DOE's Bloated Bureaucracy Keeps On Growing While Schools Suffer From Tight Budgets And Large Class Sizes.

During the Bloomberg years, the biggest complaint from education experts was the bloated DOE Bureaucracy as more and more funds were transferred from schools to Central Administration. You can read about it on my posts found Here,  Here, and Here. Now it seems that the De Blasio administration, rather than reduce the headcount at DOE Central has actually seen it increase by an astonishing 70%, starting July 1, 2017.

While schools average 89% of their fair student funding and are expected to increase to 92% next school year, the schools are underfunded by any metric used while the bloated Bureaucratic DOE Central keeps gobbling up funds to feed the beast.  By contrast, New York City having the largest class sizes in the State and suffering from high teacher turnover due to the large class sizes, lack of resources, and a lax student discipline policy is forced to hire 4,500 teachers annually.  DOE Central continues to increase their headcount and consultant services especially for teacher recruitment and nothing for teacher retention.  In fact, DOE Central is willing to pay $100 million dollars annually to allow highly experienced teachers to act as substitute teachers, rather than place them in schools to reduce class sizes,

Unfortunately, when Mayor Bill de Blasio and Chancellor, Carmen Farina, decided to retain 80% of the Bloomberg era policymakers at Tweed, that also meant that the Bloomberg ideology of "children last" continues to be the policy at DOE Central.