More wasteful DOE spending on busing, devices, and possibly School Safety Agents to come

The Panel for Educational Policy will vote on a new batch of DOE contracts this Wed. on February 24. As an elected official wrote me over the weekend, “Am looking at PEP Contracts – some are questionable.”  I replied, “Always! Which ones now?”

Here are some:  There are retroactive contracts totaling more than $58 million for school busing, mostly for the month of January, except for a Reliant bus contract for Jan. 15 through Feb. 14 for $14.6M. 

This is despite the fact that DOE created a separate non-profit company (with less transparency) that would acquire Reliant and operate its 835 routes from January to June of this year, for a total of $59 million, according to  the contracts approved at the Dec. 4, 2020 PEP meeting. 

This new proposed contract document explains:

This emergency has risen as a result of the need to provide pupil transportation during the 2020-2021 school-year, while the DOE completes individual negotiations with Reliant for their pupil transportation services. These transportation services are necessary for the preservation of the health, safety, and general welfare of students and the school system as a whole. As such, declarations of Emergency Procurement and Emergency Implementation of contracts by the Senior Executive Director for the Division of Contracts and Purchasing and the Chancellor, respectively, were made (see attached).

Unexplained is what has caused the unanticipated extension of these negotiations with Reliant, and whether they relate to the  $142M in unpaid pension costs that the DOE insisted to the PEP and reporters they wouldn’t have to cover, but the union insisted they would. 

The proposed contract list also includes paying IBM another $5.12M to “stage” and send 55,000 new iPads, similar to the process from last year, when they paid IBM a total of $40.5 million for this purpose  $478 for each of 300,000 new iPads.  The document says DOE actually purchased 404,000 iPads last year – they must have added even more since last spring, for a total of 459,000 altogether, including these new purchases.

The document doesn’t include what DOE is paying for this new round of iPads, but as many previously pointed out, iPad are far less useful than laptops especially for middle and high school students who have to do a lot of writing and editing.  The excuse DOE used last year for purchasing only iPads at a total cost of $270 million was that there was a backlog and shortage of laptops nationally, with all the sudden school shutdowns and move towards remote learning.  Yet that didn’t stop other school districts like Chicago from ordering a mixture of laptops and iPads.  I don’t know what the excuse is this year for solely purchasing relatively expensive and less practical iPads again.

Apparently, for each shipment of iPads, IBM has charged a different price for staging and shipping, according to the document:

While IBM’s price of $93.55 per device to stage an additional 55K iPads is 11.6% higher than the previous price of $83.81 for 104K iPads, the increase is attributable to an expanded scope of services to be provided by IBM. For the 55K iPads under the expanded scope, IBM will receive, coordinate inventory, and distribute iPads to multiple IBM sites for staging, as well as provide boxes and packing materials to the vendor responsible for final distribution of the iPads to end users. [How this is different from what they did last time is not explained.] Moreover, IBM’s price of $93.55 per device is 30.7% lower than its price of $135.08 to stage 300K iPads under the prior emergency contract. Accordingly, pricing is determined to be fair and reasonable.

Moreover, it would probably save money for DOE to send these devices via school buses rather than pay IBM $800,000. Why?  Because Gov. Cuomo said last year and again this year that he will only reimburse busing expenses if buses are used to deliver either students, devices, other instructional materials or food.  [see the Governor’s Exec. Budget briefing book, p. 55 and p.56.]  This is what other NY districts used their school buses for during the school shutdowns, but not NYC.

Last year, DOE was prepared to pay 85% of the full price (about $700 million) for busing during the five and a half months when schools were shut (including summer school months) – despite the fact that no buses were being used.  After advocates made a fuss and Comptroller Scott Stringer wrote a letter in protest, the city renegotiated the busing contract, saving at least 40% or $167 million during the months of May and June. Yet as the NY Post reported, though the city usually receives 50% reimbursement for school busing costs from the state, for the 5 ½ months there was no busing, the city will not be reimbursed at all – potentially making busing even more costly to the city than during a normal year.  

The same refusal to pay any reimbursing for DOE’s busing costs may re-occur this year, as the DOE agreed that they would pay the full price for busing as long as ANY schools are open and there was no system-wide shutdown.  I don’t know how many buses are sitting idle this year, but there are likely quite a few.

In other budget news, a Council hearing last week revealed that the NYPD is considering hiring 475 more School Safety Agents this year at a cost of $20 million; even as all high school buildings remain closed, and elementary and middle schools have far fewer students attending in-person (that is, when middle schools reopen next week on Feb. 25.)  

Kenyatte Reid, executive director of the DOE's Office of Safety and Youth Development said his office was recently informed that the NYPD is bringing in the two new classes. He argued the money could be used for restorative justice programs, social workers, guidance counselors, culturally responsive curriculum development, literacy programs and community schools — all badly needed resources at the best of times, made more so by a pandemic that has upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of students.

This is really unconscionable, given the ongoing shortage of teachers and school counselors instead; and despite a promise made by the Mayor to the Council to eventually cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget and transfer School Safety Agents to DOE control.  Clearly that hasn’t happened.

Just to be clear: even though  NYPD hires & trains School Safety Agents, their costs comes straight out of the DOE budget, as the DOE forced to pay NYPD for their services whether they want them or not, at a price last year of $300M. From the testimony of the DOE official quoted above, it pretty evident that DOE does not want these new Safety agents that the NYPD wants to force on them. 

Contrast this to what's happened in Los Angeles, as well as Minneapolis, Seattle, Oakland, Denver and Portland, Ore., which according to today's NY Times, have begun to "sever or suspend their relationships with local police departments or reduce their own policing ranks. Some districts have said they are reallocating the funds to hire more social workers and mental health professionals to handle problems instead."

If the DOE had remained a truly independent agency, rather than under the sole control of the Mayor, they wouldn’t have to pay another $20 million for 475 more School Safety Agents that they neither need nor apparently want.

ARIS: the super-mugging redux

Last March, we reported how Juice Analytics, a high-tech company based in DC, had greeted the announcement of ARIS, the DOE's superexpensive supercomputer, calling it an $80 million super mugging.

Ah, the sweet smell of a swindle. Don't you just hate it when consulting companies cajole deals with hand-wringing about technology and, especially, preying on clients' lack of expertise?

Teachers are underpaid, hardly appreciated, and overworked. I can only wonder what the half-life is of a system that asks teachers to log on to get information delivered by the "chief accountability officer."

See the latest from Juice Analytics, after we sent them the link to the recent NY Post article reporting on how ARIS has indeed proved to be a super-disaster: How to Feel Better About Your Data Warehouse Fiasco.

Update: In the midst of the budget cuts, the wasted money spent on this poorly conceived and executed project seems even more obscene. See this letter from Councilmembers Robert Jackson and David Yassky, saying that the contract with IBM for ARIS should be cancelled, especially given all the problems with its performance. Hurray for them!

"Super-mugging" at Tweed?

See today's discussion on the Juice Analytics website between information and data professionals, about the huge waste of money that the DOE purchase of ARIS appears to be, described as the result of "consulting companies ...preying on clients’ lack of expertise".

Another professional in the field writes: "It amazes me the price tag on this “super” computer. I mean, this could probably be done with MS Access…"

Visioactive has more commentary, agreeing that the whole thing is a “super-mugging” and then makes the following observations:

"...the real key to success is more relative to the investment in people who can turn that meaning into actionable insights. Beyond that, success is also dependent of investing in the infrastructure to act on the insights. I don’t see where the NYC school system is buying much more than custom software and perhaps a little maintenance training. If Mayor Michael Bloomberg means it when he says, “Every child in this city deserves a quality education and we will spare no expense“, I wonder how much they will really spend on the people side of the equation."

I guess we know the answer to that question. When most middle and high school teachers in NYC have five to six classes of 28 or more students a day, very little if any of this information will be "actionable." Most testing experts believe that the results of the standardized interim assessments are inherently so unreliable as to be useless in any case.

Teachers tell me that in most instances, they know all too well their kids' weaknesses, but simply don't have the opportunity to spend the individual time with them that would be necessary in order to address their needs. Nothing in this system will make this any easier to achieve.

As I've said before, anyone who's helped their own kid with their homework knows that teaching is a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process.

Someone just sent me this great quotation from John Dewey's The School and Society, written in 1907:

Individual attention. This is secured by small groupings -- eight or ten in a class -- and a large number of teachers supervising systematically the intellectual needs and attainments and physical well-being and growth of the child. ....It requires but a few words to make this statement about attention to individual powers and needs, and yet the whole of the school's aims and methods, moral, physical, intellectual, are bound up in it.

Too bad no one over at Tweed appears to understand these words, written a century ago. Until we can make robots into teachers no amount of machinery will help.

The question remains who is getting mugged here -- the officials at Tweed who have bought into this wrongheaded notion of education, the NYC taxpayer, or our kids?

ARIS: Boon or Boondoggle?

“The city just awarded IBM a five-year contract to create a massive system to manage, track, analyze, and share information about student and school performance. But it won't buy Johnny new pencils.”

That's how a properly skeptical article from, of all places, Information Week, begins about the DoE purchase of the ARIS system, called “Can An $80 Million IBM Deal Save New York City's Schools?”

"How will this look in practice? Think of a teacher trying to help a student struggling with geometry... The teacher could tap into the system and search for best practices on geometry instruction, and get contact information for teachers identified as having strong skills in that area."

Sure, this is reasonable, for a teacher to pursue for his 150-160 students -- when it's too time- consuming for most of them even to be able to correct weekly homework.

"IBM says ARIS will be a highly secure system, yet it's likely some parents and teachers will voice concerns about a Big Brother approach to tracking the performance of more than one million students, and even teachers, which total about 90,000 in the public school system."

The conclusion?

