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Speeches
The DOE’s five-year, $12.5 million contract with All Kinds of Minds raises a number of troubling questions: Why didn’t the Chancellor publicly announce his latest big-money reform? Is it because he’s worried about how the public will react to a plan that places the burden of evaluating special needs students squarely on the shoulders of our already-overworked teachers? Is it because he knows that it’s risky to adopt a program that doesn’t recognize learning disabilities such as dyslexia and Asperger’s syndrome but instead identifies all special needs children only as right-brained or left-brained? Or is it because he’s worried that the DOE will appear to be ducking the crisis in special education by brushing aside the whole system?
This is only the latest in a series of puzzling no-bid contracts that the DOE has recklessly handed out. First they spent $31 million on Voyager, an untested reading program that may be impractical for New York City schools. Then they gave the Leadership Academy $1.1 million for a vague and ill-conceived parent training program. Now we learn that they will pay All Kinds of Minds $2.5 million a year to train teachers in an unconventional method of evaluating children with special needs.
There is only one conclusion to draw from this series of contracts: Chancellor Klein likes expensive consultants. Rather than spending the City’s precious money on more trained evaluators and teachers to deal with the City’s current backlog of special ed cases, he has bought into another scheme that is controversial and potentially inappropriate. The Chancellor must know he’s on shaky ground because, as he’s done so many times before, he kept the All Kinds of Minds contract a secret for six months, even as the crisis in special education became a subject of public discussion.
Clearly, Chancellor Klein has many questions to answer. It’s time he learned to trust the public. It’s their schools, not his. If All Kinds of Minds fails the children of New York City , he will have the public to answer to.
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