Watch the full episode. See more Metrofocus.

We’ve written about two interesting exchanges during Thursday’s “On Education” panel discussion, but there were many more over the course of the discussion’s 102 minutes. Now you can watch them all — at least until Hurricane Irene cuts your power out.

Of particular note: Prospective mayoral candidate William Thompson’s prognosis on teachers contract negotiations (starting at 27:40); Success Charter Network CEO Eva Moskowitz on her efforts to deal with “the burnout factor,” which include giving teachers 11 weeks of paid vacation (36:55); Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch decrying exaggeration in the city’s claims of improvement (1:09:00); and UFT Vice-President Leo Casey and Moskowitz debating whether schools should be run like businesses (1:12:00).

Manhattan Media organized the discussion, and City Hall News and GothamSchools moderated it. The video is provided by Metrofocus, a new project of WNET.

The dispute took place during this morning’s “On Education” panel, which GothamSchools co-hosted.

During a back-and-forth with Board of Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch over the success of mayoral control in New York City, the DOE’s typically reserved chief academic officer, Shael Polakow-Suransky, said the complaints of parent advocacy groups are not as credible as the surveys the city collects on parent satisfaction.

“Ninety-two percent of parents report that they are getting really good service each year from their schools,” he said. “I would urge people before categorizing stuff based on the voices of politicians or specific parent advocacy groups that may not have had their needs met, to really look at the data about what real parents are saying.”

On the panel, William Thompson, a former city comptroller and prospective mayoral candidate, raised his eyebrows and appeared startled by the comment (1:55 in video).

And in the audience, Ocynthia Williams also took issue with Polakow-Suransky’s characterization of parents when the panel fielded questions. “I’m with one of those parent advocacy groups, and I am a real parent, even though I’m an advocate,” Williams said, eliciting some applause. “I took offense to hearing you say that real parents like what’s going on in their schools.”

Williams is a parent leader with the Coalition for Educational Justice.

“When he said, ‘the real parents,’ you heard a ‘woah’ come over the room,” she said after the panel discussion.

After the discussion, Polakow-Suransky and Williams huddled together and spoke quietly. Williams said the DOE deputy had offered her both an apology and an explanation.

“He said that the statement had not come out the way that he meant. He said that the conversation is being defined by a small group of people, and I said to him, ‘Yes, but those people are parents too,” said Williams, whose six children all attended New York City schools.

She said outcries from parent advocates are important because they represent parents who do not speak during public meetings. In this case, she told the audience that Polakow-Suransky was wrong to highlight parent satisfaction at a time when the racial achievement gap is widening. Last year, Williams was part of a CEJ protest against low test scores that derailed a school board meeting

“That 92 percent he said comes only from people who are surveyed, who actually return their surveys,” she said. “Schools in the communities are failing — so no, our parents are not happy.”

Given half an hour each on the Brian Lehrer Show, Thompson and Cerf took questions on school safety, the accountability structure, and what major changes they (or their candidate — Cerf hasn’t said whether he’ll return to the Department of Education after the election) would put in place over the next four years. Throughout the interview, Thompson emphasized his interest in lowering class sizes and shifting school administrators’ focus away from standardized tests. Cerf spoke at length about the importance of using technology to cater to students’ different learning styles. Neither offered clues to how the city would pay for these changes.

Asked by host Brian Lehrer to name the greatest innovation he’d bring to the city’s schools, Thompson had one word: curriculum.

I think we’d like to make sure that schools teach things like reading and writing — we’re seeing a number of our students who can’t write. I think things like science, civics, and history, art and music education, phys ed, those should all be part of a curriculum and we’re seeing them start to disappear. So I think that, given where we’re at these days, that is innovative.

It’s not a question of reducing the number of standardized tests, it’s reducing the focus on them, he said.

Thompson called the current administration’s focus on standardized tests “obsessive.” He  noted that recent data from the national math exam showed New York State students’ scores to be flat, whereas students’ scores on the state’s exam have risen in the last several years.

“I think teaching to the test is a phrase that ends conversations rather than begins them,” Cerf said when asked if the schools’ emphasis on testing was having a detrimental effect.

I do believe that teaching test taking skills is not good for the long-term educational interests of children. I believe that focusing on the standards that we’ve decided as a society are important, and focusing on that, and then evaluating the degree they’ve learned those standards, is exactly the right focus.

When a caller said she had quit after 16 years of teaching at a city school because her principal had allegedly fudged students’ test scores and ended suspensions to boost the report card grade, Cerf defended the system. He said that the alternative to the current accountability system was “an absence of accountability for student learning altogether.”

Any system of accountability is going to have occasional problems with it, I think it’s inevitable.

…

I think most of our principals are pretty terrific and I believe they’re getting better and better and better every year. I don’t think the answer to sort of manage the variation in the quality of principals is more top down bureaucracy, more compliance checks, more box checking, more inspectors, more you-better-do-this-or-else. I think that the history of school reform in this country shows that sort of Soviet-style, top down, we know what you ought to do and we’re going to make sure that you do it, doesn’t work. It just doesn’t work.

Cerf said that he and Thompson were in agreement on one major issue: teacher bonuses. Following a segment in which Thompson said he believed in awarding bonuses for student performance on standardized tests to schools rather than individual teachers, Cerf said he agreed.

“That puts us in the middle,” he said.

Much of the action is happening in the comments section of a Huffington Post column posted yesterday by Comptroller William Thompson, who has been gaining on Mayor Bloomberg in polls. In the column, titled “Why Joel Klein Should be Fired,” Thompson described what he called “a pattern of brazen actions taken by the Department of Education that fly in the face of basic management standards.” 

