The DOE is prepared so spend half a million dollars to make sure this incoherent and pointless management structure remains in place past the elections – one that NO ONE including principals likes, outside of Tweed and the PSO’s , including New Visions, which of course benefit from the steady revenue stream of taxpayer money. --- Leonie HaimsonLeonie has just posted this important analysis bases on a leaked memo to Gotham Schools - and kudos to them and Geoff -
by Geoff Decker.
One of their scummy ideas is to start long-term projects using the networks that a new administration can't kill. These people are such swines.
MORE below the fold
Everyone should read this full Parthenon memo; reprinted below – showing how desperate DO is to retain network structure they have hired Parthenon as consultants for $275K, paid for through private funds. FYI Parthenon is also one of Gates Foundation’s favorite consulting companies so quite possible they are footing the bill for initial phase of project.Note however that “A longer-term phase of the project that Parthenon pitched involves managing the implementation of its vision during the 2013-2014 school year. That phase would cost more than $400,000, but Polakow-Suransky said he anticipated that part of the project being completed in house.”That means that the DOE is prepared so spend half a million dollars to make sure this incoherent and pointless management structure remains in place past the elections – one that NO ONE including principals likes, outside of Tweed and the PSO’s , including New Visions, which of course benefit from the steady revenue stream of taxpayer money.I have spoken to network staff who say that even they don’t think the system makes any sense and that it should be eliminated and districts restored – especially as they have to spend most of their time driving from one part of the city to another, wasting time and contributing to global warming.One of the projects envisioned : “Internal communications: Increasing Principal support of the networks to bolster their defense of the aspects of the structure that are most valuable.”Expect statements, with principals pressured to sign on, especially from New Visions schools; New Visions in the past has pressured principals to hire their network as their PSO.Also, (as I wrote in comments section)“Note how conversations with "key stakeholders" exclude parents, teachers, & students. A better example of Bloomberg's oppressive reign is hard to imagine. They should have called it educrats first instead of children first.”See also Crain’s – revealing how a leaked memo from DFER says that they don’t think any GOP candidate can win, but that Thompson, Quinn, and Weiner should be expected to be charter-friendly and continue to co-locate charters in DOE buildings.Education reformers are MIA in campaign | Crain's New York Business http://shar.es/wBZ2Eby Geoff Decker, at 8:27 pmIntent on preserving the Bloomberg administration’s education legacy, the Department of Education has hired a favored consulting firm to craft a plan that would safeguard a signature policy.The city has hired the Parthenon Group to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the system through which principals choose support organizations to provide professional development, curriculum, and budgeting help.The consulting firm, which has previously studied school closures and small schools for the department, is charged with crafting a strategic vision to ensure that Children First Networks are preserved when another mayor takes over next year.“While there is no set of actions that can perfectly ensure ‘sustainability’ of the network model, the goal of the project will be to identify a series of steps that can bolster the odds of sustaining those elements the DOE views as most essential,” the firm wrote in its bid for the project. The confidential bid was submitted in April and obtained by GothamSchools.Related Stories
- Liu audit questions department’s ability to tell networks’ value April 25, 2013 3
- Walcott announces new networks for phase-out schools April 27, 2011 7
- City says bureaucracy reorganization will save $13 million January 28, 2010 14
- A DOE plan to personalize bureaucracy is making unions nervous March 10, 2009 18
- Ethics board ruling highlights tension in DOE “network” system January 23, 2013 11
Those
steps could include recommending parts of the networks to sacrifice as
“low-hanging fruit” in order to save the broader structure. They could
also include launching pilots that the next mayor would inherit when he
or she takes office in January.
Advocates of the networks say they empower principals and ensure that teachers and students get the help they need. But critics argue that the arrangement has left the school system fractured and inefficient. Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have criticized the current structure and said they would move away from it if elected.
The
Parthenon project’s details reveal the extent of the department’s
machinations to stop a new administration from changing the direction of
the city’s schools. The department has previously worked to extend the
Bloomberg administration’s education policies by getting the Panel for
Educational Policy to sign off on school space-sharing agreements that
would begin in 2014 and on contracts for network providers that would
extend through the next mayor’s first term.
According
to the $375,000 bid, which officials said would be privately funded,
Parthenon is first studying the evolution of the networks since they
launched in 2007, from providing exclusive support to helping the city
enforce compliance in its schools. Then it will tackle the politically
charged question of how much local communities should play a role in
school governance. The entire project would take about two months and
wind up in mid-June, according to the bid.
The
$90 million network system consists of 55 organizations, some run by
external nonprofits, that receive funding based on how many schools
elect to contract with them. The structure was designed in part to
create a marketplace in which principals migrate to the organizations
that provide them with the best services, allowing the least popular and
lowest-performing ones to shut down. The city has dissolved five
networks in the last two years and will close three networks at the end
of the school year.
