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Public Testimony 2003
New York State
Assembly Education Hearing Testimony
Given by: Noreen
Connell, Executive Director for the Educational Priorities Panel
September
12, 2003 New York
Good morning. My name is Noreen Connell. I am the Executive Director of
the Educational Priorities Panel, a coalition of twenty-eight civic, parent,
and religious organizations that have worked together for over twenty-seven
years to improve the quality of public education for New York City’s
children through driving more resources to the classroom.
Thank you for holding this hearing. EPP has lasted so long as a coalition
because we are narrowly focused on budget and administrative issues and
their impact on school children. We do not "do" discipline,
curriculum, or governance because some of our member agencies hold diametrically
opposite positions on these issues. But now that mayoral control is in
place and the Children First plans have been implemented, EPP can begin
to evaluate the impact of this new administrative structure on the school
system.
I want to begin my testimony with an important proviso. There will be
unanticipated consequences of these changes that will not be clear for
a number of years. One of the least popular reports issued by the Educational
Priorities Panel was its 1981 study, School Decentralization in New York
City. It attempted to answer why parent organizations lost leverage in
this governance change and why some community school districts were losing
a focus on curricula and instruction. At the time, these questions were
somewhat embarrassing, because decentralization was supposed to increase
parental input and instructional innovation. Mayoral control is supposed
to increase accountability and a focus on instruction. Five years from
now, undoubtedly, we will all have a better understanding than we do today
about whether the new structure is accomplishing these goals, but today
here are
EPP’s perceptions of what has taken place so far:
Administration
The most dramatic change is that a large, politically powerful mid-level
bureaucracy – that came into existence starting in 1898 – has
been replaced. Much attention has been given to the streamlining of a
mid-level bureaucracy under Children First. But a much more important
aspect of the new administrative structure is that it is a bifurcated
structure. Ten Regions and Learning Support Centers focus on instructional
tasks while six Operational Centers focus on non-instructional tasks.
* Positives
At first blush, it appears that more mid-level administrators have been
allocated to instructional tasks. Over one hundred superintendents have
replaced fortysuperintendents. Instead of one superintendent having to
manage the performance of thirty to fifty schools, each superintendent
will be working with only ten schools. Children First
appears to have lived up to its pledge of putting more effort into student
instruction.
* Negatives
The advantages of bifurcating tasks have not been provided to school level
administrators. As early as January of this year, EPP urged the Mayor
and the Chancellor to duplicate the system we saw in England and Scotland,
where a strong central bureaucracy was balanced by a strong management
team in each school. Even in small schools with only 200 students, we
saw that there was always a bursar on staff. We understand that there
was an internal discussion among the Chancellor’s staff as to whether
a similar position, a "business manager," should be created
for every New York City public school, but by spring a decision had been
made that the only new school-level staff members were to be curriculum
coaches and parent coordinators. This person handled all the non-instructional
tasks for the head teacher and assistant heads. Without a business manager
at the school level to take up many of the tasks formally performed at
the community school district level, principals will have less time to
focus on instruction than before.
Large high schools with assistant principals for administration will be
able to cope, but we are most concerned with small elementary schools.
We understand that some principals have recently been allowed to hire
business managers, but that these funds have to come out of their school
budgets, possibly at the cost of an additional teacher or program. EPP
applauds the addition of school staff members, curriculum coaches and
parent coordinators, but we continue to strongly recommend that every
school should be provided with extra funds for a business manager in order
to free up the time of principals and assistant principals to focus on
instruction. If this administration wants to manage instruction, it cannot
only be done by mid-level managers, it must also be done at the building
level.
Resources
One of the key tests of the efficacy of the new governance structure is
whether the Mayor and the Chancellor will play a leadership in shaping
and negotiating the CFE remedy. It is not enough to criticize the timing
and composition of the Governor’s Commission. I am concerned, but
so far not unduly alarmed, that the evidence presented during the trial
about inadequate resources for New York City’s school children is
not being sufficiently addressed in discussions about possible remedies.
