It is now Day 5 of the Great School Bus Freeze-Out, as the editorial writers are calling it. Deputy Chancellor Kathleen Grimm is scheduled to provide another "parent update" on the status of the city's bizarre bus route changes later this morning, her second in as many days. (A good thing, methinks.)

But the fallout continues.

In a blistering story that made the wood of the Daily News for the second time this week, the newspaper outlines the "bungled decisions and poor planning at the highest levels of the Education Department" that led to this week's bus chaos. The headline writers gave out a grade of F "for all the city officials who bought into this shameful, doomed plan."

Meanwhile, the NY Post editorial board today wasn't impressed that it was the deputy mayor and deputy chancellor who were sent out to defend the mess Thursday. They urge the mayor and chancellor to end the foolishness and suggest they are in denial about how stupid their bus reorganization plan is.

What are some of the obvious lessons from all of this:

-- Implementation is still a big problem for the Department of Education. In fact, and this is painful to say, they really haven't implemented ANYTHING particularly well since the mayor got control of the city schools in 2002. I'm willing to be corrected if anyone can point to anything specific that they nailed from the get-go, but I can't think of anything. This is a big, bureaucratic system. It's difficult. And people within the system often just shrug their shoulders about how basic stuff gets so screwed up. But discussions about school reform would be much more productive if the supporters of the ideas and goals of Bloomberg and Klein acknowledged that this implementation issue has been the Achilles heel of the NYC education story.

-- It would be interesting to know exactly how many of the city's 1,400 school principals called someone high up at the Tweed Courthouse this week and said, "What you people are doing right now isn't good enough for my kids. Go back to the drawing board and try again." If the culture is really changing the way we want it to, principals have got to call out the bureaucrats on this kind of mess. It is no surprise that an administrator orchestrating the bus changes from Florida could care less about a kid standing at a cold bus stop at 5:30 in the morning. It is no surprise that a $400 per hour outside consultant could care less about whether buses arrive at school in time for students to receive the before-school tutoring that was a part of the recent UFT contract changes. You wouldn't expect them to care in this bureaucracy. But it is a surprise, and somewhat upsetting, that principals didn't revolt on this issue on behalf of their kids. They are the ones who are supposed to care. How many of them realized that this was pretty close to being an act of child endangerment/neglect on the part of the Department of Ed and then did something about it?

-- This was bad news on Monday and Tuesday. But it became worse news and a front page story for the New York Times only after Mayor Bloomberg made the incredibly misguided decision to lash out at the parents. It's great that Joel Klein, Kathleen Grimm, and Dennis Walcott are out there apologizing, but Bloomberg is the one who acted out here. Is that how he treats his customers at Bloomberg LLP?

-- At some point people are going to point out the obvious: Of all the places in an almost $20 billion budget to go looking for cost-savings, they for starters had to pick one of the areas where kids are actually being served? In the hierarchy of sacred cows in NYC, is pupil transportation really that prominent?

UPDATE: How bad is this situation? Even Council Speaker Christine Quinn is distancing herself from Bloomberg right now, and she's usually one of the mayor's biggest boosters.

UPDATE II: Gothamist is on the case, and includes a cool picture of zombies surrounding a school bus. Gotham Gazette's Wonkster is here.