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Today’s news about a contractor accused of stealing $3.6 million from the Department of Education comes from a report by the Special Commissioner of Investigations. We’ve pasted the full report below.

The report paints a picture of contractor Ross Lanham’s straightforward scheme: he billed the DOE at a high price, and paid his subcontractors at a lower price. The difference, allegedly, went into a lavish lifestyle that includes three houses on Long Island.

More surprising, though, is the extent to which IBM and Verizon turned a blind eye to Lanham’s accounting. For instance, when an IBM staffer noted irregularities in Lanham’s billing, Lanham protested that the DOE was “okay with it.” IBM, perturbed, shuffled Lanham and his consultants into a different subcontracting company with a different name, but said nothing to the DOE.

Next, Verizon accepted Lanham’s subcontractors after he threatened to take the DOE contract to IBM. Puzzlingly, Verizon found out that Lanham was not giving his subcontractors the full amount that Verizon was paying out, but only went into action after the DOE contacted them with their concerns. (more…)

Did Albert Shanker scoop Joel Klein on ARIS?

The late formidable teachers union leader may not have named that particular New York City platform, meant to make it easier for parents and teachers to share information about student achievement and teachers’ lesson plans. But, in 1995, giving testimony to a Congressional committee on educational technology, Shanker did imagine a future tool that sounds quite modern:

Of course, this vision sounds more like what the web site Better Lesson is building than what embattled ARIS has been able to achieve.

The full text of Shanker’s testimony is inside the PDF linked on this page, on page 266.

Not long before Merryl Tisch became head of the state’s public schools, she was a student herself, at Teachers College. There she wrote a doctoral dissertation on what would become her pet issue, teacher training.

The dissertation offers a window into Tisch’s oft-cited critique of teacher preparation — one that is far more robust and detailed than the stock line she uses in speeches.

Publicly, Tisch and education commissioner David Steiner have offered a barebones roadmap for changing how teachers are prepared. Last month, the Board of Regents approved an expansion of the number of alternative teacher certification programs in the state, opening the door for non-university programs to certify teachers.

Steiner has often spoken of increasing classroom-based training, and Tisch told me in an interview that the Board would seek programs “with a track record of success.” But the Board hasn’t been more specific about what they will look for in these programs, or how many they seek to approve, or what exactly a training program completed without the aid of a college or university will look like. (more…)

The state Education Department has released graduation rate data on its website; find all the Power Points and spreadsheets here. The New York City rate jumped to 56% from 53% last year. We’ll have a more complete report later in the day, including coverage of Mayor Bloomberg’s take on the numbers.

After months of discussion, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver finally introduced a bill to extend mayoral control last night. The full text of the bill is below.

The bill, which was discussed last Wednesday but was only printed last night, calls for minimal changes and has  already met with Mayor Bloomberg’s approval. Amendments include having the schools chancellor become a non-voting, ex-officio member of citywide school board, mandating that two of the mayor’s appointees be parents of children in the public school system, and authorizing the Panel for Educational Policy to approve no-bid contracts and any that exceed $1 million.

While the bill proposes that the Independent Budget Office and Comptroller’s office audit the DOE, it does not establish the department as a city agency, subject to all of the restrictions and oversight that other agencies are.

According to the Times, assembly members expect to pass the bill by this Wednesday. (Explaining the importance of the discussions, the Times story cites our story from last week, reporting on the personal role U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is playing in the debate.)

The bill’s sponsors include Catherine Nolan, Herman Farrell, Jr., Darryl Towns, Vito Lopez, Audrey Pheffer, Michael Benedetto, Janele Hyer-Spencer, Jonathan Bing, Michael Benjamin, Ann Margaret Carrozza, Barbara Clark, Vivian Cook, Steven Cymbrowitz, Adriano Espaillat, Michael Giaranis, Micah Kellner, Rory Lancman, Margaret Markey, Nettie Mayersohn, Grace Meng, Felix Ortiz, Jose Peralta, Peter Rivera.

The bill is after the jump. (more…)

A Daily News report this week cast doubt on the validity of the state’s math scores. A major problem the News pointed to is that the math tests seem to repeat themselves, broken-record style, making it easy for teachers to coach their students on how to give correct answers — without necessarily understanding the underlying math. A second problem is that the tests may be getting easier over time, the story said.

Here’s a graphical portrait of what this means in practice, courtesy of Jennifer Jennings, the doctoral student at Columbia University whose analysis informed the News’s story.

A math question seventh-graders answered in 2009:

A math question for seventh-graders in 2008:

And finally a question from the same test’s 2007 version, assessing the same concept, but in a much more difficult way: (more…)

The receptionist at the office of the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon. Condon's staff takes up more than an entire floor at its financial district building.

I just picked up the 600 pages of reports on wrongdoing and misconduct by city school employees that got sent to Chancellor Joel Klein in 2007 and 2008, but never surfaced publicly. The Post highlighted some of the contents: a Stuyvesant librarian’s unauthorized field trips to a Quiz Bowl, a substitute teacher who showed students a movie in which he appeared with a semi-naked woman.

But the biggest story is what is not in this file: Any investigations into top or even mid-level Department of Education officials, or any evidence of educators fudging student performance data to make their school look better.

The absence is matched by a similar drought among those investigations that have been publicized. The development suggests one of two conclusions. On one hand, the new reports could disprove critics’ concerns that growing pressure to produce higher test scores and graduate more students has led some educators to cheat. They could also squash the speculation that the Special Commissioner of Investigations, Richard Condon, somehow managed to cover up looks into higher-profile targets. On the other hand, the cynical conclusion is that high-level misbehavior and cheating are happening with little intervention from an office whose purpose is to investigate schools for misconduct. (more…)

Were you somehow unable not to make today’s mayoral control hearing? Don’t worry! You can still read Chancellor Joel Klein’s testimony in its entirety right here on GothamSchools, courtesy of the Department of Education: (more…)

Courtesy of the Campaign for Better Schools, here are a couple of pictures of the scene at Queens Borough Hall right now, where the first Assembly education committee hearing on mayoral control is underway. Zakiyah Ansari, a campaign organizer, reports that the room is “packed to the roof” with about 200 people. The Campaign for Better Schools, a coalition of community groups, has not yet formally unveiled its position on the mayoral control law; campaign leaders say that will happen soon.

Remember that Red Hook high school that is not only getting shut down this year, but is closing immediately, without a phaseout — making it the first school in the city (at least that I know of) never to graduate a single student?

An Agnes Humphrey junior just wrote in with a description of what it feels like to have your school close around you:

Im a junior at this high school and i was P.O when i found out. we (the students) was notified about this about 2 or 3 weeks before high school applications where supposed to be sent in, that was back in december. a week before the deadlines, they told us that we had to pick schools to transfer to. most of the students here including myself have been here since pre-k even middle school we are not ready to transfer into a new big high school when we were so used to attending a small school setting. also since ive been here i have seen a GREAT turn around in students behaviors. its not that bad as it used to be. Its january now and were not hearing much word of what to do next…