Klein proves to be mathematically illiterate -- again!

See the priceless piece in today’s Daily News, about how Comptroller Thompson sent a letter to Chancellor Klein, challenging him on his oft repeated claim of having saved $200 million from the bureaucracy, and another $290 million last year.

Klein responded by writing that Thompson’s letter “is riddled with errors." Only Klein’s own letter had a basic mistake in the math:

"If someone uses 100,000 gallons of gas at a price of $3.50 and then cuts back to 900,000 gallons, that is a real savings even if the cost of gas goes up to $4," Klein wrote, figuring the price rises to $360,000, not $400,000. The only problem is, by Klein's numbers, the price would actually go up to $3.6 million.

Here is an excerpt from the Thompson letter:

I have indicated previously that the Department appears to be engaged in a "shell game." This latest review does nothing to dispel that judgment. As I am sure you will agree, Exaggerated claims undermine the Department's credibility, and the withdrawal of critical information—such as the cessation o f school-based-expenditure reports-limits transparency and accountability.

As the City's budget is being formalized, it is critically important that accurate data be used to guide DOE decision making. I therefore, and once again, strongly urge your office to resume the publication of reliable school-based expenditure reports so that analysts and the public have a transparent view of DOE's efforts.

Clearly, wherever they made cuts, it wasn’t at Tweed, where wasteful spending, high salaries, and the headcount continue to grow each year.

And though the article says that Klein referred to the fact that “The Independent Budget Office pegged the savings at $221 million” the IBO also said they couldn’t confirm that this amount was redirected to schools, as the DOE claimed, and in fact, couldn’t figure out where the money was spent.

Here is an excerpt of an email to me in March of 2007 from George Sweeting, the deputy director of the IBO:

“We did conclude that there were substantial savings, but we also said that the available information made it hard to tell how much was redirected to the schools or elsewhere in the DOE budget. The difference between our numbers and the Comptroller’s result from assumptions about what to include as administrative savings. The analysis was described in our March 2005 report on the Mayor’s Preliminary Budget for 2006. http://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/march2005.pdf; The discussion is on page 65 of the report (page 71 in the PDF).

There’s a follow-up on this controversy on NY1, with more comments from Klein, who added today that “he's working on new solutions to school overcrowding in difficult economic times.”

Please, Mr. Klein: tell us what they are; perhaps as in your letter, your can simply underestimate the thousands of students in overcrowded schools by a factor of ten.

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.