The city Department of Education is turning the collapse of the investment bank Bear Stearns into a hiring opportunity, tapping a managing director at the bank to become the department’s newest chief financial officer.

City school officials have offered the CFO position to George Raab, a managing director of investment banking at Bear Stearns.

Mr. Raab has accepted the offer, but the appointment will not become official until a background check is completed, a spokesman for the Department of Education, Andrew Jacob, said.

The department has been without an official CFO since 2006, when a longtime civil servant, Bruce Feig, left the job.

A consulting firm that was hired in June 2006 to cut excess bureaucracy from the city school system, Alvarez & Marsal, took over the job of managing the department’s finances after Mr. Feig’s departure.

Chief among Mr. Raab’s tasks will be steering the school system through an uncertain economy. The difficulties at Wall Street firms such as Bear Stearns have meant diminished revenue projections for the city, and that is translating into school budgets that are tighter than officials had hoped a few years ago.

Mr. Jacob did not disclose the salary Mr. Raab would receive at the Education Department, saying the figure cannot be finalized until the background check is completed.

The last chief financial officer, Mr. Feig, made $178,156 a year.

The Alvarez & Marsal contract, which expired in November 2007, totaled $15.8 million. The department has said the firm redirected $171 million to principals’ budgets from school bureaucracy.

Mr. Raab had been at Bear Stearns for at least 10 years.

He did not respond to telephone messages left at his home and office yesterday, and Department of Education officials declined a request to make him available for an interview.