Within hours of the column’s publication, DOE press secretary David Cantor had responded. ”Virtually all of Mr. Thompson’s claims are incorrect or distortions,” Cantor wrote in his comment, the first attached to Thompson’s column. 

Then, the mayor’s campaign manager, Howard Wolfson, jumped into the fray, posting a link to the campaign’s official response today, which indicates that Thompson’s five-year tenure as Board of Education president in the 1990s could be a prime target for the Bloomberg campaign. From the statement: 

So, here are the facts: When Mr. Thompson ran the old Board of Education most test scores declined or were flat. Dropout rates went up four points and graduation rates showed little improvement. Pervasive violence in our schools prevented children from learning. Billions in cost overruns were rampant and shoddy accounting even failed to accurately count the number of students in the system.

Despite this poor record, Mr. Thompson insisted on politics as usual, opposing Mayoral Control and failing to end social promotion. In short, Mr. Thompson had ample opportunity to improve and reform a dysfunctional system, and he failed to do so.

But Thompson is looking forward while the Bloomberg campaign is fixated on the past, according to Thompson spokesman Jeffrey Simmons, who also posted a comment. (Simmons got attention last week when he barred DOE employees, including Cantor, from attending two of Thompson’s press conferences.) From his comment:

As Mr. Cantor – and his campaign compatriot – cry foul and discuss the past, Thompson is addressing the future, and a public school system that is held accountable, reigns in out-of-control contract spending (just look at today”s Daily News column exposing another example of over-the-top costs), and strengthens parental involvement in schools.

Here’s the Bloomberg campaign’s official response to Thompson’s ongoing criticism:

Today’s audit exposes “major flaws in testing by the New York City Department of Education,” Thompson’s office said in a press announcement this morning. But the audit says, “Our observations conducted at the sample schools on the day of testing did not reveal any instances of cheating.”

Today’s report is already drawing some of the same criticism from the city as yesterday’s audit, about how city schools qualify students for graduation. That audit found sloppy record-keeping at many city schools but no clear evidence of grade-tampering. City officials charged that Thompson conducted the graduation audit for political, rather than professional, reasons. As the city comptroller, Thompson’s job is to audit official city statistics. But he is also the main challenger to Mayor Bloomberg’s reelection bid.

DOE press chief David Cantor leveled the first complaints about today’s audit just minutes after the press conference began — a press conference that he was not attending after being kicked out by a member of Thompson’s staff. In an angry statement e-mailed minutes after he left the event, Cantor said his ejection shows that today’s audit was politically motivated.

“This is the first time i’ve ever been barred from entering a government press conference,” Cantor wrote. “If this was truly a non-political announcement, why in the world would they bar me or refuse even to hand me a copy of the audit from a pile two feet from the door?”

Thompson spokesman Jeff Simmons said the audit had been delivered to the department this morning.

Yesterday, Simmons barred a lower-level DOE press officer from the graduation rates press conference, saying that he was tired of having DOE flaks “shadow every move by the comptroller.”

The revelation has advocates and elected officials lambasting the city for not disclosing the agreement’s extension.

The original agreement, between Mayor Rudy Giuliani and then-Board of Education President William Thompson, was set to expire in 2002 and was widely assumed to have done so. But in fact, Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein quietly renewed the agreement in January 2003.

The renewal came to light for the first time this month, after Assemblyman Karim Camara urged his colleagues to consider school safety issues when deciding how to vote on mayoral control, according to Udi Ofer, director of advocacy for the New York Civil Liberties Union. The NYCLU was working with legislators to raise the profile of school safety in the mayoral control fight.

When Camara met with Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, Silver showed him a copy of the memorandum’s renewal, Ofer said. The paragraph-long agreement was signed by Bloomberg and Klein on Jan. 22, 2003, and does not include an expiration date.

The renewal contradicts information the City Council received during a 2007 hearing on school safety, where council members repeatedly asked whether any formal document existed to define the relationship between the city schools and the police department.

At the hearing, a deputy chancellor, Kathleen Grimm, testified that mayoral control made such an agreement unnecessary, because the mayor controls both the schools and the police. (I reported about the hearing for Insideschools.)

Grimm’s inaccurate testimony is important because it shows just how little accountability exists in the realm of school safety, Ofer said. In addition to Grimm, a police department deputy told NYCLU that no memorandum was in effect, he said.

“If they knew of this [Memorandum of Understanding], then they lied to us,” he said. “If they didn’t know, then the people who are in charge of implementing school safety have no idea of what rules govern them.”

“Either explanation would be a bad one,” he said.

After I sought comment from her office, Council Speaker Christine Quinn released a statement earlier this week calling the department’s incorrect testimony “completely unacceptable.”

“It undermines the Council’s ability to conduct effective oversight and has prevented any real conversations on the subject of reform,” she said. “When representatives of city agencies testify at Council hearings, we take it on faith that their testimony is accurate.”

Knowing the agreement was still in effect would have changed advocates’ approach to improving school safety, Ofer said. Advocates would also have pushed harder to compel the city to provide semi-annual evaluations of school safety, as required by the memorandum. At the October 2007 City Council meeting, Grimm testified that those evaluations were not taking place.

But more important than what the agreement’s existence changes is what it says about the city’s respect for the law, Ofer said.

“What’s in place was mischaracterized to the public for years,” he said. “It is fundamentally wrong when a legal document exists and the people in charge of enforcing it don’t even know it exists.”

