Chancellor Klein wrote a letter to principals Jan. 19 (not available electronically) in which he pledged to empower school-level leadership and boasted that he’d already redirected $200 million of the schools budget from Central to the school level. Yesterday, in his State of the City address, Bloomberg promised to cut another $200 million from the bureaucracy and put it into classrooms..
How are they doing? So far, not too well.
The Educational Priorities Panel just published Bulletin #2 (pdf) with some surprising findings: steep one-year decreases in spending for general education and special education instruction and services at the school level. EPP’s Noreen Connell has tracked the education budget at the state and city levels for many years and is a whiz at finding where all the budget bodies are buried. She looked over the last three DOE budgets and compared them with the NYC Comptroller’s annual financial statements.
Guess what? Under the first year of mayoral control, special ed spending dropped by $445 million, far more than the DOE budget reported. That kind of fits with what people in the schools were saying–IEPs were being treated like so much dead leaves in the school yard. Special ed spending has still not recovered to its pre-mayoral-control level.
EPP also found that though general-ed instruction spending rose a lot in 2003-04, it fell $144 million last year. When it’s all tallied, DOE expenditures rose $716 million last year, but money for instruction only grew by $41 million, chump change in a $14 billion budget.
“EPP concludes that in the first two years of mayoral control. . . there hasn’t yet been a significant shift of resources to instruction at the school level,” the report says.
Where did most of that $716 million go? The EPP’s three-year “snapshot” showed savings in mid-level administration expenses were offset by increases in central administration spending for a net “no change’ in administrative spending. That fits with what people in the schools were saying too–a lot of MBAs with clipboards, expensive consultants and leadership development programs, while the schools remained as poorly funded as ever.
18 Comments:
1 NYC Educator
· Jan 27, 2006 at 3:22 pm
Gee, I’m shocked.
After we negotiated a contract with no class size modification, no restrictions on the dawn-to-dusk multi-session trailer overridden schools that have been around for years, after we made no demands whatsoever about school spending, after we capitulated to the largest laundry list of givebacks ever for nothing, after we gave an extra class, a permanent building assignemnt and two extra days for nothing, it turns out…
…this mayor doesn’t actually want to spend money on schools.
Gosh, what a surprise.
Thank goodness we have Edwize to keep us informed.
2 paulrubin
· Jan 27, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Is anyone surprised by this? In a system of top down management, isn’t it natural that the top get the funds
I do have a fair question though. $716M. If the average teacher makes about $50,000 and got a 10% raise, or $5,000 times 100,000 teachers, is it not possible that the bulk of the $716M went for that?
That’s not to say schools are getting their fair share of the DOE’s budget. Just that it’s not necessarily just upper and middle management. Or is it?
3 Chaz
· Jan 27, 2006 at 6:16 pm
Assuming paulrubin is wrong and the $716M did not go for teacher raises then the UFT should be contacting the media. Randi should be shouting long and loud on the misallocation of the $716M to Tweed non-educators.
The general public would be outraged when they hear that upper management is using money that is desperately needed in the classroom for non-education programs. Even if much of the money was used for teacher salaries, it still shows that the Bloomberg/Klein administration has not increased funding to the instructional base, despite their claims.
I’m waiting for the UFT to put the Bloomberg/Klein admiminstration’s feet to the fire. How come they haven’t?
4 northbrooklyn
· Jan 27, 2006 at 7:16 pm
How do I access the DOE budget?
5 paulrubin
· Jan 28, 2006 at 9:25 am
Why are you assuming I’m wrong. Did the DOE budget go up $716M or $1.2B or more. In fact it would have to be more to account not only for our raises but our retroactive money. There are also some major construction projects going on. My school, for example, just finally got its internet wiring, wireless, and of course all the supporting equipment, not to mention some of the infrastructure along the way for a modern phone system. I’m not seeing our school spend any less on furniture, textbooks, computers, supplies, etc. than in past years. The only place I’ve seen money oriented cuts are a slight decrease in the number of teachers as compared to years ago but I think our enrollment is slightly down as well.
As teachers we need to remember that our principals are making final decisions in many cases as to how to spend money and if those principals’ priorities don’t align with our own, we’ll perceive cuts while others will perceive increases. The bottom line therefore is what monies are being directed outside the schools.
For example, there’s the impending waste of money on secondary busing schedules in February. And I doubt we really know how many personnel the various ROCs and Central have these days but $716M worth? Doubtful.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of the UFT outing inappropriate expenditures of education dollars also. I’m just not into assuming guilt without the facts.
