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DOE Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology Photeine Anagnostopoulos submitted her resignation Wednesday. Photo via Harvard College Libraries

The city’s top finance and budget official is following Chancellor Joel Klein out of the Department of Education, officials confirmed Wednesday evening.

Photeine “Photo” Anagnostopoulos, Deputy Chancellor for Finance and Technology, submitted her resignation Wednesday, effective immediately.

“She has served the DOE well through tough and challenging budget times and I wish her the very best in her next endeavor,” Klein wrote in an email.

“Given the transition we are about to undertake, she felt it was the right time to move on,” said DOE spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz. “We wish her well in her future endeavors, and are already beginning the process of identifying qualified candidates for her position.”

Anagnostopoulos’ departure signals that Klein’s resignation and the arrival of Hearst Magazines executive Cathie Black as chancellor will also bring a shift in power in the top circle of the DOE.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon that he was replacing Klein with Black came as a surprise to many DOE officials, including some of Klein’s senior aides.

And while Black has indicated that she plans to rely heavily on the team of top officials that Klein brought together — especially Klein’s team of eight deputy chancellors — the willingness of some of those officials to stay on without Klein is far from certain. (more…)

The Division of Teaching and Learning is set to disappear under the latest reorganization at the city’s education department.

The move is part of a slate of changes intended to streamline the department’s organization, according to spokesman David Cantor. He called the changes, which include the creation of a deputy chancellor for community engagement position, “an organic next step” in the series of administrative shifts that have taken place under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein.

The teaching and learning office, which is on its fourth leader since 2007, is getting folded into the Division of School Support, which contains the network structure that currently manages how schools receive administrative assistance. The new office will be called the Division of School Support and Instruction and will be headed by Chief Schools Officer Eric Nadelstern, giving him authority over the central piece of schools’ business for the first time.

“Obviously the aim is to make instruction as effective as can be, but I don’t think anyone’s going to see any kind of sudden shift in the way we go about teaching kids, and nor do we want that,” Cantor said. “The point is just to help do what we’re good at better.”

Under the changes, which will finish taking effect by July 1, the current head of teaching and learning, Santiago Taveras, will become the first-ever community engagement czar. Leaving behind his instructional past, Taveras will manage how the department presents to the public proposals that are set to come before the city school board, known as the Panel for Educational Policy. (more…)

The city’s Department of Education will likely lift the ceiling on class sizes this year, a department official said today.

DOE chief operating officer Photeine Anagnostopoulos told the City Council education committee this morning that it was realistic to expect the city to “adjust” its class size targets. How dramatic the increases will be is still unclear, she said.

“We have to go back and do some more homework,” Anagnostopoulos said.

Anagnostopoulous’ comments came during a hearing on the department’s use of state Contracts for Excellence funding. The funds are given to school districts that prove they will spend the funds in six key areas, one of which is class size reduction. (more…)

Schools Chancellor Joel Klein warned of “unacceptable financial consequences” today if principals do not accelerate their hiring.

In an e-mail today, Klein encouraged principals to list and fill their open positions as soon as possible to help reduce the number of teachers without jobs. If a principal can’t pay for a teacher, the teacher goes into a pool of “excessed” teachers whose salaries are paid by the department. If the size of the pool swells, the department could end up shouldering thousands of teachers’ salaries — all while the teachers aren’t officially on a school’s staff.

Klein emphasized that principals should plan to fill their vacancies with teachers who already work in the system, especially the more than 2,300 who currently lack a permanent position. “You should be aware that excessing conditions make it unlikely that we will lift hiring restrictions across the board,” he wrote. Restrictions have been lifted in a handful of specific license areas, most recently in special education, where the hiring freeze was lifted yesterday.

Some have speculated that principals might try to evade the hiring restrictions by not listing their open positions publicly before the “open market” period of teacher hiring ends next week.

“That’s maybe what some of them were trying to do and that’s why we had Joel send out the e-mail today,” said Photo Anagnastopoulos, the department’s chief operating officer. (more…)

A week after principals were required to submit their budgets for next year, the city still doesn’t have an answer to the question of how many teachers are losing their positions because of budget cuts.

That question is essential for the counterintuitive reason that positions cut at schools actually don’t save the system any money. If a principal can’t pay for a teacher, the teacher goes into a pool of “excessed” teachers whose salaries are paid by the department. That pool already contains more than 1,700 people and has been criticized as a burden on the city’s budget. If the size of the pool swells because of the budget cuts, the department could end up shouldering thousands of teachers’ salaries — all while the teachers aren’t officially on a school’s staff.

Department of Education staff are still crunching the budget numbers, officials say. The department’s chief operating officer, Photeine Anagnastopoulos, told me on Tuesday that the excess situation was shaping up to be “not as bad” as she and others had anticipated, particularly considering that principals haven’t yet launched the bulk of their hiring for the fall.

