Class size bill passes state legislature! Now call the Governor and urge her to sign the bill!

 

Thanks to the leaders of the Legislature, as well as Education Chairs John Liu and Mike Benedetto, along with our champions Sen. Robert Jackson and AM Jo Anne Simon, the class size bill S09460/_ A10498 passed the NY State Senate Thursday afternoon at 59-4; and the Assembly early Friday morning; 147-2.  It will require that class size be capped at no more than 20 students in grades K-3; 23 in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school, phased in over the next five years. Good articles about these long-awaited and much needed measures were published in Gothamist, Chalkbeat , Politics NY and News 4 NY and NY1; while other media outlets uncritically repeated long-debunked anti-class size myths.  Our press release with AQE and Ed Law Center is below.

Now, please urge Gov. Hochul to sign the bill, so that planning for smaller classes can begin!  Call her  at 1-518-474-8390; or message her here.  Tell her: Please sign the class size bill as soon as possible so that NYC students can receive the smaller classes that students in the rest of the state already receive.

 

For immediate release: June 3, 2022

Contact: Leonie Haimson, 917-435-9329; leoniehaimson@gmail.com
Wendy Lecker, 203-536-7567, wlecker@edlawcenter.org
Julia Watson, 978-518-0729, julia@aqeny.org

 

NEW YORK, N.Y. (June 3, 2022) — Advocates for New York City public school students hail the passage of S09460/_ A10498 by the New York State Legislature. The law mandates caps on  class size  to be phased in over five years in all New York City public schools.  The caps are  20 students per class in Kindergarten through 3^rd-grade;  23 students per class in grades  4^th through 8^th. ; and  25 students per class in high school academic subjects.

The new law amends the 2007 Contract for Excellence (C4E) law which  required New York City  to reduce class size averages by 2012.  Yet the New York City Department of Education failed to comply and class sizes  grew larger, sometimes exponentially. The new law requires caps in all schools rather than averages and adds enforcement mechanisms to ensure City  compliance.

“If this law is enacted, it will transform New York City schools by finally ensuring smaller classes in all grades,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters. “For too long, city students have struggled in classes that are 15 to 30 percent larger than those in the rest of the state. These excessive class sizes have deprived them of the close feedback and support of their teachers that they need to succeed, a glaring inequity. While all students benefit from smaller classes, the research shows that those who benefit the most are children of color, who make up the majority of students in the NYC public schools.”

“This law is the culmination of persistent advocacy by  parents and teachers across New York City,” said Wendy Lecker, Senior Attorney at Education Law Center (ELC), which works to enforce  the legal rights of New York public school students. “Smaller class sizes are an essential element of a constitutional ‘sound basic education’ as defined by New York’s highest court. This legislation is vital and long overdue.”

“For years, parents, educators and advocates have fought to reduce class sizes in NYC public schools in order to ensure students get the individualized attention they need to succeed. Senator Robert Jackson stood with parents to lead the fight to fully fund Foundation Aid to ensure NYC schools would have the resources to significantly lower class sizes,” said Jasmine Gripper, Executive Director for the Alliance for Quality Education. “In 2020, AQE surveyed parents to ask their top priorities for schools and overwhelmingly parents named smaller class sizes among the top two priorities. The passage of the Class Size bill gets us closer to that goal. We urge the governor to sign it immediately.”

”Advocates and parents thank the Leaders of the State Legislature, Speaker Carl Heastie and Majority Leader Andrew Stewart Cousins along with the Chair of the Assembly Education Committee Michael Benedetto and the Chair of the New York City Senate Education Committee John Liu for shepherding this bill to passage.  We are also greatly indebted to the lead sponsors of the original bills on which these amendments are based, Senator Robert Jackson and Assembly Member Jo Anne Simon for ensuring the promise of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit will finally be fulfilled,” Ms. Haimson said. “Now we hope and expect Governor Kathy Hochul will sign the bill, so that our children can be provided with the smaller class sizes that students in the rest of the state already receive.”

 

Class size bill to be voted upon in Legislature today!

