In the Daily News this week, Ben Chapman reported on
a proposed contract for Joel Rose’s New Classrooms (formerly School of One)
program which uses algorithms and computers to deliver so-called “personalized
learning”. This contract for as much as
$670,000 is to be voted on at the August 23 PEP meeting. The DOE’s RA (Request for
Authorization) says the company won a competitive
bid, though the cost was higher than the other bidders – whose identities are not
revealed:
“While New Classrooms is a higher priced outlier for their
license fees, they provided documentation demonstrating that this license fee
encompasses a more extensive package of services than what other vendors have
offered. On this basis, pricing can be determined to be fair and reasonable."
I have been tracking this program ever since Joel Rose was
working at DOE and started School of One in
a few NYC public schools in the summer of 2009. In 2010-2011 School of One was implemented as
a full-time mathematics program in three NYC middle schools, costing at least $3.3 million, with about a million
dollars from the NYC Department of Education, and the rest provided by venture
philanthropists, including the Robin Hood Foundation, the Dell Foundation,
and the Gates Foundation. Rose’s company
was named “New Classrooms” and
the program renamed “Teach to One” when the venture spun off as a separate
non-profit company and introduced in other districts around the country.
I previously wrote about the numerous conflict of interest
issues pertaining to this school, as well as some negative evaluations of its
quality here,
here
and here,
including a visit I took myself to a School of One classroom in Chinatown in
2012, which featured students listlessly answering multiple questions randomly
until they got them right.
Yet before it
was even tried out as actual school-year program, Time magazine touted “the School of One” as one of the 50 top innovations
of 2009. It quickly garnered positive
media in The
Wall Street Journal, New
York Times and Education
Next. Bill Gates repeatedly has praised
the value of this program, most recently in a April 2016 speech
in which he said that New Classrooms “represents
the future not only of math, but a number of subjects.”
The ability of Rose to take his program private and form a
new company that would then contract with DOE was controversial, to say the
least, given the conflict of interest laws.
When the first NYC contract was awarded in Jan. 2012, it was at no cost to the city, as the company promised that
the DOE would be granted “joint ownership or a royalty-free perpetual
non-exclusive license to the platform … for use in NYC schools."
(See p. 37 for this
language in the
2012 RA document.)
Even so, the awarding of the contract in 2012 generated
negative comment, as noted by Rachael Monahan in the Daily
News:
Under the agreement, the city will share with Rose’s
groups the licenses for the School of One program, which uses
computer-based learning to individually tailor math classes for students at
three middle schools…“This is exactly the type of thing that raises eyebrows
and causes people to question” the Education Department, said Michael
Loughran, a spokesman for city Controller
John Liu, whose office will review the
contract....
“We believe this zero-cost contract is a smart move
for the city, potentially saving millions of dollars,” said spokesman Matt
Mittenthal, defending the deal that aims to
expand School of One to 50 schools.”
Yet in 2014, as previously reported, DOE proposed a new, one year contract for
$420,750 for New Classrooms – ignoring the fact that they had previously been
promised a perpetual free license. Nor
did the DOE ever claim joint ownership.
Since then, a new study has been released of the New
Classrooms program in NYC schools. Jonah
Rockoff and a team of researchers at Columbia Business School conducted an
experimental randomized study – the gold
standard --of the program in NYC schools.
The study concluded that “School of One had no statistically significant
effects on student achievement—positive or negative–relative to traditional
math instruction.” This evaluation is not mentioned by New Classrooms
anywhere on its website, nor on the US Department of Education i3 website,
which helped fund it.
Instead, another study is trumpeted on the New
Classrooms website – a non-randomized study
by Doug Ready that found modest test score gains but included this caveat:
“It is
important to stress again that these findings cannot be attributed to TTO [Teach to One] without the use of
experimental or quasi-experimental designs. In other words, we cannot state
definitively that TTO caused
the above-average achievement gains noted above.”
