Michael Bloomberg Said To Be Considering Run For The White House

Run, Mike, run!

Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering Independent run.

— ian bremmer (@ianbremmer) September 26, 2015

A Roger Simon reply to the Bremmer tweet puts this into perspective:

.@ianbremmer Possible, but In the past, "those that know" invariably turn out to be on Bloomberg's payroll.

— Roger Simon (@politicoroger) September 26, 2015

You got that right, Roger.

My new favorite political analyst, the very astute 102 year old Richard M. Nixon, gives us the last word on the Bloomberg trial balloon:

I want this to happen so he's laughed off the goddamn stage. https://t.co/IH0RRzpwRn

— Richard M. Nixon (@dick_nixon) September 26, 2015

Me too, Mr. President.

Me too.

And I think he'll be quite successful if he runs.

Isn't the country desperately longing for a New York billionaire who wants to take away their guns, Big Gulps and styrofoam?

Bloomberg Administration Hid 911 System Overruns, Conducted Little Oversight Of Consultants Or Vendors

Juan Gonzalez reports that fiscal genius Mayor Bloomberg oversaw a 911 system overhaul that was $1 billion over budget and ten years delayed.

Gonzlaez also writes that Bloomberg officials hid the cost overruns:

-The overhaul, now scheduled for completion in 2017, has soared in cost by almost $900 million — from $1.3 billion to $2.2 billion.

-More than $200 million of those costs were not previously known because Bloomberg aides buried them in the budgets of other agencies.

-Officials rewrote the monthly reports of 911 project managers or pressured them to “sanitize” and “soften” negative news so as to “to improve the spin” on its progress.

And of course there was no accountability from the Bloomberg administration on the consultants or vendors putting the project together because these weren't lazy city employees working on it, they were heroic private consultants and innovative private vendors:

-Multiple layers of private consultants and vendors virtually ran the overhaul with little supervision from city employees. At times, those consultants ended up marking up their bills to the city as much as 600%.

 -During one 18-month period, City Hall kept cancelling meetings of the interagency city group that was nominally in charge of the project, leading the city’s own quality control consultant, Gartner Group, to complain: “The most senior members of the administration simply failed to pay attention.”

I wrote yesterday that if de Blasio oversaw such a public safety and financial disaster, there would be hell to pay in the media for it.

But really, other than a couple of Juan Gonzalez columns and a few other news items, it seems former Mayor Bloomberg remains the fiscal and management genius he was always depicted as in the media.

Report: Fiscal Genius Mayor Bloomberg Royally Screwed Up 911 Upgrade

Explain to me how Michael Bloomberg continues to be revered as a fiscal genius after CityTime and this mess:

The city’s mammoth upgrade of its antiquated 911 emergency call-taking system was plagued by delays, cost overruns and “persistent mismanagement” under the Michael Bloomberg administration, investigators charged Thursday.

In a 109-page report, the Department of Investigation said failures over nearly a decade, including poor performance and price markups by a number of contractors, drove up the price of the overhaul by hundreds of millions of dollars.

The project, which was launched in 2004 to improve the city’s 911 call infrastructure and create essential backup protections, isn’t expected to be completed until 2017, at a total cost of more than $2 billion.

“[The project] not only is late and over its original budget, but also has tested public confidence in the city’s ability to deliver on necessary improvements to the 911 system that are critical to public safety,” the report says.

It's amazing what billions in your bank account can do for your reputation.

I guarantee you, were de Blasio to have similar scandals like CityTime or the 911 mess, the elites of this city, including the media, would not be so gentle.

A Bloomberg DOE Scandal Still Haunts The City

Do you remember the Willard Lanham/Project Cougar NYCDOE scandal from back in 2011?

If you don't, you can look up some posts I wrote about it here, here and here.

The basic overview was a DOE tech consultant stole a bunch of money from the DOE with the help of IBM and Verizon, who helped him cover the trail.

The consultant, Willard "Ross" Lanham, stole $1.7 million from the DOE from 2002-2008 on top of the six figure salary the Bloomberg DOE was already paying him as a consultant.

The scandal got the tabloid treatment when it was discovered that Lanham had an estranged wife (who you can see below) still living in his house (which you can see above) he had built in his own little real estate development and running a "Cougar" dating service for herself out of it.

She billed herself as "yummy mommy" on her blog and lived the high life meeting 20-somethings in the Long Island club scene:

Lanham had even named the street where his house was after his wife, Laura.                     

It was a sweet story of crime, betrayal and fiscal ineptitude from Bloomberg and his minions.

News of the story came around the same time we were beginning to understand just how much got stolen in the CityTime scandal.

The $1.7 million Lanham stole with the help of IBM and Verizon was a pittance compared to the $600 million the CityTime crooks stole, but it still pointed to an underlying rot in the way Bloomberg and his government outsourced work, hired consultants and did little-to-no oversight on the projects.

Now we learn via a Scott Stringer report that the city is STILL paying the piper for the Lanham scandal, two years after Lanham went to jail and almost a year after "fiscal genius" Bloomberg flew off to Bermuda:

New York City has been missing out on tens of millions of dollars a year in technology funding for schools from the federal government because of a continuing investigation into the Education Department, the city comptroller said this week.

...

The money comes from a program called E-Rate. It charges an average fee of about 25 cents per month to landline and cellphone bills and then uses that money for services like broadband technology in schools and libraries, according to the Federal Communications Commission, which oversees the program.

Since 1998, the city has pulled in more than $3 billion in E-Rate financing, the comptroller said, and while New Yorkers have continued to pay into that system, they have been barred from the receiving end since 2011 because of a federal investigation.

The F.C.C. declined to confirm or deny any investigation, but a city official said the inquiry was prompted by a scandal involving Willard Lanham, a former technology consultant for the city. He was accused of stealing money from the Education Department and using it to satisfy his and his wife’s expensive tastes, including for cars like a Corvette and a Porsche and to finance the construction of luxury homes on Long Island.

