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A Spanish-language Keep it Going NYC subway ad. GothamSchools

Spanish has been making more and more appearances at the highest levels of city government as Mayor Bloomberg hits the campaign trail, so I wasn’t surprised last night when I boarded a subway car and saw one of the by-now-familiar Keep it Going NYC ads boasting about the city’s escuelas.

When translated, the ad, which is pictured above, reads, “Because we think that the opinion of each person counts, the New York City Department of Education asked all parents, students, and teachers what they think about their schools — 800,000 of them responded.” (Our resident Spanish expert offers one correction: The first words after Ciudad de Nueva York should be les preguntó, she notes, lest native speakers think the ad copy is in the first-person.)

The ad is part of an ongoing campaign by the Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit fundraising organization associated with the Department of Education, to promote developments in the city schools since Bloomberg became mayor. The organization purchased subway ads for the first time last fall, and the colorful ads are also at bus stops and on taxi marquees. Below the jump is a (bad) picture I took of the ad atop the taxi that brought Elizabeth and me home from the airport on Friday night. (more…)

City Council Member Melinda Katz introduced a resolution asking the state to change the law so that the Department of Education is required to follow city contracting rules. (Via Azi's Flickr)

Comptroller Bill Thompson attracted lots of press Wednesday by accusing the Department of Education of “runaway spending” on contracts. But another, less sexy development could have a much greater impact.

That’s the fact that momentum is growing to force the department to follow the same contracting rules as other city agencies, in the form of endorsements from a list of advocates, including one office that rarely butts into policy debates, and a new City Council resolution calling on a change in the state law that allows the DOE to duck the usual regulations.

Agencies from the NYPD to the parks department cannot hand taxpayer dollars over to an outside contractor without first following the rules of a citywide office called the Procurement Policy Board. The DOE is the only city agency that does not have to follow the board’s rules, which do everything from forcing public hearings on contracts above a certain price to imposing strict guidelines on what contracts have to be bid competitively.

The DOE’s exception was born well before the 2002 mayoral control law gave the mayor authority over the schools, but it has gotten more attention under the new structure, which makes school contracts harder to track. While the old Board of Education reviewed all contracts above a certain size before they were signed and held public hearings where citizens could respond to the contracts, the Department of Education has presented only a small number of contracts before the new version of the board, the Panel for Educational Policy.

The result is that hundreds of contracts have been offered without competitive bidding — and without a public hearing to discuss what the contracts include.

A group of Columbia Journalism students has reported that the DOE also makes it difficult to find contracts once they’ve been signed. The department does not maintain reading rooms for the public to review contract documents, against the requirements of the Freedom of Information Law, and many contracts simply aren’t available for review, they reported. Asked about the concerns at a City Council hearing Wednesday, school officials said they would look into them.

A Public Airing

The lack of PEP hearings is despite language in the state law that gives the panel the power to “approve contracts that would significantly impact the provision of educational services or programming within the district.” (Read a PDF of the law here.)

Patrick Sullivan, a PEP representative from Manhattan who is a critic of the Bloomberg administration, told me that he has seen only labor contracts come before the PEP, never a goods-and-services contract. Sullivan said that he recently asked the department to submit a new $79 million contract with a firm called MAXIMUS to manage special education data for a PEP vote.

The department’s general counsel, Michael Best, denied Sullivan’s request in an e-mail message that I obtained, though he did offer to share some information about the contract — after the meeting had happened. Best wrote:

If you really want to see the contract, we do not have an electronic version to send around, but if you were willing to come down to tweed we can arrange to let you take a look at it.

Sullivan, who was appointed by the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, said he was not satisfied. “If the PEP had to vote on the contracts, then there would be some accountability there. Then we would be holding Klein accountable for the spending,” he said. “Because they refuse to allow any of those, and they just spend whatever they want and whenever they want, they’re refusing to comply with the accountability requirements of the law.”

A spokeswoman for the department, Ann Forte, said of the contract, “We do not believe Panel approval was required.”

City Council members would urge state lawmakers to make that change under a resolution introduced this week by Council member (and comptroller candidate) Melinda Katz. “It is amazing to me that there would be allowed any exception to what any city agency must do,” Katz said at a hearing Wednesday, announcing the resolution.

School officials yesterday declined to follow an invitation from Katz to self-impose the restrictions other agencies follow. They said the department’s exception is important because it allows the system’s 1,400-odd schools to buy things like copy machines and textbooks on their own, without having to navigate a maze of regulations. “They need the flexibility, within accountability guidelines, to actually make the purchases necessary for their students,” the department’s chief operating officer, Photo Anagnostopoulos, said.