NYCLU filed a Freedom of Information Law request against the police and schools departments to find out if a memorandum existed, Ofer said. The police department sent NYCLU a copy of the 1998 without the 2003 renewal. The education department simply did not respond, he said.

In 1998, Giuliani and Thompson, now comptroller and a mayoral candidate, inked a deal to turn control of school safety over to the police department the following year. But after 2002, the police officers assigned to schools did not disappear. Instead, their number swelled.

The October 2007 City Council hearing came after a series of high-profile flare-ups, in which students were arrested for minor infractions and a principal was hauled from his school in handcuffs after intervening in a student’s arrest.

Grimm referred me to the Department of Education’s press office for comment. I have yet to hear back.

MOUextension From Karim Camara’s Office

Throughout the school governance debate this spring, some have argued for a significant curb on the mayor’s power: to require the DOE to follow the same rules as other city agencies when it comes to budgeting, oversight by the comptroller and public advocate, and public notification about policy changes. That argument reappeared in correspondence from the comptroller’s office this week.

The exchange began last week when Thompson told the DOE that he would not approve a $150 million contract with a school supplies provider because the selected vendor charged more than many stores for the supplies. His critique of the contract and the process the department went through before entering into it was the focus of a Daily News column by Juan Gonzalez earlier this week.

Yesterday, the DOE responded to Thompson’s criticism, explaining in a public letter that the new contract would actually save the city money. In a rejoinder sent last night, Thompson’s office questioned why it took media attention before the department answered its questions about the contracting process. 

Were the department required to follow the same contracting procedures as other city agencies, it would have had to answer those questions throughout the bidding process, the comptroller’s office emphasized. And the shortcomings of the contract process the DOE conducted, such as the fact that the department was seriously weighing just one of two bids, would have been addressed earlier, according to the letter from Thompson’s office.

“If the DOE followed the City’s rules, a single bid would have resulted in a red flag,” wrote John Goddard, an executive in the comptroller’s office.

Both letters are below:

City’s Letter in Response to the Comptroller’s Office 6-9-09

Comptroller’s Office Letter Response to DOE.61009 1

Assemblyman James Brennan

A state lawmaker who has vocally opposed Mayor Bloomberg’s control of city schools announced today that he plans to introduce a bill laying out an alternative governing structure for school system. Assemblyman James Brennan wants New York City’s school governance structure to look more like that of Boston, where mayoral control faces built-in “checks and balances,” his office announced today.

Under Brennan’s proposal, which the Post first reported last week, the city’s Board of Education, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, would retain its balance of seven mayoral appointees and one appointee each from the five borough presidents. But the mayor’s appointees would have to come from a pool of 14 names nominated by a 13-person panel representing a wide range of constituencies, including parents, teachers, administrators, the business community, and others. The mayor would also be allowed to appoint members of the nominating committee.

The complicated nominating system resembles the one proposed in March by Comptroller William Thompson, who is running for mayor.

Brennan’s bill is likely to end up being largely symbolic, even as the deadline for state lawmakers to decide the fate of mayoral control is now just eight weeks away, according to Peter Goodman, a longtime United Federation of Teachers member who worked on the UFT’s proposal for revamping mayoral control. Goodman said that because the bill won’t have come from the chair of the Assembly’s education committee, Catherine Nolan, it is unlikely to attract serious attention from legislators.

“If it doesn’t have the chairman’s name on it, then it’s not in play,” Goodman said, adding that the decision about mayoral control will probably come down to the wire, after other difficult issues including a MTA rescue plan are resolved. Portions of Brennan’s bill might be used in whatever proposal lawmakers finally do put forth, Goodman predicted.

Brennan also released two new studies today, one that revisits his earlier claim that Mayor Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have taken credit for test score gains that are unfairly inflated, and one that attacks the wastefulness of no-bid contracts and administrative reorganizations.

Under Brennan’s school governance proposal, the Board of Education would be in charge of approving departmental contracts. In a report released alongside the bill announcement, Brennan said that the DOE has wasted taxpayer money as it the size of its no-bid contracts ballooned from $15 million in 2001 to $300 million in 2008-2009. “Vetting multi-million dollar no-bid contracts is simply good government,” he said in a statement.

CORRECTION: This story originally said that the New York Civil Liberties Union has endorsed Brennan’s bill. It has not.

In a strongly worded letter of his own sent to Thompson this weekend, Klein elaborated on the department’s defense, saying that the comptroller disregarded information about how the department structures contracts and pays for services when he put together his report. One example of the “distortions and misrepresentations” in Thompson’s claims, Klein wrote, was that a contract with the Xerox Corporation had cost the city 6700 percent more than it was supposed to:

The Xerox contract was actually registered for $31 million. We originally registered the contract for $20 million in 2002, and later extended it twice, once by $10 million and a second time by $1 million. It appears that you cite the amount of this last extension as if it were the entire registration amount. 

Klein’s entire letter to Thompson is posted after the jump.

April 5, 2009

Hon. William C. Thompson, Jr.
Comptroller of the City of New York
1 Centre Street
New York, NY 10007

Dear Comptroller Thompson:

I am writing in response to your April 1 letter regarding the Department of Education’s use of requirements contracts. Unfortunately, your office’s analysis is marred by distortions and misrepresentations. Based on the numbers in your materials, your office failed to conduct a careful reading of the contracts and to verify basic contract information-even citing as a “particularly stunning example” of DOE “mismanagement” a contract that was entered into while you were President of the Board of Education.

