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A line of parents and students stretches down the street. At right, Comptroller William Thompson greets a parent. (Michael Markowitz)

The line to get into PS 41 in Greenwich Village yesterday wrapped around the block, giving parents and students time to meet the politicians who made the school a campaign stop yesterday. Comptroller William Thompson, who is running for mayor, appeared at PS 41, where enrollment has swelled, just hours before releasing an audit taking aim at the city’s spending on class size reduction efforts. Also on hand were City Council Speaker Christine Quinn and Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who represent the neighborhood.

PS 41 parent and District 2 parent council member Michael Markowitz sent us these pictures. Send yours to tips@gothamschools.org.

A school system run by Comptroller William Thompson would continue experimenting with teacher “merit pay,” he said yesterday in an exclusive interview with GothamSchools. But he said he wouldn’t expect such an experiment to yield much in the way of results.

His mixed message underscores the odd reality of performance pay plans. Though the plans enjoy increasing political support, no research studies have conclusively shown they improve student achievement.

“Would I continue merit pay? Yes,” Thompson said. “Should it make the difference? Hopefully not.” (more…)

Believe it or not, there are just four months before the city’s mayoral election, and tonight the three declared candidates will take questions from a group whose endorsement is still outstanding.

Tonight’s Working Families Party forum isn’t a debate, per Mayor Bloomberg’s refusal to debate his two challengers, Democrats William Thompson Jr., the comptroller, and City Councilman Tony Avella. Instead, the candidates will each answer the same seven questions, of which one is about the city schools:

The question alludes to the recent Center for New York City Affairs report that showed that some large high schools suffered as the city opened more small schools.

The Working Families Party hasn’t yet endorsed a candidate, which Elizabeth Benjamin at the Daily News says doesn’t bode well for Thompson. (The teachers’ union is a major financial backer of WFP; in a recent gift, the union sent $20,000 to the party in February 2008.) Tonight’s forum could be a deciding factor in whom the party endorses. Watch the forum online here starting at 5:30 p.m.

City Council Member Melinda Katz introduced a resolution asking the state to change the law so that the Department of Education is required to follow city contracting rules. (Via Azi's Flickr)

Comptroller Bill Thompson attracted lots of press Wednesday by accusing the Department of Education of “runaway spending” on contracts. But another, less sexy development could have a much greater impact.

That’s the fact that momentum is growing to force the department to follow the same contracting rules as other city agencies, in the form of endorsements from a list of advocates, including one office that rarely butts into policy debates, and a new City Council resolution calling on a change in the state law that allows the DOE to duck the usual regulations.

Agencies from the NYPD to the parks department cannot hand taxpayer dollars over to an outside contractor without first following the rules of a citywide office called the Procurement Policy Board. The DOE is the only city agency that does not have to follow the board’s rules, which do everything from forcing public hearings on contracts above a certain price to imposing strict guidelines on what contracts have to be bid competitively.

The DOE’s exception was born well before the 2002 mayoral control law gave the mayor authority over the schools, but it has gotten more attention under the new structure, which makes school contracts harder to track. While the old Board of Education reviewed all contracts above a certain size before they were signed and held public hearings where citizens could respond to the contracts, the Department of Education has presented only a small number of contracts before the new version of the board, the Panel for Educational Policy.

The result is that hundreds of contracts have been offered without competitive bidding — and without a public hearing to discuss what the contracts include.

A group of Columbia Journalism students has reported that the DOE also makes it difficult to find contracts once they’ve been signed. The department does not maintain reading rooms for the public to review contract documents, against the requirements of the Freedom of Information Law, and many contracts simply aren’t available for review, they reported. Asked about the concerns at a City Council hearing Wednesday, school officials said they would look into them.

A Public Airing

The lack of PEP hearings is despite language in the state law that gives the panel the power to “approve contracts that would significantly impact the provision of educational services or programming within the district.” (Read a PDF of the law here.)

Patrick Sullivan, a PEP representative from Manhattan who is a critic of the Bloomberg administration, told me that he has seen only labor contracts come before the PEP, never a goods-and-services contract. Sullivan said that he recently asked the department to submit a new $79 million contract with a firm called MAXIMUS to manage special education data for a PEP vote.