Best, the department’s general counsel, said other mayoral agencies must get every contract they write reviewed by a chief contracting officer. That would be very difficult in a system of 1,500 schools, he said.

Katz and other advocates said Wednesday that the exception means the department’s contracts fly under the radar of proper oversight.

George Sweeting, the deputy director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, added his endorsement to the resolution, in a move he said was unusual for the IBO, which usually stays out of policy debates.

“The PPB rules are intended to improve transparency, avoid excessive costs, and reduce the potential for favoritism that can result in the absence of competitive bidding,” Sweeting said in prepared testimony. “It is difficult to understand how those rules are considered useful when other city agencies procure goods and services, but unnecessary or too cumbersome for the DOE.”

The Speed Imperative

City Council members also pointed to the department’s $16 million contract with Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm that re-arranged the school system’s bureaucracy. The contract attracted attention because it was awarded without any bidding and because it led to the 2007 scandal where a midyear rerouting of school bus lines left many children stranded in the cold. The department has said the bus routing was a mistake but defends the rest of Alvarez & Marsal’s work, which it says saved the city $170 million.

David Ross, the department’s head of contracting, told City Council members Wednesday that Schools Chancellor Joel Klein awarded Alvarez & Marsal the contract without any competitive bidding because he felt a time crunch. “The chancellor had an interest in completely making extensive changes to the school system and operations,” Ross said. “It was felt that it was just not practical or possible to do an RFP or competitive process and make the reforms and changes that were needed in the schools.”

He said that Alvarez & Marsal “had the advantage” because they had already begun working with the school system under a contract with the Fund for Public Schools, which used private philanthropic donations to start off work with the firm. “They were already there. They had done a lot of the work,” Ross said. “So the inertia behind them was already very significant.”

School officials repeatedly called the Alvarez & Marsal contract unique. In an interview yesterday, Ross told me that the department handed out $28 million in no-bid contracts in 2008, a number he said is low compared to years past. In testimony to the City Council, Anagnostopoulos said the so-called “exceptions” contracts were all less than $5 million in value, and 85 percent of them were with community-based organizations that run pre-kindergarten classes.

In the Village Voice, Wayne Barrett fact-checks the Bloomberg administration’s party line on how Caroline Kennedy reinvigorated the Fund for Public Schools.

What Kennedy and Chancellor Joel Klein claim:

Kennedy told the Times that the Fund was a mere “pass-through,” collecting “an average of $2 million a year” before she got there. “We kind of re-launched it and revitalized it, you know. Now, we’ve raised $238 million since then,” she said. Klein’s CNN article said that Caroline “took over an office that previously oversaw donations to PTAs and alumni associations and re-created it around a model of a public/private partnership,” claiming that “under her leadership, the Fund has raised more than $240 million.”

What Barrett found in actual documentation:

But the Fund’s tax forms show that the $11.2 million it raised in Caroline’s first fiscal year—which ran from July 1, 2002, to June 30, 2003 (she started the job that October)—was very similar to the $10.7 million raised the year before. The total actually dropped to $10.9 million in 2003-2004, the only full fiscal year that Kennedy was on staff. It grew to $14 million when she left, and then exploded nearly two years after she was gone, to $39.6 million. Kennedy and Klein’s figures of $238 million and $240 million credit her for everything the Fund raised for the four years that she was merely a board member, an absurd exaggeration.

From the department of questions Caroline Kennedy may or may not answer, here are two I sent to her via her spokesman yesterday:

1. What is your position on mayoral control? Should it be reauthorized with no changes or are there any revisions that would be acceptable? For instance, Geoffrey Canada’s group has argued that the Bloomberg administration did not do enough to involve parents in decision-making. Do you agree with that assessment?

2. What portion of money raised by the Fund for Public Schools went toward the advertising campaign called “Keep it Going NYC”? Could you explain the specific importance of those advertisements? I’ve heard several explanations but never a really clear one about how they directly or indirectly help the public schools.

You can see the answer Kennedy did provide to a mayoral control question from the Times here, saying she supports it broadly but is open to revisions “so long as they don’t prevent the Mayor from taking the actions he thinks are appropriate and for which he will be held accountable.” I haven’t received a reply to my questions yet. Any others we should be asking?

Caroline Kennedy is the vice chairman of the Fund for Public Schools.

The state assembly’s decision to study whether the Fund for Public Schools should be exempt from a state law that asks nonprofits for detailed financial disclosure reports is something to watch. That’s because the charity group’s exemption stems from a claim that has enabled the city Department of Education to opt out of a list of other laws and protocols: the notion that the Department of Education is not legally a city agency, and therefore doesn’t have to follow city law.

