Elizabeth Rose resigns from DOE; who will take her place but hopefully not adopt her positions and policies?

Former Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose resigned yesterday.  Her resignation letter to DOE colleagues below recounting her record omits the countless school co-locations she pushed through despite huge parent and community opposition, her failure to address school overcrowding honestly with accurate reporting and reasonable enrollment projections, and her view that neither class size nor school overcrowding matters in terms of student learning.  

All these attributes and beliefs reflected the same ideological biases that she carried over from Joel Klein, who first plucked her from the corporate world to appoint her as Director of Portfolio Planning in 2009. This division was in charge of pushing through unpopular school closings and charter school co-locations, and throughout multiple hearings, Rose appeared indifferent to parent and student concerns. Others who preceded her in this job during the Bloomberg years include the current Superintendent of Louisiana schools John White and the head of the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation Marc Sternberg. Rose then rose through the ranks swiftly to become Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm's chief of staff, and after Grimm died, inherited her position.

Though Rose mentions the removal of PCB lights in her resignation letter as one of her proudest achievements, she omits the fact that DOE faced lawsuits and EPA pressure that forced them to speed up the PCB removal process.  She also doesn't mention the months of delay before DOE began to test school water for lead according to the new state law, and the confusing and even dishonest messages she put out about this issue to reporters and parents. 

It probably didn't help her case either that Rose was revealed to have engineered a secret, illegal deal with Eva Moskowitz that she could move a new Success charter middle school into the PS 25 building after DOE closed the school, without going through any of the legally mandated process for changes in school utilization.  This move was only forestalled when the parents of PS 25 won a temporary restraining order against closing their school.

Her resignation comes after her two major demotions in recent months; first her removal by Chancellor Carranza from the Deputy Chancellor position to a new post entitled "CEO of School Operations," and then, after the busing scandal broke, a further demotion to “senior contractors advisor for transportation." 

No one person seems now to be exactly filling the powerful position of Deputy Chancellor for School Operations that Rose once held.  The new organizational chart appears to divide her responsibilities between former Mayoral adviser Karin Goldmark, now Deputy Chancellor for School Planning and Development, Chief Operating Officer Ursalina Ramirez, Deputy Chancellor for School Climate and Wellness LaShawn Robinson, and Josh Wallach, Deputy Chancellor for Early Education and Student Enrollment. 

Goldmark served during the Klein years as Vice President of  the controversial Leadership Academy, which was known for training non-educators to be principals, who when assigned to schools were too often shown to be inept and/or corrupt.  Moreover, the DOE's spending on the program was later found to be riddled with "waste, fraud and abuse," according to a scathing audit by the City Comptroller.

Incidentally, in  emails recently released by the Mayor's office after the NY Post and NY1 successfully obtained them via a Freedom for Information lawsuit, both Goldmark and Wallach were revealed to have been in favor of adopting a Unified Enrollment plan for the DOE in 2015 that would have helped recruit NYC students to charter schools. 

Preliminary draft of Mayor's 2015 speech

 
This enrollment system has been supported by the Gates Foundation which awards additional funding to districts that agree to adopt it, and has been heavily promoted by Gates-funded pro-charter advocacy groups like the Center for Reinventing Public Education.  

Though as Chalkbeat notes,  "De Blasio's aides quickly worked the idea into a draft of his 2015 speech," an excerpt of which is to the left, the Mayor deleted this passage and did not adopt the system. The final speech delivered September 15, 2015, and entitled "Equity and Excellence" is posted here.

Rose's resignation letter sent yesterday is below.

__________________________

Dear Colleagues,

When I first joined the DOE in 2009, I never imagined that I would still be here nine years later.  I can honestly say it is because I have loved the work we do, and loved serving our students and this City.

