Post mortem on a disappointing state budget

 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.

Legislators and parents speak out against the Governor's proposal to allow up to 300 more charter schools in NYC

Today there was a press conference on the steps of City Hall, to oppose Gov. Hochul's proposal to raise the cap on charter schools, that could add as many as 300 more charters to NYC, as every charter that is approved can multiply into three schools, elementary, middle and high school.  

Stories about this very reckless and damaging proposal by the Governor, which seems to have gone over with the Legislature like a lead balloon,  were published in the NY Times, Chalkbeat, and NY Post, among others.  In Gothamist, I was quoted saying if the cap was raised, it could prevent any  chance that will be enough space in many schools to reduce class size. 

It was very reassuring that so many Legislators have pushed back quickly against this proposal, including the very powerful chairs of the Senate NYC Education Committee John Liu and the Senate Education Committee Shelley B. Mayer, both of whom spoke out forcefully at the press conference, along with Senators Robert Jackson, Jabari Brisport, Cordell Cleare and Jessica Ramos.  Other speakers included NYC Comptroller Brad Lander, UFT President Michael Mulgrew, and many parent leaders.  Many of them also thanked the Governor for fully funding Foundation Aid, but said raising the cap could undermine the good that these additional resources might provide. Check out the videos below.

         

Sen. John Liu explains why he sponsored the class size bill

Sen. John Liu at his Education Town Hall meeting on August 17, 2022 explains why he sponsored the class size bill and how smaller classes are essential towards providing NYC students with their rights under the New York constitution according to the state's highest court in the CFE case. He says it's a simple matter of the Legislature upholding the constitutional rights of children. I missed taping the very beginning of his comments, when he said that the passage of the bill is one of the proudest moments of his legislative career.

 

Why Friday's hearings on Mayoral control were the best in twenty years -- and what was said about the need for smaller classes & more fiscal oversight

I’ve testified at countless mayoral control hearings since it was instituted nearly 20 years ago. Yesterday’s joint Senate and Assembly hearings far surpassed any of them.  You can watch the video here. Sorry to say there were very few news stories about it, because most of the education reporters were covering the Mayor's announcement about lifting the mask mandate in schools.  It was their loss, since the questioning by legislators was sharp and had a new seriousness about it, and the testimony from parent leaders was passionate and incisive.

In recent years, the opposition to Mayoral control has grown, here in the city and nationwide.  As I point out in my testimony, the system has never been popular among average voters.  But the evident dysfunctionality of the system and the way it allows autocracy to override the wishes of parents and the needs of children, no matter who is Mayor, is now more widely recognized.  Many districts such as Detroit and Newark that once suffered under mayoral control or worse, state control, have returned to an elected school, and Chicago will soon do so.  

This was the first time in my experience that influential legislators seem really intent about making improvements to the law.  Sen. John Liu, chair of the NYC Education Senate committee, and Sen. Shelley Mayer, chair of the NY State Senate Education Committee, along with Assemblymembers Harvey Epstein and Jo Anne Simon, closely questioned Chancellor Banks  about what changes could be made that would ensure that parents have a real voice in the system.  Yet he seemed strangely unprepared for their pointed questions.

After a brief appearance by Mayor Adams, who was driving in his car but didn't have time to answer any questions, Chancellor Banks said that the DOE had brought down school Covid positivity rates  from 16% at the beginning of January, to below 1% now, which he claimed was a "direct result of Mayoral Accountability."  

Yet as was widely reported, Omicron exploded in our schools with tens of thousands of students becoming infected in January, with DOE's safety protocols recognized to be  largely ineffective.  The Omicron surge rose and fell on its own in our schools, as it did nearly everywhere else in the city and indeed the nation, and this had nothing to do with any new measures put in place by the Adams administration. Indeed, as I pointed out in a tweet, the schools in Los Angeles have put in place far more effective Covid vaccine and testing protocols, and their schools are governed by an elected school board.

Banks also claimed he would be a far different kind of Chancellor than those who preceded him, because he himself had gone through the public school system.  Unmentioned was that Joel Klein attended NYC public schools as well, and we know how little respect he showed parent and community views and priorities.

Banks promised that he intended to closely collaborate with the parent-led Community Education Councils.  But when AM Epstein asked him what he thought of any of the numerous specific improvements to the Mayoral control that the CECs have proposed in many resolutions, Banks admitted he hadn’t read them.

Senator Shelley Mayer followed up by asking whether he would agree to any specific changes to the law to ensure parent input is taken seriously.  Banks then turned to Deputy Chancellor Weisberg to ask "Dan do we agree with any changes?" Weisberg, who was himself high in the DOE leadership structure for six years under Chancellor Klein, said no.

There was also much discussion on the failure of the DOE to put any effort into reducing class size during the twenty years of mayoral control -- even though this is a critical reform proven to help students learn, especially students of color.  Smaller classes are also the top priority of NYC K12 parents every year on the DOE's own parent surveys.

