Bake Sale Ban Leaves Thompson Without Dough

October 4, 2009 (GBN News): A provision in the NY City Department of Education’s recent ban on bake sales in schools may adversely affect Mayoral candidate William Thompson’s ability to compete financially with Mayor Bloomberg. The prohibition on this traditional form of fund raising purportedly seeks to limit the availability of unhealthy foods in schools. But the ban does not just affect PA’s and PTA’s. According to a fine print provision of Chancellor’s Regulation A-812, “All current and former employees of the Department of Education are prohibited from selling non-approved food items.” As a former Board of Education President, Mr. Thompson would presumably fall under this stipulation.

Mr. Thompson already faces a huge gap between Mayor Bloomberg’s spending, already over $60 million, and his own, which so far totals just under $4 million. With many expected Thompson donors sitting on the sidelines in the face of the billionaire Mayor’s huge resources and consequent political power, the Democratic candidate had begun resorting to bake sales to raise badly needed funds. But the DOE ban could leave him, like the school parent organizations, starved for funds.

J. Fredrick Runson, head of the Political Science Department at the Manhattan Culinary Institute, says that the bake sale ban could backfire on the Mayor. “Clearly, the ban seeks to stifle both parent groups and political opponents of the Mayor,” Dr. Runson told GBN News. “But look at the bright side. His opponents will now get healthier, while he himself continues to indulge in all of the stuff he bans for everyone else. They’ll eventually outlast him.”

Truth meter of Bloomberg's education campaign claims at zero

The NY Times revealed today that Mayor Bloomberg has spent $65 million so far on his re-election campaign-- on his way to spend around $120 million, which would break all records, including his own. In contrast, his opponent Bill Thompson has spent less than $4 million. Bloomberg has spent $22 million on TV ads, and $10 million on mailings -- including at least five copious large postcards filling the mailboxes of every New Yorker, trumpeting his achievements in the field of public education. Let's a take a careful look at these claims.

Claim: Reading Scores UP 27.5 percentage points.

REALITY: the most reliable assessments, the federal exams known as the NAEPs, show no improvement in reading scores since the Bloomberg/Klein policies were put in place. Meanwhile, the state tests have become so easy over time that a student can pass simply by random guessing.

Claim: School Crime DOWN 44%.

REALITY: Reports from the Public Advocate's office and an audit from the Comptroller's office find the practice of underreporting of school crime in NYC schools is widespread. Because of the unreliability of such statistics, the DOE does not even incorporate this data into their school grading system.


Claim: Dropout rates DOWN 6.5 percentage points.


REALITY: While graduation rates are up, so are the number of students discharged from our schools without diplomas, but not counted as dropouts. More than 21 percent of NYC students were discharged from high schools without graduating in 2007, the latest year we have data, and the those discharged in their first year of high school has doubled, for unexplained reasons. The higher the discharge rate, the higher the graduation rate, since all these students are removed from the cohort, as explained in this report.

It has also become easier for students to graduate from high school without completing their course work or attending classes through the discredited practice of credit recovery, in which they can gain credits for courses that they would ordinarily have failed by attending a few weekend sessions or doing an independent project.

Claim: Cut $350 million from the bureaucracy and put it in the classroom.


REALITY: This is one of the most repeated claims of this administration, with no independent evidence to back it up. In 2003, the DOE claimed cuts to the bureaucracy of $250 million, mostly from dissolving the school districts, but the Independent Budget Office and the City Comptroller found little evidence of these savings, nor how such funds had been redirected. See also NY Times, “On How Much City Schools Cut Bureaucracy, a Rebuttal”, and NY Daily News, “Ed Dept. savings called shell game.”

What has happened since then? The claim of $250 million in savings has now mysteriously been inflated to $350 million, while the cost of over-paid consultants and educrats at Tweed has grown, as have the no-bid contracts, with more than $340 million awarded by DOE between FY 2005 and FY 2008 alone.

