Letters 97
EPP October 1997 Letter on Special Education Reform, Class Size Reduction in the Early Grades, and Pupils with Compensatory Education Needs (PCEN)

October 22, 1997

Chancellor Rudolph Crew
New York City Board of Education
110 Livingston Street
Brooklyn, NY 11201

Dear Chancellor Crew:

As you may know, the Educational Priorities Panel is a citywide coalition of 25 civic and parent organizations that have worked together since 1976 to monitor the impact on children of fiscal and administrative decisions made by the New York City Board of Education. Our mission is to ensure that the maximum resources available go to student instruction and services.

We want to congratulate you for your many budget and legislative accomplishments as you begin your third school year as Chancellor. We particularly want to commend your administration’s continual focus on classroom instruction and student outcomes in the face of many diversionary issues. Every time a new edition of the School-Based Budget Reports is issued, the quality of information has improved. We are eagerly looking forward to the edition that will detail actual expenditures. These budget reports should help the education community achieve a better understanding of how current resources are used and what policy and fiscal choices need to be made to improve both student learning and to ensure a fairer distribution of funds.

We are writing to you at this time because EPP is concerned about the continuation of certain fiscal policies that do not promote improved student learning or a fairer distribution of funds. Some of them are under your direct control, others require that you marshal support from elected officials at the state and federal levels. Rather than wait until the hearing on the Chancellor’s Budget Request in the spring, when many decisions have already been made, we want to outline our objections to these policies in a timely manner in the hopes that they will be given serious consideration.

I. Extraordinary Needs Aid
Since 1989, EPP was the only civic organization at the state level advocating a shift of state funding from failing students needing remediation to one based on student poverty rates. We objected to the perverse funding incentives in Pupils with Compensatory Education Needs (PCEN) and Pupils with Special Education Needs (PSEN) because schools that improved their students’ test performance were "rewarded" with a reduction in funding. Schools with the weakest instructional leadership received more PCEN/PSEN funding than other schools serving similar socioeconomic student bodies. We believe that EPP’s advocacy for a "poverty index" as a means of securing more equity in state school aid played some role in replacing PCEN/PSEN with Extraordinary Needs Aid in 1993. However, as an advocacy coalition, we have found ourselves profoundly saddened that for five years in a row the school district that we thought would most benefit from state funding based on student poverty rates has continued to distribute its ENA funding on the basis of student failure rates. Last year, for the first time, we began to fully understand that district superintendents were not compelled either by the State Education Department or the Board of Education to allocate these funds on the basis of students’ need for remediation services, and that some superintendents were "compensating" schools for not having the student poverty levels that would make them eligible for Title I funding. Needless to say, this type of "flexibility" subverts the very concept of a poverty index.

With the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit in the courts, EPP strongly believes that the continuation of PCEN/PSEN funding in New York City only adds to the state legislature’s and the State Education Department’s cynicism about the motives and policies of the New York City Board of Education. We understand that there have been internal discussions both at the SED and BOE about ENA allocation practices. EPP urges you as soon as possible to develop a public policy and allocation system for ENA funds for New York City schools so that it mirrors the integrity of the state allocation system and will no longer contain perverse funding incentives or be misused by district superintendents.

II. Title I Borough Allocations
Because of the actions of Congressmembers Susan Molinari and Major Owens, New York City is the only school district in the nation where per-pupil allocations of Title 1 funds are based on the neighborhood where a student attends school. It is shocking that a Staten Island school receives $1,189.49 per pupil in Title I funds when a Queens school only gets $553.55. In this case, the Board of Education itself was the victim of short -sighted, borough-based Congressional intrigue. We urge your administration to work now with the Congressional delegation from New York City to eliminate borough allocations of Title 1 when the Elementary and Secondary Education Act comes up for reauthorization. EPP also recommends that your staff also evaluate whether ENA funds can be used to supplement Title 1 funds to create a uniform per-pupil allocation for schools serving high poverty students, thus nullifying the effect of Title 1 borough allocations. Since the borough school board proposal did not survive in the governance reform legislation enacted by the state legislature, we do not understand why there hasn’t been a more assertive effort by your administration to nullify what is, in essence, a borough system of allocation which disadvantages students and schools in three boroughs.

III. High School Formula
As EPP stated in our testimony before the Board of Education’s hearings on the Chancellor’s Budget request, we believe that the high school formula contains perverse funding incentives in that it generates more administrative positions for schools with higher rates of delayed graduation. In interviews with high school superintendents and principals, we have come also to believe that there appear to be other disincentives to lengthening the school day and creating more ambitious afternoon, evening, and summer school programs, many of them related to collective bargaining issues. These include per session pay rates and whether they count towards pension. There are also indications of administrative turf conflict between the summer school programs and high school superintendents and principals. Our assumption at EPP is that your administration is looking at all the problem areas, including the underfunding of the high school formula. EPP again reiterates our recommendation that high school students attending for a fifth, sixth or seventh year not be included in the base for determining high school administrative positions, though an equivalent unit amount for these students could go into programs that would help these students accelerate their graduation. EPP concludes that greater flexibility in teacher scheduling might encourage high school principals to expand their P.M. programs and create their own summer schools. By directing units generated by fifth, sixth and seventh year students to additional teaching positions rather than administrative positions, the ever increasing rate of delayed high school graduations might be curbed. On this point, EPP wants to make it clear that we believe that some students need an extra year or two in order to graduate and that graduates should be fully prepared for college and/or employment no matter how long it takes. But we object to the cavalier attitude of some officials that it is all right to take an extra year or two out of a young person’s life when P.M. school or summer school could help her/him graduate at 18. No suburban community would tolerate a school system where high school stretches out to be a five-year experience for one third of their teenagers.