But a source familiar with the budget process says the numbers have been delayed because the department is “scrambling” to check principals’ math about whether they need to cut positions. Staff at the department’s service centers are “going over budgets in high-excess schools trying to negotiate fewer excesses,” the source said. (more…)

Randi Weingarten is hoping that the hiring freeze will help teachers in the group known as the Absent Teacher Reserve. (GothamSchools)

Teachers union president Randi Weingarten is trumpeting the teacher hiring freeze announced today as a victory for teachers who have been sitting on the city payroll but without actual teaching jobs, the group known as the Absent Teacher Reserve pool.

The freeze also marks a victory for her in a long-standing dispute with the Bloomberg administration over what to do with teachers who find no placement in the city’s newly free-flowing teacher market, which for the first time requires that both principals and teachers have a say in which teachers are assigned to which schools. While the Bloomberg administration has pushed for letting go teachers who don’t find placements, the union has insisted on full job security, even for teachers who spend several years without finding a placement.

Today’s announcement ensures not only job security, but actual positions at schools. Now, when principals need to fill an opening, they can turn only to teachers in the pool, and not to teachers from one of the alternative certification programs, Teach for America and Teaching Fellows, that serve the city.

Weingarten said that she expects that “virtually all” members of the ATR pool will be helped by the freeze. “The principal still has the right to choose,” she said in a telephone interview today. “But they’re choosing from a pool of experienced people who have performed well in the New York City system.”

A schools official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, told reporters today that the department’s new hiring rules do not represent a win for the union or a departure from the market principles that the 2005 teachers’ contract instilled. “It is very different,” Anagnastopoulous said. “We are not force-placing anyone.” Force-placing occurred in the past, when a teacher could be placed at a school against both her preference and the preference of the principal. (more…)

Responding to shrinking budgets and rising costs, the Department of Education is putting in place what amounts to a systemwide teacher hiring freeze, Schools Chancellor Joel Klein informed principals today.

Individual schools will still be able to use their budgets to add new teachers if they are able, but the DOE is planning to cut school budgets so far that many schools will have to shed teachers, DOE officials revealed. And any new hires, to replace teachers who leave, will have to come from teachers who are already in the system, according to new rules the department is implementing.

Klein informed principals about the hiring restrictions, which the department says should allow it to avoid actually laying off teachers, this morning during a Webcast and just now in a memo, which is included at the end of this post. The department is planning to give principals more detailed information about their schools’ budgets during the week of May 18.

Speaking to reporters today, a top DOE official, Photeine Anagnostopoulos, said she could not predict how many schools would need to eliminate teachers but said that a “high percentage” might be able to cut their budgets sufficiently by reducing non-teaching staff and axing programs. She said “the goal” for the department is for all schools to make the same percentage cut to their budgets. That size of that cut has not yet been finalized, she said, adding that principals would ultimately have discretion about how to cut their own budgets.

The new restrictions require principals to fill vacancies created by attrition by picking up current teachers who are either in a classroom elsewhere in the city or in the existing pool of excessed teachers, which already includes about 1,100 teachers. (more…)

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…)

Disney's Aristocats. (Via Flickr)

We covered the Daily News’s story on the “fat cat lives” of top school officials because the story was killed, which aroused our curiosity.

Now that we see the story, the question we’re asking at our office is, so what?

Some have seen the News story as exposing corruption. That’s wrong. The story reports no evidence that school officials are being paid too much or improperly collecting assets that present conflicts of interest. What it does report is essentially what we already knew: Top school officials in the Bloomberg administration took nontraditional routes into public education. We learn that Chancellor Joel Klein, a former CEO, lives on Park Avenue, and that Garth Harries must have a trust fund. (How else could an early-30′s guy whose glitziest resume bullet is a consulting job at McKinsey have assets between $3.9 and $6 million?)

There are some reasonable questions to pull out of the story. There’s nothing wrong with asking whether a former McKinsey consultant and a former CEO are the most qualified people to run the nation’s largest public school system, or whether $250,000 is too much to pay a schools chancellor (Randi Weingarten, the teachers union leader, makes $350,000) — or even whether affluent people with sparse ties to public schools and public schoolchildren should run them.

Another fair question is whether there is a conflict of interest in a top school official coming from the ranks of a top Department of Education contracting company. Photo Anagnostopoulos, the DOE’s chief operating officer, previously was president of McGraw-Hill Digital Learning, which has an $80 million contract with the department to produce interim assessments — the same ones that racked up courier costs.

But the biggest takeaway here is not that affluent business-world transplants are running the public schools; it’s the likelihood that, by putting in a phone call, the same affluent people were able to go over the heads of reporters and editors and get a story killed.