The city should have showed them the money.
The Department of Education lost points on its application for $40 million in federal funds by refusing to make school-worker salaries public — and wound up with zilch.
The submission in the first-ever Race to the Top competition among school districts for $400 million finished 43rd out of 61 finalists.
The plan would have expanded online course offerings to 1,000 schools and redesigned dozens of other schools from the ground up, but it missed the winners’ circle by just 10.3 points out of 210.
Officials here lost three points solely for their lack of transparency on salaries, and four points for their incomplete description of how they would form partnerships to help older high-school students who are short on credits.
Many of the points were lost simply for incomplete answers.
“For a variety of policy, labor- relations and privacy reasons, the NYCDOE does not currently make the [school-level salary] information . . . public or available on our Web site at the individual level of detail,” officials wrote to explain the lack of data. That answer led to an average loss of three points among three reviews.
DOE officials said they were given inconsistent instructions on what to include in the application and noted that one of the reviewers had awarded the city all 5 points for budget transparency.