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Dennis Walcott might want to introduce his left hand to his right hand. They have a lot to talk about.
The chancellor’s promise to teachers that he would examine charges that principals are promoting failing students is off to a confusing start. Three separate investigative units are potentially involved, and the tangle sometimes cuts the chancellor out of the loop.
Even worse, Walcott has no authority over the most important unit, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for schools, headed by Richard Condon.
Teachers who accepted Walcott’s offer on this page to make complaints directly to him at DMWalcott@schools.nyc.gov usually got a polite greeting and a promise. “Good afternoon. Thank you for your e-mail. We will follow up. Have a nice evening” was his response to a Brooklyn high-school teacher who detailed a series of scams that allowed numerous students to graduate despite failing required courses.
Alas, nothing is simple in the land of a million educrats, even a promise from the chancellor. The Rube Goldberg-like bureaucracy was designed to make sure everything falls between the cracks.
Most of the 25 or so complaints Walcott received involve changing student grades so they can be promoted or graduate. Teachers say some principals mandate passing rates of up to 80 percent and warn that failing students could result in schools being closed and employees losing their jobs. Some also cite phony attendance rates.
City Hall told me Walcott sent all complaints of cheating he got to Condon, a former police commissioner who has held the school position since 2002. He is independent of the chancellor and has the power to pick his cases, and he rejected all these complaints.
Without asking or telling Walcott, Condon’s office told me, he forwarded the accusations to the Office of Special Investigation, which is in the Department of Education.
It reports directly to Walcott — on paper. The reality is less clear.
The unit has been probing allegations of rampant cheating at Lehman HS in The Bronx for nearly two years. When I asked Walcott why that probe was taking so damn long, he said, “I don’t control the investigation,” and that his inquiring might tilt the outcome. “I have to let it take its natural course,” he said, even though the same suspect principal remains in charge.
In fact, Walcott could have prodded investigators since the unit reports to him. City Hall now promises the Lehman probe will be finished next week and says the average probe of the in-house unit takes four to six months. A mayoral aide provided a partial list of other cheating cases where school officials were disciplined or fired.
Finally, there is a third investigative unit, the Auditor General, which also reports to Walcott. The aide says after analyzing data, it is auditing “60 schools concerning credit recovery, Regents grades and student discharges.”
Those issues are similar to the ones in the complaints Walcott got and sent to Condon, who sent them to the Office of Special Investigation. Some, in fact, might involve the same schools and principals.
The tangled, redundant process and limits on the chancellor’s authority are troubling omens. Whistleblowers, many fearing retaliation, are owed a quality and prompt investigation of credible charges. Giving them the run-around would give a green light to those inclined to cheat.
Besides, as Hercule Poirot might say, the cheaters already had enough motives. They avoided being scrutinized as failed schools, and many principals, including Lehman’s, got large bonuses for their “progress.” Those who faked that progress cheated students and taxpayers, and must pay a heavy price.
Job #1? fooling us
You can’t fool all the people all the time, but Barack Obama certainly is trying.
The great American jobs machine is broken and the White House doesn’t know how to fix it. Instead of calling a repairman, the president is pretending he really, really cares.
Actually, he doesn’t care, at least not enough to do anything differently. He is sticking to his radical agenda of transforming the country.
After injecting unprecedented doses of spending and borrowing into the economy, Obama now offers the brilliant — brilliant! — idea of more of the same. And he wonders why unemployment is rising again.
The stimulus, ObamaCare and the Dodd-Frank financial straitjacket, the avalanche of regulations and talk of more taxes — all are a vast overreach. But he’ll never admit it.
His speech Friday after the scary jobs report — a mere 18,000 new jobs in June, pushing the unemployment rate to 9.2 percent — was a cynical exercise in blame-gaming.
“The economic challenges that we face weren’t created overnight, and they’re not going to be solved overnight,” he said for the umpteenth time.
He talked of cutting the deficit and in the next breath proposed a new government jobs program on infrastructure.
True, his vision does have some success. The number of people on food stamps is now 44.5 million, up more than 10 percent in a year.
He also has a new program to let mortgage deadbeats keep their homes. If all banks agree (Obama said he will “pressure” them), unemployed homeowners can skip payments for a year before banks begin foreclosure. Until now, it’s been three or four months.
See, you don’t need a job when you can get two years of unemployment benefits, food stamps and a free house. So it goes in Barack Obama’s America.
‘Lane’-brains strike again
With the city adding bike lanes on First and Second avenues in Manhattan, expect Janette Kubla- Khan to proclaim traffic instantly calmed. In fact, traffic is so serene that it barely moves where she put other lanes. Some call this the op posite of progress.
But look on the bright side: Mayor Bloomberg is gifting a windfall to his successor. The huge cost of building and maintaining the lanes will be easy to cut during the financial crisis that will be part of Bloomberg’s wasteful legacy. And the next mayor can raise additional money by selling sledgehammers and auctioning off chances to smash the bike lanes. Let the bidding begin.
Walking anever-so-fine line
You can’t blame politicians for wanting to ban perp walks. After all, they’re an occupational hazard for our native criminal class.
Un’s usual perpetrator
Here’s a shocker: The United Nations is blaming Israel for defending itself. Again.
Tens of thousands of Palestinians, some throwing Molotov cocktails, tried to storm into Israel from Syria, Lebanon, Gaza and the West Bank in May. Israeli soldiers issued warnings and fired into the air. When the invaders refused to stop, the sol diers killed seven and wounded more than 100 on the Lebanon bor der.
Within days, Mi chael Wil liams, the UN special coordinator, said in Bei rut he was “shocked by the number of deaths” and ac cused Israel of using “disproportionate, deadly force” against “apparently unarmed demonstrators.”
And now, supposedly after an investigation, Williams says virtually the same thing in a report.
Why bother writing a report? He could have saved time by simply demanding in May that Israel surrender to its enemies.
The ‘fix’ isn’t in
There’s one way to “fix” Casey Anthony: sterilization.