“….businesses and schools are worlds apart on the types of challenges they face. Technology may help, but it'll never be able to address the all-too-familiar problems of overcrowded classrooms, overworked or inefficient teachers, and lack of parent participation and funding."

Amen.

ARIS Critics: IBM Responds

March 7, 2007 (GBN News): Critics have raised numerous questions about the DOE’s institution of a new supercomputer system, ARIS (Achievement Reporting and Information System), to track academic performance. To answer these criticisms, GBN News interviewed a key figure in this program, IBM Assistant Senior Vice President for Educational Public Relations, Fredrick Lerner. Excerpts of the interview follow:

GBN News: Mr. Lerner, 80 million dollars for a computer system is a lot of money. How can the city justify this sort of expense?
Lerner: New York is expensive. Things cost a lot of money here. We’re here to do a job for you, and we do it right. You don’t think we can do our job if we eat lunch at McDonald’s, do you? If you want the job done right, you pay us for Le Bernadin.
GBN News: OK, but I actually wasn’t referring to your expense accounts. What I meant was, what are the capabilities of ARIS that can justify the 80 million dollar expense?
Lerner: It’s an amazing system. It can track just about anything, down to the most minute detail; from standardized tests to bathroom visits.
GBN News: Bathroom visits??
Lerner: You know, back in the old days, teachers used to keep track of those things. Remember the old “number one” and “number two”? It was obviously quantifiable, but they never actually did anything with that data. Now that we have the technological capability to track it, imagine all the ways we can use it!
GBN News: I think I’ll pass on that one. Changing the subject, critics say the system has no bearing on the quality of education for the children. How would you answer that charge?
Lerner: Nothing can be further from the truth. ARIS can track students’ achievement on a minute to minute basis. Remember those quizzes the whole class would bomb out on? Obviously, a teacher not doing his or her job, but you wouldn’t know it until the end of the semester. With ARIS, school administrators will find this out immediately. The teacher gets called in and reprimanded, and the kids had better improve tomorrow or that teacher will be looking for another career.
GBN News: Smart teacher! One last question: Many critics have suggested that a system that can track such minute detail smacks of “Big Brother”. How do you address that concern?
Lerner: You don’t think the DOE hires those high priced consultants for nothing, do you? With Alvarez and Marsal around, that 80 million will be cut down to size before you know it. The DOE will be lucky if it can use ARIS to play solitaire.
GBN News: Well, I’m sure that will be a great comfort. Thank you, Mr. Lerner, for your time.
Lerner: Thank you. Let’s see, that took about 15 minutes. At $650 an hour, that will be $162.50.

The Case of the Missing Teachers

Our blog got another media mention today -- from the Wonkster, in their commentary on the new IBM computer system called ARIS.

Meanwhile, another goddawful NY Post editorial blaming all the problems in our schools -- and all the resulting discontent -- on Randi Weingarten and the UFT. You'd think the UFT was responsible for the bus route fiasco, every flawed reorganization and million dollar consultant, and the fact that none of the initiatives introduced by this administration over the last six years have actually improved our schools.

The NY Post editorial is called "The Case of the Missing Teachers" and it claims that by using their new supercomputer, Tweed will find out where all teachers who haven't been assigned to the classroom are hiding. Of course the computer system will do nothing of the kind.

The Department of Education has spent hundreds of millions of dollars over the last six years to hire thousands of administrators, consultants, coaches, and other bureaucrats -- and without making any significant improvement in class size. Last March, the State Comptroller released an audit, showing that with almost $100 million in state funds, supposed to be used to lower class size, the city only created 20 extra classes – and was using the money for other purposes, contrary to law.

There were 1566 missing teachers -- and 1566 missing classes -- compared to the number the city had claimed to have created. Despite these findings, DoE refused to accept any of the recommendations of the State Comptroller to use the funds as intended.

Has the New York Post ever written an editorial on this? Of course not.

Without any need for any supercomputer, officials at Tweed could make sure that more of the funds already available and a portion of the additional billions of dollars that will be provided by the state over the next four years are directed to the classroom by reducing class size.

Unfortunately, they plan to do nothing of the sort. Instead, they will buy a super-computer that will tell us that what we know already: that too many of our children are failing – because they are deprived of the smaller classes they need to succeed.

A quality education, according to Michael Bloomberg

My favorite quote in the Daily News article on the $80 million computer contract awarded to IBM:

But Mayor Bloomberg said the cost is worth it. "Every child in this city deserves a quality education and we will spare no expense," he said.

Forget about smaller classes, uncrowded schools, experienced teachers, arts programs or the joy of learning for its own sake.

None of these are worth spending a dime on -- even though his own kids (and Klein's) attended private schools that provided all of the above and more.

No, for the public schools, where the children of all those other people go, a quality education means a super-computer to crunch their test scores -- and their souls.

Daily News on IBM contract: enough to build 3 new schools

See the New York Daily News article on the $80 million new system to track schoolkids: "It's an expense large enough to build as many as three elementary schools from scratch - and staff them for at least a year".