6 Schoolgal
· Jan 28, 2006 at 12:04 pm
Can this money be used by principals to hire F-status teachers next year? If so, my principal will hire back her friend.
7 Chaz
· Jan 28, 2006 at 2:27 pm
paulrubin:
I didn’t say your wrong. I just did not know if teacher raises and retroactive pay was part of the equation. However, I believe the internet wireless program, presently being installed in my school came from a grant the area congressmen obtained for his community schools. This grant includes laptops which I have not seen yet.
Regardless, without teacher input on where the money is going is a waste of money when it comes to the classroom.
8 mvplab
· Jan 28, 2006 at 2:52 pm
Schoolgal:
Only a small percentage of a school budget is “discretionary” meaning that it is fully under the control of the school administration. So I believe she may still be able to do that.
9 mvplab
· Jan 28, 2006 at 2:55 pm
Chaz,northbrooklyn and paulrubin:
School budgets will be available online in the next week or two and I urge you to get your school UFT committees together to analyze your school expenditures and budget. It might be interesting to also involve someone from the PA/PTA. I was informed about this by my chapter leader and look forward to scrutinizing our school’s expenditures.
I’m not sure how you access the entire DOE budget.
10 paulrubin
· Jan 28, 2006 at 3:52 pm
Principals can do mostly tweaking to the monies since the vast majority is simply to determine how many teachers on staff. They can for example, add or subtract an AP, or a secretary, or a guidance counselor. Doubtful they can have the maximum amount of all three. They can move monies around between supplies, equipment, furniture, software and the like. But other categories are set in stone based on where the funds came from. So for example your NYSTL Software allocation which is determined by number of students and state guidelines must be spent on software. It’s simply up to the principal to get it spent wisely. Then there’s the sad reality that some principals are way more creative about getting funds than others from politicians and community groups. Some schools are better at fundraising. Some Parents Associations are more proactive than others. And so on. What the average classroom teacher sees can really vary widely even inside a single school. My point is that the bulk of the expenditures a school makes is pretty much set in stone and relates to salaries. Some of the rest is descretionary and completely depends on principal priorities. So one principal’s committment to spend big bucks on technology probably mirrors another’s committment to spend on the arts and yet a third might feel a slight reduction in class size is more important. In other words, the DOE might not always be the right target even if it’s the more convenient one.
On the subject of computers, the Project Connect upgrade is a long term commitment that’s been ongoing for years and probably will continue to be ongoing. It’s in part funded from programs developed during the Clinton era and cut back somewhat by the Bush presidency. There are state and local funds involved too. Other large grants, like Reso-A Grants, are based more on principal relationships with their city councilman since that’s where the funds come from. And as I said, some principals are better at it and some councilmen give their grants more thought than others. There are also state funds for software and hardware. So bottom line, don’t mix up funding for computer related expenditures with NYCDOE funding. They’re often separate and tend to move in fits and spurts as a Reso-A grant becomes available or as a school reaches its time for a wireless upgrade which is very expensive given the construction costs since it’s basically a complete wired upgrade with wireless access points placed in every room as well. And note, this wireless upgrade in for instructional areas only, not administrative. With all that considered, the DOE still drastically underfunds technology given the potential benefits it offers.
11 NYC Educator
· Jan 29, 2006 at 10:16 am
“…a third might feel a slight reduction in class size is more important.”
I want to meet that one. Our school is getting wi-fi, though, within the next few weeks. That will probably benefit us as much as wiring the entire school for broadband did a few years ago, considering that there are no computers whatsover in 90% of our classrooms.
12 Chaz
· Jan 29, 2006 at 11:53 am
I agree with nyc educator. How is wi-fi and broadbanding our schools an educational improvement, when there are no computers in the classroom?
By the way, it is more like 95% of the classrooms that don’t have computers in my school. However, all the admininstrators received new Dell computers in October.
13 Jackie Bennett
· Jan 29, 2006 at 10:44 pm
What I find really interesting in the numbers in Masie’s article, and in EEP’s bulletin is how very different these numbers are from the numbers in the report put out this September by the Partnership for NYC, an influential organization that was a leading force in the drive for mayoral control and which has invested heavily in the schools, particularly (I think) in the Leadership academy. The Partnership put out an interim assessment just before the elections, which relied on figures supplied by the Department of Education.
The Partnership’s report was kind of glowing.