The department’s general counsel, Michael Best, denied Sullivan’s request in an e-mail message that I obtained, though he did offer to share some information about the contract — after the meeting had happened. Best wrote:

If you really want to see the contract, we do not have an electronic version to send around, but if you were willing to come down to tweed we can arrange to let you take a look at it.

Sullivan, who was appointed by the Manhattan borough president, Scott Stringer, said he was not satisfied. “If the PEP had to vote on the contracts, then there would be some accountability there. Then we would be holding Klein accountable for the spending,” he said. “Because they refuse to allow any of those, and they just spend whatever they want and whenever they want, they’re refusing to comply with the accountability requirements of the law.”

A spokeswoman for the department, Ann Forte, said of the contract, “We do not believe Panel approval was required.”

City Council members would urge state lawmakers to make that change under a resolution introduced this week by Council member (and comptroller candidate) Melinda Katz. “It is amazing to me that there would be allowed any exception to what any city agency must do,” Katz said at a hearing Wednesday, announcing the resolution.

School officials yesterday declined to follow an invitation from Katz to self-impose the restrictions other agencies follow. They said the department’s exception is important because it allows the system’s 1,400-odd schools to buy things like copy machines and textbooks on their own, without having to navigate a maze of regulations. “They need the flexibility, within accountability guidelines, to actually make the purchases necessary for their students,” the department’s chief operating officer, Photo Anagnostopoulos, said.

Best, the department’s general counsel, said other mayoral agencies must get every contract they write reviewed by a chief contracting officer. That would be very difficult in a system of 1,500 schools, he said.

Katz and other advocates said Wednesday that the exception means the department’s contracts fly under the radar of proper oversight.

George Sweeting, the deputy director of the city’s Independent Budget Office, added his endorsement to the resolution, in a move he said was unusual for the IBO, which usually stays out of policy debates.

“The PPB rules are intended to improve transparency, avoid excessive costs, and reduce the potential for favoritism that can result in the absence of competitive bidding,” Sweeting said in prepared testimony. “It is difficult to understand how those rules are considered useful when other city agencies procure goods and services, but unnecessary or too cumbersome for the DOE.”

The Speed Imperative

City Council members also pointed to the department’s $16 million contract with Alvarez & Marsal, the consulting firm that re-arranged the school system’s bureaucracy. The contract attracted attention because it was awarded without any bidding and because it led to the 2007 scandal where a midyear rerouting of school bus lines left many children stranded in the cold. The department has said the bus routing was a mistake but defends the rest of Alvarez & Marsal’s work, which it says saved the city $170 million.

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.”

School officials repeatedly called the Alvarez & Marsal contract unique. In an interview yesterday, Ross told me that the department handed out $28 million in no-bid contracts in 2008, a number he said is low compared to years past. In testimony to the City Council, Anagnostopoulos said the so-called “exceptions” contracts were all less than $5 million in value, and 85 percent of them were with community-based organizations that run pre-kindergarten classes.

Comptroller Bill Thompson, who is also a candidate for mayor, ended his appearance on NY1′s “Road to City Hall” last night with the clearest preview yet of how he will challenge Mayor Bloomberg on the schools front. He will quote Diane Ravitch.

Thompson cited Ravitch, the NYU education historian who has emerged as a prime critic of the mayor’s education efforts, after host Dominic Carter painted a picture of how Bloomberg is likely to portray the comptroller in campaign ads.

Carter imagined ads that would single out the comptroller’s tenure as president of the Board of Education, in a pitch to associate Thompson with the days before mayoral control of the schools, which the mayor has characterized as dismal.

Thompson replied by challenging Bloomberg’s portrait of the city schools’ progress since 2002. He said that the “eminent” Ravitch has shown that test scores went up just as much before Bloomberg took office as they did when Thompson served as Board of Education president. (He served in that role from 1996 to 2001.) A spokesman for Thompson today sent me to this Ravitch quotation as evidence. The key sentence:

The gains under Crew and Levy from 1999-2002 were larger on the state tests in both reading and math than under Klein from 2003-2007.