I direct you to the following examples of incorrect or misleading allegations in the contracts highlighted in your letter:

• Xerox Corporation: The figure you give for the contract’s original amount, $1 million, is incorrect. The Xerox contract was actually registered for $31 million. We originally registered the contract for $20 million in 2002, and later extended it twice, once by $10 million and a second time by $1 million. It appears that you cite the amount of this last extension as if it were the entire registration amount. The accurate estimate is still less than the amount actually expended, but as we explain below this fact in itself is neither problematic nor atypical in a requirements contract.For the record, a review of the original Xerox contract documents shows that the original estimate was reached through a standard process. Procurement for the Xerox and T&G Industries contracts began before the start of mayoral control (the contracts went into effect on August 1, 2002). The Board of Education provided vendors bidding on this RFP (including T&G Industries) with a comprehensive inventory of the Department’s copy machines; the number and types of machines guided the unit pricing proposed by the vendors, ultimately resulting in a contract estimate.
• T&G Industries: The figure you give for the contract’s original amount, $1 million, was actually registered for $31 million. Like the Xerox contract, it was originally registered at $20 million and twice extended, once by $10 million and again by $1 million. It appears that, as with the Xerox contract, you cited the amount of the last extension as if it were the entire registration amount.
• Hewlett-Packard: The Hewlett-Packard contract is a state contract that provides Microsoft software licenses for schools and central offices. The state, not the DOE, selected the vendor and set the rates. In other words, the DOE estimate could not have had an effect on pricing. With regard to the estimate, it should be noted that we had little basis for estimating vendor expenditures when the contract began in 2005-this was the first time we procured software licenses centrally; previously, schools paid for them on their own. A replacement contract is with your office now and has a two-year estimate of $12 million, which is in line with the roughly $6 million annual expenditures against the former contract listed in your chart.
• Meizner: This contract with a software reseller was first competitively bid in June 1999-when you were President of the Board of Education and prior to this administration. With renewals, the contact lasted for 10 years. At the time the contract was initially estimated, it was the agency’s practice to provide estimates based on annual spending rather than on the full term of the contract. The $135,000 estimate that appears in your table represents the expected spend for one year; the actual estimate for the entire contract is 10 times that amount, or $1.35 million. It is also worth noting that when the Department negotiated the last renewal-for three years starting in 2007-we reached terms that ensured us a minimum 20% discount off publisher’s list prices.
• Creative Media: This contract was bid originally in 2002. At that time, as noted above, the agency’s practice was to provide estimates for annual rather than for the full-term contract amounts. The annual estimate was $589,000, which is the number that appears in your chart. We registered each renewal (provided for in the base contract) for additional amounts that your office appears to have missed. The sum of the subsequent renewals, i.e., the contract’s actual “original amount,” is about $3 million.

Your letter also raises questions about 127 “entities” that obtained contracts with the Department with “little or no competition” on which we spent $525 million. We examined the list you compiled and found that 85 percent of the expenditures listed went to state-approved providers of services to pre-school children with disabilities. As with contracts for Supplementary Education Services, which also appear on your list and about which you have criticized us in the past, we are required by law to contract with any state-approved provider. Because the state alone has the authority to review and approve programs and sites and to set rates, the Board of Education while you were Board President sensibly determined that the city did not need to perform its customary procurement process before contracting with any state-approved provider. We arrive at these contracts after the State Education Department sets tuition rates and vendors estimate costs for their services based on the size of the student register they are contracting to provide services for. This population has been growing, so it is not uncommon that registers have gone up during the five-year duration of these contracts.

In general, your analysis mischaracterizes the Department’s requirements contracting process. Requirements contracts are structured on a per unit price basis, meaning that schools and departments only pay for the units they purchase at the unit price fixed in the contract. In some of the examples your office listed, schools decided they wanted to purchase more services and goods than we originally estimated. These expenditures are not examples of cost overruns and do not add costs to taxpayers; they simply reflect increased demand, which the schools pay for out of their budgets.

You make two further charges that I wish to respond to. First, you contend that the DOE fails to negotiate the best prices in cases where expenditures exceed estimates. In fact, we analyze and estimate the potential volume that could be associated with each contract and provide our best estimate to potential vendors. The estimates sometimes fall below actual expenditures, especially in times of dramatic budget changes; since 2002, the Department’s budget has increased by $8 billion. In the early years of such growth, it may be difficult to estimate the volume of potential purchases. There could be a few contracts-among the thousands the Department signs each year-where our best estimates proved to be low relative to the price we could have negotiated on a volume discount. But we are not aware of any suboptimal pricing, and you have not presented evidence to suggest otherwise. Additionally, given the size of our district and the competitive nature of our bidding process, we believe we already receive vendors’ lowest possible prices even on the contracts where a volume discount could have applied.

Finally, your suggestion that low estimates on contracts provide “an inaccurate picture” of our expenditures appears to misapprehend the way our budget works. The DOE does not use contract estimates, which are set in varying years, as indicators of planned expenditures. School budgets and the overall DOE budget are the comprehensive financial documents that provide a “picture” of planned expenditures for a given year. These budgets change each year depending on the amount of funding the Department receives from the city, state, and federal governments. No district, including New York City, continuously revises contract estimates based on year-to-year budget fluctuations. As budgets shift, schools and Department offices adjust spending against requirements contracts accordingly. To determine how much money the Department plans to spend on pre-kindergarten services for the current year, one should consult this year’s budget rather than the estimate made when the contract was signed, which could have been several years earlier.

