The Fix is (No Longer) In

A recent Daily News report that the NY City Department of Education is using school repair money to build a $38,000 luxury lounge facility may be just the tip of the iceberg. According to a source inside the DOE, the consulting firm Alvarez and Marsal (A&M), has decided to close the Division of School Facilities and will then take over its Long Island City headquarters. The Division is responsible for school repair and maintenance, but A&M has determined that repairing schools is not cost effective. It is far cheaper, they decided, to simply close down those schools which are in need of repair, and to put their students into “small schools” within the remaining school buildings that do not have repair or maintenance problems. The Facilities Division will thus become superfluous, and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein has agreed to sell its building to A&M for the price of $1.

Apparently, the lounge that was the subject of the news report is only the beginning of a complete luxury renovation of the former Facilities headquarters building. The building is to become a sort of private “clubhouse” where A&M executives and those of DOE partners such as Edison Schools and New Visions can relax and decompress after a hard day of plundering the city school system. The cost of the renovation, which will be borne by the DOE, is to be defrayed in part by applying the $1 price that A&M will pay for the building.

This entire plan has been a closely guarded secret, but, according to the DOE source, there is more to the secrecy than meets the eye. There has reportedly been growing concern among DOE staffers as to the Chancellor’s state of mind since he reportedly became addicted to playing the new monopoly-like game, “Children First: A Game of Irony”, and these staffers have become convinced that the Chancellor has been confusing the game with reality. Blaming an “overzealous” aide for the recent ill-advised sale of a historic school building may, according to this view, have been simply a way to cover up the Chancellor’s own misconception that this sale was part of the game. It is unclear whether the decision to renovate and sell the Facilities Division building represents a similar circumstance, but speculation is that A&M Co-Chairman Bryan Marsal may have actually “acquired” the building from the Chancellor playing “Children First”.

In other education news, Chancellor Klein was said to be so pleased with the success of his appointment of Donald Rumsfeld as School Transportation chief, that he is looking to employ other notables with a proven track record in public relations. For example, Mr. Klein has reportedly offered an unspecified position to recently fired radio “Shock Jock” Don Imus. However, Mr. Imus spurned the offer, saying that the DOE was “just too controversial”.

"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?