Today, a vote is scheduled in the Legislature on a bill , A10498/ S09460 that would require NYC DOE to phase in class size caps in all NYC public schools to be achieved over five years – to no more than 20 students in K-3, 23 students in 4th to 8th grades, and 25 students in HS academic classes. There are real enforceability mechanisms attached to the law, including that state funding would be withheld if the city doesn’t follow through on its commitments to achieve a 20% reduction in class size each year.  The bill is supported by our elected leaders and a majority of both houses,

The bill is quite strong and close to the legislation that was introduced last session by Senator Robert Jackson and AM Jo Anne Simon, and will likely be voted on today or tomorrow. If the bill passes, as it is expected to, and signed by the Governor, this represents a huge victory for NYC kids, and for all of you who helped push for this– as well as the generations of advocates, parents, teachers, and elected officials who have demanded smaller classes over many decades, in the realization that it was unfair that NYC students should have to suffer from class sizes that were far larger than those experienced by students in the rest of the state.

There was also a consensus among our elected officials that with the $1.3 billion in additional state aid flowing to our schools as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, in which excessive class size was a central focus of the court decision, it was finally time to address this problem and solve it once and for all. There are some additions to the bill that allow exemptions to the law, but in our reading, only temporarily and in times of great economic distress. All of us will have to keep an eye out to ensure that these exceptions are invoked one time only, and under extreme conditions.

Gothamist has a good article about the class size bill, which also includes a short discussion of the Mayoral control bill that was submitted at the same time. That bill extends the Mayor’s control for only two more years, and expands the PEP to include more parent representatives selected directly by parents, while keeping a Mayoral majority. In addition, it puts the NYC Comptroller on the PEP as a non-voting member, to provide guidance on finances and contracts, and requires that the PEP members receive six hours of training in fiscal oversight, both of which we advocated for in our testimony to the Legislature, proposals that were also adopted by the Education Council Consortium.

Neither the class size bill nor the Mayoral control bill has been voted on yet, but we expect they will be approved either later today or tomorrow before the legislative session ends. And hopefully signed by the Governor sooner rather than later. Cross your fingers and toes!

We will include more info on the new class size and Mayoral control bills during our Parent Action Conference, co-hosted by NYC Kids PAC, to be held this Saturday, June 4 at 4 PM. For more info and to sign up now, click here.

Meanwhile, I hope you all savor this extraordinary victory to come for NYC students, and your own part in helping to achieve it.

Thanks as always, Leonie

Possible legislative breakthrough on class size: please help us get this done!

We have heard via our friends in the legislature that there is a real push by the Assembly and the Senate to include requirements on reducing class size in the extension of Mayoral Control.  In he NY Post, NY State Sen. John Liu, the powerful chair of the NYC Education Committee, was quoted as saying he supports reducing class size as part of amending Mayoral control.  

Please call your legislators!  Tell your Assembly member and Senator that you need them to push for smaller class caps as part of any Mayoral control package , along the lines of S. 6296/A. 7447 ,  with strong accountability measures attached. 

The legislative session ends next week on June 2; we only have a few days to get this done! 

Thanks! 

Sign up NOW for our annual Parent Action Conference on June 4!

Please sign up for our Annual Parent Action Conference on Saturday June 4 from 4 to 6 PM, sponsored by Class Size Matters and NYC Kids PAC.  

Invited keynote speakers include Congressman Jamaal Bowman, NY State Senator Robert Jackson and NYC Council Education Chair Rita Joseph.

Following that, we'll have a brief presentation on the proposed budget cuts to NYC schools and the capital plan, and what parents can do to prevent them from being imposed.

This will be followed by your choice of workshops on a host of important issues:

• Reforming Fair Student Funding

• Resources for parents navigating the special education system
  

• How DOE puts your child’s privacy at risk

• Literacy in NYC: How parents forced a change

• The problems with charter schools

• Parent organizing and advocacy

Please register now at Eventbrite here or at 

https://tinyurl.com/PACconference22  

A flyer you can download is here.

Our testimony to the NYC Council urging them to prevent the Mayor's proposed cuts to school budgets and the capital plan!