These mischaracterizations and distortions add little to public understanding of DOE procurement issues. Our offices have worked closely together in the past. I hope that practice continues into the future, and that you will contact us to verify contract and purchasing information to ensure the public is properly informed.

Sincerely,

Joel I. Klein

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.

School officials said that spending more on these contracts than was expected is not necessarily a bad thing. “Whether it’s that more schools actually want the service, that it was actually successful, or whether we found that there was more need in the school, they required more training, say — that’s why you see those contracts,” Photo Anagnostopoulos, the department’s chief operating officer, told City Council members today.

School officials also said Thompson’s analysis overstates the difference between projected and actual costs, sometimes “wildly.” Contracting staff at the department have already found several cases where the comptroller’s figures are “wildly different” from their own records, David Ross, who runs contracting for the department, told me in an interview.

Ross said that city records show that the Xerox contract was estimated originally at $31 million, not $1 million, as Thompson reported. That means the overr-run was $36 million, not $66 million. He said another contract for copy machines, with T&G Industries, was originally estimated at a higher cost than it ended up being: $31 million, compared to an ultimate cost of about $14 million. Thompson’s report said T&G’s estimated original cost was $1 million.

In his letter to Klein, Thompson argues that under-estimating how much schools will want to use a service hurts the Department of Education’s leverage in negotiating a low price. He describes that as “contrary to sound business practice.” In an interview with reporters today, he called the practice “frightening.” “If it was a few contracts that would be one thing,” he said. “But…the over-spending continues and continues to grow.”

Ross said he agrees that under-estimating the amount of interest schools have in services could be a problem if it means giving up opportunities to negotiate a lower price. (If the school system knew it was going to buy, say, a thousand Xerox machines rather than 10, it could probably persuade Xerox to lower the price of each machine.) “I understand my responsibilities here,” he said.

But he said that the department does hunt for these kinds of opportunities. In one of the cases the comptroller’s letter to Klein highlights, a contract with Meizner Inc. for computer software, the department actually realized a few years ago that it was spending above its estimate — and negotiated a 20% price discount.

The comptroller’s report lists the estimated cost of the contract at $135,000, which then ballooned to spending of $5.6 million. Ross said his figures suggest the actual estimated cost was $1.35 million. He said the $5.6 million figure could have been even higher had officials not negotiated a price discount.

The comptroller’s letter to Klein and full press release are after the jump.

Thompson’s press release:

THOMPSON EXPOSES “RUNAWAY CONTRACTS” AT THE DEPT. OF EDUCATION

-Comptroller probe finds 1-in-5 contracts balloon past costs, including one that jumped by 6,700 percent-

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. today charged that the Department of Education has routinely let hundreds of contract costs balloon well past their expected costs – including one that jumped by 6,700 percent.

“It’s simply a case of runaway contracts,” Thompson said. “It’s reprehensible that the Department of Education plays by its own rules and goes on some insane spending spree. And who pays? Taxpayers, parents, children, all of us.”

Thompson aimed his harsh criticism in a harshly worded letter to Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for not containing the swollen contract costs. Thompson then submitted testimony spelling out his fiery findings to the New York City Council Committees on Education and Contracts.

“The Department of Education continues to maintain a long-held and ill-considered opinion that its contracts and other purchases do not require the same stringent safeguards as those of other local and state agencies,” Thompson said. “As a result, taxpayer money continues to be squandered through an opaque process that does not take advantage of the competitive marketplace. This is unacceptable.”

What did Thompson find?

• One out of every five – or 20 percent – of the Department’s contracts that ended in the last two fiscal years inevitably cost well over the estimated amount by 25 percent or more.
• That rate already continues to climb. So far, in the current fiscal year, 27% of the Department’s requirement contracts have swollen costs topping 125% – and there’s still three months left until the fiscal year ends.
• One contract, with the Xerox Corporation, was supposed to cost at most $1 million – but the Department spent close to $68 million – a 6,759 percent jump in costs. Another, with Ideal Restaurant Supply, jumped from $15,000 to more than $852,000 – a 5,530 percent jump.
• During those two fiscal years combined, the Department issued 372 requirement contracts, originally estimated to cost $325,236,416 but which inevitably exceeded those estimates by 25% or more. The final tab wound up at more than $1 billion.
• Additionally, many recipients of the contracts – 127 of them – got the lucrative work without any competition because the Department didn’t put the work out to bid. Those 127 contracts were supposed to cost $195 million at most. But the Department spent $525 million on them.

“The Department’s purchases exceed contract amounts by such a large margin that it raises fundamental questions about the integrity of the Department’s entire contracting process,” Thompson said. “These actions display a clear pattern of mismanagement when it comes to expenditures, and the Chancellor and the Mayor must fix this situation and rein in these costs.”

The Comptroller over the last seven years has repeatedly exposed fiscal incompetence and a lack of accountability and transparency in budgeting and contracting at the Department of Education. Key among his concerns has been a disturbing pattern of so-called no-bid contracts, which are executed without competition.

“The Department must create and follow an open and formal procurement practice and demonstrate that it will spend the public’s money in an accountable manner,” Thompson said. “I call on the Department to take immediate action to ensure that the scarce public dollars entrusted to it are used prudently. Doing so will benefit not just our schoolchildren and our school system, but our city as well.”

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

As the debate over mayoral control mounted this winter, Comptroller William Thompson, himself a mayoral hopeful, conspicuously did not address the essential question of whether the mayor should control a majority of members on the city school board. Today, Thompson revealed his position: The mayor should appoint every board member — but he shouldn’t have unlimited choice.

