The
state budget was finalized on Saturday, more than two weeks late, and to the
surprise of many, Mayor Adams was successful in getting Mayoral control renewed
within the budget. He did not get four
years, as he and the Governor wanted, but he got two years, which flies in the
fact of what nearly all the Legislative leaders had said about the importance
of keeping school governance outside the budget. As Sen.
John Liu said,
The
proper way to do this is a thoughtful deliberation and hearing more voices in
the process — taking into account more opinions from education stakeholders —
and that’s exactly what we had planned to do immediately after the enactment of
the budget. As it turns out,, the governor was very insistent on including this
issue, and the governor has a great deal of influence during the budget making
process. So this decision making was clearly rushed. It’s not best practice,
but this is where we are.”
Instead
of giving the thoughtful consideration the issue deserves, especially after weeks
of public hearings on the matter, where hundreds of parents and teachers came
out to speak about why mayoral control was inherently flawed and needs badly to be reformed,
the Governor apparently insisted the issue be shoved into the budget as part of
a backroom deal.
Extending
mayoral control for two more years represents not only a slap in the face to
all those parents and teachers who spoke out, but also to the State Education
Department, that made a real effort into holding hearings
in every borough, and commissioning a 500
page report on Mayoral control, released just 11 days ago. That report analyzed the public comment,
looked at how Mayoral control in NYC differed from school governances systems
elsewhere in the country, and recommended several significant changes,
including reconstituting the Panel for Educational Policy so that the Mayor no
longer has a majority of appointees, and establishing a Commission to come up
with more fundamental reforms.
But
all of that effort was for naught, as Albany reverted to its usual bad habit of
wheeling and dealing, with only three people in the room making the final
decision on this issue of monumental importance: Governor Hochul, the Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and the
Senate Majority Leader, Andrea Steward Cousins.
Knowledgeable
sources say that while Hochul’s insistence was crucial, Speaker Heastie was favorably inclined towards
renewing mayoral control, and Majority Leader Cousins could not withstand that
pressure from the other two.
At
the very first borough hearing in the Bronx, John Collazo, chief of staff for
the Assembly Education Chair Michael Benedetto read aloud statement from
Benedetto that the Assembly as a whole recommended mayoral control should be
renewed in its present form “at
least six more years.” As shown on the video (see about 1.11 hour in), his speech
was booed.
While
it is unlikely that the entire Assembly held this consensus, it seems probable
that on such a high profile issue, Benedetto would not have issued this statement
without checking it first with Speaker Heastie.
The
only apparent change to the governance system
or the composition to the Panel for Educational Policy will be that from now on,
instead of the Panel for Education Policy electing its own chair, Legislature
leaders and the Chancellor Lester Young of the Board
of Regents will
produce
a list of nominees for the position, from which the
mayor will
select
one. This seems to be a supremely silly idea, as well
as being somewhat insulting. Rather than
lessening the Mayor’s power, this will add yet another mayoral appointee to the
Panel to the 15 out of 23 that he currently controls. It is hard to understand what such a trivial
change could possibly mean in terms of providing checks and balances or lead to
any more accountability in policymaking or minimizing waste and fraud.
Governor
Hochul said “I want parents & children & teachers to know that
governance mechanism been in place for many years will not be politicized. It
will not be a political football for the next few months.”
Except it was she who politicized the issue by cramming mayoral
control into the budget where it did not belong. No parents or teachers I know of will be
assured by this backroom deal, which instead was engineered presumably to satisfy
StudentsFirst and the charter school lobby, which had threatened to spend millions
on ads pushing for the continuation of mayoral control, in a campaign funded by
Bloomberg, the Walton family, and other billionaire supporters of privatization. Though charter schools are NOT under mayoral
control, and these ads never mention charter schools, the billionaires who
really exert outsize influence with the Governor and the Mayor, and in fact funded
Adams mayoral campaign want to make sure that he will be able to continue providing
favors to the charter school sector in the future.
While the sensationalist ads created
by the charter lobby trumpeted the corruption of the pre-Mayoral control days,
since Mayoral control was instituted there have been many much larger, multi-million
dollar corruption scandals at the Department of Education as I detail in my
presentation to the NYC Bar Association.
And cronyism and conflicts of interest seem endemic to this
administration, as evidence by a NY Post expose
today, as well as here,
here,
and here.
In any case, it appears that once
again, public school parents and teachers and community members lost out, and the
charter lobby won. There is no other
reason the Governor should have to support the Mayor in this way, who himself
is experiencing record
low popularity according to polls – if it were not to keep her big donors happy.
This brings me to another point – one of
the reasons that elected schools boards were instituted in the first place was
to try to insulate them from the horse trading that goes on in ordinary
politics, so that children’s education is run by people singularly focused on
this issue alone, which is too important to be traded away for some other
monetary or policy issue. But the back
room deal, at least when it comes to the fate of NYC students and schools, lives
on in this budget. One can only imagine
the constituent outcry if the Gov. tried to eliminate elected school boards in
the suburbs or the rural areas of the state and impose a system where the Mayor
had unilateral power over their schools, with a chair of their school board appointed by the State Legislature, the Chancellor,
and the Mayor.
