UPDATE: No performance evaluations for any Chancellor or top administrator at Tweed since Bloomberg took office

Correction!  Lisa Fleisher FOILed for the DOE performance evaluations BEFORE I did.  Apologies to her.  I had wrongly assumed otherwise.
UPDATE: Lisa Fleisher of the Wall Street Journal FOILed for the job evaluations of the top leadership at Tweed shortly after I did – but smartly, she asked for all the evaluations back to 2001, when Bloomberg took office. 

Guess what?  There are none.  She also shows how this is sharp departure from pre-Bloomberg days and the way things are done in other school districts.  Walcott explains the disparity from the strict accountability demanded of teachers:

"They're in front of the classroom and teaching our children, and we need to have a sense of how well they're doing," he said. "With us, we're not teaching children directly, we're setting policy. And I don't think it's hypocritical at all."

That really makes a lot of sense.  

Klein claims that instead of evaluations, he fired any of his aides who weren’t doing the job.  And those were who again?  

This latest revelation is perfect coda to the Bloomberg era, when accountability at the top was promised New Yorkers, but instead we got mismanagement, corrupt and wasteful contracts, privatization, and damaging policies that were abhorrent to parents and educators alike.

Growing the bureaucracy: but guess which office at Tweed has actually shrunk?

The Daily News carried an article this morning, showing that despite the budget cuts, and the increasing class sizes in our schools, and the fact that there is supposed to be a “hiring freeze” at Central, Tweed continues to hire more educrats – with nearly a hundred new ones since last February: Bureaucrats and class sizes are up sharply

Here is where you can see the headcount as of November 2008 (the latest available data)-with Central at 2422 full time employees; as of February 2008, there were only 2342. In October 2004, the earliest data I could find, there were only 1984 – which means the bureaucracy has increased by 22% since then.

In October 2004, the Department of Assessment and Accountability had 19 employees. As of Nov. 2008, this number has grown to 89 – an increase of 421%. Enough to create more useless and misleading test score data.

The Chancellor’s office had seven positions, while now he has16 underlings, a growth of 129%. Enough to help him run around the country and brag about his non-achievements here in NYC.

Office of School Enrollment Planning and Operations (OSEPO) had 19 employees, and now has 35 – an increase of 84% --enough to screw up preK admissions royally!

The Office of Public Affairs had 13 employees as of 2004; now Communications, Communications, Media Relations & Community Affairs is up to 23 – an increase of 77% -- enough to spread disinformation far and wide.

But not all offices of Tweed have grown.

For example, the Office of the Deputy Chancellor for Teaching & Learning had 133 positions in October 2004. Now it is down pitifully to 23 – a reduction of 83%. This is symbolic of the actual interest in teaching and learning at DOE.

The teaching staff has also shrunk since last year. According to a DOE spokesperson, there are “440 fewer teachers working directly with students than … the year before.”

Tweed still on its non-stop spending spree

See another great column today by Juan Gonzalez of the Daily News, pointing out all the expensive hiring STILL going on at Tweed – despite projected budget cuts of nearly $200 million. Apparently the educrats at Tweed have invented a creative new meaning for the words “hiring freeze.”

"They're centralizing the entire bureaucracy, adding all these jobs that don't make any sense to anyone," said Leonie Haimson, director of Class Size Matters, an educational advocacy group. "They're growing like a cancer on the school system."

As for all the new job openings advertised on his Web site, Cantor sounded surprised when told that five new ones had been posted just this week.

"There is a hiring freeze," Cantor said.

"No one is hiring anybody. We had a partial hiring freeze and now we have a total hiring freeze."

He could not explain why so many job openings were being posted during a hiring freeze."

DOE is still adding an expensive new “knowledge management team” in the Accountability Office at $1 million plus. To add insult to injury, the two people running this team is supposed be in charge of telling principals and teachers how to improve instruction, despite having no background in education themselves (sound familiar?).

If you’d like to take a look for yourself at the ridiculously high salaries for Tweed's job postings, check out the DOE job hiring page. Scroll down and look at the section for Administrators and Central Employees. Under the heading of the Chancellor's Accountability Initiative there are currently 15 new postings, most of them extremely high paying, including a Director; Knowledge Management (5389) – who among other things, is supposed to “Oversee Knowledge Management budget of $1M+” and also “Work with the Office of Strategic Partnerships to procure private funds to continue the development of the system.” See also – Associate Director, Policy Team (5865): “Serve as a resource on statistics and research methodology for other members of the Policy Team and broader Office of Accountability.” All you need is a BA and some experience with statistical software. Probably the less expertise in statistics the better, if this individual is going to follow the lead of the current crew i. The listing should instead say, “be prepared to ignore the real meaning of statistical significance when the results come out differently than you would like.” In other words, be ready to make it all up as you go along. This gang are still acting like a bunch of high-spending financiers before the collapse on Wall St. – still paying huge salaries for more and more grandiose projects, and insisting on bonuses to principals, teachers and students for pumped up test scores, just like inflated stock prices – all based on smoke and mirrors, while intent on sucking our school budgets dry. Who will prick their balloon? When if any, will they be forced to re-anchor to reality? Who knows -- when no one seems to be in charge of the fantasy land in the land of Tweed.

Whose taking the Mayor's cuts? not those at Tweed

While the Mayor claims that his proposed cuts of more than $500 million over two years will have "no impact whatsoever" on our schools, see this Daily News article today: Teachers' furor over slashed budget about what the mid-year cuts are already doing to schools in Queens.

Some examples: larger classes, no money for substitute teachers so students have to sit in the auditorium with no teachers at all, elimination of academic intervention services. See also article in Sunday's NY Times, Citywide Scissors, Bloodletting in the Neighborhood, which reveals the devastating effects on class size and services at a school in Brooklyn, PS. 308.

On the impact on schools on Staten Island see here: Cuts clobber school programs.There's more from principals about the awful choices they are facing right now on the InsideSchools blog.

2. Meanwhile, see today’s NY Post: SCHOOLS COMPUTER AN $80M 'DISASTER' with teachers and principals unable to log into the superexpensive supercomputer. And NY1’s Mike Meenan reveals that DOE now admits to only cutting $15 million at headquarters – instead of $70 million as originally reported.

“There's really frustration that we're not seeing cuts at the bureaucracy level. The number they revealed today, $15 million, is quite small," said [Patrick] Sullivan, [Manhattan rep to the PEP]

The administration has also backtracked on their promise of a hiring freeze at Tweed. Instead, there’s something called a “head count reduction plan.” See Klein stumble on the NY 1 video while explaining what this means:

“Klein says that means taking a hard look before filling an open job at DOE headquarters "These vacancies can’t be filled until we need a critical assessment," said Klein.

Yeah, right. Incompetent administrators, supercomputers that don’t work, massive amounts spent on testing and “data inquiry teams” in every school without access to the data, while classes grow in size and kids have to make do without critical services. In reality, even the minimal $15 million Tweed now admits to cutting is partially illusory, since a good portion of these savings actually result from the failure of the contractor to produce all of the interim assessments on time.

I guess the Mayor is partly right: these cuts are likely to have “no impact whatsoever” on the overpaid “educrats” at Tweed. While in the suburbs, superintendents and school boards are planning to protect the quality of their kids' education by raising property taxes, here in NYC the administration would rather see schools cut back while protecting the bloated bureaucracy and reinstituting property tax breaks.