I reached Ravitch by telephone today. She told me that she was surprised to hear herself cited by Thompson. (Like me, she happened to be watching NY1 at just the right moment last night — though probably unlike me, in her case the timing of “Gossip Girl” had little to do with that.) “I’m not involved in his campaign or anyone else’s campaign,” Ravitch told me. “I don’t do politics. I haven’t been politically active since the Hubert Humphrey campaign in 1968.” (more…)

Comptroller Bill Thompson. (Via Azi's Flickr.)

My former colleague Jacob Gershman is very good at raising subjects everyone is talking about but nobody says in print. He did so with today’s piece on Comptroller William Thompson Jr., who is making school issues a big part of his mayoral campaign — without clarifying his positions on some of the main school issues of the day.

Gershman argues Thompson possesses a “carefully cultivated irrelevance.” But there is stuff we do know about where Thompson stands on education issues, though much of the facts raise more questions than they answer.

First, we know that he’s said he favors retaining control of the school system if he becomes mayor. It’s unclear exactly how much control he’d like to give himself (a big empty space, as we pointed out), but he’s said repeatedly that he supports the mayor having primary authority. “I may be in a shrinking group of those who support it,” he told a committee in testimony that was supposed to be off the record but which I obtained when I was at the New York Sun.

We also know the two main points of attack Thompson has selected for criticizing Bloomberg’s school efforts: He criticizes the mayor on transparency, which he says is so poor that even his office struggles to understand the school system’s finances, and parental involvement. Both of these are safe issues; they’re exactly the points conceded by one of the most prominent mayoral allies on schools, Geoffrey Canada, and they avoid the nastier battlegrounds of school closings, accountability, and charter schools. (more…)

Yesterday, Elizabeth posted a letter from Comptroller William Thompson urging city officials to use millions of dollars earmarked for reopening a Brooklyn jail instead to build new schools.

But the comptroller isn’t the first to use the Brooklyn House of Detention as a pawn in an argument about schools.

Way back in January (Yes, it’s been a long year!), City Council member David Yassky, who represents the jail’s neighborhood, supported a plan that would renovate the building to include a new middle school, in addition to shops and jail cells. But after a sharp outcry from parents and other community members, the city killed the proposal quickly.

Brooklyn House of Detention (via Flickr)

Comptroller William Thompson Jr. is tying a longstanding argument with the Bloomberg administration over whether to expand a downtown Brooklyn jail, a project that is slated to cost about $430 million, into a debate about … schools!

From a letter Thompson sent to the mayor today:

In these challenging fiscal times, the City would be better served to redirect this nearly half a billion dollars to school construction, an already proven under-funded need. Why threaten the successful economic revitalization of Downtown Brooklyn when the money could be better spent building nearly ten new schools?

Thompson first entered the push to build more schools, and to criticize the mayor for not building enough of them, this spring with a report arguing that public schools are now bursting at their seams. Here’s the full letter as a PDF.

Comptroller William Thompson Jr. with Randi Weingarten (via Flickr)

Could we be seeing the start of a campaign theme?

William Thompson Jr., the city’s comptroller and a likely mayoral candidate, today attacked the Department of Education for transportation policies that he said are marred by “confusion and mismanagement.” In a letter to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, he called on the department to launch an immediate review of its transportation policies.

The attack was a response to a Daily News report that a 3-year-old autistic boy had been left alone on a school bus for more than six hours. But it might foreshadow a longer argument to come establishing Thompson’s education credentials against Mayor Bloomberg. Thompson is certainly not the first person to criticize the Department of Education for “confusion and mismanagement,” and one of the groups that often sounds that theme, the teachers union, is close to Thompson.

The comptroller himself has privately directed similar complaints on the “mismanagement” theme toward non-transportation-related DOE policies. In transcripts of his private testimony to a commission on school governance that I obtained, Thompson complained that he has difficulty tracking the education department’s spending.

“If you look at the lack of financial and fiscal transparency at the Department of Education, it is astonishing,” Mr. Thompson said.

In short, if Thompson is looking for an education argument against another likely mayoral candidate, Mayor Bloomberg, he might have found one.

The press release summarizing Thompson’s complaints about the busing problem is after the jump. (more…)