 May 25, 2022

Check out our  submitted budget testimony before the NYC Council Finance Committee for today. We urged the Chair Justin Brannan and other Council Members to prevent the Mayor's proposed cuts to school budgets of $375 million, that are projected to lead to a loss of about 3200 teaching positions, which in turn may cause the sharpest increase in class sizes since the Great Recession, the last thing NYC kids need to recover from the Covid crisis.  We also ask them to oppose the proposed $1.5 billion in cuts to new capacity in the capital plan, which is unsupported by evidence and apparently relies on an unrealistic change to the school capacity formula that assumes every middle school and high school classroom can be scheduled for every period of the day.

Our testimony also follows.  If you'd like to submit your own comments on these cuts,  you can send an email to testimony@council.nyc.gov by Friday.

Please check out our panel on The Fight for Smaller Classes: Activism in the Wake of the Pandemic

The panelists included Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters, Lisa Haver, co-founder and coordinator of the grass-roots Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, and Leah VanDassor, the president of the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) in Minnesota, which just achieved smaller class size caps in their contract after a threatened strike. Teacher union members and activists from Philadelphia, Colorado, and Los Angeles asked questions and added comments from the audience.

New and Emerging Threats to Student & Teacher Data Privacy

On May 6, the NY Post revealed that about two million students in NY State alone may have had their privacy violated by the massive Illuminate data breach; students in CT and CO were also affected.

This is an update from reporting in The Journal, based on FOILed records from NYSED that found at least one million students affected, across 24 school districts and 18 charter schools in New York, plus one Board of Cooperative Educational Service.

The NY State Education Dept. and the NYC DOE needs to do a far better job protecting personal student data and complying with the NY State Student privacy law 2D, which was passed in 2014, and to minimize the sharing of student data, ensuring strict security standards including encryption, and requiring that vendors delete it as soon as possible and at the very least when students graduate, none of which happened here.

Illuminate has reported that the hackers accessed a "database storing some information in the unencrypted format", according to The Record news site, and that the data may have included student and parent names, email addresses, grades, attendance, birth dates, ID numbers, genders, race and ethnicity, languages spoken at home, Title I and disability status and more.  Data from the records of students in Colorado and Connecticut may also have been breached.

Two weekends ago, Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and Doug Levin, Co-Founder and National Director of K12 Security Information Exchange and a national expert on student data breaches, gave presentations at the Network for Public Education national conference in Philadelphia, in which we discussed the Illuminate Breach and the how districts and schools can better protect the privacy of their students and teachers.

Please follow the following links for videos of this session, separated into Part I and Part II, along with questions and comments from the audience.

Please help us advocate against the egregious budget cuts planned for schools next year!

Yesterday, Mayor Adams announced his executive budget, and though he added $1.2 billion for various initiatives, including even more funding for the police, he is still planning to cut school budgets by $375 million over the next three years, which combined with unidentified school budget “efficiency savings” of this year, would amount to about $411 million in cuts.  Some of that would be partly made up with federal stimulus funds, but he still plans to cut school budgets by about $225 million next year, increasing to the $375 million the following year.

At the same time, the Mayor is proposing to cut $1.1 billion in new school construction, with a loss of about 11,000 new seats, compared to the capital plan that was adopted last June.  Queens would suffer cuts of over 6,000 seats and Bronx nearly that many.  For more on the proposed seat cuts by district, see our presentation here.

So now we need your help.  Please take the following three steps:

• Call the Mayor at #311 and your Council Member.  You can find your CM phone number by plugging your address at https://council.nyc.gov/districts/   Tell them: “Please do not cut the budget to schools or the capital plan; which would cause class sizes to increase and worse overcrowding.  Instead, provide dedicated funding to further reduce class size and make it more equitable across the city.”

• Then send an email message to the Chancellor by clicking here,  saying the much same thing.

•   Finally, please volunteer to join us in a meeting with your Council Member to urge them to fight these cuts, by filling out the Google form here, or by responding to this message. 

•  Ask your CEC or Community Board to pass a resolution on opposing these cuts; a sample resolution is posted here.

Though the Council has pushed the Mayor to restore many of his proposed cuts, they have not said anything about reversing his devastating cuts to school budgets, which would likely cause the sharpest class size increases since the Great Recession. 

Nor have they said anything about the proposed $1.1 billion in cuts to the capital plan.  The City Council needs to hear from their constituents that they care passionately about this issue.

 Thanks so much for your support and please forward this message to others who care.

