GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

An essential piece of the state’s Race to the Top plans is in limbo after State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli shot down a controversial contract.

On Friday, DiNapoli rejected a $27 million contract with Wireless Generation to build a statewide “Education Data Portal” that would have allowed schools and teachers to track and use student performance data.

State teachers unions and advocates had protested the contract because it was offered without competitive bidding and because Wireless Generation’s parent company, News Corporation, is embroiled in controversy over illegal wiretapping conducted by some of its publications. DiNapoli cited both concerns in his letter to the State Education Department turning down the contract.

The rejection marks yet another setback in the state’s school reform plans. Last week, a judge ruled that the state should not be allowed to use student test scores to count for 40 percent of teachers’ evaluations, bringing to a standstill a centerpiece of New York’s Race to the Top plans. Now the data clearinghouse that would make the evaluations possible is also at risk. (more…)

City school officials have underreported the number of students who dropped out of high school in the past by reclassifying some of them, according to a report released by the State Comptroller today.

The report, which comes out of an audit completed by Comptroller Tom DiNapoli’s office in January, examines a group of students that are labeled as “discharged,” meaning they have left the school system for legitimate reasons, such as moving to another state or deciding to enroll in a G.E.D. program. It finds that some of these students should actually have been labeled as drop-outs, but because of paperwork errors or school officials’ failure to follow state regulations in certain cases, they were counted as discharged.

Students who are discharged don’t count towards the city’s drop-out rate and some advocates have argued that principals can misuse the discharge code, entering students who simply dropped out in order to inflate their graduation rate artificially. Overall, the comptroller’s report found that even with the improper discharge classifications taken into account, the city’s graduation rate was “generally accurate.”

To determine whether the city’s Department of Education was improperly classifying drop-outs as discharges, auditors in the comptroller’s office examined the records of students who started high school in 2004 and should have graduated in 2008, but were discharged along the way. They randomly chose 500 of the 17,025 general education students who were discharged and 100 of the 1,923 discharged special education students. (more…)

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.