A Bumpy Week for Klein/Bloomberg and the Education Equality Project

by Clay Burell · 2009-04-06 07:04:00 UTC
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[While the below is about NYC, it's also nationally significant. Federal Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has signed as a supporter of the EEC, supports Klein/Bloomberg and mayoral control of schools, and spoke at the conference in NYC last week.]

It hasn't been a good week for NYC Schools Chancellor Joel Klein and the Education Equality Project (EEP) he co-founded (under suspicious circumstances) with Al Sharpton. (The EEP is the "test the students, silence the parents, close the schools, blame the teachers, ignore the socio-economic factors" wing of education reform.)

Not quite the party they'd planned? They held a conference this week - their biggest ever platform for the EEP, according to the pre-conference fanfare - that didn't seem to go over very well. Arne Duncan was met with boos when he announced his support of Mayor Bloomberg's control of NYC public schools. Al Sharpton himself backed away from supporting Klein's boss. A Q&A session featured critiques of Klein's claims of improvement and calls for his dismissal. See New York City Public School Parents for a good summary and web roundup about the event.

The EEP website doesn't pass the test for accuracy and rigor: Aaron Pallas at Gotham Schools saved me the labor of fact-checking the Education Equality Project's website, and here's the score: out of its 8 featured facts about the achievement gap, Pallas finds four are false, two are "toss-ups," and two are true. By my count, the Klein-Sharpton site would score 25% if this were a test. (Since two are toss-ups, I might make excuses for them and inflate the grade to a 40. But that goes against the "no excuses" mantra.)

Shades of AIG in NYC schools fiscal management: Klein's status as poster-boy of Eli Broad's "business administration" solution to urban school district administration may have taken a hit if the report by City Comptroller Bill Thompson on $700 million in contracting overruns for a two-year period is even partly accurate. (Thompson is running for mayor against Bloomberg.) Fred Klonsky highlights some whoppers:

  • Contracts for goods and services that have exceeded their cost estimates by nearly $700 million over the past two years.

  • A single $1 million contract with Xerox to lease copiers that ended up costing the DOE nearly $68 million.

  • A contract for cafeteria equipment that ballooned from roughly $15,000 to $850,000.

  • A software deal that went from $135,000 to $5.5 million.

Image by williac

Clay Burell
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