Control board slips contract approval under under George Arthur’s nose

As I reported in last week’s issue, Buffalo Fiscal Stability Authority secretary George K. Arthur raised questions about a $1.7 million dollar item up for approval by the control board involving ResulTech, the Maryland firm hired by the Buffalo Public Schools to provide “ongoing technical support at Academy School 44.”

Arthur’s concerns were not satisfied by a reply sent last Monday, July 7, by BFSA principal analyst Michael Kelly, who explained the ResulTech contract extension this way:

…there is no evaluation or report of this group forthcoming. However, the State Department of Education is producing and will release a report on Academy School #131 (a.k.a. 44) after a recent visit. The report is at the request of BPS after a visit by State Education Department personnel. The report may recommend additional ways to improve academic performance at the school, but is expected to support the current practices in place at Academy School #131. The District was looking for another set of eyes to review their current practices, but the review is unrelated to the work by ResulTech at the school.

The reply doesn’t mention that Buffalo Teachers Federation President Phil Rumore also contacted the Department of Education requesting an investigation into ResulTech’s role at the school, which is puzzling until we consider the source of Kelly’s response, which we’ll get to later.

What Arthur was asking for, in part, was an explanation why the program which has thus far cost the BPS $5.4 million over the past two years never received any kind of evaluation at the end of its second year, a year that saw shockingly low test scores—100 percent failure rate for eighth grade math. The program was also the target of harsh criticism from Rumore, based on feedback from teachers at the school. Kelly’s reply only furthered Arthur’s concern, and he expressed that via e-mail to all control board members on July 11.

The lack of a review for the program’s second year flew in the face of recommendations by Mansoor A. F. Kazi at the Program Evaluation Center at the UB School of Social Work. Kazi conducted a review of ResulTech’s first year and advised that a real-time evaluation of the program’s progress “should be carried out at the end of each marking period in order to investigate the circumstances in which the ResulTech blended curriculum is more or less likely to be effective, and to inform the future implementation with the aim of helping more students to be successful.”

However, that initial study, completed in the spring of 2007, is the last one examining the program at the school. There’s been no followup, and apparently school board members Mary Ruth Kapsiak, Catherine Collins, Florence Johnson, Vivian Evans, and Pamela Perry-Cahill felt that ResulTech’s results were good enough for the roughly 300 at-risk youth who attend the school, and approved the contract on June 25, bringing ResulTech’s compensation up to $7.1 million dollars for three years. All that remained was a rubber-stamp from BFSA.

Now Arthur is confused. He was under the impression that by moving to table the vote, he and other members of the BFSA would have the opportunity to investigate the contract further—hopefully holding a public hearing on the matter.

To his surprise, BFSA Executive Director Bertha Mitchell had already forwarded a notice to Jim Kane, executive assistant to Superintendent James A. Williams, dated July 8, indicating that the ResulTech contract (among others) had been approved by the BFSA.

That letter was actually composed by BFSA senior analyst Bryce Link, who said that he had assumed the July 7 explanation offered by BFSA principal analyst Michael Kelly had settled the matter. Link went on to say that the reply Kelly provided to Arthur was actually from Associate Superintendent for Education Services Will Keresztes, who is the same person who put together the new contract extension for ResulTech in the first place.

As we go to press, Arthur is still waiting to hear back from control board chair Paul Kolkmeyer, to see if there is any point in pursuing a matter that seems to have already been approved.

The message in all of this seems to be that students can be allowed to fail, but vendors don’t even have to take a test as long as they have advocates in the right places.

—buck quigley