The New York Post recently put out a news story uncovering one of the better kept secrets in NYC, that while students of the City University of New York (CUNY), who are predominately people of color and/or working class, work multiple jobs to stay in school, "The presidents of five City University of New York colleges and the dean of the university's law school get free housing in lavish homes in top-notch neighborhoods.
"Another 15 CUNY presidents and deans receive monthly $5,000 housing allowances, enough collectively to cover a year's tuition for nearly 200 students. Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY chancellor, earns $450,000 and gets an extra $90,000 a year for housing, giving him the highest allowance in the nation along with the new State University of New York chancellor and a college administrator in Kentucky."
All of this goes is someone legitimized despite the upcoming $600 increase in tuition for CUNY students, an increase that will purge thousands of students from the system.
Public Schools, Private Money
Cross-posted from The Wonkster:
Since taking control of the city schools, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein have sought private funds for schools and also used supposedly private non-profit groups to boost their education agenda. All this may well have brought needed funds to city classrooms, but it also has created a tangled web and led to concerns about conflicts of interest and where the private roles stops and the public one begins. As evidence, look to a few recent events and reports. First there was yesterday’s City Council hearing on education contracting, which inevitably turned to discussion of the $15.7 million contract awarded in 2006 to Alvarez & Marsal — without benefit of competitive bidding. (For more on other subjects discussed at the hearing see this account of alleged cost overruns from Gotham Schools, a report on how the department’s contracting procedures allegedly hurt small local businesses and an account of the range of issues in question.) Questions of financial rectitude aside, council members blame A&M for suggesting changes that lead to the school bus botch of winter 2007.
Department of Education officials said the $17 million contract had led to saving of $170 million — since the report has ever been released, who knows? And department contracting chief David Ross said there was no need to put the contract out for bid because A&M had already had a contract with the Fund for Public Schools, a foundation created by the administration. “Time was of the essence,” Ross said. “It just was not practical to do” a competitive bid.” Or as Ross reportedly said when questioned about this in 2007, A&M “had people on the ground” by the time the contract was awarded. As a supposedly private organization, the fund does not have to go public with its contracts the way the city does. Its officials do not have to file financial disclosure forms. But what if it serves as a kind of farm team for contractors, allowing them to escape the usual scrutiny? Or as Councilmember John Liu said yesterday, “allows them to get a $16 or $17 million contract without competitive bidding”? A similar situation arose last summer with the city’s program to train principals. The contract did go out for competitive budding but to no one’s surprise the group that won it was the Leadership Academy, the organization that had created the program when it was supported by private funds. As skoolboy wrote at the time, ““The DOE had a competitive bidding process to award a contract to an organization that Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein had created and publicly supported over the past five years.” To further blur the public private line, Klein, not content to run the nation’s largest public schools system and the Fund for Public Schools, last year co-founded the Education Equality Project (you’ve got to give the guy points for energy). A joint project of Klein and the Rev. Al Sharpton, it seeks to close the educational achievement gap between white and minority students. On Monday, the Post reported that the city’s malleable Conflicts of Interest Board had granted Klein and top education department staff permission to raise money for the Education Equality Project “using both city time and city resources.” Council of School Supervisors and Administrators President Ernie Logan, apparently a supporter of the project’s program, reportedly called the fund-raising arrangement “the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.” Maybe — but you can’t argue with success. Yesterday, Juan Gonzalez reported in the Daily News that soon after Sharpton and Klein forged their alliance Sharpton’s National Action Network received a $500,000 donation to support his work for the project. “The huge infusion of cash — equal to more than a year’s payroll for Sharpton’s entire organization — was quietly provided by Plainfield Asset Management, a Connecticut-based hedge fund, where former Chancellor Harold Levy is a managing director,” Gonzalez writes. The money reportedly did not go directly to Sharpton but was channeled through Education Reform Now, a group Gonzalez said is headed by former Daily News reporter and charter school advocate Joe Williams, who also heads Democrats for Education Reform. Williams (another busy guy), who is president and treasurer of the Education Equity project, would not tell Gonzalez how the donation was handled or what it was used for. Williams did tell his former colleague that the project’s board has not met in the 10 months since Klein and Sharpton formed it and city Education Department employees have so far made all day-to-day decisions. At the time of the donation, Gonzalez writes, “Plainfield Asset Management, a major investor in gaming operations, was pressing city and state officials for approval of two deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars annually.” At the same time, according to the report, Sharpton was settling a “longrunning IRS investigation of his organization” that resulted in his owing some $1 million in back taxes and penalties. The Education Equality Project group will be meeting in New York today and tomorrow as part of the National Action Network’s annual convention
New School in Exile update
Yesterday, Friday April 10th, at about 6am a group of students from the New School in Exile took over a New School building with two simple demands: the resignation of New School President Bob Kerrey and full control the building as a free student space. By noon, most of the occupiers were gassed and arrested and are now sitting in jail. Bob Kerrey and the NYPD claim that some of the occupiers were violent, albeit NSIE claims otherwise. Regardless, I can't image that the NYPD were too civil themselves.
