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| New York City Chancellor Carmen Farina |
The Central Crisis in New York Education
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Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s forthcoming
State of the State address is expected to focus on what can be done to improve
public education across the state.
If he is serious about the issue,
he will have to move beyond peripheral concerns and political score-settling
with the state teachers’ union, which did not support his re-election, and go
to the heart of the matter. And that means confronting and proposing remedies
for the racial and economic segregation that has gripped the state’s schools,
as well as the inequality in school funding that prevents many poor districts
from lifting their children up to state standards.These shameful inequities were fully brought to light in 2006, when the state’s highest court ruled in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New Yorkthat the state had not met its constitutional responsibility to ensure adequate school funding and in particular had shortchanged New York City.
A year later, the Legislature and
Gov. Eliot Spitzer adopted a new formula that promised more help for poor districts
and eventually $7 billion per year in added funding. That promise evaporated in
the recession, spawning two lawsuits aimed at forcing the state to honor it.
A lawsuit by a group called New
Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights estimates that, despite increases in
recent years, the state is still about $5.6 billion a year short of its
commitment under that formula.
A second lawsuit was filed on
behalf of students in several small cities in the state, including Jamestown,
Port Jervis, Mount Vernon and Newburgh. It says that per pupil funding in the
cities, which have an average 72 percent student poverty rate, is $2,500 to
$6,300 less than called for in the 2007
formula, making it impossible to provide the instruction other services needed
to meet the State Constitution’s definition of a “sound basic education.”
These communities and others like
them are further disadvantaged by having low property values and by a statewide
cap enacted in 2011 that limits what money they are able to raise through
property taxes. And last year the New York State United Teachers union said
that the cap had been particularly harmful to poorer
districts.
These inequalities are compounded
by the fact that New York State, which regards itself as a bastion of
liberalism, has the most racially and economically segregated schools in the
nation. A scathing
2014 study of this problem by the Civil Rights Project at the
University of California, Los Angeles, charged that New York had essentially
given up on this problem. It said, “The children who most depend on the public
schools for any chance in life are concentrated in schools struggling with all
the dimensions of family and neighborhood poverty and isolation.”
The Cuomo administration seemed
not to acknowledge these issues in a letter last month to the chancellor of the
New York State Board of Regents and the commissioner of education in which it
promised “an aggressive legislative package” to improve education in the state.
Among the dozen issues it said it wanted to address were strengthening the
teacher evaluation system, improving the process for removing low-performing
teachers and improving teacher training.
The regents agreed that these were
legitimate issues needing attention. But they also noted that these reforms
were unlikely to improve the schools unless they were paired with new
investments along the lines of the $2 billion in extra spending that the
regents had recommended earlier. No less pointedly, they urged Mr. Cuomo to
address the “deeply disturbing inequalities in resources” that exist between
poor and wealthy districts, as well as the destructive pattern of segregation.
Mr. Cuomo must take on both of these central issues.
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