Board of Education officials and experts testified at length about large
average class sizes, school overcrowding, poor environments for learning,
and inadequately trained teachers. Will these problems be solved? Now
that the first stages of Children First have been implemented, the Mayor
and the Chancellor need to articulate where investments are needed in
the K-to-12 system to provide an adequate education for the city’s
children.
Another test will be whether the Maintenance of Effort provision will
have to be invoked in a future budget year. The Stavisky-Goodman law,
riddled with loopholes, was inadequate protection against the city’s
attempts at supplanting its own contribution whenever additional state
and federal funds were available. The new MOE closes those loopholes.
But some city budget officials are attempting to create a new loophole
by asserting that the law only applies to the adopted budget on July 1,
but not subsequent amendments. Hopefully, since New Yorkers can now hold
the Mayor responsible for cuts at the school level, there will be no need
to test the provisions of this new maintenance of effort law.
So far, the evidence of increased resources for schools is more mixed
than EPP would have anticipated.
* Positives Given the huge projected budget gaps at the city and state
levels earlier this year, it is remarkable that the Department of Education
ended up with $30 million more than last year. In contrast to the pattern
under Mayor Giuliani, the city budget cuts to the public school system
were smaller than cuts to most other mayoral agencies rather than being
larger.
* Negatives In the last round, city capital budget cuts were not balanced
between repairs and reduction of overcrowding, but instead were entirely
absorbed by the cancellation of new construction projects. This will perpetuate
school severe student overcrowding for years. Two-thirds of the students
affected by overcrowding are Latino/a and Asian. Immigrant communities
have taken the brunt. Hopefully, the new regional structure will allow
for better use of existing classroom space, but for the boroughs of Queens
and parts of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan, no amount of reconfiguring
the grade organization of schools will solve overcrowding. The state must
reform Building Aid so that it no longer provides the city with a disincentive
to build new schools.
Another negative under the new governance structure is that some past
budget practices affecting schools have clearly continued. While Chancellors
Fernandez, Cortines, and Crew shielded schools as much as possible from
large budget cuts, Chancellor Levy did not. Chancellor Klein has maintained
the same policy as Chancellor Levy. A comparison of EPP’s pie charts
of total budget allocations for the school system for FY ’03 and
FY ’04 shows that the proportion of funding for administration dropped
from 5 percent to 4 percent, an achievement. However, the share of funding
for instruction also dropped from 55 percent to 54 percent. There was
no sizable shift of resources to the school level. Instead, savings from
personnel cuts at the school level (reductions in school aides and paraprofessionals)
partially funded additional personnel at the school level.
Another budget policy that has continued is to increase the number of
children in the classroom so that the number is just under the UFT collective
bargaining agreements on maximum class size. During bad budget years,
"breakage" has been implemented in such a way as to create the
largest class sizes possible in order to reduce the numbers of teachers
needed to staff the schools. We were fearful that this would happen this
year, and initial reports from some parents seem to confirm that children’s
classes appear to be larger than last year.
Accuracy and Transparency
Accountability is a term that I don’t particularly like to use, because
it has so many different meanings. Rather than going into a mini treatise
about this loaded word, let me just plead for the basic necessity of having
good, honest information about budget and how well our students are doing.
The jury is out on how governance changes have affected the quality of
information.
* Student Performance It was recently discovered that for years the Houston
school district was tolerating Enron-type accounting of its high school
dropout rates. Large high schools with suspiciously small graduating classes
were reporting zero or a negligible number of dropouts. Since the last
two years of the Giuliani administration, EPP and our member organizations,
most notably Advocates for Children and the United Parents Association,
have been hearing anecdotal reports that professional staff at the school
level are encouraging students to go to GED programs, even though many
of them are too young to gain admission into most of these programs. Another
related problem is that once a low-achieving student drops out of high
school, it is often very difficult for that student to gain admission
to a new school, even an "alternate" high school. I had ascribed
the increase in these types of reports to merit pay for principals, but
I am told that the formula is so convoluted that most principals ignore
the criteria for this bonus and are simply are trying to improve their
annual performance evaluations. Whatever the motivation is for this type
of "push out" behavior, the Chancellor has the management tools,
such as the development of new performance indicators, to curb incentives
to "push out" students or miscategorize drop outs. Even though
school staff are now under the gun to improve their schools’ student
test score averages, it helps no one to tolerate Enron-type accounting.
