Bloomberg Acquires Naming Rights to City Schools

September 11, 2009 (GBN News): In a dramatic City Hall news conference, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced today that he has purchased the naming rights to the entire NY City school system. Henceforth, each city school will be called “Bloomberg School” followed by the school number. For example, PS 221 will now be known as “Bloomberg School 221”.

The Mayor promised that “every penny” of the $2 billion purchase price will go “straight to the classroom” in the form of charter school funding and merit pay for teachers. US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, saying that the deal “Personifies both the letter and the spirit of our reforms”, immediately announced the Education Department will match the $2 billion with an equal amount of “Race to the Top” stimulus funds.

Critics pounced on the deal, contending that it is illegal to name a school after a living person. However, State Senator Frank Padavan, for whom the former Glen Oaks Campus was named (coincidently right before his own re-election bid), looked very much alive as he told GBN News, “If they can name it for a mere State Senator, they can certainly do it for someone as rich – I mean, as prominent – as the Mayor.”

In other news, Bloomberg LP, the Mayor’s own financial software and data company, announced today that it has been awarded a contract with the NY City Board of Elections to provide the city with new computerized voting machines. The machines are expected to be delivered in time for the upcoming Mayoral election, and a company spokesperson said that city voters will be “really happy with some of the features of the new machines.” For example, he said, as a convenience to the many voters who intend to vote for the Mayor, Mr. Bloomberg’s name will be highlighted in large print, “with little stars next to it so nobody will miss it.”

Class size audit: another broken promise to our children

City Comptroller Thompson released a class size audit on Wednesday, showing that in 2007-8, the city misused $47 million meant to reduce class size in K-3rd grades. Instead, schools used these funds on other budget items. Press release is here; the full audit is here.

The city is a serial offender when it comes to class size. Since 2006, there have been at least five audits and reports showing how the city has misused nearly a billion dollars in state funds meant for be used to hire new teachers to reduce class size. Yet there are now nearly 2,000 fewer classes in grades K-8 and 1600 fewer classroom teachers. Meanwhile, the number of high paid administrators and out of classroom positions has mushroomed.

The case studies in the latest audit are particularly interesting. One school, PS 36 in the Bronx, received $455,000 to create four extra classes in K-3, but instead subtracted two classes. As a result, they had 23.5 kids in Kindergarten classes, rather than 19; 29 students in 1st grade classes instead of 22; and 30 kids in 2nd grade classes instead of 18.

Another example: PS 327 in Brooklyn, which was allocated $335,000 and should have added four extra classes to reduce class size, but only added one. Both schools had the classroom space, according to the “Blue Book,” but didn’t follow through. Other schools that had no space to reduce class size were allocated these funds, while schools that had space were not provided with any class size funds.

The administration’s response to their failure to properly monitor the use of these funds? That the program has “ceased to exist.”

However the Early Grade class size reduction budget allocation memo is still listed on the DOE website for FY 2010 as an "externally restricted" program. The full budget memo is here, with specific rules that are supposed to be followed -- rules that according to this audit, were flagrantly violated.

Moreover, the city promised to the state to continue the program, even after it was formally folded into the Contracts for Excellence (C4E). The DOE stated as part of its C4E plan that "the Department continues to be committed to reducing class size in early grades via the Early Grade Class Size Reduction program."

Here’s another, equally creative response to the audit, from Joel Klein, on WNYC radio:

“KLEIN: We've put all the state money, we got lots of state money for that and it's all been put into lower class size. People say, well last year it went up a few tenths of a point or something like that, but last year we had budget cuts.”

What? They have never spent the state funds appropriately and in fact, the city is a serial offender when it comes to class size. See this summary; and these charts, showing the large increases by district throughout the city last year, particularly in grades K-3.

Check out how your district did. Click on the chart below, for visual evidence that there was no relationship between the schools that received C4E funds to reduce class size, and those that actually did.

Yet more broken promises to our children.

