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BUDGET INFO |
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STATE BUDGET INFO March 2, 2007 Governor Eliot Spitzer Dear Governor Spitzer: The Educational Priorities Panel applauds your efforts to create a fairer funding system for the state’s public school students. For too long New York has ranked among a group of five states with the largest disparities in per-pupil funding between high-wealth and low-wealth school districts. New York also has the unique distinction of being the only state that allowed per-pupil funding in its largest city to fall significantly below the state’s average per-pupil funding level. As a coalition of civic groups working to improve the quality of instruction in New York City, EPP has supported the restructuring of the state’s system for funding school districts so that all children in the state can have a good education. Your Executive Budget proposal to establish a Foundation Aid amount for each pupil, adjusted for regional cost and for student need, represents real reform. Your four-year schedule of increases in Foundation Aid provides the predictability which is so important for education planning at the local level and which has been so sorely lacking at the state level. EPP does have several major concerns, however, in seven areas of your budget and programmatic recommendations for state school aid: 1. Debt Service for EXCEL Facility Grants EPP’s understanding of the April 2006 agreement was that the DASNY grants were essentially upfront payments with no outlay or hidden cost to New York City and to other school districts receiving these grants. Proceeds from NYS Dormitory Authority bonds were supposed to be forwarded directly to eligible school districts, as opposed to being sent to the state comptroller and then forwarded to the school districts. The intent of this slight difference was to remove annual EXCEL debt obligations 1) from the open book ledger of the state and, more importantly from our perspective, 2) from school aid formulas. It comes as an unpleasant surprise that your Executive Budget includes $94 million in debt payments for these EXCEL grants in the formula aids for New York City. While it is commendable that your administration may be seeking more disclosure of state debt obligations, this can be done through other methods that avoid misinforming the public and pitting facilities funding against instructional funding. All the categories of aids that appear in the “Combined Aids” represent annual state funding allocations to school districts. In contrast, “EXCEL Aid” represents a debt service obligation by the state to DASNY for a one-time grant to New York City that was deemed by all participants in the April 2006 agreement as part of the “CFE facilities remedy.” Furthermore, for much smaller, high-need school districts seeking EXCEL grants, the inclusion of this debt service in the formula aids may push them closer to the 25 percent cap on year-to-year increases in formula aid. Why create disincentives for these high-need districts to improve their school district facilities? If $94 million in EXCEL debt payments are eliminated from the formula aids for New York City, the city’s share of total state aid increases comes to 39.1 percent. This is only a few points above the “share” limit on state aid to New York City that was one of the key issues in 14 years of Campaign for Fiscal Equity litigation. We sincerely hope that you will take a firm stand to eliminate the past practice which automatically limited aid to New York City and Long Island school districts to an arbitrary, but fixed, percentage of any increase in state education aid. For too many years this sub rosa procedure overrode the formulas that were supposed to make the distribution of state education resources objective and equitable. As a reform Governor you need to end this practice. Another reason why we are concerned about the inclusion of debt service for EXCEL grants in formula aids is that the CFE remedy for facilities was not intended to obviate the need to increase the overall funding level for the New York City school district’s operating expenses. At the end of the day, all the formula aid allocations are fungible funds at the school district level. State debt obligations for EXCEL grants should not be considered as allocations to the New York City school district nor in any way be represented as an increase in operating funds to the city school district or any other school district receiving EXCEL grants.
2. Student-Need Weights in the Foundation Aid Special Education Students EPP supports your proposal to keep separate funding streams for students with disabilities who qualify for Private or Public High-Cost Excess Aid. We understand that under your proposal funding for students who are eligible for Public Excess Cost has been folded into the Foundation amount and that the proposed weight for these students, as told to EPP verbally, will be 1.41. Our concern is that this proposed weight is notexplicitly stated in the description of Executive Budget prepared by the NYS Division of the Budget. Is this an oversight or are some calculations still under consideration?
Students in Poverty We were surprised to find that half the weight for poverty was to be determined by census data. For New York City and other communities impacted by immigration, this measurement has not captured the true extent of families living in poverty. In fact, New York City has continued to challenge census figures because of a continuing undercount of residents. Poverty continues to pose the greatest challenge to achievement, so this weight should be increased.
Limited English Proficiency Students The reportof Standard & Poor’s to the Zarb Commission made explicit that student weights for LEP students were not based on estimates of actual added costs of instruction but instead were based on calculations of what would be politically acceptable for assistance to language-minority students. It is time to eliminate this type of bias. A study for Mayor Giuliani by Coopers & Lybrand about actual spending patterns in New York City public schools found that spending for extra services averaged 80 percent above average instructional expenditures, which did not include non-classroom expenditures such as for curriculum development, textbooks, and staff training. In addition, this is a category of weighting that tends to be of much shorter duration than disability or poverty, since these extra services are by their very nature transitional.
