American journalist Wayne Barrett (1945-2017), a columnist for The Village Voice, gave the New York City Department of Education a nickname of “Department of Exaggeration” in three 2009 columns. The Department of Education was accused of covering up its failures in several ways, such as teaching to pass standardized tests and dumbing down those tests (making them easier to pass). Barrett believed that the Department of Education’s touted successes were exaggerated.
 
The Department of Education has also been called the “Dumbest Organization Ever.”
   
     
Wikipedia: New York City Department of Education
The New York City Department of Education (NYCDOE) is the department of the government of New York City that manages the city’s public school system. The City School District of the City of New York (the New York City public schools) is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,800 separate schools. The department covers all five boroughs of New York City, and has an annual budget of nearly 25 billion dollars.
 
Wikipedia: Wayne Barrett
Wayne Barrett (July 11, 1945 – January 19, 2017) was an American journalist. He was an investigative reporter and senior editor for The Village Voice for 37 years. Barrett was a Fellow with The Nation Institute and contributor to Newsweek. He held degrees from Saint Joseph’s University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he served on the adjunct faculty for over thirty years.
       
The Village Voice (New York, NY)
Barrett on the Mayoral Race: Thompson Comes Unglued About schools, Bloomberg Tries to Paddle Him
by WAYNE BARRETT
JULY 30, 2009
If the latest poll numbers are to be believed, Bill Thompson is now a real candidate for mayor. So it’s time for all of us in the media to start treating him like one, and for him to start sounding like one.
 
He hardly sounded like the measured and thoughtful man we know him to be when he called for Joel Klein’s dismissal and branded the Department of Education the “Enron of American education” last week.
 
I said on NY1 Friday that Thompson had gone from hibernation to hyperbole, disappearing for so long we weren’t sure he was running, and then exploding with outrage over audit findings that raised meaningful questions about the Department of Exaggeration, but bore no resemblance to counts in an indictment (Enron was a criminal fraud after all).
     
The Village Voice (New York, NY)
Barrett: Now Even the Times is Burnishing Bloomberg-Klein School Myths
by WAYNE BARRETT
AUGUST 12, 2009
Since Mike Bloomberg and Joel Klein do have a real record to sell, why do they insist on embellishing it? And why does every newspaper in town, now even including the New York Times, lend itself to the Department of Exaggeration’s (DOE) campaign to merge the renewal of mayoral control and the re-election of the mayor in the public mind?
 
The Village Voice (New York, NY)
A Bloomberg Score Card: The Mayor’s Hits and Misses
by WAYNE BARRETT
OCTOBER 13, 2009
(...)
Rudy Giuliani famously said he wanted to “blow up” the independent Board of Education. Bloomberg instead made it his own—persuading the state legislature to disband the board and turn this $18 billion bureaucracy into a mayoral agency. Mike might be hyping the grades, but there’s no doubt he has a right to boast.
 
Let’s examine a statistic that neither Bloomberg nor the Department of Exaggeration compiled.
 
Twitter
Rachel Monahan‏
@rachelamonahan
I used to cover an agency nicknamed the Department of Exaggeration by @villagevoice reporter @BarrettNation, but ODOT was notable
10:38 AM - 11 Oct 2017