Leonie Haimson and Patrick Sullivan of the Citizens Contracts Oversight Committee provided the following comments to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy about the proposed contracts to be voted on April 20, 2016. If you want to join our Overight committee, please email us at info@classsizematters.org. If you would like to send in your own comments, please do so tonight by the public comment deadline at 6:00 pm.
To: CGFarina@schools.nyc.gov, Budget@schools.nyc.gov, panel@schools.nyc.gov, fbaptiste@schools.nyc.gov , ecleveland@schools.nyc.gov, vleung@schools.nyc.gov, lpodvesker@schools.nyc.gov lzingmond@schools.nyc.gov, ICarmignani@schools.nyc.gov, ddillingham@schools.nyc.gov , kpaynehanks@schools.nyc.gov, mzorrillaaristy@schools.nyc.gov, bshuldiner@schools.nyc.gov, GLinnen@schools.nyc.gov
April
19, 2016
Dear
Chancellor Farina and members of the Panel for Education Policy:
On
behalf of Class Size Matters, the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee, and
the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, we have the following concerns about
the proposed contracts and the Fair Student Funding formula to be voted on
tomorrow night, April 20, 2016:
The Amazon contract
DOE proposes
to pay $30 Million to Amazon over three years to provide
digital textbooks and tradebooks. The ultimate plan, according to the RA, is to
provide 29%-42% of all content online by Year 5 at a cost of up to $64.5
million.
·
Yet there is no cost/benefit analysis
in the RA discussion of the proposed contract, including the huge cost of
having to purchase tablets or laptops for all the students who will access
their assigned readings through digital devices. The contract also
implies that some students will use “a school-provided device or a personal
device to access their profile and content,” Yet latter which cannot be relied
upon given the fact that many families cannot afford to supply a suitable
e-reader for their children to use at home.
·
The RA also proposes that students will
“request content for independent reading” via Amazon, which implies that the
DOE will be steering students’ personal purchases to this provider, which will
allow Amazon to further expand their market share. Yet many authors and publishers have
protested the way in which Amazon uses their dominance of the market to engage
in illegal monopolistic practices,
which goes unmentioned in the RA.
·
The DOE omits any discussion of the
growing research showing that reading comprehension and retention are
significantly reduced with the use of digital devices compared to actual
books. Here's just one
of several recent studies on this critical issue.
·
Finally there are the privacy concerns,
which are insufficiently addressed in the RA:
“Despite this
technology’s capacity for track and reporting student progress, students’
personal identifiable information will be safeguarded in this system, as Amazon
will use a DOE-provided proxy with encrypted information and limited student
information.”
It is unclear what “limited student information” is going to
be included, but in any case, many parents are not just worried about potential
breaches, but about teachers and administrators tracking students at school and
at home, and what will be done with their personal data.
For more on some of the concerns with the Amazon contract,
as yet unexplored by DOE, see today’s Wall Street Journal.
Contracts with
Special Education providers
The DOE proposes to award contracts to pay seven special
education vendors who have engaged in fraud in the past or who have failed to
pay Workman’s compensation and thus are barred from public work contracts. We
strongly believe that any company that has engaged in fraud or failed to
properly follow the law should be barred from future DOE contracts for at least
five (5) years.
We are also concerned that the DOE admits that “background checks have not been completed
for all vendors…Should noteworthy information become known to the DOE after the
Panel meeting, it will be reported to the Panel.”
No contract should be approved without a background check,
and there is no point in reporting it to Panel members once negative
information is found.
The
fact that the DOE would even consider proposing contracts for companies to
provide services to special needs students, a highly vulnerable population,
without conducting any background checks, only reaffirms our conviction that
there is insufficient care and due diligence maintained by DOE officials to
minimize risk to children, fraud and waste.
More
evidence of the insufficient care shown by DOE is shown below in the section
below headed “Reimbursing the Fund for Public Schools for
PreK vendors found “non-responsible”.
An article about these highly questionable special education
contracts was published in yesterday’s Daily News here
Whole
School Reform
DOE seeks
funding for a vendor, Southern Regional Education Board, who has provided these
services in the past and whose expertise with NYC schools has been previously
questioned. It is regrettable that the
new proposed contract is presented without any accounting for how the vendor
has performed in the past.
Pre-K providers
DOE
continues the unacceptable practice of proposing to award many pre-K contracts
without providing any information in advance on the vendors or their
backgrounds and history (see items #3-5 on pages 49- 51 and #24-25 on pages
109-110,) This again is risky and
irresponsible.
Professional development contracts
We are concerned about the proliferation of professional
development contracts. This month there
are seven PD contracts, items #7-11, #16 and #19, at a total cost of
$14,697,447 or $8,050,447 annually.
Including these, there have been a total 36 PD contracts since October
2015, costing over $27 million annually, or $98 million over the course of
these contracts.