3. Class Size Reduction With two exceptions, the accountability provisions of your Executive Budget proposal have no relationship to the goal of bringing all school districts to the standards of adequate education of the group of 465 “successful” school districts. Have any of these “successful” districts engaged in projects to increase time-on-task, to restructure high schools and middle schools, or to extend kindergarten to full-day programs? The answer is no. These successful school districts are not awash with a churning of initiatives but instead offer reasonable class sizes that help them attract and retain more qualified teachers. EPP’s strong support for class size reduction is not only based on impressive research findings of assessments of the Tennessee STAR and Wisconsin SAGE programs to reduce class sizes but also on our strong commitment as a coalition to eliminate educational double standards based on the race and class of students. The CFE trial testimony as well as judicial rulings cited New York City’s overcrowded classrooms as evidence of inadequacy. Your proposed “Contract for Excellence” would allow low-achieving school districts to substitute their current set of initiatives for any effort to create an instructional program that is similar to those of successful districts. When you campaigned for Governor your television ads prominently mentioned class size reduction as one of your policy objectives, so we are disappointed to see it relegated to an “option.”
4. Tuition Tax Deduction This Executive Budget proposal to provide tax deductions to parents who pay tuition to private schools conflicts with any effort to achieve adequacy for all school districts in the state. Sending children to private school should be perceived as a personal choice by parents, not a necessity because local schools are substandard. While your $25 million proposal is not as ambitious as Governor Pataki’s $400 million proposal for tax credits for private school tuition, it is still premised on the failure of state government to perform its function to provide a good, free educational system for all children in the state. Whether it is a legal subterfuge to skirt the state constitution’s separation of church and state is irrelevant to the issue of the motivation for this proposal. Is it a statement that the state will provide a tax deduction to parents because the state is unwilling to ensure an adequate education for their children? Shouldn’t it be the first order of business for the state to fix its public schools?
5. Middle Class STAR We appreciate your efforts to link increases in school property tax relief to income and regional home values. Nevertheless, New York City residents will still receive a disproportionately small share of this tax relief because most are not home owners. We urge you to address the issue of fairness in taxation, especially for renters who pay school property taxes through their rents.
6. Measurements for Accountability Improvement Targets for High School Graduation Researchers view graduation rates as a complex phenomena that not only measure instructional quality but also job opportunities for youth in the local labor market, so there are some problematic aspects to the use of this measurement as a performance indicator. For example, a downturn in the economy could result in improved high school graduation rates. Of more immediate concern is the need to eliminate unfair performance goals that ignore differences among school districts in requirements for graduation. New York City has among the nation’s highest course requirements for high school graduation, because they are geared to college preparatory education. One of the findings of EPP in our report about delayed graduation rates is that one course failure triggers a fifth year of high school for most New York City students given the limited schedules and limited summer school offered to them. Another finding is that students learning English at the high school level took longer to get a degree. Districts with high numbers of recent immigrants should not be penalized for the demographic characteristics of their student population. A seven-year snapshot of the outcomes of ninth graders is a more appropriate measurement of graduation rates than a four-year snapshot. These measurements should also avoid NYC Department of Education’s practices of including students who secure GED diplomas in the numbers of “graduates” and of excluding students who transfer to other districts from the cohort data.
Test Outcomes We strongly urge you to provide the NYS Education Department with sufficient funding to move up the date by which “value-added” assessments will become available. Test outcomes are universally and strongly correlated to the socio-economic characteristics of students so they tend to reflect these characteristics rather than provide a genuine measurement of school and school district performance. Instead of an accountability framework, your efforts to measure instructional performance may simply capture demographic differences.
SURR School Restructuring and Reorganization EPP strongly opposes creating a large group of schools that should be restructured or reorganized all at one time. Prior experiences with large-scale efforts in New York State have conclusively shown that no school district has the capacity to successfully undertake multiple turnaround efforts. The success of the SURR program, in contrast to the much larger and, so far unimpressive, federal Title 1 “Schools In Need of Improvement” program, has been its much more limited number of schools.
7. Raising the Cap on the Number of Charter Schools EPP members strongly object to your Executive Budget proposal to increase the number of charter schools to 250 from the current 100 charters. There is no objective research that indicates that charter schools are doing a better job than public schools, so we see no rationale for expanding this program. Moreover, in New York City charter schools continue to discriminate against students with disabilities and immigrant children even though they are receiving public funding. Though many charter schools also receive substantial private funding, their true per-pupil resource level is not made public.
Sincerely, Marilyn Braveman, Chairperson Noreen Connell, Executive Director CC Majority Speaker Sheldon Silver; Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno; Hon. Catherine Nolan, Chair NYS Assembly Education Committee; Hon. Stephen M. Saland, Chair NYS Senate Education Committee; Commissioner Richard Mills, NYS Education Department; Paul Francis, Budget Director & Senior Advisor to the Governor
[ Budget Info | FAQ NYC Students/Schools | State Funding Equity | Smaller Class Sizes | Facilities | Standards | Emergency Campaign Against Vouchers | Historical Facts | Lingo Translations | Best Schools/School Performance ] |
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