Our Albany scofflaws

Just
picture it: state police swooping down on the capitol building in Albany, arresting
Governor Pataki and members of the Senate and Assembly, and hauling them off to
jail.

It won’t happen, of course. If you
or I refused to obey a judge, you knowwhat
would happen. But not with this court order. Not when the issue is giving urban
school districts enough money to adequately educate the state’s poorest,
predominantly minority, children.

We’ve reached what should be the end
of the line in the suit commonly known as CFE: the Campaign for Fiscal Equity vs. the State of New York. Filed more than 10 years ago, the suit is based on the
state constitution, which guarantees all New York children a
“sound, basic education.” CFE charges that the state doesn’t give New York
City enough money to do that. And as the CFE suit has wound its
way through the state’s legal system, two courts have agreed with CFE and
ordered the state to come up with a new school-aid plan.

The state has appealed, and dragged
its heels, and deliberated. In the end, the governor and the legislature
haven’t been able to agree on how much money is needed. And so the deadline for
a new aid plan — July of this year — came and went.

Then the court appointed a
three-member panel to come up with a figure. Last week, the panel announced its
findings: New York City schools
should get $5.6 billion more. Billion,
not million. Every year.

And,
the panel said, New York schools
should get $9.2 billion more for capital improvements: more classrooms, science
labs, libraries, and the like.

The panel’s report is simply a
recommendation. The final number will be set by State Supreme Court Justice
Leland DeGrasse, whose eloquent, forceful ruling in 2001 first ordered the
state to come up with a new funding plan. Odds are, though, his figure will
reflect the panel’s work.

The CFE case dealt solely with New York
City, but all of the state’s urban districts are in a similar
situation. Those districts hope that if and when the state obeys the court
order, it will also increase aid to the other urban districts, including Rochester. Need and
justice may not move things, but politics might; legislators from other cities
won’t want their districts to be left out.

But are we really at the end of the
line now? What will happen if the governor and the legislators continue to
delay?

We have, as Rochester School Board
member Rob Brown puts it, “a constitutional crisis,” with the governor and the
legislators flatly refusing to obey the court. “We spend all this time teaching
our children about the separation of powers,” says Brown, and state government
blithely ignores it.

“I had hoped that the state
legislature would resolve this and come up with a compromise,” says School
Superintendent Manuel Rivera. “They were under the gun. They had a timeline.
There couldn’t have been more pressure.”

And note: This case has dragged on
for more than 10 years. The delay, as the court’s panel says in its report,
“has adversely impacted almost the entire school lives of countless children.”

Clearly, it costs more to educate
children from impoverished, poorly educated families than it does to educate
children from wealthy, well-educated ones. And poor children are often affected
by much more than poverty; many of them don’t have a stable family structure.

“What it brings home,” says Rob
Brown, “is that there is no political will to solve the problem of educating
poor minority children.”

At every step in the CFE suit, the
case for giving substantially more money to urban districts has been made. And
still we wait.

Meantime? Enrollment in Rochester has been
declining, and the district will be closing schools as a result. But my hunch
is, that will provide only minimal, temporary relief. Expenses continue to go
up, health insurance and retirement costs among them.

“We’ll have to cut back on areas
that are not mandated,” says Rivera. He anticipates staff and program cuts —
which, he notes, will feed “the system of haves and have-nots within this
county.”

Banning
the truth

It’s
hard to be shocked by anything TV networks do these days, but the latest news
is very troubling stuff.

NBC and CBS have refused to air a paid United Church of Christ ad. The ad,
which promotes UCC as a welcoming denomination, shows a burly, bouncer-type man
admitting some people to a church and turning others — including two
presumably gay men — away. It ends with this tagline: “Jesus didn’t turn
people away. Neither do we.” The two networks say it’s controversial, it’s
“advocacy,” and they don’t run such ads.

That’s indeed a hoot. Political ads
aren’t controversial? Political ads aren’t “advocacy” ads? Automotive ads don’t
advocate anything? Viagra ads don’t
advocate anything?

The ad (online at the UCC website
www.stillspeaking.org) is an innocent little thing that simply tells the truth:
Some churches, as any Christian knows, do
not welcome everybody. And yes, indeed: Truth is often controversial.

Many cable channels are running the
ad, so the NBC-CBS foolishness didn’t keep UCC from spreading its message. But
the two networks’ stand is a warning: This is where we’re headed with the
growing concentration of megamedia. The networks will protect the nation from
controversy. And if they’ll screen ads for controversy, how long will it be
before they start screening news reports?

Just as troubling is this New York Times report: CBS officials
were worried about the ad’s “implied exclusion of gays” — and about
government reaction. An anonymous CBS executive “confirmed the contents of a CBS
staff report that mentioned the Bush administration’s backing of [a] proposed
federal constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage,” the Times reported.

That ought to make your hair stand
on end, regardless of your politics.

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This article appears in Dec 8-14, 2004.