Nearly half of these contracts are proposed to provide
training aligned to the Common Core standards, even though the State Education
Department is now planning to revamp the standards.
Retroactive contracts
DOE also
continues its unacceptable practice of asking the PEP to approve retroactive
contracts after the funds have already been presumably spent. This month, there are nine proposed
retroactive contracts: items #2, 16-20, 26-28.
Reimbursing
Fund for Public Schools the City of New York for PreK vendors found “non-responsible” [Update: wrote the wrong Fund here}
Serious concerns are prompted in the
information found in the Addenda (page 132). Many pre-K providers were
approved by the PEP in July 2014, despite the fact that their background checks
were not complete.
Three providers were subsequently found to
have engaged in fraud or other illegal behavior, including B’Above Worldwide
Institute, FootSteps Child Care Inc., and West Harlem Community Organization
Inc.
Church Avenue Day Care did not file NYC
corporate taxes for 2010-2014. While this transgression would normally
disqualify a vendor (categorize them as "non-responsible"), the DOE
decided to pay the firm anyway with private funds raised by the Fund for the Public Schools
The DOE also proposes to reimburse the Fund for
Public Schools the City of NY for it payments to another preK vendor, Footsteps Childcare Inc.
despite the fact that earlier audits from the NYS Comptroller had found this
vendor had engaged in “systematic abuse
of child care grants awarded by the NYS Office of Children and Family Services,
including evidence that funds…had been misappropriated to defraud the State.”
A third vendor, B’Above Worldwide Institute,
exhibited unspecified “performance and
contract compliance issues” during the 2014-2015 school year. Despite the fact that the vendor was offered
the “opportunity to show cause why it
should not be found non-responsible,” B’Above failed to do so. Now the DOE wants to pay back the Fund for
Public Schools the City of NY for the “bridge loan” that the Fund had provided the vendor.
Panel members should oppose these
reimbursements. Moreover, the DOE's practices of using a private
fundraising entity to fund questionable vendors, presumably because they had
been barred from receiving city funds, should immediately cease.
These examples provide more evidence of
unacceptably sloppy and risky contracting practices on the part of DOE, and why
no contract should be approved by the PEP for vendors whose background checks
have not been completed.
Fair student funding
While in FY
2008, schools were provided with 100% on average of their Fair Student funding,
this year the average is only at 89% and if the mayor’s proposed budget is
adopted, next year this figure will rise to only 91% — reflecting a 9 percent
cut to our schools since 2007. Moreover, the Mayor’s proposed budget does
not project any increase in Fair student funding in the out years.
In
many cases, the overall use of the Fair student Funding formula has forced
class sizes upwards, or forced principals to choose between retaining their
experienced teachers or keeping class sizes at acceptable levels.
·
The smallest
amount of funding is allocated to students in grades K-5, where the investment
in smaller classes has huge pay-offs in terms of increased student
achievement.
·
More funding
on the level of 8 percent is allocated for students in grades 6-8, an
additional 3 percent for high school students, and 40-50 percent additional
funding for remedial services as a student falls behind, starting in 4th
grade.
·
Yet as many
studies indicate, remediation is far less effective than prevention,
which ensures that students do not fall behind in the first place,
especially in the form of smaller classes in Kindergarten through 3rd
grade.
·
The FSF
weights are far greater for special needs students if they are assigned to
inclusion classes starting in Kindergarten, (with a weight of 2.09) and in
grades 1-12 (with a weight of 1.74), though the class sizes in these ICT
classes are generally far too large to provide students with the individual
attention they need.
·
The failure
of DOE’s inclusion program, caused in large part by the excessive class sizes
of ICT classes, is something we hear constantly from parents of special needs
students.
·
This is further
evidenced by the fact that since the fall of 2012, there have been sharp
increases in the numbers of students recommended for special education
services, as well as the number of students attending non-public schools at
city expense, according to the Mayor’s Management report.
·
Total
special education enrollment in grades K12 has increased by 25 percent in four
years since the inclusion initiative began in earnest in 2012, at a huge
expense to the city. The increase in the number of students identified as
having special needs is yet another indication of the hidden cost of rising
class sizes, especially as class size reduction has been shown to significantly
reduce the number of students identified as requiring special services.
Yours sincerely,
Leonie Haimson,
Executive Director, Class Size Matters and co-chair, Parent Coalition for
Student Privacy
Patrick Sullivan on
behalf of the Citizens Contract Oversight Committee
Last week I wrote about the problems with the
new $670,000 DOE contract for Joel Rose's blended/computerized math instruction program, which was originally promised
to be provided free to NYC schools in perpetuity since Rose developed it with about a million dollars of city funds while at DOE. The Panel for Educational Policy is due to vote on this contract on August 23.
