Change Is Inevitable--Except in Vending Machines

In my school, teachers struggle with inadequate facilities like trailers, half rooms, and unventilated monstrosities even as classes take place outside and in the halls.  As if that weren't enough, Mayor Bloomberg's favorite snack company has come to town and set its machine right outside the worst classroom in the school.  Apparently, disrupting class is no problem as long as there are potato chips that need selling.

And it turns out potato chips are fine for kids as long as they're baked.  You see, if the empty calories and sodium don't arrive fried, they're good for you.  Who would've thunk it?

But it's OK.  Fortunately, the company is not unionized, and indulges in the sort of practices Mayor Bloomberg would like to see as the norm.  This story is from a few months back, but I just saw it--and here's who got selected:

Answer Vending, a Westchester-based firm, was ordered in June 2008 by the State Department of Labor to ante up $116,000. This included penalties and back pay to 21 employees it was found to have shortchanged. Answer executives didn't respond to questions last week, but Labor Department spokeswoman Michelle Duffy said the fines are still outstanding: "They haven't paid."

They sound like a fine bunch to me, just the sort of people our venerable leaders love to get into bed with.  And to help out, they've secured the services of Octagon Vending, the company that set up the Snapple deal, making sure Snapple alone could re-do its bid before short-changing the city of some 5-million dollars.   Naturally the Panel for Educational Policy voted to select this company.  Here are a few more of their bonafides:

What the workers did tell organizers was that they often had to work 50- and 60-hour weeks, without overtime, and that wages were often paid partly in cash. They received no benefits, they said. 

Now there's a company after Joel Klein's heart.  The unions say with card check they could organize in a flash, but President Change We Can Union Bust With has not managed to keep his promise to pass a bill enacting it.   So what does Octagon Vending do, exactly, besides deliver less cash than promised?

"We're paying them 15 to 18 percent of the contract, and it's not even clear what they're doing," said Patrick Sullivan, a public school parent who is Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer's representative to the panel and who voted against Octagon. "There was no assessment of their prior performance."

The much ballyhooed Money for Nothing Dire Straits sang about.  But at least they gave it to the highest bidder, didn't they?

Education officials admitted last week that the formal contract authorization request that they submitted to the panel described the only unionized firm, Canteen Vending, as offering the highest guarantees for revenue to be paid to the schools. Canteen was rejected, the report stated, only because its "vending machine operation/monitoring systems are inferior to the competitors."


The department's spokesman said this was "a misprint." Wasn't this a pretty long and involved sentence for a misprint? "I have no idea what that's about," he said. And the statement that the losing bidder made the highest offer? That was a mistake, too.

Hmm...well, if The Department of Education says so, it must be correct.  After all, they never lie.  So let's just take them at their word.

But--do we believe the first thing they said or the second?

So many questions, so little time.  And so many contracts to dole out to union-busters.

Morning in New York

Controller Bill Thompson just nixed a bunch of no-bid contracts from Tweed. So several computer consultants will miss out on quarter-mil salaries. Actually they're not as good as they sound, since they're required to kick back half to the companies Bloomberg and Klein make their sweetheart deals with.

The DoE is trashing Thompson for playing politics. "Playing politics" is the expression Bloomberg's minions use to indicate anything at odds with the philosophy of the mayor-for-life, who's doggedly insisted on controlling education with no checks and balances, despite the pathetic results obvious to anyone who looks beyond the op-ed pages of the newspapers.

It's actually a good sign that Bloomberg's people are getting this vicious this early. When you're way ahead and you know it, you run a cheery campaign like Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" and let your opponent flail uselessly in the wind.

Having spent 36 million before the campaign has actually started, the results are not as rosy as Mayor Mike would wish, as Mr. Talk pointed out yesterday. Perhaps the sun will come up in Fun City next November. That would be a nice change after eight years of PR specifically designed to block it from our view.

You Too Can Make Money Without Working!

That's right! Be the first on your block to get a no-bid contract from City Hall! Be sure you offer a vital service, like "demystifying" teachers. Mayor Mike and Jolly Joel have had enough of those goshdarn unionized employees being mystified, and they're willing to put up millions of city dollars to put an end to it.

What kind of group did they pick?

The organization, All Kinds of Minds, was co-founded by famed Harvard pediatrician Dr. Melvin Levine, who is facing new allegations that he sexually abused young, male patients.

The group scored a no-bid contract worth up to $12.5 million in 2004 - one of hundreds of no-bid contracts issued by the DOE since mayoral control of the school system began in fiscal year 2003.

According to city-comptroller statistics, the surge of no-bid contracts since then totals $342 million.

But All Kinds of Minds, whether or not it minds a few behinds, has left a few minds behind. To wit, it's trained fewer than one fifth of the still-mystified teachers it had promised to cure. I'm a bit disappointed, as I find myself mystified on a regular basis.

For one thing, what ever happened to checks and balances? How can anyone contemplate the continuation of mayoral control with the abysmal record we've seen thus far?

Thanks to Annie

Accountability Is For The Other Guy Redux

The NY Daily News reports that Chancellor Klein plans to meet with nearly 200 principals over the next couple of weeks about the mayor's current and proposed future budget cuts for the New York City school system.

You see, these New York City principals were given extra money earlier this year for the school budgets "in exchange for higher consequences if they fail to raise test scores" as part of the mayor's and chancellor's vaunted Children First education reform movement.

The extra money could be used for a variety of programs including after-school and Saturday tutoring to help students on the battery of standardized tests the mayor and the chancellor have instituted per year.

Unfortunately for all involved, the U.S. economy has begun to tank (see here) and the mayor has ordered a bunch of city-wide budget cuts including ones in the public school system. Principals were ordered to cut 1.75% from their school budgets this year while much of the central administrative NYCDOE budget was saved. In addition, the mayor has ordered additional cuts to city agency budgets between 5% and 8% for the next fiscal year, although it is unclear just how much schools will have to cut.

Nonetheless you can bet individual schools will be forced to shoulder the fiscal burden while the central administrative budget (and all those yummy, yummy central administrative consultants and even yummier no-bid contracts handed out to Klein and Bloomberg cronies) will see few if any cuts.

And that makes sense. I mean, why cut the $80 million dollar ARIS computer system that doesn't work the way it's supposed to or the no-bid standardized testing contract Bloomberg handed to McGraw-Hill, the company that STILL hasn't delivered on the standardized ELA tests kids are supposed to be taking nearly nine months after the company first got the contract, when you can cut after-school Regents tutoring, arts and enrichment programs, and field trips and force principals to try and raise their test scores and graduation rates with much less money than they were promised.

Oh, and you can bet the mayor's and chancellor's vaunted school report cards and quality review program won't be cut, even if the programs that might help schools improve in some of the categories measured will be.

Remember, it's Children First and children always, as long as Bloomberg's and Klein's corporate cronies are not hurt in the pocketbook or the balance sheet.

No wonder principals are mad as hell over the budget cuts. Unlike the CEO's from Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and Countrywide Financial who got dragged in front of Congress yesterday after receiving millions in executive "performance" compensation even as they made terrible business mistakes that cost their companies and shareholders hundreds of millions of dollars, you can bet Klein and Bloomberg will hold principals, assistant principals and teachers accountable for "improvement" even as he cuts the school budget by as much as 10% (and perhaps even more if the economy continues to worsen.)

You see, accountability is for everybody except the big-time businessmen, the corporate CEO's, the short-selling hedge fund managers, or billionaire media moguls.

Reasons to be Thankful

Mayor Bloomberg should be a happy guy today. Though NYC schoolchildren have lost almost 3 billion dollars a year in the CFE verdict, the court has re-asserted his right to do whatever the hell he likes with the remaining 2 billion a year. That's a good thing for several reasons.

First of all, his recent collaboration with UFT President Randi Weingarten has freed the mayor from even having to pretend he's using the money to attract or retain quality teachers. Once those pesky teachers accept yet another contract that fails to meet cost of living, their goose is cooked, and there'll be no seconds, thank you very much.

Second, City Hall's precious tradition of no-bid contracts remains protected. Just as it's vital to our national security that Medicare have no right to negotiate drug prices, the most efficient way for the city to award contracts is that of Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein doing whatever the hell they feel like, whenever the hell they feel like doing it. After all, their educational programs have repeatedly stressed the importance of kids being able to do whatever the hell they like whenever the hell they want to, and it behooves good role models to be consistent (except when dealing with teachers, of course, who need to be told what to do every damn minute).

Finally, their vision and insight is vindicated by the 15.8 million contract they signed with Alvarez and Marshall. While critics complain that 10 other firms competed for that job in St. Louis, they never point to the fine work A and M did reforming the exemplary New Orleans school system. And what the hell do people from Missouri know anyway? Show me? Yeah, we'll show you right here, pal.

So it's vitally important that we continue to allow Mayor Bloomberg to do whatever the hell he wants with NYC money. After all, that's why we gave him absolute power to control city schools with no checks or balances whatsoever, and from everything I read, he's doing a heckuva job.