Instead, according to a plan that Thompson outlined before Assembly members at a hearing on school governance in Brooklyn this morning, the mayor should select board members for two-year-long terms from a slate of candidates put forth by a 19-member ”nominating committee” representing a diverse set of interests. Under the plan, the committee would be composed of

• Five members appointed by the Mayor;
• One member apiece appointed by Borough Presidents;
• Four parent members chosen by the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council;
• A teacher selected by the United Federation of Teachers;
• A principal chosen by the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators;
• A college or university president selected by the New York State Education Commissioner; 
• A member of the business community appointed by an organized business entity selected by the Mayor; and
• An education school faculty member selected by the college or university president member.

In a statement, Thompson said the arrangement would allow the mayor to set education policy but would ensure that the perspectives of parents, teachers, and education experts are included in the decision-making process. A chief complaint of Mayor Bloomberg’s control over the schools since 2002 is that those constituencies have been ignored.

The man most considered most likely to join Thompson in the mayor’s race (other than Bloomberg himself), Rep. Anthony Weiner, has said he supports “unfettered” mayoral control, with the mayor continuing to control most seats on the city school board.

Thompson’s full statement, which includes his proposals for strengthening parent involvement and monitoring education department data, is below the jump.

THOMPSON UNVEILS PLAN TO IMPROVE MAYORAL CONTROL OF NEW YORK CITY SCHOOL SYSTEM 

Thompson plan establishes stronger educational board, improves parent input, and calls for independent audit of test scores and graduation rates

New York City Comptroller William C. Thompson, Jr. today unveiled a proposal to improve accountability and transparency in the New York City Department of Education by establishing a committee to appoint a stronger educational board and increase involvement of parents in the education of their children.

“As we look ahead to the sunset of mayoral control, we should reauthorize the law, but we must strengthen it and do a better job of enforcing its existing provisions,” Thompson said in testimony before the New York State Assembly Education Committee in Brooklyn. “With an enormous stake in their children’s educational success, parents must have a true voice in the decisions that impact their children’s schools…It is time to put the ‘public’ back in public education.”

You can view the Comptroller’s testimony at www.comptroller.nyc.gov. This was the second time Thompson testified before the Committee on mayoral control. The Comptroller testified at a February 6 hearing, expressing his support for mayoral control but sharply criticizing the Mayor and Schools Chancellor for shutting out parents and allowing no-bid contracts to balloon.

At today’s testimony, the Comptroller proposed that the Department of Education’s (DOE’s) current Panel for Education Policy (PEP) be replaced with a 9-member school board appointed by the Mayor from a pool of nominees recommended by a nominating committee comprised of a cross-section of New Yorkers committed to student success. The board would serve fixed, two-year terms, be responsible for all matters of policy and serve as an appeal board for certain actions of the Chancellor.

Additionally, Thompson proposed that the nominating committee have 19 members, consisting of:

•        Five members appointed by the Mayor;
•        One member apiece appointed by Borough Presidents;
•        Four parent members chosen by the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council;
•        A teacher selected by the United Federation of Teachers;
•        A principal chosen by the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators;
•        A college or university president selected by the New York State Education Commissioner;
•        A member of the business community appointed by an organized business entity selected by the Mayor; and,
•        An education school faculty member selected by the college or university president member.

Accordingly, the committee would nominate three candidates for each of the nine positions on the board – to be chosen by the Mayor. At least four of the nine must have a professional background in education, finance or business management.

“Under this system, based on models from Boston and Cleveland, the Mayor would continue to appoint the Chancellor,” Thompson said. “The mayor and the Chancellor would also continue to exercise broad authority to direct policy, with the difference that – unlike the current system – voices representing students, parents and individuals with a wide range of education expertise will have a means to be heard.”

Thompson concluded his testimony in noting that he and others are calling not for an end to mayoral control, “but a commitment to making it more transparent, more accountable, and more inclusive.” Thompson added: “We must commit ourselves to the goal that every child entering the New York City school system is given the best opportunity to walk out of high school prepared for college and ready to take his or her place in the new economy of the 21^st century.”

Additionally, the Comptroller unveiled other proposals to improve mayoral control:

School Leadership Teams

Thompson recommended amending State Education Law to specifically state that District Superintendents’ annual evaluations of principals consider a principal’s record in developing an effective, collaborative School Leadership Team. “There must be a meaningful effort by principals to engage parents, not just lip service,” Thompson said.

Community Education Councils

The DOE routinely ignores existing statutes governing Community Education Councils (CEC), rarely consulting them before schools open or close and not involving them in developing district report cards. The DOE has narrowly interpreted the Councils’ statutory role in school zoning, denying them a voice in program offerings in their districts and schools. Thompson said the law should clarify the Councils’ role in school zoning to ensure that they have a voice in deciding what programs are offered.

Additionally, Thompson noted that 9 of the 11 voting members of the CEC must be a parent of a child attending a school in the district and is selected by the President and Officers of a Parent Association (PA) of Parent-Teacher Association (PTA). Thompson instead proposed that all PA and PTA leaders in a district meet and select from their members the nine to sit on the CEC.

District Family Advocates

Thompson noted that many District Superintendents spend a substantial amount of time outside of their home districts, which takes them away from reviewing school budgets, evaluating principals and assisting parents. As Superintendents have been pulled away from their role in assisting parents, the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy has tried inadequately to fill the gap. There currently are at most only two Family Advocates per district, and many districts only have one.