IV. Special Education Reform
EPP was very disappointed that the legislature postponed special education funding reform. We supported the Regent’s plan to provide funding for school districts based on their student population and poverty rates. We will continue to support the Regent’s plan in the next legislative session. But EPP has some concerns that the Regents’ other recommendations for SED oversight of school districts seems divorced from their own findings of the extreme range among school districts in proportions of special education students. We were shocked to discover that in some school districts, over 20% of students have been put in special education programs. EPP has informally expressed our concern that any SED ranking of performance by schools or school districts -- which may determine the degree of oversight by SED in budgeting and instruction -- must define "performance" on the basis of average test scores of all students, irrespective of whether they are general education or special education students. There should be, of course, an exception made for students who are so disabled that a test would be meaningless.

Again, informally, when we asked why SED would create a performance measurement that actually rewards school districts with high special education referral rates, we were told that any ranking of school district performance would continue to be based on general education test scores, but would also show each district’s special education referral rate. This is not good enough. We are trying to ascertain whether the new regulations under IDEA support the continuation of separate reporting of test scores. But this much is clear to EPP: By separately reporting out average test scores for general education students and for special education students, school districts that have "beat the system" by referring many low-performing students to special education will have higher than average test scores for general education students as well as higher than average test scores for special education students. The converse is also true, because school districts with low referral rates will appear to be lower performing in both general education and special education.

This is not an abstract issue for EPP, but directly relevant to how the New York City school district’s "performance" will be evaluated should the Regents’ new oversight plan be adopted, because it will be penalized for having among the lowest proportion of special education students. We would like to know whether your administration would support the elimination of the exclusion of special education student scores from the state’s measurement of schools’ performance. We believe that this change in the analysis of school and school district performance would have an additional benefit even more important than curbing inappropriate referrals to special education. If special education test scores "mattered," EPP believes there would be more attention to instructional intervention and curriculum in special education programs.

V. Reduction of Early Grade Class Sizes
State funding to bring class sizes in New York City’s kindergarten to third grades so that they approach those in the rest of the state provides a direct benefit to students and teachers. It is also the only part of the state budget, beyond the increase in ENA, that drives more funds to urban school children.

EPP members urge you impress upon the Mayor that state funds for class size reductions could be a real step forward for public education in the city. The objective of New York City’s budget policy for decades seems to have been to maintain the largest class sizes in the state. Year after year, no matter who is mayor and no matter the growth in student enrollment, EPP has observed that OMB always seems to project a drop in the number of pedagogues in the out years of the Four Year Plan. The unwritten fiscal policy ensures that New York City schools are so bereft of the basics that most middle class parents will not send their children to them. The city can thus continue to spend only a quarter of its municipal budget for public education, a far lower proportion than any other locality in the state. EPP does not think this policy is particularly healthy for New York’s economic development or diversity. Despite city’s low property taxes, middle class families continue their exodus to the suburbs in search of schools that have average class sizes of 20 students. The state’s plan to reduce class size, if embraced by City Hall, could be the beginning of a turnaround in the public’s perception about city schools, similar to the turnaround in the perception of crime.

EPP does not underestimate the difficulties of implementing class size reductions for the entire system within 3 years, but it will also be a "dress rehearsal" of the positive changes that will come about should the Campaign for Fiscal Equity law suit succeed. EPP recommends that the phase-in be stretched out to five years and that the reduction in class sizes from K to 3 begin in the 1998-99 school year for all SURR schools, most of which are underutilized. High-achieving schools, such as those mentioned in your "Honor Roll" for the last two years, should also be allowed to reduce class size where they can locate classroom space. Stretching out the phase-in would allow your administration more time to develop the capacity in the overcrowded districts, as well as provide improved student-teacher ratios immediately for schools that need to improve their students’ academic performance as soon as possible.

In closing, we hope this letter will be the beginning of a dialog on how best to structure school funding at the federal, state, and city levels. EPP fully supports your administration’s efforts to create a system that maximizes school decision making as well as providing incentives for better instruction.

Sincerely,
Marilyn Braveman, Chairperson
Noreen Connell, Executive Director

CC
Deputy Chancellor J. Rizzo
Deputy Chancellor H. Spence
Chief Financial Officer Beverly Donohue