The topic of class size was first introduced  by Sen. Robert Jackson, the original plaintiff in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, which after many years of advocacy, is finally bringing more than $1.3 billion in additional state funds to NYC schools. Yet the administration plans to invest none of these funds in lowering class size, though the city's excessive class sizes were a central issue in the lawsuit and the court's decision that our students were deprived of their right to a sound, basic education.  The topic of class size was also mentioned by AM Jo Anne Simon and some other legislators. 

Sen. Jackson repeatedly threatened that he would hold back state funding if the DOE refuses to lower class size, as outlined in the his bill S6296A, and the same as Assembly bill, A7447A, sponsored by AM Simon. Jackson also implied that his support for continuing mayoral control was at risk due to DOE negligence on the issue-- and that in any case, he would not support an extension of more than two years.

When asked what were their plans in terms of class size, Banks again deferred to Weisberg, who said that class sizes had already decreased this year, partly because of enrollment decline - which is true. Though I hadn’t commented on the issue in my written testimony, when I had a chance to testify in the afternoon, I pointed out that if the city's proposed budget cuts to schools are adopted, amounting to nearly one billion dollars over three years, class sizes will quickly increase to their former levels. 

In response to Jackson's questions, both UFT President Michael Mulgrew and CSA President Mark Cannizzaro agreed that lowering class size was critical; Cannizzaro added that to do so, the Fair Student Formula (FSF) that  is the main source of every school's funding must be altered, since it  is aligned to large classes. 

In my oral testimony, I pointed out how the FSF Task Force created by the City Council in 2018 had never released their report, because its members pushed for revising the formula to allow for smaller classes, but the Mayor's office under de Blasio had stifled their concerns, by refusing to allow the issue to be mentioned in the report.

Another problem that both Mayor Adams and Chancellor Banks encountered is a glaring contradiction in their rhetoric .  Both repeated their now-familiar refrain about how terrible our schools are, especially for Black and brown kids. But of course, if true, this failure persists after twenty years of mayoral control - the very system that they claim is necessary to solve the problem. 

Banks tried to get around this evident contradiction, by testifying that all the deficiencies exhibited by our schools are the result of the system that earlier prevailed, more than twenty years ago: "We are still dealing with the remnants of the past world before Mayoral Accountability was adopted.  Corruption, patronage, and inequity ruled the day, and our students suffered greatly.  That is evident in some of the glaring disparate outcomes we still see, especially for communities of color."

Yet this argument didn't seem to be particularly convincing to the legislators.  In fact, in the first five hours or so of the hearings, while I was still watching, only one of them expressed strong support for continuing the current system for another four years, Senator Luis Sepulveda from the Bronx.  A four year extension is what Gov. Hochul has proposed and of course Adams and Banks would prefer:  The attitude of the other legislators seemed to range from slight skepticism to clear opposition,  at least during the portion of the hearings that I was able to observe.

Moreover, the parent leaders who spoke were nearly unanimous in their criticism of the way in which mayoral control had allowed their voices to be ignored and the needs of their community's public schools to be trampled upon, by both Bloomberg and de Blasio.  Their testimonies were tremendously compelling,  and in their combined impact, overwhelming.  I hope you watch them here. There was only one parent among the scores who spoke during the first five hours who said she supported the current system to any degree: Yiatin Chu, the co-chair of PLACE,  and even her co-chair, Lucas Liu, appeared to disagree. 

My brief oral comments are at about 4 hours and 46 minutes into the video, and focused on two issues: class size and fiscal accountability.  In my written testimony, I detailed and supported many of the changes proposed by the Education Council Consortium and the CECs, including a reconfiguration of the Panel for Education Policy so that the mayor no longer appoints a majority of members, and a requirement that the DOE should be made subject to local laws passed by the City Council.  Currently, unlike every other city agency, the City Council can pass laws regarding education only in the area of requiring more DOE reporting, not in any policy area.  I also spoke about the need for stronger fiscal oversight by the   Panel for Education Policy, who every month routinely rubber stamp many wasteful contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars, with insufficient scrutiny and sometimes even those awarded to vendors who had previously been shown to be corrupt. 

To address these glaring problems, I proposed that the NYC Comptroller be able to appoint a non-voting PEP member, who could provide expert counsel on contracting and other financial matters .  I also proposed that the Comptroller be responsible for training the PEP members in financial oversight, accountability, and fiduciary responsibilities.  According to state law, all Board of Education members are supposed to receive at least six hours of such training; and yet PEP members have publicly said that the training they receive is insufficient and minimal at best.

The state law does include a provision that the DOE is exempt from these requirements, but only if the Chancellor certifies annually in writing to the State Education Department that the training that PEP members receive is at least as rigorous as the law requires.  Yet after I FOILed the State for these written certifications, NYSED said they hadn't received any in at least the last three years.