Proponents of
the current support system say it is better than what existed prior to
2002, when Bloomberg began to remove geography as a variable for
determining support. They said political favoritism was rampant under
that structure because school district boundaries often overlapped with
political jurisdictions, allowing elected officials to hold sway over
student enrollment and hiring policies.
“Every
assembly member, every City Council member, every Congress member was
regularly on the line trying to get students into a certain school” and
get people hired for job openings, said Eric Nadelstern, recalling his
time as a regional superintendent in the Bronx. Nadelstern also helped
devise the network system when he was a deputy chancellor for the
department.
But critics, including
many leading Democratic mayoral candidates, say they’d like to see some
support services restored to the district level. They say that
decoupling geography from support has had the unintended effect of
isolating schools from community-based organizations, parents and
religious organizations that often anchor neighborhoods.
“We
need to start to create schools within geographic areas that talk to
each other again, that there’s a place for parents to go, that
principals have a superintendent they can work with to be able to
support and help them out,” Bill Thompson, a former president of the
Board of Education, told teachers at the United Federation of Teachers
mayoral forum last month.
Last
year, the City Council — led by Speaker Christine Quinn, who is running
for mayor — grilled education officials on the ways it held networks
responsible for how its schools perform. And an audit by Comptroller
John Liu, also a candidate, into one of the city’s 55 networks found
that it did its job, but criticized the city for being unable to
correlate a school’s performance to the support it receives.
Chief
Academic Officer Shael Polakow-Suransky acknowledged some of the
concerns raised by the system’s critics were legitimate. But he said,
“We don’t want the main function of the Department of Education to be in
response to political needs.”
“I
think that the question that the candidates will need to answer for
principals is, does this shift mean that you’re going to take away my
autonomy?” he added. “Is this really about geography or is this about
moving autonomy away from principals?”
Polakow-Suransky
said he hoped the work that comes from the Parthenon Group would help
inform the candidates during the campaign and beyond.
The
first phase, underway now, is a review of the current system and
involves interviews with Polakow-Suransky and other department leaders,
network leaders and executives, and principals. A second phase involved
crafting the “future vision” for networks under a new administration.
A
longer-term phase of the project that Parthenon pitched involves
managing the implementation of its vision during the 2013-2014 school
year. That phase would cost more than $400,000, but Polakow-Suransky
said he anticipated that part of the project being completed in house.
Project Context
Over
the course of the Bloomberg administration, the New York City
Department of Education has thoroughly transformed the structure through
which it supports schools. A gradual series of organizational changes
reflected several consistent trends: toward increased flexibility for
schools on matters of curriculum and instruction; toward greater
autonomy for Principals in selecting their own support structure; toward
tighter integration of instructional and operational support; and
toward clearer performance management of the support structure itself.
Today’s structure – in which schools select a Children First Network of
their choice, blending instructional and operational support – is meant
to embody the administration’s fundamental principles of empowerment and
accountability.
As this
administration nears its close, the DOE faces the chance that a new
administration, like so many others, will begin by re-examining the
organizational structure. There is a broad sense among DOE leadership
that many of the shifts of the past decade – to strip away burdensome
requirements, layers of bureaucracy, and channels for local political
interference – are essential to preserve. Yet many critiques of the
current structure exist, and certainly some aspects of the system are
working better than others. In this environment, there is a risk of
adopting an all-or-nothing “the current system or the old district
system” mentality that obscures a range of intermediate choices and
tradeoffs that may exist. An effective strategy to sustain the network
model must be nuanced in identifying the underlying values inherent in
the structure, and the specific aspects of it that are (or are not)
driving impact for schools.
Parthenon
proposes to support the New York City Department of Education with an
assessment of the network model and a strategy for how to prepare for
the next administration in a way that protects the core of the reforms.
We recognize that this project is one of several similar efforts taking
place systemwide to reflect on issues of sustainability, and we would
hope to conduct this project in alignment with those efforts.
The deliverables of this project will be:
· An assessment of the current network structure that crystallizes the core values, key strengths, and challenges of the system
· A
future vision that articulates what is essential to preserve in the
current structure, what should be preserved but tweaked, and what (if
anything) are “low hanging fruit” to be changed
· A plan for the next 6-12 months that identifies specific actions for NYC DOE to take to support its future vision
Project Approach
Parthenon
proposes to take two months to complete the deliverables outlined
above. From an activities standpoint, we will divide the work into two
phases: the first month to undertake an accelerated process of primary
research and data analysis that brings information to bear on the
long-term questions of network structure and sustainability; and the
second month to assemble a plan for the path forward for the remainder
of this year and beyond.
