Aaron Short of the New York Post shows how New York City used the $107 million in Race to the Top funding that it received during the Bloomberg administration.
Let’s just sat it was NOT a game-changer:
“Bureaucrats are winning the Race to the Top.
“Less than a quarter of the $107 million that the school system received in federal Race to The Top funds last year was sent directly to school principals.
“The decision on how to spend most of the money — $83 million — was made by the central Department of Education, which channeled the federal funds to support staff, consultants and fringe benefits, according to a study by the Independent Budget Office.”
A spokesperson for the DOE defended the allocation of funds to central office, saying that it takes a lot of people to run such a big system.
My question: why is the de Blasio administration defending the bad decisions of the Bloomberg administration?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Your line, Mr. Rains …
didn’t di Blasio back off on appointing the anti-privatization chancellor that he should have? how can he be pressured now to meet campaign promises to parents?
Just like “the Texas Miracle”, “amazing” improvement in DC under Rhee, this was always a smoke and mirrors result. But no one is ever held accountable and told to explain the regression….the reformers will just move on to the next Miracle.
Farina and DeBlasio aren’t doing much to change the failed policies of the Bloomturd administration. There are still the money soaking networks, coaches, consultants, principals, vice principals, deans of mini schools, pre assessments, post assessments, data crunchers, lawyers, new systems, fixes to new systems, old systems, fixes to old systems, paperwork, paperwork, paperwork…….. And what do we get now from Farina – more time for poorly constructed professional development!!!
What DeBlasio can do right now is change the Fair Student Funding formula but I’m not holding my breath.
Agreed, my child’s school was forced to collapse a lower grade next year due to a some families moving away. 32 kids per class is unjust!
Don’t worry, RL: it turns out the provision in the contract that calls for more time for poorly constructed professional development doesn’t actually stipulate that the time has to be used for poorly constructed professional development. Same thing with the Tuesday block that’s supposed to be set aside for parent engagement.
It stinks that you have a lot of paperwork, but it appears you’ll now have a couple of hours free on Monday and Tuesday afternoons to whittle away at it.
“. . . more time for poorly constructed professional development!”
I so dearly love being professionally developed!
At the first sign of pushback from corporate types, alleged progressives like de Blasio run for cover. Doing what’s right is very hard, and it frequently involves falling on one’s sword. Constant accommodation of the enemy just cements their power through every type of administration.
Where is the pre November de Blasio? He was the man!!! Politics hit hard.
De Blasio and Farina should have walked through Tweed on her first day at work, news cameras in tow, and had every holdover from Bloomberg’s administration escorted out of the building by security, with a recommendation that they find representation from the criminal defense bar.
That they did not, and that serial school killers like Kathleen (The) Grimm (Reaper) are still drawing paychecks rather than putting up bail, shows how far liberals can be trusted when the Overclass has reached consensus, as it has regarding education.
As further evidence of the bait-and-switch, all of the demands for parent involvement – generated by school closings and re organizations, unresponsive networks, school bus schedules changed during mid-winter blizzards, etc. – have now supposedly been taken care of by dumping them in teacher’s laps via the new contract, which turns parent involvement into another empty mandate for teachers.
Public schools and their teachers are political orphans, folks, and the sooner our strategies reflect that, the more realistic the chance for our struggles’ success.
wow. heartbreak. can no one get thru to the mayor on this?
I remember when the Board of Education at 110 Livingston Street was depicted around the country as the embodiment of bureaucratic waste by Giuliani which lead to Crew’s departure as Chancellor. With guidance from the “reformers” who just hate government waste it appears to have gotten bigger and more wasteful than ever. Incredible!
Would this post be a reason to support district control over all schools or oppose it?
Given that the NYC public school district is responsible for educating over 1,100,000 students in over 1,700 schools, it is not surprising to me that parents might feel that they have more imput in a charter school like Community Roots Charter School than they would in the traditional public school system.
“The bureaucrats are winning the Race To The Top.”
The bureaucrats also are winning the War on Poverty. Yes or no?
If “yes,” then these two statements beg a question.
Community Roots Charter School isn’t even allowed to have a normal PTA, so if parents have that “feeling,” it is based on wishful thinking.