Said Thompson: “Because they report to Tweed rather than the District Superintendent, their ability to resolve parent concerns is limited.  Families currently have no place to go for effective help other than the principal – or Tweed. For that reason, I believe that the District Family Advocates should be reassigned to report to the Superintendent.”

Testing

Thompson called for an independent body to audit test scores and graduation rates. He said that concerns over data manipulation have arisen over the Department’s trumpeted gains in test scores and improvements in graduation rates. “If the public is to trust the City’s claims of gains, we must remove both the incentive and the opportunity to manipulate results,” the Comptroller said.

“This goes to the heart of the educational mission to give our young people the skills they need – and the city needs – to compete in the new century,” said Thompson.

Thompson noted that the DOE’s budget nearly doubled – from $12.5 billion to $21 billion – since the mayoral control law was passed. “A lack of improved achievement to align with increased resources,” he said, “threatens not only our students’ future, but the very future of our city.” 

Procurement

In earlier testimony, Thompson faulted the DOE for avoiding fair and open competition in the awarding of City contracts, noting the soaring rate of non-competitively bid contracts. Thompson said the DOE has executed millions of dollars in contracts forged outside of the competitive bidding process.

“With its top-down approach, the current administration has sought to avoid debate and public scrutiny, while fundamental decisions regarding education reform have been made by executives with no education background,” Thompson said.

But on the all-important question of whether the mayor should control a majority of the seats on the school board, currently known as the Panel for Educational Policy, Thompson said nothing. According to Elizabeth, when reporters pressed him on the point after his testimony, Thompson declined to provide a straight answer. This separates Thompson from Rep. Anthony Weiner, currently his main rival in the mayoral race. Weiner believes that the city schools should remain firmly in the mayor’s control.

Thompson urged lawmakers to clarify whether the DOE is officially a city agency and to require independent analysis of DOE data and measures to help parents to get involved in school leadership.

Thompson also described how, as president of the city’s old Board of Education, he helped build a foundation for the constrained form of mayoral control he now supports. “In short, we laid the groundwork for a more centralized management of our public school system that helped clear a path towards mayoral control,” he said. “But in doing so we prioritized two things that are currently missing from the current administration’s approach — transparency and parental involvement.”

Below the jump, Thompson’s entire testimony as it was prepared.

TESTIMONY BEFORE THE EDUCATION COMMITTEE OF THE NEW YORK STATE ASSEMBLY REGARDING GOVERNANCE OF THE NEW YORK CITY SCHOOL DISTRICT

Good morning, Chairman Nolan and members of the Education Committee….Thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify today regarding governance of the New York City School District.I want to make clear at the outset that I have always supported mayoral control….But as the sunset of the law draws near, it is imperative that we review school governance as practiced under the Bloomberg administration.

This is a subject of great concern to me, not only as a New Yorker and a product of the New York City public schools…but because as Comptroller I am mandated to audit all city agencies.

Recent audits conducted by my office have found numerous failures in basic governance at the New York City Department of Education.

In the past two years alone our audits have found that the DOE:

• failed to monitor and track the provision of special education services effectively;
• failed to adopt effective controls to ensure that violent incidents at city high schools are reported to the State Department of Education;
• failed to provide both vision and hearing screenings in accordance with regulations due to lack of oversight;
• failed to exercise necessary controls over universal pre-K payments to non-public schools in Brooklyn and Staten Island; and,
• failed through its Office of Pupil Transportation to effectively record and follow up on school-bus-related complaints.

Among my duties as the City’s Chief Financial officer, I have also been particularly attentive to fiscal accountability at the Department of Education.

As many of you know, through my office’s responsibility for registering City contracts, I play an important role in ensuring that the laws and regulations designed to encourage fair and open competition are followed.

Under the tenure of this Department of Education, however, the use of non-competitively-bid contracts has soared all out of proportion, with a cumulative total of close to 300 million dollars since Mayor Bloomberg entered office.

How did they get to this point? The DOE refuses to adopt a set of formal procurement rules similar to those followed by every other City agency – a process that is open and subject to public comment and accountability.

Contracts at all other City agencies are subject to the rules of the Procurement Policy Board, which takes a deliberative approach to developing policies under which the City procures goods and services….There is discussion, debate, and an open forum through which the public can comment.

This is a process that, while not always perfect, is at least transparent.

By contrast, since the Board of Education became the Department of Education, it has exploited a gray area in the law … one that allows it to treat itself as a State agency whenever it is convenient to do so … and then as a City agency when it is likewise convenient.

The Department has even taken the position that it is not required to register its contracts with my office if it does not want to — a position I obviously disagree with.

That is neither good government nor good public policy, and has led to a number of questionable contracts in recent years.

In May 2004, I recommended State legislation to make the Department subject to the same procurement rules as every other City agency….Rather than pass a new law, elected officials in Albany encouraged the DOE to work in good faith with my office to resolve the problem voluntarily.

And yet despite the best efforts of my office, the DOE has continued to process millions of dollars in contracts outside of the competitive bidding process….As you consider extending mayoral control, I urge you to make the New York City DOE transparent and accountable once and for all.

When I was President of the Board of Education, I adamantly pursued accountability in our public education system. ….Indeed, such accountability was exactly what I was attempting to bring about when I pushed for a series of reforms in 1996.

As many of you will remember, at that time — some 25 years after the schools were decentralized in 1969 — the system was fragmented….Lines of authority were blurred, there was little accountability for educational failure, and local boards were mired in corruption.

