GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Call it early spring cleaning: the city’s Department of Education is planning its third official reorganization of how schools receive support services in eight years.

Support organization leaders say the new plan involves decentralizing the city’s large service centers, which offer schools assistance with writing their budgets and handling the mountains of paperwork that pile up. Since 2007, a Brooklyn principal would call the Brooklyn Integrated Service Center for help with these tasks; now, she’ll turn to a small group that’s assigned to work with her school through her support organization.

The groups, called Children First Networks, are part of a model that has been quietly piloted for several years by Eric Nadelstern, the DOE’s chief schools officer. About 300 schools are already part of the CFNs, an expansion that took place last year and is now being extended to all of the city’s public schools. The networks are small — each has a staff of 13 staff members — and are meant to personalize the way schools receive non-academic, logistical support. (more…)

While the school system limps toward a new governance structure, we at GothamSchools are shaking things up, too. To mark our first anniversary, we’re adding new staff (have you noticed those shiny new bylines?), excessing old ones, paying the bills in a new way, and changing up our content delivery model. We also plan to throw a party, at which we hope you’ll help us celebrate our continued existence despite the tough times.

Finally — permit one more forced parallel? — this post marks a new era of transparency and reader input, because we are both telling you all about the changes and asking for your help in pulling them off.

Please begin by enjoying our revised design, in which we distinguish between shorter dispatches and full-blown, robustly reported daily news stories. The shorter dispatches are indented and touched off by arrows, as in the post below this one. The stories are in the same maroon-headed format that you’re used to seeing blog posts.

The goal is to hold ourselves to an even higher standard, truth-telling-wise, while still keeping you up to date on the minutiae of school news (who just went wild at a City Council hearing, what article we just read and recommend, a deep thought, a breaking news item). (more…)

The Department of Education's new organizational chart.

After reshuffling its internal bureaucracy, the Department of Education will publish a run-down of the changes on its web site in the next few weeks, in the form of the following flow chart — or, to be precise, a small variation of this flow chart. (A DOE spokeswoman, Ann Forte, says small parts of the chart still need to be fleshed out, such as the labor strategy team.)

The chart lays out the new internal structure of the people who work at DOE’s Tweed Courthouse headquarters, with only six people reporting directly to Chancellor Joel Klein, down from a number that had been around 20.

Publishing such detailed information in chart form, and on the DOE’s web site, comes after critics charged the department with being obtuse about its internal makeup. Right now, the web site offers only a list of the names and titles of people who report to Klein, without clarifying how the department is organized. The last time the department published an actual chart mapping out this structure was in 2004, after a reporter filed a request asking for one.

The most notable change is the new spot for Garth Harries, whose office of new schools is now folded under Kathleen Grimm, the deputy chancellor for infrastructure and planning, under the title “system planning.” John White, a top aide in the old new school office, now oversees that team, while Harries is on a special assignment to rethink special education.

Here’s the full chart, below the jump: (more…)

The same person who will lead the Department of Education’s review of special education masterminded the internal reorganization that’s currently underway at the department.

DOE spokesman David Cantor told me Garth Harries, who came to the DOE from the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, devised the new organization as a way to make the department more efficient. At a time when cuts to schools and “potentially hundreds of layoffs” are on the horizon, “we had a strong feeling we need to be as efficiently organized as possible,” Cantor said.

With only a few exceptions, the new organization simply adds a level of reporting between managers and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, who until now has had more than 20 DOE officials reporting directly to him, Cantor said. “When the dust settles, there’s not really anything that’s notably different about it,” he said.

One place where changes are more substantive is in the Office of Portfolio Development, currently run by Harries, where responsibilities are being dispersed among several different managers. (more…)