Yet the views of NYC residents are not
given the same respect or consideration as the residents of Scarsdale or
Allendale, or even voters in Detroit, Newark, and Chicago, all of which have moved
away from mayoral control in the past few years.
The
state
budget also includes complicated language around class size, which says that
the Mayor and an independent auditor must certify the city’s annual education
budget to ensure that it includes sufficient funding to meet the annual targets
in the class size reduction law. Now “independent
auditors” are a dime a dozen, as we saw in the
Enron case. But there is another wrinkle
in the law: if the required class size targets are not reached by the end of
October, the City Council must add whatever additional funding is needed to
meet those targets in the November budget modification. As we saw in the recent
lawsuit
over the cuts to school budgets, it is difficult to get a court to overrule
the Mayor and the Council, even when they clearly violate state law.
How
effective this will be in fencing in Mayor Adams is difficult to predict, Adding another budgetary provision to state
law is like a parent saying to a misbehaving child, “I really mean it this
time.” In any case, as Ben Max pointed out
on twitter, it is “quite something that the
state passed a class size law and due to the mayor's opposition to implementing
it the legislature feels it necessary to add new legal mechanisms to make the
city follow the law.”
The
state budget also specifies that the DOE will have to add two billion
dollars for classroom construction to the proposed five-year capital plan,
over and above the $4.1 billion currently proposed new capacity. That amount is sorely needed, especially, as
the DOE cut more than $2 billion to new
capacity after the class size law was passed.
But whether that will mean dividing existing classrooms or common spaces
to even smaller spaces, or building and leasing new schools is unclear, as well
as whether the amount is enough, especially as the head of the School
Construction Authority testified at recent Council hearings that it would cost an
estimated $22 to $25 billion to create enough new space to comply with the law,
which is six times the amount they will now be obligated to spend.
We
have long argued that the estimates of
the DOE and SCA of the capital costs for compliance are inflated. Just a few weeks ago, after all, the
Chancellor and Deputy Chancellor claimed that it would cost $32 billion to $35
billion for that purpose. But how much
it will actually cost is , is unclear, as
I discussed in my
testimony to the City Council, because of a chronic lack of transparency by
the SCA and DOE, who refuse to share their methodology, despite both state and
city laws that require them to do so. In
the end, how much more space is needed will depend on whether the DOE agrees to
implement other changes recommended in the Class
Size Working Group report, including capping enrollment at lower levels in
overcrowded schools when there are underutilized schools nearby, or moving some
school-based PreK and 3K programs into nearby community based organizations or
Early Childhood Centers, which currently have thousands of empty seats.
At the last minute, according
to several sources, Hochul also tried to include in the budget amendments to the
state law that attempts to ensure that all non-public schools, including
ultra-Orthodox Yeshivas, provide an equivalent secular education, include sufficient instruction in English, math, and
science. Negotiations on this issue continued
until late Friday night, and was the last item holding up the finalization of
the budget. Like the billionaires who fund charter schools, the ultra-Orthodox leaders
have outsized political influence with both the Governor and the mayor, and as
a result, their schools continue to receive millions in state subsidies while
graduating many students unable to speak English or do basic math. Luckily, in this instance she failed to get
her way.
There is also a poison pill
in the budget, that so far has not been reported on, to my knowledge. The State Foundation formula that largely
determines school aid has not been updated since 2007, and there has been a
move to ask the State Education
Department to commission a study on how it might be revised. Yet instead, Hochul insisted that this study
be done instead by the conservative Rockefeller
Institute, run by Cuomo’s former budget director Robert Megna. The Institute’s Director of Education Policy
Studies is Brian Backstrom, an ed reform consultant who used to run the
Foundation for Education Reform, a charter lobbying organization, and is still serves
as the board co-chair of the Henry Johnson charter
school in Albany, and also sits on the
Brighter Choice
Foundation board that funds charter schools. His bio below boasts that “he is one
of the founders and chief architects of New York’s early charter school
movement” and he advocates for various forms of school vouchers, including private
school tuition tax-credits. It is likely
that whatever the Institute recommends in terms of school
funding will be biased towards further privatization, rather than supporting
public schools. 
In other more welcome news, on Friday the Mayor
agreed to restore $500 million in planned cuts to the education budget ,including
many programs that had been previously funded through federal stimulus dollars
during the administrations of both de Blasio and Eric Adams. The Mayor now has agreed to increase funding
for PreK and 3K programs, including PreK for students with special needs, as
well as to pay for guidance counselors,
community school services, and other programs that were on the chopping block.
What the Mayor did not agree to
do is to reverse planned cuts to
restorative justice programs, or to make any commitment that schools will not
face cuts in their budgets, especially for those schools that may have lost
enrollment since the pandemic. This
means that many schools can expect to see their budget for staffing cut, leading to increases rather than decreases in
class size. As I also pointed out in my
Council testimony, the size of the full-time K12 teaching staff has already
shrunk by over 4,000, and the city’s financial plan outlines a further
reduction of 3,000 teachers over the next two years. Whether the language in the state budget that earlier
described will be effective in preventing further class size increases from happening
is unclear to me at this point. We
will just have to see how this ongoing battle over class size and trying to persuade
the Mayor to comply with the law plays out now that he has gained Mayoral
control for the next two years --- the rest of his first and perhaps only term in office.
