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LETTERS 96 |
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Letters 96 June 10, 1996 Dear Councilmember: The enclosed petitions have been signed by over 2000 parents and other concerned residents of New York City who urge you to put an end to continuing education budget cutting. They want public schools of high quality for children. They also want an end to the budget gimmicks that have made education funding an elaborate political shell game. You have an opportunity over the next week to work to improve New York City public schools for over one million children or to continue to participate in budget gimmickry. We ask that you take the following 3 actions: 1) Fund Chancellor Rudy Crew's 6 initiatives to strengthen the Board of Education's instructional program. The instructional crisis in the New York City public schools, after seven years of budget cutting, is so severe that it demands the same urgent attention as the school repair problem, if not more so. Here are the immediate challenges facing the Board of Education that the Chancellor's initiatives address: • The city's school children lag significantly behind children in the rest of the state in meeting the State Education Department's standards for third grade reading, and the State Education Commissioner plans to raise these minimal competency standards even higher. On average, 90% of third grade students in the rest of the state are at or above grade level in reading on standardized tests, but in New York City only 61% meet this level of mastery. $12 million (initiative #1) will provide funds for a competitive grants program to encourage schools to improve their early grade reading programs so that more third graders will meet state standards. • Since 1989, the State Education Department has placed 114 schools on a list of low-performing schools subject to "Registration Review," 110 of them New York City schools, and the State Education Commissioner plans to shift responsibility for school improvement from the State Education Department to the local school district. After at least two years on the state SURR list, with the help of the State Education Department's school improvement unit, 29% of these schools improved enough to be removed from the SURR list. But now the New York City Board of Education itself must develop its own capability to help administrators and teachers improve the instructional program of low-performing schools. $5.75 million will provide funds to create a Board of Education school improvement unit ($.6 million, initiative #2); develop performance standards for schools and assess student progress ($.65 million, initiative #5 and $4.5 million, initiative #8). • New York City has the highest proportion of special education students in the state and the highest percentage of mildly disabled students in segregated settings, where their academic performance, on average, actually declines from their prior level of achievement. 60% of New York City special education students are in segregated placements, in contrast to a state average of 41.2% and a national average of 19.8%. A 1985 New York University study found that both reading and math scores declined for students in segregated placements, one of the few studies conducted on this topic. $6 million (initiative #3) will provide funds for a competitive grants program for innovative programs to prevent special education placements and to allow some special education children to be educated in general education classrooms. • In New York City, only 6.7 microcomputers were available for every 100 public school students in the fall of 1994, while for the rest of the state (excluding all the urban school districts) the ratio was 11.4 microcomputers for every 100 public school students. Worse, only a third of microcomputers in New York City schools are classified as new generation. City schools also lag behind most other schools in the number of video recorders, cable television reception, television sets, and CD-ROM players, essentially making it far more difficult for students, teachers, and administrators to access the information highway at a time when the State Education Department has embarked on partnerships with major technology and information industries. $2 million in expense budget funds and $12 million (initiative #4) in capital funds will enable every school to have direct access to the Internet and to standardize and upgrade information technology in the classroom. 2) Provide adequate funding for school building repairs and textbooks, either through the City Council Speaker's "Safe City...Next Generation" initiative or the Mayor's independent bonding authority initiative, with adequate guarantees to taxpayers, school children, and school employees that repairs will be done on the basis of objective need, not political deals. Part of the reason that close to 300 schools are in grave risk of losing the use of classrooms and even whole floors because of unrepaired roofs is that capital repairs, until the creation of the School Construction Authority, were done on the basis of political priorities. The current capital budget for school repairs, now at $2.7 billion, is not enough to safeguard the building integrity of all schools, so any additional funds must, at an absolute minimum, be used wisely to preserve the basic physical infrastructure of school buildings. Under either plan, just as other school districts have done, textbooks can be made a capital expense item. The $50 million allocation for textbook funds under the City Council Speaker's initiative will not mean that every student will get up-to-date textbooks, but at least New York will begin to supplement New York State Textbook Law allocations, just as most other school districts routinely supplement their NYSTL allocations. 3) Safeguard education funds by not using any increases in state school aid to supplant city tax levy funds and by not reducing the Board of Education's allocation should the state decrease state school aid. Until an agreement is reached by the Governor and legislative leaders on state school aid, which will resolve issues of growth aid, mandate relief, and cost shifts in special education, there is no way to know with certainty if there will be increases or cuts in state education funding. But we know this: Not one penny in $1.2 billion in PEG savings and headcount reductions to the Board over the last two years has been invested in the classroom. At the beginning of this decade, city tax levy funds supported almost 48.4% of school expenditures. Now, the City Comptroller reports that the city's share of education funding has dropped to 40.1%. This disinvestment in education, if continued, will transform New York into a city of the very rich, who can afford private schools, and the very poor, who cannot. Middle and working class families will have no option but to flee in ever greater numbers to high property-tax school districts in the suburbs so that their children have access to quality classroom instruction. In turn, the ever diminishing tax base will force the city into cutting its budget even further, making the city even more inhospitable to middle and working class families. Sincerely,
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