The last 9 years have been the most interesting, fulfilling, and exciting stage in my professional career.  I have had the opportunity to see long-term projects from inception to completion: the building of new buildings, the first graduating classes of new schools I helped open, the removal and replacement of all PCB lighting fixtures, identifying gender-neutral bathrooms in all our schools, and expanding universal free lunch to all schools. 

Other initiatives will continue, including significant reductions in suspensions and persistently dangerous schools, systematic improvements to accessibility and transparency of information about accessibility, major initiatives to expand and improve physical and health education, to build new gymnasiums, and upgrades to school cafeterias that increased both the number of students eating lunch and their enjoyment of their meal. Over the past three years alone, the PEP approved 174 proposals related to our schools and buildings, and we worked with CECs to approve 18 re-zonings. 

None of these would have been possible without the incredible dedication and effort of all the talented people I have had the pleasure and privilege to work with, including those on my teams, those with whom we have collaborated in our shared commitment to improving learning conditions and outcomes for all our students, the parents and advocates I have met, and especially those who have mentored me along the way.

I have served under five Chancellors, and am proud of the work my teams and I have accomplished. 

I have decided it is time to leave the DOE, both to spend additional time on some personal needs, and to figure out my next adventure.

 New York is a big city, but a small world; I hope we will cross paths again.  It has truly been an honor to serve with you.  Elizabeth

Busing fiasco followed by swift and decisive action by Chancellor Carranza

Update: see the statement from the Parents to Improve School Transportation.

The first week of school was dominated by stories about a major busing fiasco, with 67,075 hotline complaints from parents during the first four days, and many kids left on the sidewalk waiting for school buses which never came, as first reported by Ben Chapman of the NY Daily News.

Ben also broke the story that many bus drivers with criminal records had been allowed to slip through the cracks via faulty background checks, and that a retired police investigator had been let go by DOE for blocking too many hires with questionable records, while his signature was forged to the hiring documents.

As a result,  Chancellor Carranza fired Eric Goldstein, CEO of School Support Services.  Goldstein had led this massive fiefdom for more than a decade, where he controlled the spending of billions of dollars in vendor contracts for transportation, food and athletics.

This was a dramatic move by the Chancellor, as no one at that level has been fired at DOE in many years, at least in my memory.  Carranza also promised that from now on, the method for vetting bus drivers would be handled by the department's Division of Human Capital, with the same careful screening that DOE employees are subject to.

After the firing, Marcia Kramer of CBS News reported that Goldstein was already under investigation for questionable decisions regarding school food contracts: "The probe is said to focus on trips around the world taken by a number of school food executives that were paid for by food manufacturers."

Then Elizabeth Rose, who had already demoted from Deputy Chancellor to a new position called CEO of School Operations, was further demoted and re-assigned to become “senior contracts adviser for transportation," presumably to advise the new transportation head, Kevin Moran.  In April, Rose was said to have improperly overturned firings and suspensions of bus driver and attendants guilty of abusing children or leaving them unattended.  Rose will  keep her salary, however, of nearly $200,000 per year.

Rose was also responsible for making a secret agreement with Eva Moskowitz that she could move a new Success Academy charter school into PS 25 in Brooklyn - until a court order stopped the closure of PS 15.  If this move had occurred, it would have been illegal, as any change in school utilization has to be announced six months ahead of the next school year, and approved by the Panel for Educational Policy according to state law-- neither of which occurred.

Rose was also very dismissive of the importance of class size and school overcrowding, as typical of many educrats who were originally  hired by Joel Klein.  This was especially unfortunate as she oversaw school co-locations and the School Construction Authority.  Rose testified in April in response to a question from City Council Education Chair Mark Treyger that school overcrowding had no negative impacts on students, a claim that was subsequently contradicted by Chancellor Carranza in testimony one month later.