Smaller classes remain the top priority of parents, according to the DOE’s own surveys. The state’s highest court said that NYC children have been deprived of their constitutional right to an adequate education because of excessive class sizes. Class size reduction is now a state mandate, and yet the DOE continues to violate the law, with little or no compunction. In fact, last school year, class sizes increased by the largest amount in ten years.

We will be asking the state to withhold any more C4E funds from NYC until the city actually follows through on its moral and legal commitments to our children and reduces class size.

Some news articles about the audit are here: Space crunch keeps kids at home, bussed elsewhere, as packed classes begin in city -- Daily News; DOE misspends millions: Class size sky-rockets -- Examiner.com; Thompson says DOE spent class size reduction money elsewhere -- GothamSchools; Comptroller Says DOE Didn't Use All Funds for Smaller Class Sizes --WNYC; Thompson Claims Mayor, DOE Misused Funds -- NY1.

City's claims re school construction are as inflated as the school grades

See today’s column by Juan Gonzalez in which he shows how the administration’s claims as regards school construction are as inflated as the school grades.

Many buildings claimed as “new school construction” are instead space leased in office buildings or parochial schools. What’s the problem with counting leased seats the same as new school construction? For one thing, the city never includes in their calculation how many seats are lost each year, when leased spaces lapse.

See this list of leases for Manhattan schools alone -- with thousands of seats subtracted due to lost leases in recent years. And the list is not even complete. For example, Baruch College HS, which lost its space last year, will spend one year in the former School for the Physical City, until that lease is finished, with no permanent home yet for the future.

The city’s press release also blatantly claims that this year’s total of 13,000 seats plus last year’s total, “represents the most-ever new classroom seats to come on line in a two-year period since the School Construction Authority was created in 1988.”

This is false. As Juan writes, “During three of those years, Giuliani created an average of 19,000 new seats. Under Bloomberg, the city has created more than 14,000 seats only once, in 2005, and school overcrowding continues to grow.”

No matter how you slice it, nearly any two years during the Giuliani administration produced bigger totals. Click on the chart above, with data taken directly from Mayor’s Management Reports.

Also, while the press release claims that “the 2005-2009 Capital Plan [was] the largest school construction effort in the City’s history,” this is not true either. Many previous administrations have built many more seats. Even Kathleen Grimm, Deputy Chancellor, was forced to admit this at a recent City Council hearing, when Robert Jackson presented her with the facts. See this account at Gotham Schools.

And the overcrowding has worsened, contrary to what City Hall claims. According to the DOE’s “Blue Book” 48 percent of students attended overcrowded schools as of the 2007-8 school year. This compares to 43 percent of students the year before. (We have no data as of 2008-9 as of yet.) Hundreds of children were put on waiting lists for Kindergarten this fall.

The new five year capital plan further cuts the number of new seats by 60 percent -- which will provide only approximately one third of the space necessary to eliminate current overcrowding and reduce class size to state-mandated levels -- and will do nothing to address the increased enrollment expected in neighborhoods throughout the city.

Three recent reports, from the NYC Comptroller, from the Manhattan Borough President, and from the Campaign for a Better Capital Plan, have each pointed out how school construction has lagged considerably behind the needs of our growing school-age population.

Just yesterday, the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer put out yet another report, School Daze, showing how the DOE’s enrollment projections have consistently fallen short, and do not take into count the growth of new residential development, making it likely that thousands of Manhattan children will be left without schools in the near future.

Our classrooms are already overcrowded, and our children are facing a worsening crisis unless the city faces the truth – and builds more schools. In a recent survey, 86 percent of principals said that their class sizes were already too large to provide a quality education.

Indeed, the city is supposed to grow by a million residents by 2030 – without any plan to deal with the increased number of schoolchildren this will entail. Yet the only mention of schools in the PlaNYC report that detailed the need for improvements in every other aspect of the city’s infrastructure was a recommendation that excess school buildings should be renovated into more housing.

Already, the city’s share of capital spending going to schools has fallen sharply – click on the chart to the right. This disturbing trend is likely to continue, given the hugely inadequate new five year capital plan.