Our briefing on class size, overcrowding, student privacy & likely impact of huge proposed cuts to school budgets and new school construction

 Last night we presented information to the Citywide Council on High Schools on class size, overcrowding and the likely impact of the huge proposed cuts to school budgets and the capital plan.  They also wanted a short briefing of the privacy issue, especially as our schools suffered a huge breach of the personal student data accessed by the Skedula/Pupil path program.  Take a look and let us know if you want a briefing on any of these issues for your CEC, Citywide Council  or Community group by emailing us at info@classsizematters.org.  thanks!

What Illuminate, NYC DOE & the NY State Education Department did wrong to enable one of the largest student data breaches in US history

Late Friday, in a weekend news dump, the NYC Department of Education revealed
that the personal data of about 820,000 students, past and present, had been breached from the program known as Skedula and Pupil Path, who attended NYC public schools going back to the year 2016.  These programs were developed by NYC teachers, but are now owned by a company called Illuminate.

This was possibly the largest district breach in US history, according to Doug Levin, a data security expert who was quoted in the Daily News, (though this Pearson breach that affected multiple districts was larger.)  There have also been articles in the NY Post and The Record about this hugely damaging breach.

According to these articles, Illuminate says that hackers gained access to the names, birthdays, race and ethnicities, home languages and ID numbers of current and former public-school students, going back to the 2016-17 school year, including in some cases, their disability and free lunch status as well.

If you are a parent whose children was affected by the breach, or you suspect your children might have been; please here is a sample message you can send to DOE to try to find out what data Illuminate had access to for your child.  You can also reach out to us to let us know if you've heard anything from DOE or Illuminate about this, and/or email us info@studentprivacymatters.org with any questions.

This seems to have occurred during the program’s extended shutdown in January, which we wrote about at the time, speculating that it might have been caused by hackers and may be signalling a data breach.  At that point, both DOE and Illuminate tried to tamp down concerns.  As the DOE spokesperson was quoted by the NY Post at the time, “We’re in close communication with Illuminate Education as they investigate and have been informed that so far there is no confirmation any of our schools’ information was accessed or taken.”

The Post added: “The company did not explain or return messages from The Post, but emailed principals Friday it is transferring the data to a “new secured environment, ” implying that the data had not previously been sufficiently secured.

I was quoted in the Post that teachers often use the system to record very sensitive information about a student’s emotional state or behavior, and to recommend counseling or other intervention services.  It is not clear at this point if those communications and records were breached as well.

Skedula was originally developed by NYC teachers, who started a company called Datacation that was later bought up  by IO Education, which in turn was purchased by Illuminate Education.  According to the NY Post,  Illuminate has received more than $16 million from DOE in the last three years for the use of these programs.  Abram Jiminez, who was hired by ex-Chancellor Carranza to lead a school improvement office, previously worked at Illuminate, and held stock in the company.  He was later forced to quit after the conflict-of-interest was exposed,  as well as other earlier scandals .

Now it turns out that not all the data held by Illuminate was properly encrypted, despite promises made by the vendor in their contractual agreements and as is required by the state student privacy law.  Pertinent language from the NYS student privacy law Education Section 2D, passed in 2014, is  excerpted below:

Many years ago, I submitted a FOIL request without success for all the privacy agreements that DOE had with vendors who had access to student personal information to see if these agreements complied with the state law.  I re-submitted the FOIL request Sept. 2020, more than a year and a half ago. 

After the breach late Friday, the DOE sent me a link to 960 pages of documents consisting of their privacy agreements with 19 vendors, including Illuminate.  Though lengthy, this is far from a comprehensive list, considering DOE contracts with literally hundreds of ed tech vendors whose products they encourage schools to use.

The Illuminate privacy agreements I received are now posted here, along with my comments.  They seem to require relatively strict security controls, including periodic risk assessments,  a mutually agreed upon risk mitigation plan, the right for DOE to review all incidence response reports, and to request an SSAE16 report from the vendor (which I believe means a security audit.)

Moreover, Illuminate also “shall allow DOE, upon reasonable notice, to perform security assessments or audits of systems that handle or support Confidential Information. Such an assessment shall be conducted by an independent 3rd party agreed upon by the Vendor and the DOE.” In addition, vendors must engage an independent company to assess the security of their systems annually and produce audit logs for all systems that manage private information.

