Mayor indicted, Chancellor resigning, and the Panel for Educational Policy eliminates its Contract Committee; so much for Mayoral control!!

 

October 2, 2024: Update: Chancellor Banks announced he is moving up his retirement to Oct. 15, 2024, apparently at the Mayor's request.

Mayor Adams has now been indicted on  five federal charges of bribery, fraud and soliciting illegal foreign campaign donations.  Chancellor Banks is resigning as of Dec. 31, 2024, to be replaced by Melissa Aviles-Ramos, current Deputy Chancellor for Family Engagement. This follows the announced resignations of other top officials, including the Police Commissioner and Commissioner of Health, in the last two weeks.

We should recall the false narratives promoted by those including Governor Hochul who insisted on extending unchecked Mayoral control for two more years last April, with no strings attached: that any other system invited corruption, instability, and inefficiency. The Mayor himself insisted on renaming Mayoral control "Mayoral Accountability", and Chancellor Banks threatened to resign if the governance system was altered in any significant way. And look at what has happened since. 

The only minor tweak the Legislature made to Mayoral control was that the Chair of the Panel for Educational Policy chair would be appointed by the Mayor from among three nominees put forward by leaders of the Legislature and Board of Regents. And yet it turns out that the new Chair will be exactly the same man who already held that seat as a Mayoral appointee, Greg Faulkner. The only difference is that now the Mayor will get an extra PEP appointee, to further cement his control over controversial educational policies, as well as questionable contracts and spending.

The Chancellor himself was reported having privately met with the CEO of 21stCentEd in October of 2022, and  subsequently greenlit a major contract with this company that had hired his brother, Terrence Banks, as a lobbyist. According to the Daily News,  21stCentEd has since received more than $1.4 million in business from the Department of Education for providing a variety of services. In cases where a family member is involved, the city requires that a Conflict of Interest waiver be obtained.  And yet Banks never applied for one. Both Chancellor Banks and Terence Banks have had their homes raided and their telephones seized by federal investigators.

Terence Banks also apparently lobbied for a Florida-based tech firm called Saferwatch which markets “panic button” apps to be used to alert authorities in case of school emergencies such as fires or active shooters.  The NYPD signed a contract with Saferwatch which was piloted in several schools  last year.

We have seen tremendous privacy problems with Teenspace, an online mental health program for NYC students 13 and up, relentlessly promoted by the Mayor and the Chancellor, after the Department of Health signed a $26 million dollar with the parent company Talkspace last year. And yet as we have discovered, Teenspace collects, shares and uses personal student data for marketing and commercial purposes with multiple social media "partners" that would be illegal if the contract was with the DOE rather than the Department of Health.  When a NYC student visits the Teenspace website on their phone, their personally identifiable information is collected by 34 cookies, and shared with 15 ad trackers, as well as Facebook, Amazon, Meta, Google, and Microsoft among other companies. The company has also been sued in California for sharing personal data with TikTok, including  the mental health data of minors. One should not be surprised to learn that lobbying firm for Talkspace is Oaktree Solutions, the firm owned by Frank Carone,  a close associate and a former chief of staff to the Mayor who was with him last night when Adams was huddling with his attorneys after learning of his federal indictments.

Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Adams own partner,  Tracey Collins, who already worked at DOE,  was promoted and named the “senior adviser to the deputy chancellor of school leadership,” and recieved a 23% boost to her salary to $221,597 a year.  Shortly thereafter, Sharon Adams, the wife of the Mayor’s brother Bernard Adams, was hired by DOE, at a salary of $150,000-a-year .

The whirlwind of scandals and investigations surrounding the Mayor and his top appointees, including the Chancellor, should give rise to a new call for more accountability, oversight and checks and balances at DOE, but I fear that no lessons will be learned by those in power, because their interests lie in maintaining one-person rule, and ignoring the voices of parents and teachers.  Indeed, there have been many cases of large-scale corruption at the DOE under previous administrations. 

