GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

An unlikely union force turned out for the monthly school board meeting tonight to protest a controversial contract that was up for approval.

For once, it wasn’t members of the United Federation of Teachers that was most vocal against the city’s education proposals, but thousands of angry phone technicians with the Communciation Workers of America.

The workers are part of a 45,000-member nationwide strike against Verizon for higher wages and better health benefits. For two weeks, the New York Locals  have picketed in front of Verizon stores and corporate headquarters.

But tonight, the workers took their fight to Murry Bergtraum High School – coincidentally across the street from Verizon’s main headquarters – where the Panel for Education Policy voted to approve a $120 million contract for the telecommunications company to provide data services to the Department of Education. (more…)

The city Department of Education awarded outside vendors $342 million in contracts in the last three years without following competitive bidding procedures that are standard across other city agencies, an audit released today by the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, has found. School officials are allowed to offer no-bid contracts, but only if they follow certain guidelines, and the audit declares that Bloomberg administration officials often did not follow its own regulations.

For instance, vendors often won the no-bid contracts without any proof that avoiding the regular process would save the city money. In some cases, school officials actually destroyed records about the contracting process, the audit found.

School officials told auditors that the records were destroyed “mistakenly” and that the employee who destroyed them has been given training “to prevent future problems.” Speaking to reporters today, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein said the school system would compile better documentation in the future, but he pointed out that the audit found no cases of contracts that cost the city money or were of poor quality. He also said that a majority of the 291 no-bid contracts are with vendors that operate prekindergarten classes. (more…)

I have a story up about the growing pressure on the Department of Education to change the way it gives out contracts.

One of the main defenses school officials give is that the city rules that govern contracts for all other agencies, from the NYPD to the parks department, are just too cumbersome for the school system, which needs to have the chance to either cut off a contract at a moment’s notice — or hand one away with extreme speed:

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.”

Last week, the City Council’s education committee examined next year’s Department of Education budget, and next week it is scheduled to look into the explosive issue of charter school expansion. For today, however, the committee is turning its attention to the technical but no less important issue of how the DOE enters into business contracts.

The DOE hires external vendors to perform a variety of services, from managing admissions processes to constructing data systems. Some of the department’s contracts, such as one with the consulting firm Alvarez & Marsal to redo the system’s bus lines two years ago, have been criticized for being expensive and being entered into without a competitive bidding process. In January 2008, the state comptroller, Thomas DiNapoli, announced he would open an audit of the department’s no-bid contracts, which at that point totaled more than $300 million. The results of that audit have not been released.

Tired of waiting for DiNapoli, a handful of enterprising Columbia University journalism students launched NYCPublicEyes.org, a Web site that they’re calling “an experiment in open-source investigative journalism” to get more details about the DOE’s contracting practices. So far they’ve posted a list of no-bid contracts the DOE has entered into, which they obtained by filing a Freedom of Information Law request. They’re also updating their blog as they learn more: The most recent post is about how two offices that technically are supposed to monitor DOE spending, the Public Advocate’s Office and the Comptroller’s Office, gave the students two different lists of no-bid DOE contracts. My guess is that NYCPublicEyes, like GothamSchools, will be reporting about today’s hearing.

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…)

If you’re confused today’s DOE press release announcing that the department has awarded a contract for principal training to the NYC Leadership Academy, you’re not alone. The Leadership Academy has been training principals since it opened in 2003, so today’s announcement sounds like a blast from the past — except that for the last five years, the academy has been funded using private dollars, and now it will be paid for with public money.

Joel Klein announced the academy’s creation at a December 2002 press conference where he was joined by former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, who would lead the development of the academy based on his company’s management training program. To train a generation of leaders, principals would be selected from a competitive pool of applicants, thrown into an intense summer program in which they managed mock schools, then given real principals to shadow for a year before receiving assignments of their own. The program’s first three years would be funded through donations, many of them from corporations and major foundations, and the expectation was clear that the DOE would pick up the tab at the end of that time. In fact, Chancellor Klein said he hoped he would be able to use money awarded as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit to pay for the program; those funds finally began to make their way to the city this year.

But three years later, the program appeared to be in jeopardy. Not all principals who graduated from the academy found jobs as school leaders, and some of those who did garnered criticism as they ruffled feathers when introducing change, brought a business-like management style to schools, and sometimes proved incompetent. Vigorous — and expensive — efforts to recruit principals from outside the city yielded few transplants. City officials questioned whether the program’s success rate warranted its high cost. Ultimately, the scope of the program was scaled back, and rather than accept full responsibility for the program, the DOE started picking up the salaries and benefits for the principals-in-training, which make up the bulk of the academy’s budget.

It’s now been three more years, and the DOE has announced that the Leadership Academy bid competitively to win a contract to train principals. Obviously the Leadership Academy, constructed by Joel Klein to serve the DOE only, was the department’s preferred vendor. And it’s certainly appropriate for the DOE to foot the bill for training its own principals. But given that the academy was just three years ago considered inappropriate for the DOE’s budget, I would love to know what evidence the DOE is using to justify the expenditure now. Surely there must be information the DOE can make public about the success rates of Leadership Academy graduates? (In my experience, new principals coming from the academy are as mixed a bag as administrators who got their positions through other avenues.)

And I’d also like to know what three other vendors were foolish enough to prepare bids for this contract!