slash because they don’t know yet how much money they’ll be losing.

They won’t find out for a while. Their first hint will come next month, when the city presents to the City Council its preliminary budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1.

Principals will really be able to start planning for next year in the “late spring,” DOE spokeswoman Ann Forte told me. The state’s fiscal year begins April 1, so by then schools will know how much they’re losing from the state and will also have a good idea of how much they’ll receive in city funds.

The process to arrive at the city’s preliminary budget is underway now. (more…)

City Hall (via Flickr)

Data specialists, new small schools, and empty seats in gifted programs could all go the way of cash bonuses to top-scoring schools if the City Council gets the budget cuts it wants.

The Council is proposing $170 million in additional budget cuts, on top of the millions Mayor Bloomberg already suggested, in an attempt to preserve a $400 rebate to homeowners that the mayor says the city can’t afford.

Almost $80 million of the proposed cuts would come from the Department of Education, the largest amount from any single city agency. Nearly $40 million of that would be programs associated with the department’s flagship Children First initiative, such as the school-based “inquiry teams” that analyze data about individual students. Other cuts would come in the form of delays, such as opening fewer schools each year and tabling plans to buy new data systems to manage enrollment and hiring information. And the proposal would require teachers to do jury duty on their own time, during the summer, so that schools won’t have to pay for substitutes. (more…)