Council Members Dromm and Treyger urge Congress to make sure while funding schools, NYS and NYC can't pull back their support at the same time

See the letter below, sent late last week from Council Members Danny Dromm and Mark Treyger, chairs of the Council Finance and Education Committees to New York Senators and our Congressional delegation, urging them to provide the additional funding our schools will need next fall to reopen safely and well, with the enhanced in-person support that students will require to recover from the huge losses they've suffered this year.

The letter also points out that the federal aid should be structured so that the state cannot simply cut education funding in the same amount as the additional aid districts receive from the federal government, as Governor Cuomo did last year with his "pandemic adjustment", cutting NYC's aid by nearly a billion dollars.

 As the Education Law Center and AQE point out in a new analysis, Cuomo threatened to do this again in his new Executive Budget, by slashing state aid by over half of the $3.85 billion in federal emergency relief funds in the previous funding passed by Congress, the Coronavirus Response and Relief Supplemental Appropriations (CRRSA) Act, funding that was meant to respond to the ongoing impacts of COVID-19, not to plug holes in state education budgets. 

At the same time, CM Dromm and CM Treyger also urged the Congress to make sure the city doesn't use these funds by withdrawing its support for schools as well:

" At the same time, include rigorous maintenance of effort provisions in the law, so that the city does not cut back on its own funding, as it is threatening to do with significant cuts to the budgets of as many as 60 percent of schools. This happened previously during the last economic recession in 2007, when during the first two years of the recession, even as the state and the federal government increased aid to schools, the class sizes of NYC students increased sharply, because the city cut its own funding at the same time. Sadly, class sizes in our public schools still remain significantly larger than before 2007, particularly in the early grades."

According to Education Week, the Biden plan does contain certain restrictions to ensure maintenance of effort on the part of states and districts, particularly in relation to their aid to high-poverty districts like NYC: 

States receiving aid through the bill released Monday would have to agree not to cut their per-pupil spending for high-poverty districts more than any per-pupil reduction they make for districts overall, during fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023....In addition, states could not cut their own aid to the 20 percent of districts with the highest share of economically disadvantaged students from fiscal 2019 funding levels. That requirement would also cover fiscal 2022 and fiscal 2023.

There would be similar conditions for districts’ limits on how much they could cut aid to high-poverty schools.

States would also have to agree to maintain certain levels of spending on K-12 schools in general in proportion to recent years’ spending levels, although they could apply for a waiver from that requirement.

Let's hope that these provisions stick and are strong and meaningful, given the propensity on the part of the city and state to take advantage of funds coming from elsewhere to pull back on their own support to public schools.

 

DOE to delay the release of any class size data due Nov. 15 until Dec. 31, and any disaggregated data until Feb.15

UPDATE: in late February the DOE released links to aggregate class size data that then links to spreadsheets on the Open Data site that seems absurdly low.  Now they say they will not release any disaggregated data that may be more accurate till sometime in March.

UPDATE 1/4/21:  According to City Council staff, the DOE now says they are further postponing the release of any class size data until "early or mid-January."

UPDATE 10/23/2020: Chalkbeat wrote about this issue here.

See the letter from Karen Goldmark below of DOE responding to the letter from CM Mark Treyger, saying they will not release any class size data until December 31, based on the size of classes on November 13, rather than the legal deadline established by city law of November 15.  It also appears from the letter that they do not intend to report any disaggregated data till February 15-- still based on the size of classes as of November 13  (!).

It is very difficult to understand why this should take so long, especially as at the Mayor's press conference on Oct. 26, the Chancellor said that schools have been reporting attendance data and thus class size in "literally three buckets of attendance every single day": in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes. 

One suspects that DOE officials just don’t want people to know how large the online classes actually are, as reported by parents and the media here, here and here.

 

34 NYC council members urge de Blasio to avoid cuts to the classroom via savings in the education budget

See the letter from NYC Council Education chair Mark Treyger and signed by 33 other Council Members to the Mayor below, where they call for "common sense savings" by eliminating unnecessary spending on contracts, administration,  and testing to prevent damaging cuts directly to school budgets next year, which would lead to even larger classes and the loss of school counselors and other critical services. 

If you'd like to speak out against wasteful spending on contracts and consultants, or on other matters you can speak at tonight's Panel for Educational Policy meeting by signing up between 5:30 PM and 6:15 PM here.

More on this letter and potential budget savings in this Daily News article.

Today's "Talk out of School" on the toxic levels of testing and lead in NYC schools

On today’s Talk Out of School on WBAI radio, we spoke with NYC Council Member and Chair of the Education Committee Mark Treyger, about yesterday's oversight hearing on “Breaking the test culture” in our NYC schools, the highlights of which I described on the blog. 

We discussed the success of the the 38 schools that belong to the NY Performance Standards Consortium, that use projects and performance-based assessments instead of  Regents exams that most NYC high school students are required to pass to graduate. The Council Member referred to these schools to as the “best kept secret in our education system”. Meanwhile, the overemphasis on standardized testing in our public schools encourages rote learning and memoritzation rather than develop deep knowledge and critical thinking. We also talked about DOE’s proposal to implement yet another set of standardized tests in our schools and create yet another data system called Edustat.  I followed up by asked him what the powers of the Council were to prevent the implementation of these likely damaging and/or wasteful programs might be given mayoral control.

Christopher Werth

In the second half of the show we were joined by Christoper Werth, senior editor at WNYC’s narrative unit, who explained thow his visit to his young daughter’s elementary classroom led to a groundbreaking investigation of lead contamination, followed by a new round of testing by DOE.  

We also discussed how the risks posed by lead in school water compare to lead in peeling paint and dust, and described how the model bill proposed by NRDC would mandate filtration systems on all drinking water outlets in schools and lower the action level requiring remediation. The possible correlation between the phasing out of lead paint and the national  drop in crime rates was another topic we touched on in our discussion. 

Click here to download or livestream the full episode. More information on these issues are linked to below.

• NYC Public School Parents on NYC Council hearings on Breaking the school testing culture.
• Christopher Werth's reporting on crumbling lead paint in schools
• NYC Public School Parents on high levels of lead in water still found in schools in third round of DOE testing.
• DOE inspection results for peeling lead paint in classrooms
• DOE inspection results for lead found in school water  
• NRDC FAQ for parents on lead in school water: what should you do?
• NRDC Model State Legislation: “Get the Lead Out of School Drinking Water Act” Summary of Provisions