Tweed still on its non-stop spending spree

See another great column today by Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News, pointing out all the expensive hiring STILL going on at Tweed – despite projected budget cuts of nearly $200 million. Apparently the educrats at Tweed have invented a creative new meaning for the words “hiring freeze.”

"They're centralizing the entire bureaucracy, adding all these jobs that don't make any sense to anyone," said Leonie Haimson, director of Class Size Matters, an educational advocacy group. "They're growing like a cancer on the school system."

As for all the new job openings advertised on his Web site, Cantor sounded surprised when told that five new ones had been posted just this week.

"There is a hiring freeze," Cantor said.

"No one is hiring anybody. We had a partial hiring freeze and now we have a total hiring freeze."

He could not explain why so many job openings were being posted during a hiring freeze."

DOE is still adding an expensive new “knowledge management team” in the Accountability Office at $1 million plus. To add insult to injury, the two people running this team is supposed be in charge of telling principals and teachers how to improve instruction, despite having no background in education themselves (sound familiar?).

If you’d like to take a look for yourself at the ridiculously high salaries for Tweed's job postings, check out the DOE job hiring page. Scroll down and look at the section for Administrators and Central Employees. Under the heading of the Chancellor's Accountability Initiative there are currently 15 new postings, most of them extremely high paying, including a Director; Knowledge Management (5389) – who among other things, is supposed to “Oversee Knowledge Management budget of $1M+” and also “Work with the Office of Strategic Partnerships to procure private funds to continue the development of the system.” See also – Associate Director, Policy Team (5865): “Serve as a resource on statistics and research methodology for other members of the Policy Team and broader Office of Accountability.” All you need is a BA and some experience with statistical software. Probably the less expertise in statistics the better, if this individual is going to follow the lead of the current crew i. The listing should instead say, “be prepared to ignore the real meaning of statistical significance when the results come out differently than you would like.” In other words, be ready to make it all up as you go along. This gang are still acting like a bunch of high-spending financiers before the collapse on Wall St. – still paying huge salaries for more and more grandiose projects, and insisting on bonuses to principals, teachers and students for pumped up test scores, just like inflated stock prices – all based on smoke and mirrors, while intent on sucking our school budgets dry. Who will prick their balloon? When if any, will they be forced to re-anchor to reality? Who knows -- when no one seems to be in charge of the fantasy land in the land of Tweed.