Eric Goldstein was hired in 2004 during Bloomberg/Klein years as a deputy overseeing food, transportation and high school sports, and promoted to chief executive in 2007. Goldstein was just recently sentenced to two years in prison, for a corrupt scheme he was involved in 2015-2016, during the De Blasio administration, by receiving bribes in exchange for turning a blind eye to tainted food served to public school kids — including chicken tenders laden with plastic, bones and metal, causing choking.

There is also the recently revealed, shocking case of DOE staffers in the Queens office who took their own kids on trips to Disneyland and other trips by using federal funds meant to provide educational experiences for homeless children.  For some reason, the DOE failed to ask for restitution for the money stolen; and neither the DOE nor the Special Investigator for Schools  reported the alleged fraud, forgery and misuse of federal funds to any authorities for possible prosecution.  To make things even more bizarre, the SCI held off posting its findings report, dated January 2023, for nearly two years after it was completed, and when they did so, they posted it quietly without any press release or notification, perhaps in hopes it would be ignored by the media focused instead on the allegations and investigations surrounding the Mayor.  I have since reported these alleged crimes to the Inspector General's office of the US Department of Education, and the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York.

There have been many more multi-million dollar DOE corruption scandals under Mayoral control over the last 20 years, a selection of which I summarized in my testimony to the State Education Department and my presentation last year to the NYC Bar Association, both posted here.

And yet despite all these allegations of cronyism and worse, the first thing that the newly reconstituted Panel for Education Policy did in its first meeting of the new school year on September 25 is to eliminate its Contracts Committee by amending their  Bylaws  as depicted below.

This committee, whose meetings have been livestreamed and recorded, has provided the only public airing of discussion and questioning of DOE officials by PEP members of the rationale behind  hundreds of millions of questionable DOE contracts before the final Panel vote.  The approval to ditch the committee was 13-6, with one abstention.   As usual, every Mayoral appointee plus the new, supposedly "independent" Chair voted in lockstep to eliminate the Contracts Committee and its monthly public meetings.  So much for so-called Mayoral accountability!

Sexual harassment and the complicit culture of corruption at DOE

Abusive principals who kept their jobs (credit NY Post)

More terrific reporting by Sue Edelman of the NY Post, to follow up on her earlier exposes,  on the dysfunction that allows predatory principals to repeatedly harass teachers and yet keep their positions and six figure salaries, because DOE has dragged their feet so long they can no longer be fired.

Instead, DOE chronically ignores teachers' claims and instead informs the principals of their accusations, who then retaliate by firing them or making their lives miserable.  In one horrible case that Sue describes, the principal of PS 15 in Queens Antonio K’tori was protected by District 29 Superintendent Lenon Murray, who himself was subsequently accused of sexual harassment.  Earlier, several young girls were molested by a teacher at PS 15, who is now in jail.  The girls won a $16 million jury award against the city, with the parents blaming DOE and the K'tori for “negligent supervision.”

Yet even now, after teacher Shaunte Pennington filed a civil lawsuit against K'tori in court, who fired her after she reported harassment starting in 2012, the DOE has delayed doing anything for so long about her complaints that the three year statute of limitations has lapsed and he can't be dismissed.

“It’s a system that gives predators a platform and access to victims,” Penniston told The Post. “Nothing is done, and there are protections for perpetrators.”

In case after case, even when administrators are removed from their schools, the DOE is forced to pay them their full salaries until they choose to retire.  As I'm quoted in the article, "It’s a terrible burden on the teachers who are complaining, and a terrible burden on taxpayers, because we have to pay large amounts to settle these cases — and then the salaries of the principals in perpetuity."

I've written frequently about the well-known dysfunction at the OSI, the DOE's internal investigative office, as well as the problems at the Special Investigator's office (now under the authority of Commissioner of Investigation Mark Peters).  Both offices have records of refusing to aggressively pursue the valid accusations of whistleblowers, who are then forced to go to the media or to court to get their reports of corruption taken seriously.