Mr. Lanham was sentenced to 37 months in prison in 2012 for stealing $1.7 million that was supposed to pay for Internet access at the city’s public schools.

In the letter, Mr. Stringer requested an update on the proceedings and asked when the city would be reinstated to the program. The comptroller said that while the Education Department had retained experts in E-Rate compliance as consultants, and paid them more than $670,000, “apparently those contracts ended without resolution to the city’s E-Rate problem.”

A spokesman for the department said that applications had already been submitted for the current E-Rate funding year, and that the program’s administrators were reviewing that application as well as those from the previous three years.

Last week, the F.C.C. chairman, Tom Wheeler, proposed raising the annual spending cap on the E-Rate program, which has not changed substantially since it began in 1997, to $3.9 billion, in an effort to increase Internet connectivity in schools. The F.C.C. said the increase would cost consumers a few cents more per line each month.

Mr. Stringer said this potential increase in spending could mean the city would miss out on more than $350 million by the 2018 fiscal year. He said he did not know if the city would eventually receive the E-Rate money at the end of the investigation.

I've said this before, I'll say it again today:

Why does Bloomberg still have the reputation for being a fiscal genius and responsible manager of the city?

When you add up the consultant scandals and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years, you see that billions were either stolen or wasted.

And as you can see from the Stringer report, the city STILL continues to pay for Bloomberg's criminal malfeasance.

Let's imagine this was de Blasio screwing all this stuff up for years and years.

Can you imagine the treatment it would receive in the papers?

And yet, we see time and time again these stories of consultant criminality and tech boondoggery during the Bloomberg Years get reported with nary a negative word about our former billionaire mayor.

Reminds me a little of this, without the guillotine part at the end:

Why Are Bloomberg And Klein Still Considered Tech Geniuses?

Harris Lirtzman left this comment on the ARIS post from this morning:

I thought you and your readers might be interested in an article I wrote on Schoolbook on Jan. 28 in the long, painful lead-up to the contract negotiations called "Cut Waste at Education Department Before Negotiating Teachers Contract."

One could put any number of the technology and organizational and procurement boondoggles from the Bloomberg Era in any order of waste, perversity or simple ineffectiveness: my top candidates were SESIS (the "Special Education Student Information System"), your very own beloved ARIS, failure to collect hundreds of millions in federal and state reimbursements to the City for providing "related services" to students with disabilities because the DOE has no effective way to capture the information that would support the claims, stopping non-competitive contracts and procurements to "DOE-friendly" organizations and reforming or eliminating the failed and expensive school network systems.

I have always found it remarkable that the man who was responsible for building one of the most successful financial technology companies in the world could not get a single effective technology system build during his time in the City-- ARIS, SESIS, City-Time, Enhanced 911--but yet he and Joel Klein were lionized as visionaries and effective managers by many who wanted to believe.

ARIS we hardly knew ye but we're so glad to see you go.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/opinion-cut-waste-coming-table-over-teachers-contract/

I would add the NYCHA computer system, the FDNY and Sanitation Department GPS systems, and the EMT tablets to the list of Bloomberg tech boondoggles that Harris lists (SESIS, ARIS, CityTime and the 911 system.)

Let us imagine Mayor de Blasio had even a tenth of the failure that Bloomberg had with these boondoggles.

Can you imagine the press coverage?

And yet, Bloomberg has never been personally called to account for the billions of dollars of taxpayer money he lit on fire for these projects. 

NYCDOE Tech Consultant Arrested For Cocaine Trafficking - Why Is Bloomberg Not Blamed?

This would be one of Bloomberg's vaunted tech consultant hires:

Two Bronx men, including a city Department of Education tech consultant, were busted by the feds for cocaine trafficking, authorities said Friday.

Yinmi Rodriguez, 27, who has been employed in a Bronx high school since 2008, used city computers to track the UPS delivery of the dope from Puerto Rico to the Bronx, officials said.

More than 11 pounds of cocaine were"intercepted" by police.

Rodriguez has been on leave from his DOE gig since April 2013.

Let's see, Bloomberg's NYCDOE hired a guy who beat a teenager to teach teenagers and a guy who used NYCDOE computers to track cocaine shipments.

Let's imagine what stories the press would write if these were de Blasio's hires.

And yet, as always, Bloomberg is let off the hook - no accountability for the "Accountability Mayor."

Financial Genius Mayor Bloomberg Costs NYC Taxpayers $60 Million Extra On WTC Contract

Let us imagine Mayor de Blasio pulled some criminal act like this:

In a deal worked out by ex-Mayor Bloomberg, taxpayers will pay nearly $60 million extra to move a city agency seven blocks into expensive office space at Four World Trade Center, a Daily News investigation has found.

Back in 2008, Bloomberg signed off on an agreement to move the Human Resources Administration from its longtime headquarters on Water St. a few blocks west to Larry Silverstein’s tower.

The deal was part of Bloomberg’s effort to jump-start the stalled rebuilding of the Trade Center complex. At the time, the economy had imploded and Silverstein was having a tough time getting commitments to lease space in the yet-to-be-built 4 WTC.

Under Bloomberg’s pact, the deal to rent 581,642 square feet there meant paying a per-square-foot rate far in excess of what the city was paying for the Water St. digs, records show.

In the last four years of the Water St. lease - 2014 through 2018 - the city was expected to pay $26.95 per square foot.

Under the Bloomberg deal, during those same years the city will now have to pay an escalating rate that starts at $56.50 per square foot and rises to $59.50 per square foot. Silverstein had originally asked for $78 per square foot.

That comes to a total cost exceeding $100 million - way above the $46 million the city would have paid out if HRA stayed put at Water St.

And taxpayers will also have to cough up another $5 million to buy out the old lease, records show. That brings the total extra cost to $59 million.

