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Comptroller Bill Thompson. (Via Azi's Flickr.)

My former colleague Jacob Gershman is very good at raising subjects everyone is talking about but nobody says in print. He did so with today’s piece on Comptroller William Thompson Jr., who is making school issues a big part of his mayoral campaign — without clarifying his positions on some of the main school issues of the day.

Gershman argues Thompson possesses a “carefully cultivated irrelevance.” But there is stuff we do know about where Thompson stands on education issues, though much of the facts raise more questions than they answer.

First, we know that he’s said he favors retaining control of the school system if he becomes mayor. It’s unclear exactly how much control he’d like to give himself (a big empty space, as we pointed out), but he’s said repeatedly that he supports the mayor having primary authority. “I may be in a shrinking group of those who support it,” he told a committee in testimony that was supposed to be off the record but which I obtained when I was at the New York Sun.

We also know the two main points of attack Thompson has selected for criticizing Bloomberg’s school efforts: He criticizes the mayor on transparency, which he says is so poor that even his office struggles to understand the school system’s finances, and parental involvement. Both of these are safe issues; they’re exactly the points conceded by one of the most prominent mayoral allies on schools, Geoffrey Canada, and they avoid the nastier battlegrounds of school closings, accountability, and charter schools. (more…)

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.

People at Educon in Philadelphia (via Flickr)

Last week, I chronicled an academic discussion on the subject of where school reform should go under President Obama. Over the weekend, a bunch of tech geeks had a conference on the same subject — and their ideas will probably end up being just as important to the future of schooling.

The conference, called Educon, attracted members of the increasingly large but sorely underlooked education movement called Learning 2.0, the MySpace/Twitter-inspired approach to school, in which technology facilitates extra interaction between students and teachers (and students and students and teachers and teachers). Among the people gathered in Philadelphia was at least one group from New York City: 20 staff members at CIS 339 in the Bronx, a middle school whose approach to technology I profiled in the Village Voice a few months ago.

You can read 339 Principal Jason Levy’s takeaways from the conference at his Principal 2.0 blog, here, including notes from the panel he ran, on what to do if your principal says no to a new idea. (One apparently good consideration is “The ‘Media’ Test:  Where in the NY Post will this story end up?”)

David Warlick also provides good notes from a panel discussion on the direction President Obama should take education. The conference’s convener, Chris Lehmann, principal of the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, made the case that “accountability has to be a richer more complex conversation.” Another person talked about making accountability more “intelligent” with tests that assess for deeper learning, not just memorization.

Naturally, Warlick communicated his own takeaway via Twitter:

I just twittered: “The point of ed reform is having classrooms where it just doesn’t matter if kids are getting tested — to them or the teachers.”

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (via Flickr)

The New York Post’s headline today — “SILVER IS DISIN-KLEIN-ED” — is a fun, gossipy way of getting at a really important story.

The thing is, it’s not just Sheldon Silver, speaker of the Assembly, who doesn’t like Joel Klein. Many of Silver’s colleagues in the legislature are in the same boat. I first cataloged the grievances of a list of state senators and Assembly members in August. That was more than a year after an assemblyman from the Bronx, Ruben Diaz Sr., became the first public official to call on Bloomberg to fire Klein. Since then, I haven’t found any lawmakers who don’t complain about Klein. In fact, I’ve actually met one state senator, Kevin Parker of Brooklyn, who ideologically is in line with the administration, but opposes its reforms.

The best explanation for this bad blood that the Post provides is this one, from “an official who knows both men”: “You have two guys who both think they’re the smartest guy in the room. Those two guys aren’t going to like each other.”

But my understanding is that there’s more than personalities at play here. There’s a substantive difference in policy. (more…)