One of the more troubling features of the New York City Department of Education under Children First has been the proliferation of contracts with various private and for profit corporations, including a large number of ‘no bid’ contracts. The finances of the nation’s largest school district are being operated as if its books were those of a Lower East Side family deli, without the checks and balances, the transparency and the accountability that should be in place with the expenditure of public funds provided by the taxpayers of New York City.
New Yorkers are now seeing the fruits of such usurpation of the public trust. First, there has been the ongoing school bus debacle, provided courtesy of the ‘no bid’ work of Alvarez and Marsal. Now an article in today’s New York Times, “Tutoring Company Is Paid Far More Than Contracts Specify, Comptroller Says,” brings further news of the extraordinary misuse of public funds at Tweed.
New York City Comptroller William Thompson revealed that the Department of Education had paid Platform Learning, a private tutoring company now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy hearings, nearly nine times the amount it was entitled under two contracts with Tweed. The company took in $63 million while it was entitled to $7.6 million.
If this was not bad enough, consider that Platform Learning was found last year by the Special Commissioner of Investigations to be hiring employees who had criminal arrest records, and to be offering “students and educators money and gifts for choosing its services.”
“Our contracts with Platform Learning,” DOE spokesperson Andrew Jacob told the Times, “give us the flexibility to provide all families the type of tutoring they think is best for their children.” Wouldn’t you like such “flexibility” in your financial arrangements, with returns increased to the tune of multiples of nine? What is amazing is that with this sort of largese from Tweed, Platform Learning still finds itself in bankruptcy.
And now New Yorkers are supposed to trust the same crew at Tweed to outsource public education, with a whole series of contracts for private and for profit corporations to operate as partnerships for New York City public schools. Reports from the “bidders conference” for these partnerships held Wednesday tell of a five hour meeting that ended after an hour and a half, when people began walking out in disgust at the confused replies and non-answers they were receiving. Weeks after the latest phase in the continuing permanent structural revolution has been announced, Department of Education officials are still unable to answer such fundamental questions as whether or not high schools will have their own district, separate from elementary and middle schools.
Would you buy a pastrami sandwich from these guys?
Tagged: Children First
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5 Comments:
1 institutional memory
· Feb 9, 2007 at 4:38 pm
SOMEWHERE, BOSS TWEED MUST BE THINKING, “YER MAKIN’ ME PROUD, BOY-O, KEEPIN’ MY NAME ALIVE!”
Isn’t it rich that Joel Klein and his boys operate out of a building named for New York’s all-time championship grifter, William Marcy “Boss” Tweed?
Would it be a greater irony if the place were named for Willie (“I rob banks because that’s where the money is”) Sutton, or the inimitable Charles K. Ponzi, the eponymous inventor of the Ponzi Scheme?
You can’t make this stuff up!
2 R. Skibins
· Feb 9, 2007 at 10:38 pm
New York City Comptroller William Thompson should investigate Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg for the no-bid contract for Everyday Math. This program, rejected by the state of California and many school districts across the nation, is creating a generation od functional illiterates.
Rumor has it that former deputy chancellor Diama Lam’s husband was employed by the publishers of Everyday math. If this is true, then the program should immediately be scrapped, and Chancellor Klein should be fired.
3 xkaydet65
· Feb 10, 2007 at 11:32 am
You want a real Ponzi scheme, look no further than America’s Choice. AC is one of the preferred vendors of pedagogical gruel. Its boss, a guy named Tucker, first name escapes me, has spent years convincing principals and LISs to adopt his curricula. You pay $75K and AC will do the rest.
Now many schools have come up with the cash, but are not receiving the promised services. No training, no school visits, maybe an occasional trip to a demonstration school for a couple or three teachers. I know two principals who are openly wondering here in February what did they spend their money for.
I do find it hard to believe that a self professed liberal Democrat like Klein, who loyally served the Clintons in two areas, would be so venal as to allow the DoE to become mired in such a coruptive mess. No bid contracts, 900% overpayments on contracts, handing jobs to corporations of proven incompetence.
Its time for somebody, not the UFT I am afraid because their track record shows an inability to coherently criticize the DoE, to put all these dots together and show the city what a corrupt and incompetent crew has wrought in Education in this town.
I’m not necessarily anti corruption. When my maternal grandfather was Jimmy Walker’s Hospital Commish, with a grade school education, every ambulance in NYC had a doctor on board and Bellevue was the finest municipal medical facility in the world. But old time Pols knew they had to deliver to the goods. Modern reformers deliver to themselves.
4 institutional memory
· Feb 11, 2007 at 10:18 am
CONFLICT OF INTEREST? NAH, THAT’S OUTDATED … IT’S A CONFLUENCE OF INTEREST!
It’s funny how much one can learn poking around on Platform Learning’s website:
“Prior to co-founding Platform, [CEO Eugene V.] Wade was Executive Vice President for Development at Edison Schools.”
What a remarkable coincidence! Platform Learning has a connection to Edison! Amazing!
Call me cynical, but I’ll bet Wade and Chris Cerf might even know each other.
What a small world.
5 Jackie Bennett
· Feb 11, 2007 at 2:10 pm
As Klein makes a fetish of test-score accountability, it will be interesting to see who will hold him accountable for the Platform Learning sinkhole into which he and the DoE funnelled 63 million dollars in NCLB funds.
DoE claimed it couldn’t have known in advance how many students the company would tutor, thus the nine-fold discrepancy between amount contracted and amout paid. But that very thin excuse seems to disappear completely by the time the second contract rolled around. By the time of the mere 1.9 million contract in 05 , Platform had already taken 40 million.
What’s especially interesting to me is that the investigation of Platform (along with Newton, a subsidiary of Edison) started BEFORE DoE entered into the second contract . The investigation started in September of 2004, and it included the improper practices Leo Casey mentioned in the main post.
The 04 investigation didn’t conclude until March of 06. Nonetheless, its presence ought to have given the DoE pause as it considered the second contract. At the very least, there ought to have been closer scrutiny. But apparently, there wasn’t . A year after the investigation began, Platform was able to enter a second contract for 1.9 milion. which, if I am reading the Times article correct, earned Platform an additional 23 million for the grand total of 63.
63 million is a heck of a lot of money, but Platform filed for bankruptcy.
The head of Platform Learning? Eugene Wade (who is, among other things, a bankruptcy lawyer).
And who before that was executive vice president at Ediison.
From whence comes …Christopher Cerf.