Thursday, May 26, 2011

New York City Crime Scene - Teacher Morale Plummets As Bloomberg's Consultants and Admininistrators Continue To Steal Money With No Accountability.



Teacher morale has fallen so low that even the Mayor's poodle, Chancellor Dennis Walcott, is concerned on the effect on the students. The teacher morale problem is primarily due to the excessive paperwork, political climate in the classroom, lack of a contract, and the specter of looming teacher layoffs that is pitting "newbie" teachers against senior teachers. The onslaught against teachers is lead by Mayor Bloomberg who claims that the City must be frugal with their budget and wants to reduce the teaching force by 6,100 and raise class sizes by 3 to 5 students.

However, the Mayor's concerns seems not to apply to the consultants and administrators under him who commit crimes, seemingly, on a daily basis, only to end up still having their contracts or positions in the City. Just look at what has been reported in the last month.

  • The official, Karen Shaffer, an assistant commissioner of the Department for the Aging, was not only demoted and fined, but will also now have to use a scanner to prove that she is showing up at work. An agency spokesman said she was not fired, for reasons that were not clear.
  • In another black eye for the Bloomberg administration, a contractor for the scandal-scarred electronic-payroll system yesterday admitted the project's manager ripped off the city by cheating on his own time sheet.More about the CityTime taxpayer ripoff can be found here.
  • Officials at the contractor, Science Applications International Corp., said they will reimburse the city the $2.47 million that project manager Gerard Denault unfairly billed when he worked on the massive project to switch city employees to the system.
  • A group of consultants billed taxpayers for full-time, six-figure salaries while spending big chunks of their time devising - along with their school system boss - plans for a new business enterprise, Special Commissioner of Investigation Richard Condon reported Tuesday.
  • The boss, George Raab, the DOE's chief financial officer at the time, "engaged in prohibited private business relationships" with the consultants, Condon said.
  • A top Department of Education official who quit after admitting to an affair with a consultant she supervised passed him inside information - and approved a $60,000-a-year raise for him, records show.
  • Judith Hederman, the $168,000-a-year executive director of the DOE's division of financial operations, resigned May 4.
  • Four veteran construction executives were arraigned Wednesday on charges that they systemically stole tens of millions of dollars from investment firms, insurance companies and law firms as they built corporate offices in buildings across Manhattan.
  • A cuckolded computer consultant hired to link the city's 1,400 schools to the Internet was charged Thursday with downloading $3.6 million into his crooked pockets.
  • Willard (Ross) Lanham, aided by corporate giants IBM and Verizon, masterminded the massive fraud to enjoy a life of luxury from 2002 to 2008, according to a scathing report from the special schools investigator.
When it comes to the Bloomberg Administration and the DOE, it is accountability for others not for them. Is it any wonder why the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has demanded that the Bloomberg Administration fix the Scandal-Scared Department Of Education? Of course he needs to clean up his own Administration as well but don't count on the arrogant Mayor to do it.

Update: Finally, an arrest was made in the $80 million dollar CityTime scandal. Maybe this is the beginning of the end for the Bloomberg Administration managers and consultants who commit crimes and are not brought up on charges.

2 comments:

reality-based educator said...

I think the Raab scandal is particularly damning because Klein himself hired the former Bear Stearns bankster and the guy starting working on his next finance gig the moment he took up at the DOE. Also, the DOE consultants, Willard Lanham and the FTA scandal, is bad, especially because DOE vendors like IBM and Verizon helped Lanham hide his crime while a DOE official, Judith Hederman, seems to have perjured herself in the FTA case.

And yet, despite all this missing money, the lack of oversight, the egregious incompetence with which Bloomberg runs the outside contracts, the layoffs are still going forward and Walcott has the nerve to go to Albany to ask for tools to fire "bad teachers."

As Juan Gonzalez said in the Raab story the other day - you just can't make this stuff up.

Anonymous said...

Surprise, surprise! Career teachers can't walk on waters, but very few of them are crooks. which charactoers gravitate towards BloomKlein? The bird of same feather flys together.