Wow! Five point four billion clams: We quote:
(from Spitzer’s Education Budget)
“Another $3.2 billion in annual funding for New York City when fully phased in over the next four years. When combined with $2.2 billion in increased annual spending on education by New York City in four years (as reflected in the City’s four-year financial plan), the total amount of increased spending on New York City schools in four years will be $5.4 billion.”
Real money. Far more than CFE required and far more than anyone would have believed possible just a couple of years ago.
But it’s still very abstract. Even aside from the question of whether the Legislature will pass this budget, there is long experience to tell us that billions of dollars can and actually do disappear in the labyrinth of DOE bureaucracy. Until real people do the work of turning the billions into concrete programs, services and improvements that you can see and touch and that make an absolute measureable difference in the lives of students and schools, even five billion dollars is abstract.
What’s good about the Spitzer budget is a renewed emphasis on resources. For years we’ve heard “accountability,” spoken as a threat. Money (and very little of it) was only going to go to people who were “accountable,” meaning that they got the test scores up.
In this budget, the fresh air comes in the form of a large increase in funding for universal pre-kindergarten and full-day kindergarten, for increased special ed funding and incentives for middle school students to pursue math and science. His accountability measures are expressed as a contract between the state and local districts in which districts are urged to spend the increased funds on things that work, like class size reduction, increased student “time-on-task,” teacher quality, middle and high school restructuring and full-day pre-K.
Even the test score stuff has been humanized, with a commitment from the governor that by 2010 the Regents will have created an accountability system based on measurement of student growth instead of absolute scores alone.
But this fresh air could quickly start to smell funny when it arrives in New York City. The governor’s budget, probably wisely, doesn’t prescribe exactly how districts spend their state education money. BUT here in NYC we know the mayor and chancellor have only the most cursory interest in class size reduction. Their views on improving teacher quality are best revealed in two new initiatives: evaluating teachers for tenure based on their students’ test scores, and a new “fair” funding formula calculated to drive the most experienced teachers out of the system. Their middle schools and high schools restructuring plan is only about structure–changing grade configurations and opening ridiculous numbers of new schools. Nothing on teaching and learning.
It is evident from the Chancellor’s Next Big Thing, the initiative he calls “Fair Student Funding,” that he is focused on driving down labor costs in the schools. He says he’s redistributing teaching talent so poor schools get more of it and rich schools less, but essentially he’s making it too costly for all principals to hire or retain veteran teachers. [More about this in a future post]. It appears that much of the state funding increase that is coming to the city will go to muffle the impact of this teacher redistribution incentive for the next couple of years by increasing funding for all schools. Within a year, though, stable, high-functioning schools will start losing senior teachers and replacing them with cheaper ones. And we’re just one recession away from seeing that happen in all our schools.
Against all modern principles of good budgeting, one wishes the governor would tell Klein exactly how to spend the new money: class size reduction in every grade, hard-to-staff school incentives, generous resources at the school level, professional development and mentoring in collaborative teams that have time to meet and work together during the school day. Well, one wishes for many things…
It is a sad day for the city, this amazing state budget announcement. Because the educators who could make that money really work for kids, and help the schools grow and change, have long since been driven underground, while the ascendent lawyers and consultants at Tweed are devoting themselves to things like the fabulously successful new bus schedule, which will save us $12 million. 12 million snails. Chump change. What it comes down to is that the city schools are going to get $5.4 billion and it could be substantially misspent.
