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REPORT TO THE BLACK, PUERTO RICAN AND HISPANIC LEGISLATIVE CAUCUS
MARCH 2004

AA/L, high-needs districts

These are suburban school districts where more than two thirds of the students are receiving free and reduced lunch. Based on 2003 state test data for 4^th and 8^th grade English Language Arts and Math, this is a summary of the number of schools where a majority of students are testing at grade level. Since test scores for ELA or math are sometimes missing for one school in a few districts, in this table and all subsequent ones, only schools where both test outcomes are available are tabulated.

AA/L, modest-income districts

This second group of suburban school districts with a majority of African-American and Latino students have close to half of their students eligible for free and reduced lunch.

For the purposes of comparison, we counted the number of elementary and middle schools in the remaining districts in Westchester, Nassau, and Suffolk where white (W) students are the majority. In all of these districts, a small proportion of students are eligible for free or reduced lunch.

W, modest income districts

W, middle income districts

W, high income districts

EPP made a similar count of schools in the large city school districts.

In the fall of 2002, EPP distributed a 94-question survey to the district offices of members of the Caucus to learn the types and frequency of school-related complaints received by their staff. There were 26 completed surveys, most of them from New York City. All of the respondents reported that the overwhelming number of education-related complaints came from individual parents.

The survey responses revealed that many of the highest-volume complaints were problems that the 1997 LADDER and 1998 RESCUE legislative initiatives sought to solve through more funding for Building Aid, class size reduction in the early grades, pre-K programs, textbooks, supplies, and computers.

Complaints related to under-performing schools, which rank second and fifth among the most frequent types of calls from parents, was a problem that is not addressed directly by any legislative initiative at the state level. At the federal level, after three decades of Congressional efforts to expand educational services to low-income students through Title 1, there was a shift of strategy in 2002 with the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (called No Child Left Behind). The new objective is to improve student outcomes by focusing on instructional quality and access to good schools. Critics of this change in strategy assert that school improvement is not being funded sufficiently by the President and Congress. The reverse characterization could be made about NYS legislative initiatives - there are well-defined strategies to secure more resources for high-needs districts, but no strategies to increase the number of good schools in these districts.

If the risk taken by Congress is that school improvement efforts without adequate resources are more likely to fail than succeed, the risk taken at the New York State legislative level is that more resources will not necessarily result in a higher number of good schools. In other words, both sets of strategies - more resources and better instruction - have to be in place.

Discussion

The distribution of state school aid to districts is a political process that is heavily influenced by regional negotiations. For three decades, state legislators have focused on 'shares' of total increases in aid that are roughly equivalent to the number of students in the upstate region, the suburbs around New York City, and New York City. Year after year, 51percent of increased school aid goes to upstate districts, 11 percent to downstate-suburban, and 38 percent to New York City, which is one school district.

As EPP's 1999 report, Checkerboard Schooling, observed, this 'regional shares' policy makes a mockery of the numerous and complex formulas in state aid, which is supposed to distribute funds to school districts objectively - based on each districts local resources and student needs. School districts with a good tax base should get less state funding, and those where local income and property values are low should get more state funding. Similarly, because additional educational services are needed for children whose home language is not English or who live in poverty, districts serving large numbers of immigrant or low-income children should be provided with extra resources to help these children meet learning standards.

Even these formulas need reform. Up until 1993, when a formula for Extraordinary Needs Aid was created, the education funding system did a poor job of measuring student needs. Six years later, when EPP released its first Checkerboard Schooling report, we found that it still didn't drive significantly more funding to high-needs districts, because the legislature had imposed limits on year-to-year increases that particularly affected these districts.

Checkerboard II, EPP's 2001 report found that the Extraordinary Needs Aid and Operating aid formulas provided more funding to high-needs districts and thus were equitable. But there was an irrational pattern to two tax relief formulas that are no longer in existence (Tax Aid Effort and Equalization Aid). Another 201 EPP report,Getting It Right , discussed the absence in almost all of the formulas, except Building Aid, of regional differences in costs. Education is driven by personnel expenditures, and in the downstate area of the state these costs are higher because average wage levels are higher. Yet one of the more frequent and powerful formulas in state school aid, Combined Wealth Ratio (known as CWR), which measures school district income and property wealth relative to a state average, is not adjusted for regional cost differences.

There has been a reluctance to reform the formulas to better reflect regional costs and students needs, because to do so would alter the 'regional shares' concept of how school aid should be distributed. Even modest improvements in formulas don't seem to make much of a difference. 'Regional shares' function almost like a deadly magnetic field that snaps all changes back into a traditional grid - every improvement in the formulas results in a 'adjustment' in another formula or calculation so that every region still gets the same share of total state school aid. This particularly hurts New York City.

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