At this point, it is unclear if the vendor complied with any of these mandates, or if DOE ever asked them to do so, even after the January outage occurred.

In addition, the vendor was required to inform DOE of any suspected breach within 24 hours, instead of waiting for months, as they did in this case.

There is some evidence to suggest that the breach may have occurred when the data was being transferred to an Amazon cloud from a Google cloud. See pp. 34-35, for the question and response by Illuminate on the issue of where the personally identifiable student information (PISI) was stored:

 

This evasive language suggests that at least some of the data was initially stored on an insecure Google Cloud that was not in the US; though they did not answer the question of where it was located.

The following passage implies that migrating data "in bulk" is risky; and if this is attempted, it must be approved in advance by DOE InfoSec:

 

Did DOE approve of this data transfer?  Did they ask any questions about the Google cloud, referenced above?  If DOE did not do its due diligence to follow up on any of these issues, either when the contract was signed or especially after  the January cyberattack occurred,  it is nearly as much at fault as Illuminate.

There is also evidence from this document that DOE profoundly misunderstands FERPA, the primary federal law that protects privacy .  They write the following:

 

And yet actually, FERPA regulates the behavior of districts and schools, not vendors. 

Instead, DOE is responsible for limiting access to any and all student information that Illuminate did not need to perform its contractual obligations, including the highly sensitive student disability information and Free lunch status that ended up being hacked. 

Also, the DOE should have made clear in the contract that all student data should be destroyed, not just when the contract lapsed, but annually, or at the very least, when students left the system, which clearly did not happen.

In any case, it is clear from the law and these documents that the vendor can and should be punished for delaying notification of this breach by as much as $8 million dollars, as well as have its contract immediately revoked, and further fines and possible criminal penalties imposed for lying about having encrypted the data.

Chalkbeat ran an article yesterday about what parents can do to protect their kids from identify theft at this point.  More advice here from JD Supra. Kids’ data is especially vulnerable to identity theft because they have no credit history, and current estimates are that this affects one in every 50 children, and costs families nearly $1 billion a year. Usually, districts or the vendors themselves sign up parents for free for services that are supposed to monitor identity theft– companies like Experian. Unfortunately, in order to sign up, parents have to provide them these companies more personal data, though these companies themselves experienced their own data breaches.

Sadly, there is really no recovering from the harm of having your child’s personal data spilled out on the internet.  The most important lesson to take from this tragic incident is to make sure that DOE cleans up their act in the future by taking the following precautions:

1- DOE should minimize data sharing with third party vendors – instead of encouraging schools to sign up with hundreds of these data-gobbling ed tech companies, as they have done.

2- DOE should minimize the amount of personal data shared with each of their vendors, to restrict this disclosure to ONLY what the vendor needs  to perform its contracted services, rather than give unlimited access, as seems to have happened here.  

3- In their contracts, DOE should require that their vendors should be required to immediately delete student data annually from their records and certainly once the student has graduated.

4- DOE must provide rigorous oversight to ensure that their vendors perform and provide the independent security analyses, reporting, and audits required, including proof of encryption, and if they do not, cut them off immediately, fine them to the maximum, and cut off all future contracts.

5- Finally, the State Education Department should strictly enforce all the provisions in the state law, which still has not happened, despite the fact that the law was passed in 2014.

If you are a parent whose children was affected by the breach, or you suspect your children might have been; please here is a sample message you can send to DOE to try to find out what data Illuminate had access to for your child.  You can also reach out to us at info@studentprivacymatters.org with any questions, and let let us know if you've heard anything from DOE or Illuminate about this.

 

Latest Talk out of School: How parents can navigate the frustrating special education system in NYC public schools

 

On the latest Talk out of School podcast, aired on WBAI on Saturday, I gave a brief summary of the very eventful week just past.  

Then I interviewed to Jennifer Choi and Rachel Ford, NYC parents and co-founders of Special Support Services, about what happened to kids with special needs last year during the height of the pandemic, how parents can navigate the complex and frustrating system in NYC to better ensure that their children with disabilities receive the services they  are legally entitled to, and what suggestions they have for changing the overall NYC system, which has frustrated so many parents with long delays. 