The city is now locked into a 15-year lease where the per-square-foot rate will rise to $73.21 in the last five years of the lease, starting in 2024.

Bloomberg still has the rep for being a fiscal genius, one who saved the city from financial ruin countless times with his business acumen.

You know, like paying $73.21 a square foot instead of $26.95 a square foot for space.

NYCDOE, Mayor Bloomberg Threw Away $356 Million In Federal Repayments For Special Education Services Because Of Sloppy Accounting

Juan Gonzalez in the New York Daily News:

City public schools lost $356 million during the past three years in federal Medicaid payments for special education services because city and state officials failed to properly apply for reimbursement, the Daily News has learned.

“Red tape and bureaucracy should not stand in the way of (the city) being reimbursed for the vast array of services provided,” city Controller Scott Stringer said in a report obtained by The News.

As a result, between 2012 and this year, the city Department of Education kept shifting funds originally slated for books, supplies and other general costs to pay for those special education services, Stringer said.

And unless officials reform their practices quickly, the school system will miss out on another $310 million from Medicaid over the next four years — for an astonishing total loss of $666 million.

“That’s just unacceptable,” Stringer said. “There’s no excuse for leaving so much money on the table.”

Think about all the things the state had to do to "win" $700 million in Race to the Top money - change teacher evaluations, sign on to the Common Core (or some other "college and career-readiness standards), change the state tests, create a data tracking system for all the stats.

Now think about the city and state together throwing away $356 million in federal reimbursements for special education services and getting set to throw away another $310 million over the next four years for a total of $666 million overall.

That's almost the entire Race to the Top award for the whole state.

All the city had to do was get its paperwork in order to get the money.

But it couldn't do it.

The next time you hear somebody, especially somebody in the media, talk about what a "fiscal genius" Bloomberg was, remember how much money in special education services reimbursements he threw away through his own ineptitude.

$356 million dollars.

Not a lot of money to the Mayor of Money, I'm sure, but a lot of money that then had to be taken out of the city public schools budget and couldn't be used on other things like books, supplies and general costs.

When you add up all the money Bloomberg wasted through his tech boondoggles like the 911 system redo, the NYCHA computer system redo, the FDNY GPS fiasco, etc., along with the fraud perpetrated against the city under Bloomberg's watch (like the CityTime fraud, the various NYCDOE scandals, etc.), you get a picture of a mayor who had no clue what he was doing but got hailed in the media as a "fiscal genius" because a) he owned half of it and b) most journalists bow down to power, especially when that power might be their boss somebody.

We now have one more example of Bloomberg's incompetence in this special education reimbursement mess.

Previous Bloomberg contractor and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Previous Bloomberg NYCDOE consultant and tech fraud stories can be seen here, here, here and here.

Now de Blasio better get his act together and get the money or we can add him to the Hall of Shame.

I'll give him this year, since he only came to power in January.

But September 4, 2014 starts a full year of school with de Blasio in power.

What used to be Bloomberg's messes now are de Blasio's.

Another Bloomberg NYCDOE Contractor Fraud Story

Mayor Bloomberg was a self-described financial genius who saved the city from financial ruin numerous times - and yet, the contractors his administration hired robbed the city blind.

Here's the latest:

A contractor for the city Department of Education was busted for allegedly scamming the city for more than $1 million with massive overcharges — including billing the city $572 for circuit breakers that cost a measly 18 bucks.

Derval (Eduardo) Lazzari, 54, also had his companies charge the city $157.50 a pop for over 8,000 non-existent “carbon dioxide” tests on refrigerators, federal prosecutors said.

The Queens man “cheated the New York City Department of Education and the children it educates by submitting fraudulent invoices for repairs to New York City schools,” Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said.

The criminal complaint said Lazzari had been running the scam since 2006, when his company, Acme American Repairs, was awarded a contract to repair cafeteria equipment in city schools.

“Beginning shortly after the 2006 contract went into effect, Lazzari instructed the billing clerk ‘to bill as close to $1,000 on ever work ticket as possible without going over,’” regardless of what work — if any — was done, the complaint says.

The contract eventually paid the company $22 million, and it was awarded a second deal in 2010, court papers say.

The big bills caught the eye of the Special Commission of Investigation for city schools, which discovered the rampant overbilling, court papers say.

The agency found “Acme repeatedly billed the DOE $572.05 for a circuit breaker estimated to cost $18,” and “repeatedly billed the DOE between $200 and $300 for electrical outlets estimated to cost between $2 and $22,” the complaint says.

The company also billed “for parts or services that were not installed and/or inapplicable to the type of repair and/or service work completed.”

Previous Bloomberg contractor and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Previous Bloomberg NYCDOE consultant and tech boondoggle stories can be seen here, here, here and here.

De Blasio Looks To Create Job Training Programs That Work

De Blasio says many of the jobs programs from the past (i.e., Bloomberg's) didn't work:

The city is spending half a billion a year to place out-of-work New Yorkers in low-wage jobs - and it's time to stop, Mayor de Blasio said on Tuesday. 

De Blasio, speaking at a thriving manufacturing hub in Brooklyn, announced plans to revamp all of the city's employment training programs, which he said do little to prepare would-be workers with good-paying jobs to help alleviate the income gap. 

"We don't want to place people in minimum wage jobs," de Blasio said. "That's not what we came here to do." 

He is creating a 30-member "Jobs For New Yorkers" task force - which includes labor, business and non-profit heads - that will help shift the city's focus towards finding employment in high paid jobs, as opposed to lower-paid gigs. 

Studies have shown that even as New York's job growth has inched up since the great recession, many of the jobs created have been in low-paid sectors - like hospitality and tourism - while at the same time spots in high-paying fields have shrank. 

"In the past, there's been a temptation to tout achievements in terms of job training and placement, but when you looked a little more closely some folks were in those jobs for three months, or six months or nine months and then they were out of them," de Blasio said. "That's not acceptable to us. We want jobs that people can stick with, that a family can grow with. That's what this task force will focus on."  

