School improvement: the price is wrought

When
you hear stories about New York State’s urban schools and budget problems, you
might assume that only the “Big Five” urban districts (including
Rochester) are in a bind. But a new report from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity
says, basically, we’re all in this together.

            Well, most of us.

            On March 30, the American Institutes
of Research and Management Analysis & Planning Inc., under CFE’s auspices,
put out its New York Adequacy Study.
AIR and MAP worked with dozens of teachers and academics, and also got help
from groups like the New York State School Boards Association and the
Albany-based Fiscal Policy Institute.

            The study specifies how New York
State should implement what’s become known as the “CFE decision,” a
Court of Appeals judgment that required more spending for high-needs schools in
New York City (and by extension, other high-poverty areas). The court set July
30 as the deadline for an implementation plan.

So how are
most New York Staters in the same boat? The study charges that 517 school districts
in New York State “will require increased investment” to ensure a
“Regents-level education.” A good number of Monroe County school
districts are on the list: Brockport, Churchville-Chili, East Irondequoit,
Gates-Chili, Greece, Hilton, Honeoye Falls-Lima, Rochester, Spencerport, West
Irondequoit, and Wheatland-Chili. (The county’s most affluent suburbs are
conspicuously absent.)

            There’s a wide range of need here,
of course. The study says the Rochester city schools need a boost in state
funding of around 40 percent. East Irondequoit needs 17 percent more, says the
study, while Hilton needs just 3 percent more.

            Neighboring counties are
represented, too. The study says Wayne County’s Gananda and Red Creek districts
need 43 percent and 34 percent more, respectively. Geneseo and Mt. Morris, both
in Livingston County, need 15 percent and 38 percent more, respectively; and
Wyoming County’s Letchworth district needs a whopping 61 percent more, says the
study.

            All in all, the Adequacy Study says
New York State must increase its school spending by $6.6 billion to more than
$9 billion over four years.

            But it’s not just about dollars and
cents. The study lays the program areas into which the money should flow.

            The target areas include the key
structures of progressive educational reform: significantly smaller class
sizes, pre-K in all schools (including a half-day program for three-year-olds),
more teaching assistants and specialists, and some extended-day and
extended-year programs.

Governor
George Pataki, meanwhile, has in effect submitted a lower bid.

            On March 29, the governor’s
handpicked New York State Commission on Education Reform issued its own report,
which headlined three goals: “dramatically increasing accountability,
simplifying [the] school aid system, and targeting strong support to high-needs
districts.”

            The “strong support” would
total $2.5 to $5.6 billion in additional state aid. Standard & Poor’s, one
of the nation’s pre-eminent financial services firms, did the math for the
commission. S&P based its conclusions on spending patterns in existing
“successful school districts,” so defined.

            In a prepared statement, Commission
chair Frank Zarb, who’s had a long career in the financial services industry,
emphasized a hierarchy of needs. “It is important,” he said, “to
provide resources, but it is possible to add billions more, only to have it
sucked into the existing structure while things get worse. We must give
priority attention to system reforms… [and] new measures of
accountability.”

            Indeed, the Zarb Commission, as it’s
become known, has a thing for numbers-based accountability. But how would such
accountability be monitored and enforced? For one thing, says the Zarb report,
school districts would have to file three-year “improvement plans.”

            Under these terms, “troubled
schools” could find themselves in big trouble. “If a poorly
performing school is not improved within three years, the entire school must be
closed,” says the Zarb report.

            That doesn’t mean the building and
students will disappear, of course. As the report says, the affected schools
would be “restructured” with a “new principal and staff.”
They’d also be allowed to “convert” to charter schools. (The Rev.
Floyd Flake, a former US Congressmember and a nationally known charter-school
advocate, sat on the commission.) Enforcement would fall to a new “Office
of Educational Accountability,” which would make site visits, impose
sanctions, and more.

            The report also says school
districts should be empowered to eliminate tenure for principals and other
administrators, and to limit teacher tenure through “accelerated”
disciplinary processes. Moreover, it recommends granting greater mayoral
control over school districts, as in New York City under Mayor Michael
Bloomberg. (Bloomberg recently said his schools need $5.3 billion more from the
state.)

“There’s
no perfect way to do this,” says David Shaffer of the Public Policy
Institute and the Business Council of New York State. Shaffer was a Zarb
Commission member; he says CFE engaged him “as a sort of outside
critic,” as well.

            The Zarb Commission showed no
“ideological slant,” says Shaffer. “The one-word summary of the
Zarb report is ‘yes,'” he says. But “the big question is whether the
CFE is going to take yes for an answer.”

            Shaffer poses another big question:
whether the state legislature will adopt a plan for increased funding or allow
the matter to revert to the courts.

            Maria Behncke, a city of Rochester
resident who’s the local coordinator for the Alliance for Quality Education, a
key CFE ally, finds some “heartening” things in the Zarb report. For
one thing, she says, it does “recognize there’s a structural inequity in
the system.” She’s happy the report addresses things like class size and
urban poverty. But, she says, “they’ve put things in [their report] that
could block the essential good that could come out of this.”

            Everyone favors accountability of
some kind, says Behncke. But schools, she says, already get closer scrutiny
than any other area of public spending. Items like mayoral control, Regents
testing, and charter schools should be open to public discussion, she says. But
that can’t happen, she says, under current conditions.

            Behncke also attacks the notion that
city schools already get more than their share of funds. The Alliance for
Quality Education, she says, studied the numbers in the most recent New York: The State of Learning report
from the State Education Department. This report put the Rochester City School
District’s instructional expenses at $6,080 per pupil. The Monroe County
average was $6,160 per pupil.

CFE board
member Thomas Frey, a former Monroe County executive who also served on the Board of
Regents, highlights a political angle. “Who would be surprised that
Pataki’s group would come in low — lowball the figure?” he asks. He
charges that Zarb and company were empanelled precisely to knock the amount of
funding down.

            “The Campaign for Fiscal Equity
has from the beginning put this in the hands of professional educators,”
says Frey. Thus the CFE, he says, “came up with a real plan” for
targeting funds to schools whose students “need a lot of extra help.”

            Money remains the issue, though. Where
will it come from? Consider one fact: According to the Fiscal Policy Institute,
in recent decades New York’s top income-tax rate has dropped from more than 15
percent to around 7 percent.

A
public meeting on “Fair Funding,
Better Schools: Creating Real Solutions” will be held Thursday, April
22, 6:30 till 8:30, East High School, 1801 East Main Street. The meeting will
focus on the amount of funding necessary to provide a sound education to all
children. Event sponsors: Campaign for Fiscal Equity, NY State School Boards
Association, League of Women Voters of NY State. Free. 888-690-0212.

This article appears in Apr 7-13, 2004.