Pure Chutzpah: Klein and Budget Cuts

Chutzpah, the old Yiddish joke goes, is when a child murders his parents, and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. In the last two weeks, Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein has offered an apology for the budget Mayor Bloomberg and he have provided New York City public schools that could only be described as a bad chutzpah joke.

Weeks ago, the State Legislature and the Governor delivered on their promises to the students of New York City, in a time of need when the economy has hit a tough spell: they came through with the financial support the state had guaranteed last year when the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit was settled. Now, the Mayor and Chancellor have delivered a budget for New York City public schools that falls $400 million short of what the city had promised in that same agreement, with slashes to school budgets that range as high as 6%, compounding a 1.75% across the board cut in January, for total cuts that approach 8%. And the Chancellor blames… Albany. It is the fault of the State Legislature and the Governor, he wrote to the schools and told the media, that the Mayor and he are cutting their budgets — despite the fact that New York CIty has a $4 billion surplus which the Mayor wants to spend on tax cuts.

In this tortured logic, it is the insistence of the state that the city spend its state aid in the classroom and its CFE aid in the classroom of the neediest students that is all at fault. Let Klein spend the money as he wants, to finance his well over $90 million ARIS computer system which only 1 in every 10 NYC educators has ever used [a system purchased over $80 million required an additional $10 million to fix security leaks before it even went into use], to pay for hundreds of millions of dollars of no bid contracts to political lieges like the New Teacher Project, to subsidize his contracts for standardized tests every six to eight weeks that contractor after contractor has failed to deliver in a timely and usable form, to support his bloated bureaucracy at Tweed which has grown by nearly 20% in the last three years. Do that, and all will be well.

Klein’s dissembling is no ordinary piece of political dishonesty: it is a lie so shameless and so negligent of the Chancellor’s responsibility to New York City public school students that it must be understood as nothing less than a betrayal of the office he holds. Worse, in an attempt to cover his own failure of responsibility, he has adopted the most base of ‘divide and conquer’ strategies, seeking to pit school against school and community against community by cutting some schools at a rate more than four times greater than others. While he talks on a national stage of the moral imperative to address the achievement gap and bring equity to education, in New York City he proposes taking CFE money from the neediest students to give to other schools as compensation for the City’s failure to honor its promises to all schools. He has forfeited his moral authority to be our Chancellor.

This lie is so transparent and its harm is so obvious that no one is the slightest bit deceived by it. New York City’s public schools and communities are responding with a single voice: these cuts are unacceptable; the promises New York City made to its public school students must be kept, and every school must be made whole. Bloomberg and Klein have been reduced to relying on bought and paid for tabloid pages [here and here] that disregard the most basic facts and ignore even the rules of internal consistency. The talk of increased New York City funding for schools in the same breathe as an acknowledgment of cuts to schools that come close to 8% from this year’s budgets in the most extreme cases, the suggestion that funding schools would have to come at the expense of police at a time of a budget surplus and tax cuts: there is a shrill desperation here that demonstrates that Klein knows his claims are bereft of credibility in the court of public opinion.

A particular word must be dedicated here to the “cuts” that are, Klein tells us, to be made from Tweed’s own budget, as opposed to from funding for schools. We have been down this road before: in January, when the total cuts came to $180 million, $80 million was to come from Tweed. But when $47 million in unanticipated state revenue to schools was thrown into the calculations, that was written off Tweed’s — not the schools’ — ledger. What was now $33 million in cuts to Tweed consisted in large part of cost transfers from Tweed to schools and of projected “savings” which raise more questions than they answer. For example, schools must now assume the cost of repairing their computers and other instructional technology, a responsibility had previously been covered — with resulting economies of scale — by a central DoE contract. In the latest iteration of Tweed cuts, purportedly totaling to $200 million, scores of millions of dollars of savings are anticipated from “purchasing efficiencies.” Either the fiscal affairs of the DoE has been very poorly managed, such that efficiencies on this remarkable scale could be found now, or Klein and Co. have no intention of ever meeting that target, using it instead to buy time until it makes further cuts to schools in the future. Worse, there are still more cost transfers to schools, such as deferring the purchase of textbooks. Most egregiously, when students’ families did not fill out free lunch forms, schools would now have to make a choice being letting hungry, poor students miss what may be the one square meal of the day or taking the money from academic programs to feed them — all for a savings of $5 million a year. Even the staff reductions from central are not, with very few exceptions, from Tweed itself, but from the Integrated Service Centers, which are supposed to provide logistical support for schools.

This is a budget perhaps best described by Mary McCarthy’s characterization of Lillian Hellman’s account of history: “Every word she writes is a lie, including and and the.”

 Print