For more info and pics you can visit the New School in Exile's website here.
Angus at StudentActivism.net added a video to his blogging about the matter. The video, which is 1 minute and 59 seconds long was put out by the NYPD. For the video click here.
He writes:
It’s a little odd that the cops would think that posting video in which they weren’t beating or pepper-spraying people would serve as a defense against evidence that they beat and/or pepper-sprayed other people at a different stage of the day’s events. What’s really odd, though, is that the video is so short. If there was no police misconduct at any point during the arrests inside 65 Fifth, that’s great news. But if that’s the case, shouldn’t the cops release all the tape they have from inside the building, instead of just a two minute clip?
The fact that the NYPD youtube administrator has decided to disable all commenting on the video is also pretty questionable, since they only appear to do that for a select few videos. We're not idiots, right?
Anyhow, I think its amazing that Kerrey is still sticking around. If most of your students and a fair amount of your professors hate you and wish you would leave, and the only people who respect the legitimacy of your presidency are the officers of the NYPD, then don't you think it's time to find a new day job?
Anthony Seminerio wants to give the bad guys a spanking
 Members of the NYC council are notorious for being complete idiots. Come and learn why. Corrupt Queens Councilman Anthony Seminerio, known for pocketing half a million dollars in bribes, has proposed punishing young people who graffiti by spanking them with a paddle. I have professors who can deconstruct the sexual aspect of this...um...fetish-BDSM-legislation much better than I can, so I will just skip it and say briefly that graffiti is not just some pesky criminal act done by gangs, but it reflects the anger of young people at a nauseating class disparity which occurs along racial lines. This class disparity is apparent in NYC as the differences between affluent areas and impoverished areas are vast, and are only becoming worse due to NYC's gentrification.
Sometimes I graffiti too. I add a little zest to an expolitative advertisement by pointing out its sexism or racism.
But of course Seminerio won't bother with any of that thought-stuff. He'll just be glad to paddle down a Black or Latino boy (let's not pretend this matter doesn't occur along racial or gender lines), degrade his "little" attempt at resistence, and while everyone's distracted by it he'll just be pocketing some more bribes.
You can contact your councilmen and women here.
Compensation, much?
 Governor of New York David Paterson unveils a plan to expand health insurance to the largest uninsured age group: young adults 19-29. Times Union breaks the story. The expansion emerges in the wake of a proposal by the unelected governor for large scale cuts in welfare programs. He has pretty much cut through these programs like butter: nearly a billion dollars will be taken from medicaid services and over a 100 million will be denied to the City University of New York, which spends nearly all of its money on financing the education of underprivileged youth, by 2010. Thanks? Meanwhile, most of the mainstream media is focusing on Paterson's "bald move" to cut government spending on lifestyle drugs, such as propecia, curently subsidized by NY State for elderly health care programs. Um...yeah, you show them David! Wait a second, I didn't know my EDUCATION was a lifestyle drug. Also, I didn't know propecia cost the state a billion dollars.
Nevertheless, any recognition of the right of young adults to have healthcare works for me. Especially when finding a job today is increasingly becoming impossible and many young adults are coming out of high school and college without livelihood. With this plan we very well may live to see the inside of a cubicle. How exciting.
However, knowing that he is proposing to drastically cut state spending on insurance I did have to ask: Where is this money coming from exactly? Oh yeah, our parents.
"Under Paterson's plan, insurers and employers who provide health insurance would be required to offer continued coverage to the older children of employees. For parents, providing the insurance would be optional."
Yeah, he sucks. But I'm still going to support this thing.
You can contact the assemblymen and women in NY Legislature here.
|
RSS Feed