In previous hearing Eliz Rose minimized impact of overcrowding on education; do you agree? asks @MarkTreyger718. @DOEChancellor says when he had fewer students as teacher he could do so much better, with 20-25 vs 45 students; learning environment important but funding limited

— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) May 22, 2018

Today, Sue Edelman in the NY Post revealed that 24 staffers at the DOE Office of Pupil Transportation were provided with cars at city expense – including several employees who do little but drive their cars to and from their office each day. Included among them is a Rabbi, a “liaison to yeshivas” who has both a car and a personal driver paid for by the DOE: 

Rabbi Morris Ausfresser, a liaison to yeshivas, who lives in Brooklyn. Another OPT employee serves as his personal assistant and chauffeur. “I can’t answer any questions,” he said Friday

According to the website See Through NY, Ausfresser has been working at DOE as an “Administrative Quality Assurance Specialist” for at least 11 years, and  received a salary of $101,873 in 2017.  (Since Sue didn't report the name of his “personal assistant and chauffeur” I'm unable to look up his salary.)

On twitter, I asked how many yeshiva kids get busing at city expense to schools that deny them a minimally adequate education.  According to Naftuli Moster of Yaffed, "The answer to your questions is: almost all boys attending Hasidic Yeshivas, especially boys. So around 30,000-60,000." (He later amended this to "almost all children, especially boys.")

In 2012, I published a blog post with a link to a spreadsheet obtained by CEC 31 President Mike Reilly through a Freedom of Information request, showing that a higher percent of private school students who request school busing for safety reasons had their waivers approved by OPT than public school kids.

Reilly's FOIL followed the elimination by DOE of middle-school busing in many areas of Queens and Staten Island that have no public transportation,  which may have contributed to the death of at least one public school student. (Reilly recently won the Republican primary for an Assembly seat for the South Shore of Staten Island, and is certain to be elected, as he's unopposed by any Democrat.)

After Mike received the data from DOE, then Queens PEP member Dmytro Fedkowskyj proposed a resolution to create an  advisory committee of stakeholders to oversee the process of granting safety variances to students, a committee that would include parent several CEC members.  The resolution was tabled after a contentious meeting by the mayoral majority of appointees on the PEP. 

One of the DOE staff who has been provided with a private car is the OPT safety director, Paul Weydig,  who oversaw the faulty and likely legally defective vetting of bus drivers.  Weydig made a salary of $110,131  in 2017 - also as an “Administrative Quality Assurance Specialist” – a little more than Ausfresser.  Weydig’s wife also reportedly works at OPT, “Lisa D’Amato, a contract compliance officer whose unit rubber-stamped the questionable bus-driver applications," according to the NY Post article.

Weydig was cited in a Daily News article for questioning a decision to de-certify a driver with ten prior criminal convictions, including grand larceny, identity theft forgery and fraud.  He emailed the investigator who rejected the drive, emailing, "“What are you trying to prove here?”  This investigator, Eric Reynolds, was removed by DOE, apparently for flagging too many bus drivers with questionable records.

Busing has been a perennial problem at DOE.  One recalls how Joel Klein switched bus routes in the middle of winter at the behest of the consulting company Alvarez and Marsal, leaving kids shivering on corners and provoking huge outrage in one of the biggest blunders of his extremely bumpy record.  He actually apologized afterwards, an extremely rare move for him.

Carmen Farina was not adept in dealing with corruption or incompetence.  She pushed through a contract worth as much as a billion dollars with a vendor found to have engaged in a corrupt kickback scheme just a few years before , and refused to act for many months even when confronted with clear evidence of cheating or abusive educrats. (See the Governance section of the NYC Kids PAC report card for a summary.)

At this point, Chancellor Carranza seems to have handled the busing controversy with decisive swiftness,  at least compared to past administrations. 

