Monday, September 24, 2018

WILL LATEST BUS SCANDAL CONVINCE CHANCELLOR CARRANZA TO DIG DEEPLY INTO CENTRAL DOE BUREAUCRACY?

The New York City Public School Parents Blog has a summary of the recent NYC Department of Education busing scandal. Parent activist Leonie Haimson credits Chancellor Richard Carranza for taking swift action to actually terminate a top official at the central DOE.

From Leonie's piece:
The first week of school was dominated by stories about a major busing fiasco, with 67,075 hotline complaints from parents during the first four days, and many kids left on the sidewalk waiting for school buses which never came, as first reported by Ben Chapman of the NY Daily News.

Ben also broke the story that many bus drivers with criminal records had been allowed to slip through the cracks via faulty background checks, and that a retired police investigator had been let go by DOE for blocking too many hires with questionable records, while his signature was forged to the hiring documents.

As a result,  Chancellor Carranza fired Eric Goldstein, CEO of School Support Services.  Goldstein had led this massive fiefdom for more than a decade, where he controlled the spending of billions of dollars in vendor contracts for transportation, food and athletics.

This was a dramatic move by the Chancellor, as no one at that level has been fired at DOE in many years, at least in my memory.  Carranza also promised that from now on, the method for vetting bus drivers would be handled by the department's Division of Human Capital, with the same careful screening that DOE employees are subject to.


Is this a new day at the DOE where people may actually be held accountable or is this just someone taking the fall and will it be business as usual down at Tweed Courthouse? 

Do you think Richard Carranza is going to dig deep to discover what many of of the Klein-Walcott-Bloomberg-Farina people have been doing at the DOE?

I know that the DOE is receiving larger budgets but much of that money doesn't filter down to the schools. I wonder why.

8 comments:

  1. But really this whole bus fiasco started when Bloomberg broke the bus drivers union and hired the cheap labor bus companies. I remember when the bus companies went on strike, Bloomberg made them bust and hired the cheap non union bus company. Suddenly kids were on the street, spec ed students in wheel chairs stranded due to poor planning on the cheap bus companies.hired by bloomberg our next president, right?

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  2. Bloomberg may as well be still running the schools.

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  3. This is another example of cheap labor in our society bringing down the quality of life. Bloomberg broke the bus drivers union and the drivers now are all scabs resulting in the chaos we are witnessing. Mike Bloomberg set this city school system on such a fuked up course it will take decades to fix

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  4. Fraud, corruption and age discrimination.

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  5. Investigators sweeping investigations under the table when it comes to corrupt principals like Dwarka.

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  6. Did your blog report recently that someone(Mulgrew?) stated there are 300 lawyers at DOE?? If that number is close to being accurate there is where the cuts should take place. Does the Gothcha Squad still work for the DOE????

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  7. 300 lawyers is a holdover from Bloomberg/Klein times. Culture down at tweed has yet to change as far as any of us can tell.

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  8. Just as parents forced changes to the testing regime in NYS so parents forced this change at the DOE.

    We should never underestimate the power of parents, engaged and/or enraged, to force changes in education.

    I wish that our union understood the absolute need to organize TOGETHER with parents to change working conditions in the schools and to reduce class size, among many other things.

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