In September, the task force will give de Blasio a report recommending specific initiatives the city can do to train and place the out-of-work in sectors that have jobs, and pay well - like tech, manufacturing, and accounting. 

Leaders of the task force include Cesar Claro of the Staten Island Economic Development Corporation, Jukay Hsu, founder of the Coalition for Queens, and Vincent Alvarez, the president of the New York Central Labor Council.

Mayor Bloomberg used to brag about the placements people received through his jobs placement programs, but as with much else about Bloomberg's tenure as mayor, when you took a closer look at his actual "accomplishments," you saw that they were phony:

New York City’s Department of Investigation (DOI) has reported that, of 6,500 job placements claimed by Seedco, 1,400 were fraudulent. That is, those who had purportedly been helped by the nonprofit were either still jobless or they had found jobs on their own without Seedco’s help. The DOI report says that Seedco “developed systematic practices to report false placements.” One of the most remarkable findings is that Seedco got the city’s approval for shredding job placement documents for the period of 2008 to February 2011, so the actual number of fraudulent job placements might be much higher. 

If you want to see an example of the courage of a whistleblower, look to Bill Harper, a former deputy director at Seedco. In August of last year, Michael Powell of the New York Times first reported about Harper’s allegations that SEEDCO was falsifying reports of job placements for its performance on city government contracts. At the time, Powell said that Seedco tried to sully Harper’s reputation and claimed to have conducted an audit that found only 60 fraudulent job placements compared to Harper’s count of 400. A month later, Powell was back reporting on new allegations about Seedco’s job placement accomplishments. This time around, both the city oversight agencies and Seedco itself were less defensive and dismissive, and Seedco promised corrective actions such as reviews and retraining of staff. 

Though Seedco’s relatively new senior management is promising to make additional changes, the new charges are obviously not good news for the organization. Powell reports that federal prosecutors are looking at Seedco’s job placement contracts and the city has announced that it will take away Seedco’s $7 million annual contract and give it to a different nonprofit.  

Why did a great and respected nonprofit allegedly get involved in this kind of behavior? According to Powell’s article, “The employees at Seedco…described a culture of unrelenting pressure from the Bloomberg administration to produce data showing that the job placement effort was working. Each year, city officials increased the targets for placements, even in the midst of a deep recession. The city required contract agencies to give weekly, monthly and quarterly reports of progress. City officials graded their progress, giving good marks to those with high numbers of placements, and poor grades to those that fell behind.” Staff reported that managers pressured them to fake job placements and learned tricks for fabricating job placement reports.  

Under Mayor Mike Bloomberg, the city has emphasized performance-based contracting, making Seedco’s competition for new contracts, such as a contract for a new workforce center in the Bronx that it wanted at the time, dependent on showing the numbers. Faking the reports had reportedly become part of Seedco’s organizational culture of responding to Bloomberg’s city hall pressure.

Of course that's one of the past jobs programs de Blasio is alluding to when he announced his jobs program task force.

Classic Bloomberg criminality- and yet, many people in this city still think he was a great mayor.

One Final Bloomberg Boondoggle

From the Daily News:

In one of its final acts, the Bloomberg administration pushed through a costly contract to modernize the city's 311 call system — hiring the same company fired by the feds for the botched rollout of the Obamacare website.

The city’s Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, known as DoITT, awarded the contract to the Montreal-based company CGI on Dec. 31, hours before Bill de Blasio was sworn in as mayor.

Bloomberg administration officials were keen on approving the deal because the former mayor sees the 311 hotline as one his legacies, sources said.

But rival companies are up in arms, saying CGI has little if any experience managing call centers. A website, Dont911nyc311.com, has popped up to protest the contract.

CGI has never overhauled “a 311-type system,” said a source in the information technology industry.

“We’re transferring a service New York City provided to its people to a service New York City is contracting to outside parties to do. It’s a serious situation.”

The contract will cost taxpayers $10 million this year — and potentially tens of millions more in future years.

This is the same kind of Bloomberg behavior that brought us the 911 system overhaul - the one that cost over $2 billion dollars, is years behind schedule and still doesn't work right.

Same as the CityTime boondoggle as well.

How the press never went after Bloomberg on the 911 system, the CityTime mess and the other contract boondoggles is beyond me.

You can bet they'll go after de Blasio if he does the same.

But Bloomberg essentially gets a pass - no meme about what an incompetent steward of city contracts he was.

Michael Pollan Knows Nothing About Mayor Bloomberg

.@michaelpollan @paultough NOT a good idea; Bloomberg has been a disaster when it comes to instituting tech systems; witness CityTime
— leonie haimson (@leoniehaimson) November 24, 2013

Apparently Michael Pollan missed not only the news about CityTime scandal - the worst fraud ever perpetrated against NYC - but also the 911 system overhaul mess that has seen Bloomberg spend over $2 billion dollars in tech upgrades that cause the system to freeze repeatedly and just may have led to the death of a four year old.

Or the EMT records modernization project Bloomberg instituted that the NY Post called a "technical nightmare" that causes the new wifi devices to freeze up and lose information - again putting lives at risk.

Or the NYCHA computer system upgrade that Bloomberg spent $36 million on that Juan Gonzlaez described this way in the Daily News:

Bureaucrats at the New York City Housing Authority gave their new $36 million computerized rent-collection system the bizarre acronym NICE (NYCHA Improving Customer Experience).

But for landlords and public housing tenants, the system — designed by firm Siebel-Oracle — is a cyber-monster run amok.

Since NICE was launched in February, the annual certification process for 100,000 tenants who receive Section 8 rent subsidies has turned into a hellhole of disappeared documents, erroneous payments and baseless eviction notices.

Many of the 30,000 private landlords who get paid by the Housing Authority are up fed up.