Documented abuse and misuse of public education funds. Can’t blame the teachers for this one. More damaging evidence against the plaintiffs in the upcoming teacher tenure case….
That would be a metric they could actually reliably measure.
How much ed reform money has actually made it into classrooms the last 20 years?
That might be a much more productive “debate” than elaborate formulas from economists and endless litigation.
Money is easy to count. I don’t know about other parents but I’d much rather my taxes go to a teachers salary than 5000 consultants. Ed reformers love data. Let’s look at some reliable numbers: money.
Good piece on How RttT cost public school districts way more than they gained.
We questioned Congressman Brian Higgins about why many school districts have seen a lack of Race to the Top funding. When the funds came to the state, Higgins hailed the infusion of dollars as a good investment.
“Clearly the federal government underestimated the costs associated with designing and implementing these programs in the individual states,” Higgins said, and that, there is no more funding to help districts unless Congress approves the money.”
When are they going to stop falling for this? We’re now going on 20 years of promises by national ed reformers in government that the cost of new mandates will be covered, and they never are. Couldn’t they have banked the funds BEFORE they agreed to put CC in? They’re going to be abandoned again, and worse, when and if it fails they will be blamed, again. CC will become just another in the endless list of reasons we need charter schools. At some point don’t public schools have to protect themselves? Obviously no one in DC gives them a second thought.
http://www.wgrz.com/story/news/education/2014/05/19/race-to-the-top-school-districts/9277183/
The visible Rheeformers are in it for their own paychecks via contributions to their foundations for excellence in syphoning pubic dollars into the end-game privateer pockets. I do think people are waking up to the nonsense, but all you wonderful bloggers and reporters of the truth have to keep on truthing and exposing the lies of the thieving educrats.
they want to drive parents who have options straight out of public schools, not into charters but into the private schools where they send their own children. Shame!
I found that my middle son had to go outside the public schools for courses that were a
Pro private to his individual educational needs.
All of us here know that it is all about you TE.
Really? What do you know?
Betsy,
A better response perhaps would be a request that Dr. Ravtich change the title of the blog to a better education form most or a better education for some. With that title, ignoring some students would be expected.
You have told us this 1,000 times. We got it TE.
What do we know?
We know that you’re a troll.
M.Fiorillo: I had a few conversations/debates with TE. When I used numbers to back up something he challenged there was no response. Claims to be a teaching economist but could be somebody just trying to disrupt the conversation.
TE, please reveal who programmed you. Are you an IBM or a Dell?
Were you spawned in an Apple factory in midland China?
Michael Brocoum,
You are indeed correct. The overwhelming majority of TE’s comments are intended to divert discussion from the topic at hand, and to validate the orthodox economic fundamentalism that is driving so-called school reform. Then he will occasionally throw in a relevant comment, in order to try and inoculate himself against the charge of being a Troll.
Diane does the right thing by letting him post; we do the right thing by ignoring him.
M. Fiorillo: Ignore is the operative word. He should receive zero responses. Eventually he will go away.
I hate to be the one to tell everyone to put down their pitchforks and torches, but this line from the piece–“The DOE insisted that almost all the federal funds ultimately ended up in the schools in 2012-13 and defended the use of funds.”–is probably true, mostly.
The funds that schools use to purchase services from a useless network do not come out of a school’s budget; they are allocated on a per-school basis from the central office. If the network’s fee is less than that budgeted amount, the school may use the funds for “academic intervention, professional development, textbooks, supplies, and other equipment.”
It looks like what happened here is that some of the money was pushed to the schools as an additional network rebate. Also, out of that $83 million, $10 million went to professional development and curriculum, and about another $10 million went to school- and retiree-related fringe benefits.
It probably bears mentioning that $83 million only comes out to about $75 dollars per NYC DOE student. What’s outrageous and depressing isn’t so much where the DOE spent its RTTT money, but that it was only $124 million to begin with.
Tim: what is truly outrageous is that the UFT sold it’s soul for that amount. We based a complete contractual overhaul into an unproven system on this money
An amount that is less than .05% of the 24 billion dollar yearly budget of the NYC DOE and only slightly more than the thousand dollar blood money “bonus” teachers received