Some resources we mentioned are below;  past episodes of Talk out of School are here.

Resources

Class Size Matters report shows significant declines in citywide class sizes that will increase once again if Mayor’s budget cuts are made, March 20, 2022

Class Size Matters testimony at the Council education budget hearings, March 21, 2022 

COVID Case Counts More Than Doubled in Public Schools Since Last Month, DOE Data Shows, The City, March 23, 2022

NYC education panel breaks with city to reject $82M contract,  NY Post, March 24, 2022

Personal data of 820,000 NYC students compromised in hack, NY Post, March 26, 2022

Special Support Services website

NYC DOE Special Education Standard Operating Procedures Manual   

NYC DOE IEP Translation Unit

How To Make Parent Support line P311 Work For Your Child

Jennifer Choi testimony at NYS Senate & Assembly hearings on School Governance,  March 4, 2022

Surge of complaints by parents of special education students sparks ‘crisis’, Chalkbeat, May  28, 2019 

NYC vows to address special education failures detailed in state review. But will their reforms go far enough?, Chalkbeat, July 9, 2019 

NYC Special Education Complaint Backlog Grows — Even as Some Hearing Officers Twiddle Thumbs, The City, Nov. 15, 2021

How another sketchy contract to be voted on tomorrow by the Panel for Educational Policy highlights the need for more financial accountability in the current system

Update Wed. night; at 8:30 PM. Amazingly the PEP voted down this Contract, only the 2nd time in its history.  "The vote was 6 yes, 5 no votes & 3 three abstentions the resolution does not pass." Tom Allon, mayoral appointee voted no, as did the new Manhattan appointee Kaliris Salas Ramirez, the new Brooklyn appointee Tazin Azad, and the  Bronx appointee Geneal Chacon, and Tom Shepherd, the CEC appointee. Mayoral appointee Alan Ong abstained, as did the Queens appointee Deb Dillingham and Staten Island appointee. Jaclyn Tacoronte. More on this here.. 

Update later in the afternoon on March 22: since I posted this a few minutes ago, the Mayor's office announced his nine appointments.  Newly announced member (presumably to replace Joe Belluck) is Dr. Vasthi Acosta, the executive director of Amber Charter Schools. There are several reps connected with charter schools, and I am quoted in the NY Post about why this is problematic.

Tomorrow, Wed. March 23 will be the second meeting of the NYC school board under our new mayor, Mayor Eric Adams. Since Mayoral control was instituted in 2002, the board has been composed of a super-majority of Mayoral appointees. 

At that time, it was renamed the Panel for Educational Policy (PEP) by then-Mayor Bloomberg, though according to state law it is still officially called the NYC Board of Education. Among the Panel’s duties is to approve Department of Education contracts, with many inflated and wasteful contracts rubber-stamped over the last twenty years. Only once in its history has it voted down a contract: last year, when a majority of members voted in the midst of the pandemic not to approve a contract to Pearson for the test given to four-year-old students to be admitted into NYC’s controversial gifted program. 

Even though the law requires monthly meetings of the PEP, the Chancellor cancelled the January meeting.  Eight new members appointed by the Mayor participated at the February meeting, though their names and contact information are still not posted on the relevant PEP page . Instead, the names that are listed still include the eight members appointed by de Blasio, who vacated their posts at the end of December. The identities of the new appointees can be found in the minutes of the February meeting, though no contact information or biographies. 

The ninth member who was slated to be appointed by the Mayor in February was Joe Belluck, an attorney who is also the chair of the SUNY committee that authorizes charter schools. Belluck withdrew his name right before the meeting. This was presumably due to conflict-of-interest issues, given that charter schools take away valuable public school space through co-locations approved by the Panel, and now cost the DOE budget more than $2.6 billion dollars annually. (Full disclosure: my organization, Class Size Matters, put out a press release against Belluck’s appointment the day before he withdrew.) 