The DOE's malign neglect is likely the reason there are so few sexual harassment claims compared to other city agencies, only 570 over four years, considering there are roughly 135,000 full-time workers, mostly women; and an even tinier number -- only seven-- of substantiated complaints.  Teachers are clearly afraid to complain for good reason, knowing that if they do, their jobs may be at risk and DOE and/or the SCI will whitewash their tormentors. Yet when asked why there were so few substantiated reports of harassment at DOE, de Blasio blamed a "culture of complaint" at the Department;

There has been a history, it's pretty well-known inside the education world, of some people bringing complaints of one type or another for reasons that may not have to do with the specific issue — and this is not just about sexual harassment it's about a whole host of potential infractions,

Later, the Mayor was forced to take this statement back, especially after a critical editorial in the NY Times.  But he still hasn't managed to confront how an ingrained culture of corruption has been allowed to fester and grow for many years at DOE.

On the other hand, Chancellor Carranza has said that this is a "Before Richard'” problem and pledged to take the allegations of harassment "extremely seriously." Let's hope he does.  In my experience, I haven't yet noted a single Chancellor who has.

Ongoing corruption, graft and waste at the DOE

See today’s NY Times about the federal indictments of four DOE employees as a result of the bus scandal investigation – accused of soliciting bribes for amounting to at least $1 million, in exchange for giving preferential treatment on safety inspections to companies that provide transportation to thousands of special ed students.

These indictments result from a terrific investigative series of reports last summer by the Daily News– not anything uncovered by DOE itself or by Richard Condon, the school special investigator. See our blog for links to these stories. In fact, the News reporters complained of stonewalling by the DOE in the process of researching the safety problems and abusive behavior on the part of these companies.

In addition, the NY Post reveals a list of community groups that received money through the Mayor’s “own secret taxpayer-funded cash stash” in the reporter’s words, amounting last year to $4.5 million, which the Mayor used “to reward favored lawmakers” like Councilman Simcha Felder (who got $1.9 million for his favorite community groups), Brooklyn BP Marty Markowitz ($900,000) and others.

Also on the list is Councilman Erik Dilan – who coincidentally or not, along with Felder is one of only four Council members who have refused to sign the resolution opposing budget cuts to schools. The Mayor’s office supplied $60,000 to a community group that happens to be run by Dilan’s wife.

Unlike those groups allocated discretionary funds directly from the Council, “Bloomberg's slush funds were channeled through various city agencies to 45 groups and weren't listed on the document released each year by the council …”

See also today’s oped in Daily News by Andrew Stengel of the Brennan Center– suggesting that the recent naming of a Queens campus of public schools for Senator Padavan might be considered a form of graft:

The state's Public Officers Law is clear on this: Elected officials cannot receive extra compensation or any gift of more than nominal value. Placing someone's name in a prominent place, whether it's an actual building or a tract of land, has monetary value. ….Naming a school after Padavan appears, at the very least, to violate the spirit of the law, which says that an elected official cannot "solicit, accept or receive any gift having a value of seventy-five dollars or more whether in the form of money, service, loan, travel, entertainment, hospitality, thing or promise, or in any other form ... in the performance of his official duties or was intended as a reward for any official action on his part.

Worse still, according to the chancellor's regulations, "schools may not be named after living persons." The chancellor and others worked around this rule by arguing - get this - that it doesn't apply to a campus. The naming is especially egregious in this case because Republican Sen. Padavan's district is a major battleground in the war over control of the state Senate, which is one seat from a tie and two from flipping to the Democrats.

But perhaps all this pales compared to the unfortunately legal, but incredibly wasteful spending practices of the DOE, which while proposing huge budget cuts to schools also intends to spend nearly $8 million next year on its so-called Accountability office – with only 18 staff members, averaging $432,757 per person! See this entry by the invaluable blogger, Eduwonkette:

On page 446 of New York City's FY09 budget, we learn that the Division of Assessment and Accountability is budgeted at $8,287,282. $7,789,623 will buy you 18 staff - that's $432,757 per person! What else could you buy for this money, according to Eduwonkette?

A) 3,894,812 subway rides
B) 15,579 pairs of Prada heels
C) 1812 hours with the Emperors VIP Club
D) 315 years of education at the Brearley School

I would also add a lot of smaller classes in our public schools, after school tutoring, and art programs.

Next time someone goes on about the corruption and waste that pervaded the system in the days before Mayoral control, perhaps you might mention one of the examples above.