The claim doesn’t come from nowhere; the city school system has been a state-authorized entity since it was created in the 1840s, and only briefly became a fully city-run entity, thanks to a power play by Boss Tweed circa 1873. But the claim is important because it’s the reason the DOE has given for exempting itself from a laundry list of other city laws and protocols over the years. So if the assembly forces the Fund to disclose its finances, that could produce a ripple effect.

Here’s a partial list of laws and protocols the DOE has avoided via this claim, compiled largely from a list Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters put together in testimony (Word doc) to a mayoral control panel recently: (more…)

Sarah Jessica Parker, Joel Klein, Caroline Kennedy, and deputy mayor Patricia Harris at an October Fund for Public Schools event. Photo by Rubenstein, via Flickr

As Caroline Kennedy travels across the state in an unusual campaign to become its newest senator, New Yorkers are scrutinizing her work history. Among the questions being asked is how much time she actually spent at the city Department of Education when she headed its fundraising office for nearly two years starting in 2002.

Back in 2004, when Kennedy stepped down from her DOE position, David Herszenhorn wrote in the Times:

In an interview about eight months into her tenure, she would not say how often she worked at the department headquarters or how many hours she spent on the job, saying only, “I put in as much time as I can.”

This week, Wayne Barrett argues in the Village Voice that Kennedy’s reported fundraising totals at the DOE are merely “hype.” (more…)

The Chicago Public Schools employee in charge of running a Web site for the district’s alumni recently created an iTunes mix featuring music by Bo Diddley, Kanye West, and other famous CPS grads.

And the person who started the playlist is issuing a “playful challenge” to New York and Los Angeles to come up with comparable mixes, the Chicago Tribune reports.

What would a New York City public schools iTunes mix sound like? I didn’t actually create one, but I did come up with some musicians who got their starts attending the city’s public schools:

Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall '59

• Tony Bennett, Art and Design
• Harry Chapin, Brooklyn Tech
• The Cleftones, Jamaica HS
• Bobby Darin, Hunter College High School
• Al Kooper, Martin van Buren HS
• Thelonious Monk, Stuyvesant
• Barbra Streisand, Erasmus Hall HS
• Suzanne Vega, LaGuardia

What big names am I missing? A Stuyvesant alum compiled a list of albums by Stuy grads on Amazon.com, but does some enterprising soul want to curate an actual playlist for download? You’ll have to do it on your own, because the closest thing the DOE has to an alumni office is the Fund for Public Schools, and all it appears to offer alums are links to a handful of individual high schools’ alumni groups.

In the city’s schools, more students are graduating, crime is down, and test scores are on the rise — according to brightly colored ads currently posted in subway trains.

The quarter-million-dollar ads are the latest installment in an ongoing public relations campaign by the Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit fund-raising organization housed at the Department of Education and essential to its recent pursuit of public-private partnerships. The fund has supported initiatives ranging from principal training to library improvements to performance pay for teachers.

The “Keep It Going NYC” campaign is meant to raise awareness about the DOE successes and encourage people to “get involved” with their local schools, whether by volunteering or making a donation, fund director Lara Holliday told me. To kick off the campaign last year, the fund spent $1 million last year to place several ads on radio and television. (Several bloggers took issue with some of the facts in those ads.)

The new ads cost $270,000 and are the first the fund has ever bought in the subways, Holliday told me. They’re up on every subway line now, she said, and soon, they’ll also go up in a few major subway corridors.

Although the fund has for now chosen an advertising strategy that is “quite a bit cheaper” than last year’s, Holliday said the fund isn’t hurting for cash. Despite the poor economy, last month’s Shop For Public Schools week brought in three times as much money as last year, in part because more stores participated, she said. And next month, the fund will hold its first-ever holiday shopping event, at the Lord and Taylor department story in Midtown Manhattan.

On “Sex and the City,” they were BFFs, but when it comes to public school funding, Carrie Bradshaw and her red-headed, Brooklyn-bound buddy Miranda are more like frenemies.

Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Carrie, last week helped kick off Shop for Public Schools, an annual event thrown by the city’s star-powered Fund for Public Schools, which focuses on “attracting private investment in school reform.”

Chances are relying on shoppers to maintain school libraries might not sit too well with Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda — she’s the face of the Alliance for Quality Education, which since 2000 has fought for improved and equitable public funding for schools across the state. Last spring, Nixon took to the streets to protest the mayor’s proposed school budget cuts.