“It’s total chaos beyond belief,” said one Brooklyn building owner. “Landlords are being mixed up and getting wrong checks. Sometimes the computer automatically sends termination notices to every tenant in a building. Transfers get held up for months. The whole thing gets worse every day.”

Or how about the GPS systems Bloomberg bought for the FDNY that the NY Times described this way:

The Bloomberg administration spent millions of dollars to put custom-made GPS tracking units in fire and garbage trucks, only to have vehicles inexplicably show up on computer screens as if they had sunk to the bottom of Long Island Sound or New York Harbor, the city comptroller has found.

Faulty devices, inaccurate locations, needless features and prices to make a vendor blush — as much as $56,000 for a single unit in a sanitation truck — characterized the two projects, according to two audits released on Wednesday.

The comptroller, John C. Liu, said the findings were more evidence of the administration’s troubled record with computer projects.

“Once again, millions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on technology that falls short of what’s promised, raising questions about the oversight of expensive outside consultants,” he said in a statement. Mr. Liu, a likely mayoral candidate, has crusaded against city technology spending on projects like CityTime, the scandal-plagued payroll system.

Last week, the Bloomberg administration acknowledged that it had mismanaged its major information-technology projects and vowed to improve oversight.

And let's not forget the Bloomberg Blizzard Disaster of 2011 that saw Bloomberg telling people to relax and take in a Broadway show as New Yorkers died in this city because Bloomberg was too incompetent to get the streets plowed in a timely fashion.

Or his downplaying of the storm threat pre-Sandy that caused some New Yorkers to take the storm less seriously than they should have.

I'm sick of these "experts" like Pollan pontificating about stuff they know NOTHING about, showing their ignorance in the bargain, and no one calling them on it.

Not that he's going to care, but I'M going to call him on it.

Pollan is an ignoramus if he thinks Bloomberg is some uber-competent techno-genius who should be tapped to fix the Obamacare mess.

This is the kind of statement that calls into question whatever else this guy writes or talks about.

We Need Transparency On The Data And Stat Manipulation At Tweed During The Bloomberg Years

From Newsday:

A former Hempstead school employee who informed state officials about the district's practice of systematically changing some students' failing grades has filed a federal lawsuit alleging wrongful termination in retaliation for his action.

Carlos Ramirez, the Hempstead school district's former director of technology, sent a letter in June to state education officials informing them of his concerns about the district's grade-boosting practice. The district decided to stop rounding up final course grades of 63 and 64 to passing scores of 65 in July -- just days before it fired Ramirez.

Ramirez filed a lawsuit Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Brooklyn seeking back pay for wrongful termination and an unspecified amount of damages, said his attorney, Aymen Aboushi of Manhattan.

The lawsuit describes Ramirez as an "exemplary employee" who was "subject to unlawful retaliation" because he reported activity that was "in detriment of public school students and their families."

The case has not been assigned a court date, Aboushi said.

"We hope one of the things that comes out of this is some transparency," he said. "Money is not the driving force for this lawsuit."

I would love to see similar lawsuits here in NYC to get some transparency on all the data manipulation and shenanigans the Tweedies under Klein and Walcott have engaged in.

Diane Ravitch has been posting "insider" reports from a NYCDOE central employee that allege widespread data manipulation and statistical fraud at Tweed.

While "philanthropic" organizations and education reform "non-profits" all hail the Bloomberg Years as a wonderful time for education, those of us in the belly of the best know how much fraudulent the academic results in schools have been.

Credit recovery programs that gave out semester credits for reading comic books (thus increasing the graduation rates), earlier test score inflation under NYSED Commissioner Mills that had Bloomberg and Klein hailing themselves as geniuses, such pressure to raise test scores all throughout the Bloomberg Years that many schools cut any program or activity that didn't engage students in state test prep.

It's been an awful time, not withstanding the pro-Bloomberg propaganda you see at corporate education-reform sites like Gotham Schools.

Now that it is almost over, I hope we get some transparency on these last 12 years so that some of the Bloombergian education reform myths can be properly sent to the graveyard where they belong.

Outside Contractor Who Stole $2.7 Million From NYCDOE Sentenced For Fraud

Let's see there was CityTime and the 911 system boondoggle and the NYCHA computer system mess and the FDNY GPS's that don't work and ARIS and the Willard Lanham fraud and the Judith Hederman fraud and now this:

A Pennsylvania man was sentenced today to 57 months behind bars for fooling the Department of Education into paying him $2.7 million after he lied about providing special-education and bilingual services to students.

Nelson Ruiz, who collected the taxpayer-funded cash from 2008 to 2012 through six companies he controlled, will also serve three years of supervised release following his prison sentence for defrauding DOE and also furthering the scheme by bribing an agency staffer. Ruiz, 36, of Shohola, Pa., copped a plea to masterminding the scheme in December.

Before being sentenced in Manhattan federal court, his lawyer, Don Savatta talked openly to Judge John Koeltl about how Ruiz started the scam by “accident,” first submitting “incorrect” invoices to DOE that he wound up being paid for. Savatta said Ruiz then purposely submitted phony papers a second time as a “test” -- and after DOE still couldn’t catch the false information and paid him again, Ruiz couldn’t stop himself from repeating the process.

“Mr. Ruiz acknowledges it was greed and easy money that drove him and is embarrassed and ashamed that it did not stop years ago,” Savatta told Koeltl.

Ruiz through his plea deal agreed to fork over the $2.7 million related to the crime.

We are so lucky we have had fiscal genius Mike Bloomberg to steward this city for the last 12 years.

I mean, how could this city have survived with Mike Bloomberg?

94% Of Regents Exams Graded As Of 1 PM Monday

According to Gotham Schools, 6% of the city's Regents exams still need to be graded.

Tests are still being scanned by McGraw-Hill and teachers sat around the grading centers today with nothing to grade.

Wednesday is the last day of school.