Hearings on NYC's dysfunctional school planning and siting process begins with DOE saying there is no negative impact of school overcrowding on students

Elizabeth Rose, Deputy Chancellor of NYC DOE and Lorraine Grillo, President, School Construction Authority

On Wednesday there were joint hearings at the City Council of the Education, Finance and Land Use committees on their comprehensive new report, Planning to Learn: The School Building Challenge, as well as five bills introduced to address the school overcrowding crisis which has led to more than 575,000 students crammed into overutilized schools according to the DOE's own data.  Here is the overcrowding by type of school, as included in the report -with elementary schools at 106% overutilizaiton, and the citywide average at 96%:

From Planning to Learn: The School Building Challenge

Deputy Chancellor Elizabeth Rose and School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo testified on behalf of the city.  Rose refused to admit that school overcrowding was a problem or disadvantaged students in any way, and claimed that "some of our more successful schools are overcrowded."

Rose remained obdurate on this point even in the face of repeated questioning from Council

Council Member Mark Treyger

Education Chair Mark Treyger, who pointed out that overcrowding leads to huge class sizes, loss of art and music rooms, and other evidence of a substandard education.  Using closets for intervention services  and increasing class size does have an impact on opportunities for kids, he pointed out. Moreover, educators aren’t robots and need working space too. But Rose refused to budge.

(One can only imagine the scandal that would ensue if a Department of Health Commissioner testified that hospital overcrowding, with patients receiving treatment in hallways or closets, had no effect on the quality of care provided.  Yet to my knowledge, no media outlet reported on Rose's claims.) 

Lorraine Grillo admitted that the SCA has only four real estate brokers on retainer in the entire city to help them find sites for schools, and yet claimed "we’ve had enormous success with our brokers" and didn't need any more help locating sites.  Yet Council Members Vanessa Gibson and Danny Dromm pointed out how it was they who had recently identified sites for new schools in the Bronx and in Queens and had forwarded them on to the SCA. In fact,  when asked, Grillo couldn't name one school site that had been located by their brokers.

As to the SCA's enrollment projections, Grillo repeatedly claimed that they were accurate within 1-2 percent citywide.  However, that claim cannot be verified since neither the DOE nor the SCA release these projections publicly, and even if true, it could still mean that from district to district, neighborhood to neighborhood the projections were completely off.  Finally, given how many schools are at or near 100% capacity, the difference of only a few students could bring many of them above the tipping point.

Dromm also pointed out that the majority of seats funded in current five year capital plan won’t be ready till after 2022- wouldn't it be better to do rolling ten year plan instead? By 2022, it is likely that school construction will have fallen even further behind the need.  Grillo said that "we're mandated only to do a five year plan", implying that they couldn't go beyond that.
 

Will you include preK seats in future seats projections? Dromm asked.  The SCA doesn't apparently include preK in its seats need projections, even though many thousands more preK students are now in our schools, contributing to even worse overcrowding. Grillo said no,  those figures come from a separate department at DOE.  (what?)

Council Member Danny Dromm

Dromm: There's a huge development planned for Willis Point with 5000 housing units; but only one elementary school planned for the area.  Why not include a middle and a high school in the project?  Grillo responded: Queens high schools are already  overcrowded (This of course doesn't explain why they won't site on there.) What about a middle school, asked Dromm? Grillo said she didn't know.  

The reality is that the school planning process uses a formula that is based on census figures twenty year old, and doesn't take into account either the increased numbers of preK students or charter school students in DOE buildings.

The planning process also requires very high thresholds of increased overcrowding to be predicted by this inadequate formula to consider building a new school, even in neighborhoods where the schools are already overcapacity.  (One of the bills we proposed in our testimony is that the City Planning be required to update the formula based upon the latest Census figures, to include preK students, and to eliminate all thresholds so that the city builds schools where the schools are already overcrowded or likely to become so when the project is built.)

CM Rafael Salamanca, head of the Land Use Committee, also asked a series of good questions:  Why does the SCA use housing data in its seat needs analyses that includes so few units  built between 2019-2024, despite the current construction boom?  Grillo didn't know what he meant.