The new schools Chancellor David Banks, also appointed by the Mayor, has repeatedly said he wants to save money by cutting waste and the bureaucracy. At tomorrow’s meeting, among the many contracts they will be voting upon tomorrow is one for a company called 22nd Century Technologies, at $16.5 million per year, renewable for five years at a total of $82.5 million. The contract is listed as “Recruiting and Staffing Services for Temporary Professionals.” This company, the contract proposal says, will be paid to hire “consultants in a wide range of disciplines across DOE schools, central offices, and/or NYCDOE Borough/Citywide offices” and will be “responsible for identifying, processing upon selection, and managing the consultants it recruits and those referred by the DOE.” The company will charge “markup fees of 17.35% and 22.50% for DOE-referred and vendor-recruited consultants, respectively.” 

There is little detail about what these consultants will actually be doing, except for that they will be “used in a wide variety of areas including special education, curriculum design and development, all of which are needed to ensure the successful execution of several temporary DOE projects or needs. “ The mention of curriculum design may relate to the Mosaic curriculum, which initially being developed by “a team of administrators and teachers … during their off hours”, according to the Daily News, but whose roll-out has been delayed. Of the $16.5 million being paid to this company, the document says nearly half will go to “supporting work that is legally mandated specialized expertise” and “supporting stimulus projects” – which I assume means federal stimulus funds, without identifying what this expertise or these projects involve. 

The reason for hiring consultants, the document claims, is that “because consultants are better suited to complete short-term tasks for schools and/or offices, instead of using full-time DOE employees.” Even if the use of consultants is advisable in this case, there is no reason why the DOE should not hire consultants directly, but instead must pay another company to hire and manage them, with a markup of 22.50% and/or 17.35%, the latter if DOE officials recruit these consultants themselves. In any case, we can expect that the mayoral appointees will rubber-stamp this contract as they have in the past, with few if any questions asked, and no discussion of larger issues. 

The DOE has lost millions in fraudulent contracts since Mayoral control was instituted in 2002. Just some of them are recounted in my City Council testimony from 2011. What this testimony doesn’t include is what happened four years later. In 2015, along with then-Public Advocate Tish James and CM Danny Dromm, we blew the whistle on a proposed $1.1 billion five year contract, renewable at $2 billion, that was supposed to be awarded Custom Computer Specialists, a computer wiring company that had been involved in a kickback scheme just a few years before. The PEP approved this contract anyway, with a vote of 10-1, but as a result of the ensuing scandal, City Hall kicked it back, and the contract was rebid and awarded to several different companies at a far reduced price of $472 million, with savings to the city of between $163 million and $627 million. 

Another result of the CCS scandal was that DOE promised from then on to publicly to post all prospective contract requests for authorization at least 30 days in advance, to allow for more scrutiny by Panel members as well as to allow for improved independent oversight. As Juan Gonzalez wrote about this result in the Daily News: “Tweed will even post information on all bids on its website 30 days before the scheduled vote by the panel, and has committed to do the same with other contracts.” Yet the DOE stopped doing this in April 2020 – nearly two years ago. 

According to a New York state education law passed in 2005, all school board members must receive at least six hours of training in financial oversight, accountability, and fiduciary responsibilities. There is an exception in the law for NYC, but only if as the chancellor annually certifies to the commissioner in writing that the training they provide “meets or exceeds the requirements of this section.” Yet PEP members have told me privately and been quoted in the media to say that they have received only minimal training in financial oversight – and much less than the six hours that the law requires. 

 I recently filed a Freedom of Information request to the State Education Department for a copy of the annual certification from the NYC Chancellor, attesting that the training provided PEP members was compliant with the law, for the years 2019, 2020 and 2021. I received a response from NYSED that they had received no such certification. 

This is one of the reasons in my recent testimony before the State Legislature on Mayoral control, I strongly recommended that the governance law in NYC be amended to require that the City Comptroller’s office take over this important responsibility. The DOE has gotten in trouble before when hiring companies to manage consultants – in the case of the Ross Lanham scandal, in which Custom Computer Specialists was also involved and millions were fraudulently charged to DOE for a different computer wiring scheme, as detailed in a report from the office of Special Investigator and in the indictment by then- US Attorney Preet Bharara. This scandal apart from the money stolen cost NYC more than $100 million in federal E-rate funds. 

This may not happen in this case. But if the Chancellor is concerned about cutting down on waste and bureaucracy, this is a strange way to go about doing it.