I cannot remember a Regents exam grading season as chaotic as this one.

Will there be some accountability for the Tweedies who put this system into place and signed off on the contract with McGraw-Hill?

Bloomberg Refuses Accountability For 911 System

It's always somebody else's fault and his beloved technology always works the way it was supposed to:

Mayor Bloomberg defended the city’s 911 system Thursday even as one of the candidates to succeed him blasted it as a failure and vowed to overhaul it.

Bloomberg said it was “very tragic” that little Ariel Russo was left waiting for an ambulance after she was fatally struck by an SUV, but blamed individual dispatchers.

“The software worked exactly the way it was supposed to be,” Bloomberg told reporters, including our Tina Moore. “There clearly was something wrong with somebody sitting in front of the screen, and maybe two people sitting in front of screens. They didn’t do what they were supposed to do and we’re looking at the procedures. It’s very tragic.

“But it was not a software thing. That’s just ginned up by unions who don’t like the fact that we have combined all of the call takers together, basically,” he insisted.

Juan Gonzalez has reported that the problem was with the software, not human error.

The Daily News editorial writers wrote the same.

Bloomberg once again refusing accountability for his tech messes - and this one perhaps resulted in a fatality.

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.

...

 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.

...

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.

Bloomberg's Vaunted New 911 System Turning Into A Nightmare

From the Daily News:

GLITCHES and repeated crashes in the city’s new 911 computer dispatch system appear to have delayed emergency responders during several life-and-death situations this week — possibly even in the crash that killed 4-year-old Ariel Russo.

Ariel died Tuesday when a 17-year-old unlicensed driver who was fleeing police rammed his parents’ SUV into the girl and her grandmother on an upper West Side street corner at about 8:15 a.m.

Logs of 911 calls obtained by the Daily News, as well as interviews with emergency responders, show that it took an unusually long 4 minutes and 18 seconds from the time of the first request for an ambulance from police at the scene to a 911 operator, until the time an ambulance was finally dispatched. Once FDNY and EMS dispatchers received and acknowledged the transmission, it took 3 minutes and 52 seconds to dispatch an ambulance and for it to arrive at the scene.

...

 

What is clear is that from the time of the crash until the ambulance’s arrival — roughly eight minutes — cops from the 24th Precinct, including a lieutenant at the scene, radioed 911 four different times in increasingly desperate attempts to get Ariel medical assistance.

In the lieutenant’s last call from the scene, at 8:21 a.m., the cop said Ariel was “semiconscious.”
“Rush EMS to location,” the lieutenant pleaded.

She was still alive, but no one knows if she could have been saved.

“I don’t know how this could happen,” Ariel’s grandmother, Ledy Russo, 61, said Thursday night. “People were saying, ‘Where was the ambulance?’ It took a long time.”

...

 

Insiders who work with the new computer system blamed the technology.

“Four minutes is a long time to take down a call,” conceded a 911 supervisor, “but the public doesn’t understand the problems we’re having with this new dispatch system.”

“When you’re trying to type in information, your computer begins buffering, and you then have to wait for 30 seconds or even a minute before you can use it again,” the supervisor explained. “That’s okay if it’s my computer at home, but not okay for a system this important.”

NYPD brass at the main 911 call center in downtown Brooklyn have taken to urging telephone operators to periodically reboot or refresh their computers to avoid the constant freezes — but that also delays the work of answering calls promptly.

According to several insiders, the new system, which NYPD brass deployed for the first time last week, has gone down several times already. The system crashes have forced operators to resort to writing down information about 911 calls on slips of paper, though police officials have said all calls were answered and no one has been endangered.

“It works,” Mayor Bloomberg said of the dispatch system on his radio show Friday, referring to the problems as “bugs” common to any new system.

...

“You wish you didn’t have bugs,” Bloomberg said, “but that’s the real world.”

Bugs don’t nearly explain the story, emergency officials say.

“This is serious stuff,” said one high ranking EMS official. “The police computers keep getting disconnected from our dispatchers. Sometimes they don’t send us any calls from entire busy precincts for hours at a time. Public safety is being jeopardized.”

That official pointed to other incidents of failed communication this week that have received no attention.

The same morning that Ariel was struck — allegedly by Franklin Reyes, who has been charged with manslaughter — a motorist on I-95 lost control of his car near Co-op City in the Bronx. The car hit a median and overturned. The injured driver managed to get out of the car and a highway police sergeant who arrived at the scene immediately radioed 911.

EMS logs show that the first notification to FDNY and EMS of the accident came in at 11:48 a.m. Within five minutes, an ambulance and fire company had arrived on the scene.

But according to the EMS official: “When our units got there, the sergeant said: ‘What took you guys so long? I’ve been waiting here for an hour and a half.’

“The sergeant kept radioing in the information, but we got it very late,” the EMS official said.
“Our ambulances keep sending messages to police radio and they just disappear in the system without police receiving them,” a veteran EMS dispatcher said. “Something’s very wrong here.”

The new $88 million computer-aided dispatch system, known as ICAD, was developed by Alabama-based Intergraph Corp. As The News reported last week, eerily similar problems emerged when Intergraph rolled out versions of its 911 systems in both Nassau County and San Jose, Calif.

The ICAD is part of a larger overhaul of the city’s 911 system, the first that’s been attempted in decades.

The Bloomberg administration launched the effort after the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. But that effort was plagued by years of delays and the failure of several major contractors to deliver what they promised.

Meanwhile, the cost has skyrocketed from $1.3 billion to more than $2 billion.

All the energy they have spent on the stupid teacher evaluation system rolled out last week and here we have a 911 system that may be in part responsible for the death of a four year old.

God help us if there's a major problem in the city and lots of 911 calls come in.

This 911 system cannot handle anything like that.

Oh, but thank God we've got a new teacher evaluation system!