EPP would like to see the Chancellor take action, even though he inherited
this problem from another administration.
* Budget Documents
By the beginning of every school year, EPP would receive a copy of a budget
allocation memorandum that was as thick as the Minneapolis phone book.
Though I dreaded having to read through it, after a five to eight days
I would have some idea of how funds from the federal, state, and city
level trickled down to the school level. I must now admit that I miss
BOR #1. When I visit the Board of Education web site every couple of days,
there are only a handful of allocation memoranda to download. The torrent
of budget documents have become a tiny stream. When I have questioned
the Board of Education’s budget staff about this, I am told to be
patient and that more memoranda will be issued. But the additional and
more serious problem is that the budget memos that I have read are written
to be "user friendly" for school staff, but now don’t always
include complete narrative descriptions or the total funds that the Board
of Education have received for a given purpose.The day that schools opened,
I received a call from a CBO administrator who runs a small after-school
program. He informed me that his program now has to pay a fee to the school
for using the facility from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m., according to Region 2 administrators.
The CBO administrator has already recruited students for his programs,
but has no funds in his budget for opening fees. This appears to be a
reversal of a policy initiated by Mayor Dinkins, as a result of a clause
in state law, to provide access to CBO’s at the lowest cost possible.
I then realized that a $5 million cut to "after-school programs,"
which I had been lead to believe would close down poorly-run after-school
programs, may have resulted in these new, unannounced fees. I mention
this incident to you, not only because I want to delve more deeply into
whether a long-standing agreement with the state legislature has been
broken, but also because there was no advance notice that these fees were
going to be charged. The information about this $5 million budget cut
was vague. Was this meant to preclude any chance to reverse this policy?
Schools in the rest of the state are used as vital community centers after
the school day has ended. It is not fair to CBO’s or to taxpayers
that there is an effort once again in New York City to close the schoolhouse
door after 3 p.m.
Note: In oral testimony at the September 12 hearing, Noreen Connell stated
that because of computer problems, she had been unable to make editing
changes in the written testimony she submitted and that she would subsequently
submit corrected copy.
This corrected copy reflects these editing changes as well a few clarifications
of language and the following two corrections.
1) Subsequent to the hearing, Ms. Connell was informed that there had
been widespread misinformation about opening fees for CBO’s, but
that Dr. Lester Young’s office had informed all Regional Superintendents
that no such policy was in effect.
2) In oral testimony at the September 12 hearing, Noreen Connell stated
that even though the share of total allocations of the Board of Education
devoted to administration had shrunk by 1 percent in the FY ’04 budget,
the share devoted to instruction had also been reduced by 2 percent. Subsequent
to the hearing, Ms. Connell reviewed once again for accuracy the Board
of Education allocation budgets for FY ‘03 and FY ’04 (adopted
at the beginning of the fiscal year) and found that the share devoted
to instruction had been reduced by only 1 percent in FY ’04. Allocations
to instruction have been reduced in FY ‘04 by about $90 million.
EPP’s methodology is to reallocate "fringe benefits" to
different functions rather than to retain it as a separate budget category.
For FY’03, all but $17 million in the category "collective bargaining"
was reallocated to instruction to reflect the UFT collective bargaining
agreement. Attached to this corrected testimony are:
* EPP’s analysis of the city’s additional contribution for FY
’04;
* EPP’s worksheets of budget allocations for FY ‘03 and FY ‘O4
used to prepare "Where Does the Money Go."
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