Read the op-ed in yesterday’s Daily News by Evan Thies, candidate for David Yassky’s City Council seat. A former aide to Yassky, Thies is a member of Community Board 1. Thies is appalled; the city is slashing $300 million from the Department of Education, which will mean overcrowding and a dearth of much needed resources. At the same time, there are no planned cuts to the DOE’s Office of Assessment and Accountability, the love child of Chancellor Klein and Mayor Bloomberg.

The budget passed Sunday for the new fiscal year will slash the Department of Education by $300 million, largely by taking money directly out of schools. Yet, the same budget includes an untouched allocation of $8 million for staff at the department’s Office of Assessment and Accountability – the mayor’s pet project to monitor students and schools – and another $23 million for operating expenses such as tests.

Although the status quo in our city’s schools needed – and still needs – to be changed, and I applaud the mayor especially for his previous dedication to improving our school system, as well as Speaker Christine Quinn for her valiant try in this budget to restore funding, it is alarming that the mayor’s nonessential and expensive accountability experiment won out over less-crowded classrooms and desperately needed resources for students.

If cuts had to be made to the education budget, as the administration says that it did – though I disagree that they must – certainly we should start with suspending or reorganizing parts of, or the entire, unnecessary accountability and monitoring programs while we work to restore the department’s budget to full funding.

The mayor, unfortunately, seems to disagree. These cuts were to be even deeper in the mayor’s original proposed budget, but the City Council managed to restore a third of the funding. And though the operating budget for the Office of Assessment Accountability would be cut modestly next year, it is unclear exactly how or where this money would be spent.

Monitoring and testing at schools has so far had mixed results. The aggregate scores of city schoolchildren on federal tests have been flat or have declined during these first years of the assessment experiment. Scores from state-administered tests have improved, but that could be merely the result of the degree of difficulty of the tests varying from year to year…