Like EEP’s Bulletin, The Partnership’s report analyzes where the money went. The Partnership, however, says that “working with available data,” one can see percent and dollar increases for instruction. And they claim these increases even for 2004, when, according to EEP, both the adopted budget and the actual spending for instruction seem to have decreased. In addition, the Partnership puts the number for instruction at about 9.7, while EEP, which relied on independent figures, put that number at about 5.8. Finally, while the Partnership (which got its numbers from the DoE) seems to show money for instruction to be about 75 percent of total funding, EEP indicates that instruction accounts for less than 50 percent of the funds.
Maybe it all depends how one defines the costs of instruction, and the Partnership is somewhat vague about what that means (unlike EEP which gives an Appendix defining the breakdown). I’m guessing though that the Partnership had a very broad definition of instruction. Maybe they are including high end bake sales?
I’m in over my head right now – I teach English, not statistics, but for me, if I did this right, the EEP report, which is based on independent numbers validates what I suspected when I first saw the Partnership report, which was that something was amiss. Issued as it was, just before the election, and relying heavily (and I think exclusively) on DoE numbers, it carried all the generalities of phrasing that make me suspect it must be tilted to one side.
Regarding Rubin’s comment about accounting for the $716 million with teacher raises: first, the EEP report, both as Masie describes it, and in what I can see from the report itself, seems to me to be talking about the 04-05 school year, which ended in June of 05, before raises and retro.
Maybe I’m wrong about that. But even if the report were talking about a period of time through the end of 05, the numbers you propose don’t seem to add up. I think there are only about 80,000 teachers in the union, not a hundred – the other 20 thousand are para’s and other titles. Taking the membership as a whole, very few would have received anything close 5000 last year, even with retro. Don’t most teachers, for example, have less than five years of service?
But I could be entirely wrong. I teach English. I’m in way over my head.
14 Maisie
· Jan 30, 2006 at 11:06 am
Paul and all,
Jackie is right: the $716 mil would not reflect teacher raises because it covered the fiscal year 2004-05, which ended in late June or early July of 2005. The new raises didn’t come through until December. By the way, I share Jackie’s skepticism about the Partnership report, which relied exclusively on DOE data. It’s all the more reason we need independent watchdogs like EPP to monitor the DOE.
The EPP said it couldn’t tell exactly what the money went toward, only that there were savings in mid-level administrative spending, “offset by increases in spending by central administration.” However, it did say that enrollment declines probably account for some of the lower instructional spending (despite the fact that state operating aid is not reduced when enrollment drops!!) You can access the DOE budget at http://www.nycenet.edu/offices/d_chanc_oper/budget/dbor/. Happy hunting.
15 Jackie Bennett
· Jan 30, 2006 at 10:08 pm
Ooop! For the record, I notice two errors in my above post.
1. 9.7 and 5.8 are billions of dollars. I didn’t make that clear.
2. The line about the bake sales should have been deleted. It has to do with possible source of funding, not what funds are used for, and makes no sense in the context is used it. That’s what I get for not printing first!
16 paulrubin
· Jan 30, 2006 at 11:38 pm
I’ll leave it to the experts then to determine where the extra money went. FYI, don’t be surprised if the DOE moves money around from one year to another to hide stuff. What else would be new?
As for those of you with schools that have no computers, that’s a shame. The person to blame is almost certainly your principal. It’s the principal’s job to get their fair share of Reso-A monies. It’s the principal’s job to get everything their schools are entitled to. Some are good at it. Some don’t care. As to my school, I’ll be moving a few dozen computers into classrooms after upgrading an already pretty nice lab. And I got the principal to commit to making another 20 brand new Dell laptops available to teachers for use with the new wireless stuff. It’s sitting in a cart ready for deployment in February. That’s aside from the old Project Smart rooms, 3 labs, assorted mini-labs, rolling carts of computers suitable for classes, etc. Bottom line. Some principals want technology in their building. Others don’t. It’s been my experience that the money’s there. Hell, every school gets roughly $30 a head for hardware/software purchases. What’s your principal doing with THAT money. It’s against the law to use that to purchase computers for administrative use. Ditto any Reso-A grants. Those are instructional grants, not administrative.
17 Maisie
· Jan 31, 2006 at 3:19 pm
If you just love numbers….
The new budget is out: just go to NYC.gov and you can click easily into the press release and the actual budget documents. The DOE got $14.87 billion, an increase of $258.8 million from fiscal ‘06. Also, the new Galaxy product, by which you can view school-specific budgets, is now available. See my new post (I’m just about to send it) for details.
18 Jackie Bennett
· Jan 31, 2006 at 7:53 pm
Thanks to Paul Rubin for the info on the Reso-A monies. I think my principal is on top of that, but what I love about this blog is that I can find out what goes on at other schools, and get info that sometimes slips between the cracks.