Team Adams is vowing to target fat at the city’s Department of Education, and a report last week by The Post’s Susan Edelman shows why it should waste no time: Over the past seven years, the department’s budget ballooned a jaw-dropping 60 percentBetween $20 billion and $32 billion plus an additional $5 billion in pension expenses.
Outlays for central-administration educrats and school-support personnel soared about $87 million and $180 million, respectively. The combined headcount increased by 44 percent. In addition, the number and skills of managers, analysts/supervisors, specialists, and supervisors soared to 5,100 from 3,500 in 2014. More than 2,000 people earned six-figure salaries, with 44 of them earning more than $200,000.
All the while enrollment figures were Falling It has no significant benefit for children. (De Blasio & Co. may crow about small increases in high-school-graduation rates, but those came as standards were lowered.)
No wonder David Banks, new Schools Chancellor, rhetorically questioned these managers: “If your job were to disappear tomorrow, would that change anything happening in any of the schools?”
Banks says for all the billions the city spends, it’s “outrageous” and “a betrayal” that 65 percent of blacks and Hispanics never achieve academic proficiency. He’s spot on.
Banks suggested that if everyone in the Department of Education went home, all the children would go to school.
The new boss vows to relocate personnel “closer to where the action is. But shifting them won’t suffice; he’ll also need to trim that bloated headcount. If he can make significant savings, he might be able to use them to benefit students and not just adults by helping charter schools grow.
Adams appears not only to share Banks’ view but to believe similar waste pervades city government and is looking to trim elsewhere, too.
He fumes that we are not giving taxpayers what they deserve every day. He promises to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse by creating a new Mayors Office of Risk Management and Compliance that will focus its attention on the Department of Correction and New York City Housing Authority.
Adams speaks like a smart businessman, railing that a number of agencies are “just taking taxpayers dollars” and “not producing a good product. The truth is that Rikers and most of the public housing are downright evil, even though the school system is in dire straits. Both have federal court-appointed monitors to oversee years-long mismanagement.
The annual corrections bill for inmates is $566,539 but they can’t fix broken doors or locks in city jails. Inmates and residents of public housing are subject to inhumane conditions such as violence, overcrowding and heat/hot water issues, mold and lead paint, as well as repair backlogs.
Adams, Banks, as well as the rest of the team have a lot of work ahead of them. This is not only at DOE.