Walcott Tries To Spin Evaluation Proposal In Daily News Opinion Piece

Dennis Walcott, lying as usual:

This is a pivotal moment for our public schools. Last week, the city and the teachers union submitted to the state what amount to competing proposals for the rules we will have to follow to evaluate our teachers.

We have tried to negotiate a deal with the United Federation of Teachers over the past few months but have hit an impasse on some key issues. If we don’t come to an agreement by the end of the month, the state will intervene, leading an arbitration process and then imposing an evaluation system on the city June 1.

No matter how we reach a deal, it has to be the right one. It must set clear expectations for teachers, provide them with meaningful feedback, help them develop and remove those who cannot improve and educate our students.

...

We are now at a point at which the teacher evaluation problem will either be solved or grow worse. We will continue to work to reach a settlement with the UFT, but we won’t agree to a system that puts adults ahead of students.

Splitting the difference down the middle between the UFT’s position and ours might seem like a practical solution, but the stakes are simply too high for that approach.

Paralyzing our principals’ ability to run their schools would be a tragedy for our children.
The union’s rhetoric that we are simply interested in removing bad teachers has always been a calculated distraction. Our goal is to give our students the best education possible, and that entails support, development and accountability.

There's a lot of additional jive in the piece, but let's deal with what I excerpted for now.

First, Walcott is right about one thing: this surely is a pivotal moment for schools.

After 11 years of mismanagement by market forces, the NYC school system is near the breaking point.  

The school closure process has become a farce, as the NYCDOE targets "low-performing schools" (always schools with the highest poverty demographic and many students with special needs), closes those schools, sends those children to new schools that they then starve of the needed resources to handle the influx of students with special needs and/or in need of academic remediation, then, as the test scores drop, targets those schools for closure too.

If Walcott and his boss actually cared about giving "our students" the "best education possible, and that entails support, development and accountability," they surely would give the schools targeted for closure all the supports they need instead of starving them of much needed resources or stealing those resources and giving them to neighboring charter schools.

Which brings me to the next reason why this is a pivotal moment for schools.

Bloomberg and Walcott and Klein before him have continuously attempted to steal as many resources from the public school system as they could in order to give it to their pet ideology project - their beloved non-unionized charters.  

Juan Gonzalez at the Daily News exposed just how close charter operator Eva Moskowitz was to Chancellor Klein and just how happy the DOE was to give Moskowitz and her charters anything they wanted, especially space in public school buildings.

Bloomberg has set up a dual school system of have's and have not's, purposely starved the have not's in order to target them for closure and open up more charters.

Again, for Walcott to say that he and his boss are concerned with giving all students the best education possible is disingenuous at best, a bald lie at worst.

Walcott and his boss pick winners and losers in this system every day in order to promote their vision of a market-based school system.

Walcott says the state must not split the difference between the city's evaluation plan and the union's plan because this will paralyze principals from being able to run their schools.

Actually the thing that is going to paralyze principals' abilities to run their schools is the new Danielson rubric which requires administrators to observe every teacher in their building multiple times over the course of the school year using an observation rubric with a 57 page checklist for a 45 minute class.  The evaluation system paperwork is so cumbersome that principals and assistant principals will soon do little else but teacher observations, pre-and post-oberservation conferences, and paperwork related to the observations.

Add in the new work that will have to be done over the Student Learning Objectives part of the evaluation, which will require principals and assistant principals to make sure every student has multiple pieces of standardized work in folders in every class in every subject for every teacher, not so that students can be evaluated but simply so that there teachers can be evaluated, and you can see just how much more paperwork principals and assistant principals are going to have to do around this new evaluation system.

On top of that, APPR puts a huge emphasis on tests scores, so that if a teacher is found to have not "added value" to his/her students' scores and receives a zero on the test part of the evaluation (20%-25% of the entire evaluation), they must be declared "ineffective" as teachers no matter how they score on the other 75%-80% of the evaluation, including all those "rigorous" classroom observations the new system is forcing.

The value-added measurement the state is going to use on teachers for the test-based part of the eval system suffers from large margins of error and wide swings in stability - does not a system that places such emphasis on voodoo statistics harm principals ability to run their schools?

You betcha - which is why over 1/3 of the principals across the state have signed a petition calling for the state to not evaluate teachers using test scores.

I get why Walcott felt the need to spin in the DN this morning.

He and Mayor Bloomberg are starting to feel the heat as their grip on power slips.

That was why they both felt the need to criticize the mayoral candidates this week for not getting on board with their reforms or praising their "legacy" running the school system.

Walcott and Bloomberg should feel threatened, because after 11 years of mismanagement, constant reorganizations, corporate cronyism, and authoritarian rule of the system by the Tweedocrats, we may be going back to a time when parents and teachers get some kind of say in how the system is run.

In addition, the Bloomberg/Walcott statistics are under attack as the union has called for an investigation into the last 11 years to see where the Tweedies and City Hall have played funky with the numbers.

They should feel threatened over that too.

Walcott can try and spin his reign of error over the system, can try and put one last stamp on the system by spinning the state to impose the worst evaluation system possible onto NYC before he and Bloomberg ride off into the sunset.

The reality is, when Bloomberg and Walcott go, many of the reforms they cherished and promoted over the objections are going to go with them.

And that includes the reforms on the teacher evaluation issue.

The system is so convoluted and complex that it is unworkable - even vaunted reformer Paul Vallas said so last week at a reform function.

And no amount of spin from Waclott is going to change that fact.