See this chart, with data drawn directly from the current SCA website - which reveals that for the purpose of projecting enrollment, the city predicts that not a single housing unit will be built in the entire borough of Brooklyn between 2019-2024, and only 184 units in the Bronx -- both experiencing huge building booms:

Council Member Salamanca

Salamanca then asked, Why is there only one multiplier used per borough to project the need for schools, given how the birth rate and immigration differs widely from one neighborhood to the next?   Grillo responded, this is only one piece of puzzle.

Salamanca also questioned why there was no effort made by the City Planning to address these issues: City Planning comes to us and says, we want 4000 new units in my district, but they have NEVER mentioned the need to build any new schools for the new families living there.  Why?  In many districts school overcrowding has existed for decades; and as we expand preK and 3K, and available land gets scarce and the population grows, the challenges increase to provide enough schools.   We must revise our methodologies to ensure all students have the maximum chance of success.

But perhaps the biggest revelation came when Council Member Treyger asked representatives from City Planning and DCAS (Department of Citywide Administrative Services) to join the DOE and the SCA at the witness table.

He then questioned them if they regularly communicate with the DOE about the need for new schools.  While they didn't answer the question directly, it soon became clear that there was no ongoing collaboration between these city agencies on the issue of school overcrowding, and that they are only involved when it came to major rezonings (City Planning) or when identifying available city-owned or other buildings for expanded preK and 3K (DCAS).

After the questioning of government officials was over, I testified, followed by disability advocates who spoke on the need to retrofit schools for better access.  Then CM Treyger asked if we felt that there was any real coordination between city agencies on tackling school overcrowding.

I answered that there was no effective collaboration that I could see, and that city agencies responded

Leonie Haimson at NYC Council hearings

only to the Mayor's top priorities, which up to now have been expanding preK, implementing 3K and building more housing, all of which actually contribute to worse school overcrowding rather than counteract it. Meanwhile, the only schools that are built are those where there is a tremendous grassroots effort undertaken from parents and their elected officials to demand this.

An example of what it requires occurred in the hugely overcrowded community of Sunset Park last year.  There have been five additional schools for Sunset Park funded in the capital plan for over 20 years without a single one built or even sited, with the DOE claiming there was simply no room in the neighborhood for new schools.  Then last year, four sites were acquired by the SCA for schools but only as a result of a tremendous organizing effort of parents, community organizations, and CM Menchaca, who identified these sites and pressed for their acquisition.

Not every community can do this, of course, and with the capital plan for school construction only half funded, many children will be left out.  Without the active involvement of the Mayor to prioritize this issue, and without a substantial boost in spending in the capital plan, along with systemic reforms to the process of school planning and siting, the problem of school overcrowding will likely grow even more severe, and NYC children will suffer the consequences.

Our testimony is posted below and here; and includes suggestions for strengthening the five bills already introduced.  It also proposes four additional bills:

• A bill to to ensure that the CEQR formula used by City Planning is based upon the latest census data –  and that it includes enrollment projections for UPK and 3K students as well as charter schools already co-located in DOE buildings.

• A bill to reform the ULURP process, so that proposed residential projects in areas where the schools are already overcrowded or likely to become so would require the building or leasing of new schools to provide sufficient seats to keep the schools below 100% utilization.  Right now the thresholds are far too high, even in areas where the schools are already overcrowded.

• Any large-scale development project or rezoning should also be referred to the district Community Education Council for their comments. Often CECs are more aware of specific issues related to school capacity and overcrowding than local Community Boards. Like Community Boards, the CECs should hold public hearings and vote on whether to recommend approval, modification or rejection to the proposed project, based upon its likely impact on schools.

• DOE should be also obligated to report each year on how many schools seats have been added and lost, whether through lapsed leases, elimination of TCUs, annexes or for other reasons. Right now, they only report on the number of seats added rather than lost each year, which gives a highly inaccurate picture of the progress made towards alleviating school overcrowding.