This NY Times analysis shows that over the course of the Bloomberg’s reign, the number of administrators, data coaches, school secretaries, and other out-of-classroom positions has increased by an astonishing 10,000, while the number of classroom teachers has fallen by more than 1600 . Those employees making over $100,000 has quadrupled – even after adjusting for inflation. Joel Klein has said he would like to continue this damaging trend of disinvesting in the classroom by further shrinking the number of teachers by 30 percent.

Sign a letter to Commissioner Steiner now!

The deadline for comments on the city's Contracts for Excellence is October 8; please lend your support by signing onto the below letter to the newState Commissioner of Education, David Steiner, urging him to make NYC comply with the law and start reducing class size now.

We are now at the mid-point of the city's mandated five year class size reduction plan, yet class sizes continue to rise, our schools are growing more overcrowded every day, and the city continues to ignore its moral and legal obligations to our children.

To sign this letter, composed by me and Robert Jackson, the chair of the NYC Council education committee, just email me and let me know your name school, district, office, or other affiliation, and whether you'd like an asterisk (affiliation for identification purpose only.)

If you're interested in more information on this issue, as well as chartsand citations to back up our statements in the letter, you can check out our C4E fact sheet. You can also send comments to DOE by emailing ContractsForExcellence@schools.nyc.gov

To Commissioner Steiner:

We urge you to require the city to start reducing class size now, according to the terms of its Contracts for Excellence (C4E). Smaller classes remain the top priority of NYC parents, according to the Department of Education's own surveys, and the state's highest court said that our children were deprived of their constitutional right to an adequate education in large part because of excessive class sizes.

In return for receiving hundreds of millions of dollars in additional state funds, the city promised that class sizes would be lowered each year until the citywide average would be no more than 20 students per class in grades K-3 and 23 in all other grades by the fall of 2011.

Class size reduction is now a state mandate, and yet last year class sizes increased last year bythe largest amount in ten years; and there are widespread reports of further increases this year.

In addition, the C4E process for public participation has been deeply flawed, as the city failed to hold any public hearings this past June, as recommended by the state, and has refused to hold any borough hearings, as required by law. Instead, a power point is being presented to CommunityEducation Councils which omits any mention of the city's five year class size reduction plan, as well as the DOE's failure to meet its class size targets for two years in a row.

In its official C4E submission, the city pledged to the state that the "the Department continues to be committed to reducing class size in early gradesvia the Early Grade Class Size Reduction program." Yet when an audit was released in September, revealing the misuse of millions of dollars of thesefunds, the DOE claimed that the program "no longer exists." Please see attached fact sheet for more information on these findings.

Clearly, the city has reneged on its promise to reduce class size. It is time that the state utilizes its full oversight authority, and requires the city comply with the law.

We recommend that a corrective action plan be imposed with the following provisions:

1-The city's plan should be revised to include specific class size reduction goals by school, district, and citywide -- sufficient to achieve its annual and five year goals.

2-The city should be obligated to assign whatever teachers remain on absent teacher reserve (ATR) to regular classrooms in their respective districts, so that class sizes can be reduced from current levels.

3-The city should be forbidden from further pursuing any policies thatconflict with its class size goals, including placing new schools in buildings before smaller classes have been achieved in the existing schools. DOE continues to insert new schools into buildings where the existing school is "underutilized" according to a formula which assumes near maximum classsizes.

4. The state should require that the city revise its capital plan so that it can provide enough space necessary for its class size goals to be achieved,as the C4E regulations require.

5. The state should hold back all C4E funds before the city has reported to the state in detail what reductions have been achieved by school, district and citywide, reporting that is now mandated by the state to occur by November 17.

This year will be the mid-point in the city's five year class size reduction plan, instituted by the Legislature so that our children could eventually be assured of an adequate education. There is no time to waste.

If the State Education Department does not require these basic steps to demand accountability and credibility on the part of the city, it will have failed in its responsibilities to our children, to the Legislature, and to New York taxpayers.

Yours,

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters
Council Member Robert Jackson, chair, City Council Education Committee and Campaign for Fiscal Equity plaintiff

(See here for more signers.)