Michael Bloomberg Belongs In Jail Next To Beverly Hall

Via Diane Ravitch, here is Sol Stern at The Daily Beast comparing Georgia governor Sonny Perdue's response to the Atlanta cheating allegations compared to Michael Bloomberg's here in NYC:

As I read about the indictments, I could not help but compare what Governor Perdue did in Atlanta with the way Mayor Michael Bloomberg handled allegations of test fraud during his 12 years at the helm of New York City’s schools. Like Beverly Hall and other Atlanta officials, Bloomberg proclaimed miraculous gains in student achievement as a result of the reforms he instituted after the state legislature gave him control of the city’s school system in 2002. In the midst of his 2005 reelection campaign Bloomberg invited the city press corps to PS 33, an elementary school in one of the Bronx’s poorest neighborhoods to hear about one of those academic miracles. The school and its principal, Elba Lopez, had just hit the jackpot on the state’s fourth-grade reading test. Over 83 percent of the 140 fourth-graders scored at or above proficiency (or grade level), Mayor Bloomberg announced, compared with only 35.8 percent proficiency in 2004. Like Atherton Elementary in Atlanta, this was a “statistically improbable” one-year gain of close to 50 percentage points. The scores for these predominantly minority and poor students were just four percentage points below the average for the richest suburban districts in the state. According to the mayor, the test results proved that his education reforms “really are paying off for those who were previously left behind.” Not a single reporter at the press conference questioned the mayor’s claim of historic, unprecedented educational gains.

Shortly after the test scores were announced, Elba Lopez retired, collecting a $15,000 bonus for her school’s spectacular performance, thus boosting her pension by as much as $10,000 per year. In 2006 the same cohort of students, now fifth-graders, fell back to a pass rate of only 47 percent, and the pass rate for the new crop of fourth-graders was just 41 percent. After I reported this startling turnabout in City Journal and reporter Andrew Wolf did the same in the New York Sun, it became fairly obvious that someone had tampered with the students’ 2005 exams. With Mayor Bloomberg successfully reelected, even his own Department of Education (DOE) felt some pressure and said it would take a second look. Schools Chancellor Joel Klein asked his Counsel, Michael Best, to refer the matter to the city’s Department of Investigations (DOI). But Best left the referral on his desk for six months. (“I goofed,” he said, when I asked why he delayed the referral.) But the DOI, whose head Richard Condon is appointed by the Mayor, declined to take the case. It was then left to the DOE’s small and understaffed investigative unit to follow up. The department had waited almost two years to start an investigation, and by this time the suspicious test papers had been destroyed.

In a report issued almost four years after the tests were administered the department’s lone investigator found no wrongdoing, yet neglected to interview PS 33’s principal Elba Lopez. As the New York Post explained in its singularly pithy way, City clears self. When I asked DOE counsel Best how the most likely suspect could be cleared without even an interview, he responded that the department’s investigator “couldn’t find her.” A few months later, New York Post reporter Yoav Gonen located Lopez at her apartment in the Bronx, exactly where she had always lived. Lopez assured the Post that there was no cheating; the reason that the students didn’t maintain their spectacularly high scores for more than one test cycle, she explained, was that the school had a new, inexperienced principal.

I have written over and over that if Mayor Bloomberg's tenure here as mayor was given a going over with a fine-toothed comb by an independent auditor not beholden to the mayor and not needing future employment and/or largesse from either the mayor or his corporate buddies, the crime statistics, the fire fatality statistics and the emergency response time statistics, the test scores and the graduation rates would all be found to be fraudulent.

Here's an example outside of education and crime of how Bloomberg funks with the numbers here in the city.

Currently Bloomberg claims New York City has the lowest fire fatality rate in history - and the mayor says this is because they have the fastest response time they have ever had:

"With record low number of murders and shootings and the fewest fire deaths in our city's history, 2012 was a historic year for public safety," Bloomberg said. "The FDNY has consistently improved fire safety over the past decade and has continued to drive response times to historic lows. These achievements and the efforts by our firefighters, EMT's and paramedics to save lives - while putting theirs on the line - is the reason fewer New Yorkers died as a result of fire in 2012 than ever before."

But a notorious report done at the behest of the city by Winbourne Consulting on the city's troubled 911 system found the following:

The group also accused the city of using inaccurate response times, since the city fails to include the amount of time it takes for a 911 operator to answer a call and loop in the relevant dispatcher — as other cities do.

“This practice inhibits the ability of the NYPD and FDNY Fire and EMS to generate accurate Response Time Information,” the report writes.

In other words, the historically low response time that the mayor is claiming to have is based on a phonied up practice that allows the FDNY to ignore the time 911 operators take with callers.

 

If the mayor's claims about the lowest fire fatality rates in NYC history are based on phonied up response time rates by the FDNY, it raises questions about the mayor's historical claims on fire fatalities.  

 

Are they based on phonied up data too?

Given the data manipulation and stat juking the Bloomberg administration has done with the education and NYPD statistics, I think the fire fatality statistics merit a second look, although I doubt anybody is going to question the mayor's claims of fire fatalities registering at historic lows.

As Sol Stern noted in his Daily Beast piece, reporters rarely challenge Bloomberg's claims of historic gains, whether they be in education statistics, crime statistics or anything else

In addition to the data manipulation and stat juking, if Bloomberg's consultant contracts and technology contracts and dealings were ever given the same once over by an independent auditor, New Yorkers would discover that the Bloomberg administration has allowed more money to be stolen during the mayor's tenure than at any time in this city since Boss Tweed ran New York from his clubhouse.

But Mayor Bloomberg, the second richest American, is not going to receive that once over - not by a press that he owns, not by politicians who fear his PAC and his wrath.

Quite frankly, if Beverly Hall is put in prison for tampering with student test papers, along with other charges such as “racketeering, theft, making false statements and false swearing," if she is facing jail time for creating "an environment where achieving the desired end result was more important than the students’ education," than Michael Bloomberg and his chancellor Joel Klein belong in cells next to her.

And as long as we're talking criminal liability for stat juking and data manipulation, NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly certainly should be investigated as well.

I am under no illusion that that will happen, of course.

The black woman formerly running the Atlanta school district, along with the largely black educators who were indicted with her, will face justice in their scandal.

But the rich white man who owns NYC, along with his white male toadies like Klein and Kelly, will almost certainly not.