The mystery continues: who is funding the Klein/Sharpton operation?

See the latest email from David Cantor below – DOE’s press secretary-- on the fact that the new Klein/Sharpton operation is being funded "anonymously" -- though apparently not by Bloomberg himself. In our earlier posting, we reported his assertion that the Gates/Broad foundations were not implicated either.

One would think that given the kind of public campaign that these men say they are embarking upon, including staging "events at both political conventions” and attempting to influence the position of the next President, they should be obligated to reveal their source of financing.

David also questions my description of the DOE press office as large and well-funded.

Here is an excel file from last October with the names, salaries and positions of thirteen people employed in the DOE Communications office, as well as many additional PR staffers, including seven in the “Strategic Response Unit”, those tasked with responding to outraged emails from parents, whose canned non-responses usually result in outraging them even more.

According to those in the know, the DOE press office is at least four times the size of any previous administration and much larger than the press operation of any other city agency. It is more than twice as big as the PR department of the US Department of Education.

Not that its members don't earn their salaries, working overtime to cover the blunders and misstatements of their superiors.

Speaking of which, the file also contains the salaries of the top administrators at Tweed as of September 2007 – with Jim Liebman, former Columbia law professor, tied for third at $196,575.00. Liebman was appointed as head of the so-called Accountability office, despite the fact that he had no experience in the fields of public education or testing and proceeded to prove this.

See this newsclip from Channel 2 back in December; with Klein trying to justify the fact that 18 officials at Tweed were paid more than $190,000 a year, saying that they could earn three times their salaries in the private sector. I responded that if so, they should go back there, because they had abundantly proven that they don't know anything about public education.

As to the ongoing mystery about who is funding the Klein/Sharpton operation, I followed up by asking David who is paying his salary when he acts as the chief spokesperson for this effort. Is he getting paid extra by this "anonymous" donor -- or are his additional duties being covered by his regular salary, i.e. through taxpayer money? In the midst of budget cuts to schools, one would think this was rather hard to justify.

Secondly, is he thinking of writing an expose a la Scott McLellan about his adventures in the land of Tweed when Klein's term in office is over? I myself would pay a pretty penny for such a book, and I bet others would as well.

I was forced to turn down David’s offer to come to Tweed to fix his copying machine; as I don't have any particular expertise in that area (not that ever stopped the Chancellor in his hiring decisions.)

Perhaps by cutting down on the high salaries of some of Tweed’s top educrats -- or eliminating one or two positions in the burgeoning Accountability office, they might be able to afford to pay a repairman. Or they could save on Liebman’s salary, as he is supposed to return to his professorship at Columbia in July.

As soon as I receive a response from David, I will let you know.

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From: david cantor [mailto:cantorrac@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 11:20 PM
To: Leonie Haimson
Subject: Re: question for David Cantor: who is funding this project?

Leonie: The project is being funded anonymously. No public money will be spent. The mayor is not funding the project.

Re comments on your blog: If Class Size Matters ever wants to hold a press conference in Washington, the National Press Club room we used (Zenger Room) is available for $500. Also, I invite you to come over to the press office when next you're at Tweed and check out our "huge" communications "juggernaut" at work. I think you'll be surprised. If you're any good at fixing a copy machine we may put you to work.

David Cantor
Press Secretary
NYC Dept of Ed

Salaries at Tweed continue to grow

There’s an article in the NY Post today, showing a big jump in the number of city employees making $150,000 or more in 2006:

The increase was led by the Department of Education, which saw its number of $150,000 earners more than double in 2006, to 229 from 97. Among these high-pay employees at DOE were new hires James Liebman, formerly a lawyer for the NAACP [actually a Columbia law professor], who earned $188,304 as the head of DOE's accountability office, and Santiago Taveras, a longtime DOE employee who earned $155,174 working with Liebman on school reviews.

Here’s a quote from me: "We've heard about many restructurings, but after each one it seems the number of high-paid executives down at Tweed [school headquarters] has mushroomed. I haven't seen any money redirected into schools."

It’s true that through all the various reorganizations, the only constant is that the number of high-priced employees at Tweed – and exorbitantly paid consultants – continues to grow. At the same time, we’ve seen little or no improvements in terms of added resources to the classroom or reduced class size.

As of 2005, six DOE employees were making as much or more than any Deputy Mayor, and twenty were making more than Police Commissioner Kelly. And of course, there are the seven Alvarez and Marsal consultants, each receiving more than $1 million – plus expenses.

In the NY Post article, Tweed claims that "DOE in 2006 cut $230 million from its administrative budget and redirected it toward the schools. We're getting an exceptional return on taxpayer dollars.”

Each year, it seems, the DOE makes this same assertion; with little or no evidence to back it up.

In 2004, the DOE claimed to have cut $200 million from administration and transferred it to schools, yet no one, including the City Comptroller and the Independent Budget Office, could confirm this.

Here are the conclusions of the IBO: “….changes to DOE’s internal budget structure make it difficult to fully assess whether the department has attained the savings it claimed….It is even more difficult to determine whether the savings were shifted to the classroom as claimed by the Chancellor and the Mayor."

In February of 2005, the City Comptroller released a letter challenging the validity of these cuts, and reporting that instead, the head count at Tweed had increased, and that our schools had suffered a net loss of over 2,000 teachers in two years, with no improvement in the teacher-student ratio.

Comptroller Thompson added that “DOE fiscal reporting practices have become markedly less transparent since the Department's restructuring. …DOE has misapplied certain units of appropriation to report expenditures, commencing with FY 2004, in a way that makes it difficult, if not impossible, to track its use of public funds."

An analysis by the Educational Priorities Panel found that rather than reducing the bureaucracy, DOE had made huge cuts to special education services, and that the percentage of spending devoted to instruction had steadily declined.

The Post article shows that the between 2005-6, the number of DOE top executives making more than $150,000 more than doubled, compared to an increase of only 4% in high-salaried employees at the Police Department. And guess what? Next year, spending for Tweed staff is projected to grow another 12%.

I predict that the increases will be even larger – with all the new positions at the Accountability office, including at least twenty new “Senior Achievement Facilitators” to analyze the huge amount of test score data spewed by ARIS, each of whom will make $139,304 - $158,602.