Phase 1: Analysis of the current network structure (3 weeks)
The
purpose of Phase 1 is to collect as much input as possible in a short
timeframe to inform the future vision and the path forward to support
that vision. Practically, this means talking to and/or surveying a wide
range of participants in the current system, and digging into any
available data on the way that networks operate today. In general, we
seek perspectives on several key conceptual questions:
· What do participants in the network structure see as the core values and practices that are most essential to preserve?
· When the network structure is working at its best, what are the key elements and conditions that enable success?
· Across
the range of functions that the network provides, where is the greatest
need / demand from schools? What is the network performing relatively
well and not well?
· What
is the balance today between each network having a unique vision vs.
networks as conduit for shared DOE priorities? What is the ideal balance
in the eyes of different groups?
· What are the biggest challenges to network effectiveness, and is it feasible to believe that these can be overcome at scale?
The
deliverable from Phase 1 is an interim presentation that provides an
assessment of the current network structure, and tees up potential
actions and decisions to be considered in Phase 2.
Team Activities:
Discussions with key stakeholders (e.g. network leaders, cluster leaders, PSO partners)
Discussions with key stakeholders (e.g. network leaders, cluster leaders, PSO partners)
· Discussions with DAPS leadership and other divisions as desired
o DAPS Leadership: Shael Suransky, Josh Thomases, Adina Lopatin
o OSS leadership: Justin and Elizabeth (individually or as a pair) and rest of the leadership team as a group
o DOE Cabinet members: Corinne Rello-Anselmi and Saskia Thompson; others as needed
· Interviews with cluster leaders and PSO partners
o All five Cluster Leaders
o Select PSO Executives (likely 2 of the partners)
· Network leader focus group: one group of 5-10 Network Leaders
· Principal
focus group: one group of 5-10 principals and/or a meeting with the
existing DAPS Advisory Group pending the timing of this project with
existing meetings
· We
would also be interested to discuss the feasibility of a very short
(less than 5 minute) survey to be distributed to all Principals, to
provide more nuanced feedback input on network performance than the
Principal satisfaction survey can offer
Analysis of current network configurations and performance
· Review the current configuration of all networks and identify segments of networks based on how/why schools have affiliated
o We
start with a hypotheses that at least 80-90% of all networks can be
grouped into ~5 segments based on their membership and how/why the
schools came together
o Variables
that may affect segmentation include: grade level, geography,
instructional model or philosophy, prior relationships, what the schools
are looking for (e.g. a hands-off or hands-on approach), and others
· Do any of these segments correlate with network performance (either student achievement gains or qualitative network strength)?
· Which
particular networks could be held up as exemplars of what the DOE is
aiming to achieve with the current structure? What is unique about them?
· How many of the networks have affiliated for “the right reasons”?
Review of Principal satisfaction data
· Understand relative network performance across functional areas (e.g. HR, budget, transportation, etc.)
· To
what extent does Principal satisfaction correlate with other dimensions
of network performance? (i.e. is the original hypothesis valid that
strong service/support to schools leads to the best school outcomes?)
Phase 2: Future Vision and Action Planning (1 month)
Using
the input and analysis from Phase 1, our team will work closely with
key leaders from the DOE to craft the two final deliverables of the
project: a future vision for the network structure, and an action plan
of specific steps the DOE can take through the remainder of this
administration to help realize that vision.
The
goal of the “future vision” deliverable is not to outline a new
proposed organizational structure, nor to suggest specific org structure
steps for the DOE to take. On the contrary, we begin from an assumption
that, at this point in the administration, it would not make sense to
pursue any broad changes to the organization. Our purpose in driving
toward a future vision is to help align the DOE leadership team (inside
and outside of DAPS) around a more detailed view of how they believe the
organizational structure could or should evolve as we move beyond this
administration.
· Can we articulate each component of the current network structure into one of three categories:
o The
core, essential values or practices that must be preserved (some would
say, for example, the Principal’s autonomy to self-affiliate)
o Elements
that should be preserved, but where room for compromise might exist
(for an existing example, how the DOE has already moderated its view on
the components of network performance management)
o Elements where the DOE might agree that change is needed – i.e. the “low hanging fruit” of any future evolution
· Within
this vision and categorization, it will be important to address several
particular issues that we can anticipate will be important to a future
administration. For example:
o The role of geography in determining network affiliation
o The role of the community superintendent relative to the network
o The role of the network in receiving or addressing parent issues
§ The needs of elementary vs. middle vs. high schools
Based
on this future vision, the remaining deliverable is an action plan to
propose and outline specific steps for the DOE to take over the next
year. While there is no set of actions that can perfectly ensure
“sustainability” of the network model, the goal of the project will be
to identify a series of steps that can bolster the odds of sustaining
those elements the DOE views as most essential. Generically, we believe
that several types of strategies should be considered in this regard:
· Strategic
pilot efforts: Using 2013-14 for a limited set of pilots that could
provide a model for changes to be considered by a future administration.
