The city should have showed them the money.
The city’s Department of Education lost valuable points in its application for $40 million in federal funds by refusing to make school worker salaries public — and wound up earning none of the winnings.
The DOE’s submission in the first-ever Race to the Top competition among school districts finished 43rd out of 61 finalists — out of an initial group of 372 applicants.
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 possible, the results show.
The feds put up $400 million for the competition.
Officials here lost three points solely for their lack of budget transparency and an additional four points for their incomplete description of how they would form external partnerships to help older high school students who are short on credits.
In fact, many of the points lost were 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 website at the individual level of detail,” DOE officials wrote in the application.
That answer led two of three reviewers to award the city 0 out of 5 points for that section.
By contrast, an unnamed reviewer wrote that top-rated Carson City School District in Nevada “provides an excellent narrative showing how the district makes salaries, budget and expenditures transparent and available to all stakeholders and the general public.”
Other highly-ranked winners among the successful 16 were New Haven, Calif. and Miami-Dade, Fla.
DOE officials said they were given inconsistent instructions on what to include in the application and noted that the third reviewer had awarded the city all 5 points for budget transparency.
“We are in the process of reviewing the comments and will consider the feedback for the next opportunity to apply for Race to the Top-District funding,” said Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott.