Bloomberg Looking To Stick Next Mayor With Multi-Year "Children First" Network Contracts

The NYCDOE has got charter school creation and space sharing in the pipeline for the next few years.

Now it turns out that they're looking to sign multi-year contracts with the Children First networks to force the next mayor to keep Bloomberg's school system structure:

Intent on preserving the Bloomberg administration’s education legacy, the Department of Education has hired a favored consulting firm to craft a plan that would safeguard a signature policy.

The city has hired the Parthenon Group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of system through which principals choose support organizations to provide professional development, curriculum, and budgeting help.

The consulting firm, which has previously studied school closures and small schools for the department, is charged with crafting a strategic vision to ensure that Children First Networks are preserved when another mayor takes over next year.

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 Those steps could include recommending parts of the networks to sacrifice as “low-hanging fruit” in order to save the broader structure. They could also include launching restructuring pilots that the next mayor would inherit when he or she takes office in January.

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The Parthenon project’s details reveal the extent of the department’s machinations to stop a new administration from changing the direction of the city’s schools. The department has previously worked to extend the Bloomberg administration’s education policies by getting the Panel for Educational Policy to sign off on school space-sharing agreements that would begin in 2014 and on contracts for network providers that would extend through the next mayor’s first term.

Bloomberg looking to keep his policies going long after he's gone.

If they sign multi-year contracts with these networks right before Bloomberg leaves office, the next mayor should cancel the contracts on January 1 and sue Bloomberg personally for fraud to recoup the lost money.