We imagine that planning for potential pilots may be a particularly
critical output of this project, and recognize a couple of concepts
already under an early stage of consideration, such as:
o A pilot or pilots to test differentiated, higher levels of empowerment for some Principals
o A pilot or pilots to examine alternative ways of structuring the Superintendent-Network relationship
· Internal
communications: Increasing Principal support of the networks to bolster
their defense of the aspects of the structure that are most valuable
· External communications / transparency: Building awareness and understanding of key aspects of the network model among stakeholders in the field and the community
· Policy: Considering
policy levers that create a visible signal for how the DOE views the
future of networks (e.g. actions to target the compensation and/or
prestige of cluster and network leadership relative to other positions
in the Department)
Team Activities
Relative to Phase 1, the activities of Phase 2 will be less geared around broad research and analytical efforts. Instead, Parthenon will focus on drafting key strategy documents aligned with the deliverables above, and will work closely with relevant leadership in DAPS to refine these drafts toward a final product. We anticipate that weekly working sessions with the DOE working team will be critical to the process during this phase.
Relative to Phase 1, the activities of Phase 2 will be less geared around broad research and analytical efforts. Instead, Parthenon will focus on drafting key strategy documents aligned with the deliverables above, and will work closely with relevant leadership in DAPS to refine these drafts toward a final product. We anticipate that weekly working sessions with the DOE working team will be critical to the process during this phase.
Team Resources and Professional Fees
The
Parthenon team will be led by Chris Librizzi, Partner, who has been
involved with all of Parthenon’s engagements with the DOE over the last
eight years. Chris will be supported by a Project Manager who will lead
some of the team’s day-to-day activities. For Phase 1, the team will
include one Principal and two Associates to drive the significant
research and analysis that we have outlined above. For Phase 2, the team
will be reduced to one Principal and one Associate as we focus our
efforts on drafting and refining final deliverables. All team members
will be allocated to the project with 50% of their time.
Professional
fees for this engagement would be $375K total for Phase 1 and Phase 2.
In addition, Parthenon would bill any project-related expenses, the vast
majority of which relate to travel. These expenses would only be billed
as incurred, and are capped at 18% of professional fees.
Appendix: Potential Additional Support for Phase 3 Implementation Planning
At
this point, we are seeking support for the activities and deliverables
described in Phases 1 and 2 above. However, we recognize that the ideas
surfaced through the 6-12 month action plan in Phase 2 may
create an urgent need for implementation activity to take advantage of
the brief window that exists for the DOE to push new ideas into reality.
Should the DOE feel that there is a need for additional support, we
would be eager to extend our engagement into a “Phase 3” that helps
drive toward implementation. At a high level, Parthenon’s involvement
with an implementation phase could take several forms:
· Periodic advisory and facilitation support:
This would consist of Parthenon team leadership (Chris Librizzi and/or
our designated Project Manager) staying connected with relevant DAPS
leadership and providing a light level of ongoing support, which could
include: periodic (e.g. weekly) calls to serve as a sounding board and
brainstorm next steps; facilitation of critical stakeholder meetings
where an outsider presence is valuable; or presentation of the project
findings to external groups. Parthenon would provide this level of
support with no additional professional fees.
· Development of a tactical project management plan and early implementation support: This
option would use the 6-12 month action plan deliverable as a
foundation, extract the highest-potential and most urgent ideas from
that plan, and transition into a next phase of developing the tactical
project management plan for executing on the idea – including key
workstreams, owners, key milestones, required materials to be developed
for the field, etc. Parthenon would then work to embed this project
management plan with each individual owner and play a supporting role in
launching each major workstream, before transitioning full ownership to
DOE staff. We estimate that this would require one additional month of
support. Consistent with the pricing of Phases 1 and 2, this would
involve an additional $180K of professional fees.
· Project management through the launch of school year 2013-14: One
potential outcome of the proposed engagement is a series of new pilots
that help to illuminate potential future organizational models.
Depending on the DOE’s internal bandwidth to manage the development and
launch of these pilots over the next few months, Parthenon could play a
more active project management role through the start of the school year
to coordinate and lead the various internal workstreams. Assuming that
Phase 2 is complete by mid-late June, we anticipate that this role would
involve roughly 2-2½ months of support. Practically, we would likely
staff this effort differently from the Phase 1 and 2 work, and assign
one Principal to work on the effort with a 100% allocation, with some
support from an analyst and from team leadership. This option would
involve an additional $300K of professional fees.
These
three options certainly do not represent all potential permutations or
structures for follow-on implementation support. We would welcome the
chance to discuss the potential needs of the DOE team in greater depth,
and to adjust these scenarios as needed.
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