We felt that if the Chancellor was to be held accountable for educational performance, then he or she must be given clearer authority. … We stripped individual school boards of the responsibility for day to day operations of schools and gave that power to superintendents.

The Chancellor in turn was given a more direct role in the selection of individual superintendents and gained the authority to intervene in schools that were failing as well as to transfer or remove principals.

We mandated School Leadership Teams in every school — made up equally of parents, teachers and administrators — that injected more accountability at the school level.

In short, we laid the groundwork for a more centralized management of our public school system that helped clear a path towards mayoral control. … But in doing so we prioritized two things that are currently missing from the current administration’s approach — transparency and parental involvement.

As we look ahead to the sunset of mayoral control we should reauthorize the law, but we must reform and strengthen it.

While Tweed has trumpeted gains in test scores and improvements in city graduation rates, concerns over data manipulation have arisen. … For the years 2003 to 2007, National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, tests have shown no gains in 4th grade reading, 8th grade reading or 8th grade math for black, white, Hispanic and lower-income students. [1]

That is why I support using an independent body to audit test scores and graduation rates. … If the public is to trust the city’s claims of gains, we must remove both the incentive and the opportunity to manipulate results.

At the same time, parents, who have an enormous stake in their children’s educational success, MUST have a true voice in the decisions that impact their children’s schools. … Every study indicates that parental involvement equates with student achievement.

The DOE has failed to ensure that School Leadership Teams have an effective role in influencing school policy. … Last year, the department’s own Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy found that only 51 percent of the schools it surveyed have a functioning leadership team.

Indeed, most parents do not even know what School Leadership Teams and Community Education Councils are. … I recommend that State Education Law require that all parents receive a brochure, translated into relevant languages when necessary, at the start of each school year explaining what these bodies do.

I also recommend that State Law require that schools post their Comprehensive Education Plan — the school’s blueprint for setting its goals and identifying specifically how it will achieve them — online, maintain a copy of the plan in the school’s general office, and inform parents by letter where they can review the CEP.

We must also nurture the development of Parent Teacher Associations in our schools.

When the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council asked the Chancellor in 2005 to publish a monthly account of how many schools have functioning PTAs, it received press coverage in the New York Times, but no response from Chancellor Klein.

It is high time for the DOE to begin publishing monthly tallies.

This failure to involve parents in the education policy process has reinforced a widespread perception that the department is arrogant and out-of-touch.

With its top-down approach, the current administration has sought to avoid debate and public scrutiny, while fundamental decisions regarding education reform have been made by executives with no education background.

The Department of Education has gone through three reorganizations in six years. … As chief investment advisor to the New York City pension funds, I would identify a company that had gone through three fundamental reorganizations in six years as a high-risk investment.

Let me be clear: mayoral control of the schools, when exercised wisely, is a means of bringing efficiency, transparency and accountability to decision-making, but it was never intended to be a green light for unchecked executive power.

With greater authority and control also comes greater responsibility — responsibility to parents, responsibility to the taxpayers who help to fund our schools, and finally — and most importantly — responsibility to our kids, whose educational achievement and advancement are directly tied to the future economic growth and prosperity of our city.

That is an assignment we cannot, we must not, and — with the leadership and foresight of this committee and others — we will not fail.

Thank you very much.

[1] And 4th grade math results reflect twice the number of students with accommodations than the administration initially acknowledged.

Speakers at a press conference to support school construction. From left to right: James Ahern of the Central Labor Committee, Leonie Haimson of the Campaign for A Better Capital Plan, Robert Jackson of the City Council, and Michael Mulgrew of the United Federation of Teachers.

Advocates who have been calling for the city to bulk up its school construction plan say the federal stimulus package could help the city do just that.

A string of City Council members, public officials, and parents urged the city to use the new federal funds to build more schools at a press conference at City Hall today. The Senate is likely to approve a stimulus package today that includes $14 billion of dollars in funding for school modernization and renovation projects, as well as tax provisions to help school districts foot the bill for new schools.

Where the federal funds will break down is not yet clear. But many are worried that whatever money the city does receive, it won’t be prepared to use. They say the city’s proposed five-year capital plan for school construction, first released in November, undersells the city’s need for additional classrooms and suggests that the city isn’t ready to make the most of new federal funds.

Expanding the capital plan would allow the city to take advantage of the stimulus money, Leonie Haimson, a parent advocate who is one of the chairs of the Campaign for A Better Capital Plan, said at the press conference. A revised draft of the capital plan proposal is due to be released next month.

The city cannot afford to continue spending on school construction as it has in the past, according to the proposed capital plan. But speaker after speaker today said the city should be planning to invest in infrastructure projects during the recession, rather than cutting back on them.

“It’s a win-win-win situation,” Comptroller William Thompson said about building new schools. Thompson, who is running for mayor, said using federal funds to ramp up school construction would create jobs, help communities, and set individual children up for long-term success.

One worry is that the state and city might try to use federal stimulus funds to fill in gaps in their education budgets, rather than adding new efforts on top of existing ones. “It’s to build schools, reduce overcrowding, reduce class size — that’s what this money should be used for,” said Robert Jackson, head of the City Council’s education committee. Jackson said he’s planning to vote against the city’s capital plan unless it is changed substantially.

“We have to be vigilant” to protect against supplantation, said council member Bill deBlasio. “We’ve been sold a bill of goods one time to many on education. … If it gets by us this time, shame on all of us.”

At the State Senate hearing today, Chancellor Joel Klein said the city could build new schools if the federal plan includes money for construction.