STATE BUDGET INFO

August 1,2007

Richard P. Mills
Commissioner of Education
State Education Department
Education Building
Albany, NY 12234                                               Re: Comments on NYC Department of Education’s       
                                                                                    Proposal for Contract for Excellence

     In my role as School Finance Advisor to the Educational Priorities Panel I’d like to offer the State Education Commission some comments from a long-range perspective. I have been an active participant in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) from its inception,  but my involvement in the effort to redirect and expand state aid for New York City school children goes back decades. As a staff member serving several of the New York City Chancellors in the 1980’s I worked closely on the then New York City Board of Education’s state aid policy and helped launch the Board of Education’s first school finance case, Levittown vs. Nyquist in the early 1980’s. The goal of reforming the state’s system of distributing school funds and bringing greater financial equity to school districts like New  York City’s has motivated my work since then.

     At last, in the Education Budget and Reform Act of April 1, 2007, the state has provided the basic steps to achieve these goals. Yet, even as we can glimpse a light at the end of the tunnel, the proposed Contract for Excellence plan offered on July 5th fails to meet the state’s requirements. We must ensure that the principles established in the CFE case and implemented in legislation are not eroded by administrative fiat.

      The state requires certain school districts in the state including New York City’s citywide administrative district (as well as each of  its 32 community school districts) to produce a plan, or Contract for Excellence, describing how they will use the extra funds to be made available in response to the CFE suit. For New York City, the state budget specifies that, in the 2007-2008 year and thereafter “$258 million should be spent in five categories: class size reduction; full day pre-kindergarten; teacher and principal quality; middle and high school restructuring and more time on task. . .” The city school district is called upon to reduce average class size within five years throughout all grades, to align its plan with the city’s capital plan and to “include continuous class size reduction for low performing and overcrowded schools beginning in the 2007-2008 school year and thereafter. Implicit in the state’s plan is the need to focus on low-performing schools and to ensure that those students most in need receive priority attention.

      The proposal for a Contract for Excellence put forward by the New York City Department of Education (DOE) on July 5th sidesteps the language of the governing state law and the language of the CFE case. Instead, The DOE’s proposal for using state funds is designed to protect and further its own agenda.  Since control of the city schools was assumed by Mayor Bloomberg in 2002, that agenda has shifted and evolved.  At present, it rests on a commitment to empower principals. Rather than micromanage every decision, the DOE gives principals a precise range of choices for selecting supervision and allocating funds within each individual school. Each principal’s effectiveness will be evaluated according to standards developed by the administration. Ultimately, the administration is accountable for each principal’s performance, but it is unclear how this performance will respond to the requirements of state law. It appears that the administration has avoided any departure from existing practice lest it threaten the independence of the principals now serving the city schools.

      The class size issue was seized upon by most of the comments made during public hearings held beginning on July 9th , comments that expressed bitter disappointment at the administration’s reluctance to commit fully to the issue even as it applies to the early grades. Comments reflected years of disappointment with the central administration’s response to state mandates to reduce class size. Despite recent declines in enrollment, the public has not seen any significant reduction in class size, relatively little movement toward meaningful full-day kindergartens, little action to reduce overcrowding in the city’s most the over utilized schools.

     The DOE’s class size proposal includes no clear numeric limits on class sizes as a system requirement or even a goal. It states that the Department will use $141 million of the new funds on class size reduction this year, but announces that a large part of this allocation will support the Fair Student Funding (FSF) reforms that are already in place. The Fair Student Funding plan is part of a revised way of budgeting for individual schools within the system designed early this year to redirect funds to the pupils with the greatest need. As applied this year, the FSF allocation plan has resulted in many anomalies. Until its unpredicted inequitable effects are recognized and ameliorated, it should not be relied upon as the chief vehicle of redirecting funds to those students most in need of help.

     Fair Student Funding support was already part of the city budget. The $30 million in funding for Reduced Class Size, revives a program formerly awarded to New York City by the state legislature. Presumably, state funds generated in response to the CFE case should supplement, not supplant budgeted Department allocations.

     The Department proposes to provide at least $40 million for Collaborative Teaching Teams (CTT) that will add a special education teacher to classes that include some special education students thereby reducing the overall student-teacher ratio throughout the system. This part of the proposal furthers the Department’s agenda to support inclusion of many special education students in regular classrooms and may indeed improve student-teacher ratios. It does not help reduce overcrowding or create additional classrooms. Another part of the proposal offers to supply “coaches” to help certain principals learn how to reduce class size but provides no apparent incentive to encourage principals to actually create more classes.

      The Department of Education’s proposed use of new state funds is largely a reassertion of its on-going agenda. Its message is: “Yes, we’re taking care of that problem already. We already are improving the equity of our fund distribution through our new Fair Student Funding formulas that direct more funds to schools with students who most need support. We’re already lowering class size by improving student pupil ratios and by adding personnel in classes that include students in special education. Extra coaches will be assigned to some schools to help principals plan for reduced class size. Additional funds will certainly help, but we don’t need to specify any new criteria or goals to fulfill our obligations under state law.”

     Parents and advocates in New York City will be not be reassured that the Contract for Excellence will bring real change until they see more concrete evidence that the state law and its specific requirements are being met. State metrics should be the standard by which the performance of the New York City school district is measured. The transparency and of accountability required by state regulations cannot be achieved using administrative data generated by the DOE. The Department needs to submit a plan that clearly commits to implementation of the state’s law and regulations, not its own agenda. We urge the Commissioner to demand no less.

                                                                                                                   Sincerely, Joan Scheuer, Ph.D

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