Meanwhile, EdWeek reports
that more than a quarter of the 53 schools that tried New Classrooms program
are no longer using it. I would guess that the number is higher. Two out of the three NYC schools
that were the first to try it in 2011-2012 school year, MS 131 in Manhattan and
IS 339 in the Bronx, dropped it. In
Oct. 2014, the Daily News reported that six city school were using the program, by the 2016-2017 school year, only two schools
were still involved: I.S. 228 and J.H.S. 88 in Brooklyn, according
to the New Classrooms website
– the latter in one of its three academies. This suggests that at least two-thirds of NYC schools
that have tried the program have ditched it.
 |
| Schools where New Classrooms operated 2016-2017 |
Nevertheless, with the backing of Bill Gates and an aggressive PR
campaign, New Classrooms has aggressively expanded to nine other states – though
the expansion has not been incident-free. In January 2017, two of the middle schools from
the Mountain View Whisman School District in Silicon Valley abandoned the
program, after having spent four months and more than half a million dollars on
it – due to “avalanche” of parent opposition and poor interim test scores,
according to the local paper.
A letter signed by 180 parents
of Mountain View fifth and sixth graders observed that “topics are taught in an incoherent and seemingly random order, are
riddled with mistakes and outright wrong answers, and students are frequently
given math problems that are better-suited for ninth-graders and beyond.”
A survey revealed
that 61% of the parents
"said they do not believe the program matches the needs of their
children," and the number of students who said they “hate math” sharply
increased, from 7% to 29%. For more
on what happened in Mountain View, see these articles in EdSurge, the Wall
Street Journal and a parent
blog here.
At the same time, it was revealed
that the Mountain View district’s contract with New Classrooms had a
“non-disparagement” clause, forbidding teachers or district officials from
publicly criticizing it – something that was apparently banned from contracts in
California in 2014 and by the federal government in 2017.
It would be very interesting to see
if DOE’s contract or the contract that NYC schools signs with New Classrooms has
a similar clause. In the past, New York City reporters who have tried to get comment
from principals at the schools that have ceased using the program have been
unable to do.
All in
all, it appears that DOE has continued paying for this program despite its disappointing
results and conflicts of interest for no particular reason. In the Daily News, I called these continued “crony contracts…inexplicable.”
Another
dysfunctional company that spun off from DOE during the Bloomberg/Klein years is
the highly problematic Leadership Academy , which still has a
contract to provide coaching to principals through 2019, and which recently received
a scathing audit by the NY State
Comptroller, who found that the Academy had been paid without any evidence that
the services had been rendered.
And all these problems with shady and wasteful contracts are
symptomatic of an even larger problem at DOE – lax oversight. For twelve years as chief procurement officer at DOE, David Ross has overseen hundreds of millions of education dollars
that have been wasted on vendors who have engaged in fraud and corruption,
including some of those described in
my 2011 testimony before the City Council.
Ross’s
career at DOE was capped off by the incredibly inflated five-year contract for $1.1 billion proposed for Computer Consultant Specialists in 2015 for internet
wiring, extendable four more years at $2 billion—hurriedly reduced to $637
million overnight after news broke that this huge amount was to be awarded a
company that had engaged in a fraudulent kickback scheme just a few years
before.
 |
| Friedlander and Ross at PEP meeting |
See the video and the account on my blog where David Ross and Hal
Friedlander, Chief Information Officer for DOE reassured the PEP members that
this was the best possible contract at the best possible price, only to have it
later kicked back by City Hall because of the resulting
scandal, and rebid to other vendors for savings of between $163 million and $727 million – depending on what
baseline is used.
As a result of
the controversy provoked by this contract, DOE promised to the City Council to
post full details of contracts within their Requests for Authorization (RAs) at
least 30 days before every PEP vote, as Juan
Gonzalez reported in the Daily News: “Tweed
will even post information on all bids on its website 30 days before the scheduled
vote by the panel, and has committed to do the same with other contracts.”
Yet in a May
2017 letter to the City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Ursulina
Ramirez of DOE and Laura Anglin of the Mayor’s office said they would post this
information online at least four weeks prior to the vote, “except where the DOE determines
it is in the best interests of the DOE and the City to provide less notice…”
This is a significant backtrack from the DOE’s earlier promise.
After 12 years,
David Ross is finally leaving – but sadly, now going to head contracts at MTA, where he will
likely waste many more millions, while Hal Friedlander, the other DOE official
who pushed so relentlessly for the outrageous CCS contract and claimed they had gotten the best possible price for the contract, has started a new
organization called Technology for Education Consortium. This Gates-funded organization is
focused on- get this – how to save
school districts money on technology. You just can’t make this stuff up.
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