Big cuts in new seats, despite overcrowding crisis, with DOE spinning as a "restoration"

See this DOE press release on their “new” revised amended five year capital plan, which they try to spin as a major restoration, but is really a huge cut.

• In the Feb. 2010 plan (which was adopted in June), the DOE said they would fund 30,000 new seats at $4B, which we clearly knew was insufficient based upon rapidly increased enrollment and overcrowding.
  

• Then, in their proposed Nov. 2010 amendment, they said they needed to increase this amount to 50,000 new seats at $7.4 billion (including 2300 seats for design only); the first time they admitted the reality of the overcrowding crisis already upon us. (Strangely enough, this document has now suddenly been removed from the SCA website.)

• In their Feb. 2011 plan, they threatened to cut way back on new seats because the governor threatened to cap reimbursement, to build only 20,000 new seats total (with 6,000 of these funded for design only) , spending only $1.7 billion for new capacity.

• And now that the governor’s proposal to cap reimbursement was thoroughly rejected by the Legislature, they are still cutting way back to only 28,866 new school seats, plus 2,314 seats in design, for a total of 31,000 seats.
  

What kind of thinking leads to such erratic, and inexplicable lurches in one direction to another? Is there something toxic in the air at Tweed?

What happened since? Did the state change their reimbursement formula or amount? No.

Did the city’s financial picture significantly change since November? No.

Did enrollment suddenly decline? No.

Did the DOE change their projections based on the fact that now, ONE QUARTER of all elementary schools now have waiting lists for Kindergarten? Unlikely.

Or maybe they just want to spend billions of dollars on technology, so kids don’t ever have to have a seat in a real school but can stay at home and get “virtual learning” instead?

The full capital plan will be released tomorrow on the SCA website. Check it out and also check out the amount to be spent on technology “enhancements”, which in the Nov. 2010 plan included a total of $1.8 billion for technology, with $1B to be spent in FY 2012 alone. In the Feb.2011 plan, this was “cut back” to $957 million, with $540 million on technology to be spent in FY 2012 alone. Which is yet another disaster waiting to happen.

Send a message about school overcrowding and the $5 billion cut from the school capital plan!

In the press of other news, like rampant budget cuts, school closings, rising class sizes, and harmful co-locations, we have failed to focus on one of the most important issues that will determine the quality of education in NYC schools for years to come: the five year capital plan.

On Wednesday, the Panel for Educational Policy will vote on this plan, which compared to DOE’s previous proposal issued in November, cuts the funding for new capacity over five years by almost $6 billion.

Spending is slashed for new seats from $8.8 billion to $2.9 billion, and the number of new seats is cut by 30,000, or 67% . At the same time the DOE wants to spend $1 billion on new technology, including $542 million next year alone – so that they can the spread of online learning to 300-400 schools over the next few years.

This an extraordinarily large amount to be spending in any one year, especially given the city’s (and the DOE’s) dreadful record with technology projects.

It is also more than twice as much as the $259 million that the DOE plans to spend on building new schools next year. If this plan is approved, there will be very few new seats over the next few years, with only 609 new seats projected for Sept. 2013—the smallest increase in more than ten years, just as our school-age population is rapidly expanding.

This is a recipe for disaster.

The November DOE proposal, which called for 50,000 new seats, was the first under this administration to admit the reality of increased enrollment citywide, resulting in widespread wait lists for Kindergarten and class sizes growing at an unprecedented rates. Though we have been warning of increasing enrollment for several years, the DOE’s official projections wrongly claimed that this would not occur until 2016 at the earliest, although it already started in most districts three years ago, and occurred citywide in 2009.

At the same time, the DOE plans to accelerate online learning, called the Izone, expanding it to 300-400 schools over the next few years, without any independent evaluation of the pilot program that currently exists.

As a recent report warned, the rapid spread of this sort of experimental, expensive program is happening nowhere else in the country:

“NYC school district leaders are taking risks with the iZone, implementing new models, committing deeply to a defined set of principles that challenge core assumptions about what a school should look like, and moving to scale very quickly. How and when they will know if they got the big bet right is a question district leaders will have to ask so that students are not subjected for too long to programs and schools that don’t work. … At some point, the district may get pushback from parents about the idea of having their children participate in unproven programs and may need to consider catch-up academic plans if certain programs are not effective.”

In truth, this plan represents a large scale experiment on our children, with no research to back it up. Already, hundreds of schools have found that the $80 million ARIS was a costly mistake, and are using a far more inexpensive and useful model called Datacation developed by a science teacher in the Bronx, as NY1 has reported.

But the half billion dollars that the DOE plans to spend next year on expanding the Izone will make the $80 million ARIS looks like chickenfeed.

For more on the radical cuts in new seats and the concomitant increase in spending on technology, see my comments on the capital plan in Gotham Gazette.

Click on the chart to the right for the number of seats that will be cut in every borough and in most districts, ranging from 39% in Manhattan, 54% in Queens, 60% in Staten Island, 72% in Brooklyn, to 78% in the Bronx, compared to the November plan.

Five districts will have all their new seats cut – including D3, D8, D14, D26 and D29. [CORRECTION: D3 does not have its 480 seats cut; I have corrected the chart to the right.]

Because the DOE has never published a needs assessment for any district, we cannot know if these cuts are fairly apportioned; all we know is that is this plan is approved, children in these communities will be sitting in overcrowded schools for years to come.

The mayor blames the Governor for proposing a cap on capital reimbursement; and it is true that Cuomo is partly responsible. But the mayor and the DOE are ultimately accountable, because of their refusal at any time during their administration to provide accurate utilization (Blue book) figures, reliable enrollment projections, or a transparent needs assessment of how many seats are actually required to eliminate overcrowding.

Instead, they have consistently hidden the truth and minimized the problem, and continued to pursue damaging policies that have made overcrowding worse, such as charter school co-locations.

To add insult to injury, at the same time the DOE plans to rapidly spread risky virtual learning to hundreds of schools over the next three years, they are refusing to replace the leaky PCB-lights in our schools in anything less than ten years, risking our children’s health and safety.

Please send the mayor, the chancellor, the PEP members and the borough presidents a message now, on the need to expand new seats in the capital plan and freeze spending on technology!

A sample email is below, along with relevant contact information, and room to plug in your own borough and/or district cuts, if you like. But PLEASE do it today. Then come Wednesday to Brooklyn Tech PEP meeting and make your voices heard.

SAMPLE EMAIL:

To the Mayor, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

mbloomberg@cityhall.nyc.gov; Cpblack@schools.nyc.gov; patk.j.sullivan@gmail.com; sipeprep@aol.com; majorm766@gmail.com; okotieuro@yahoo.com; pepofqueens@yahoo.com; llbryant@inwoodhouse.com; robert.reffkin@gs.com; tomas.morales@csi.cuny.edu; FFoster@schools.nyc.gov; jchan@dbpartnership.org; gittepeng@yahoo.com; lnieves@yearup.org; thernandez@samvill.org;

CC: BPs and education staff:

bp@manhattanbp.org; emcgill@manhattanbp.org; askmarty@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; cscissura@brooklynbp.nyc.gov; margkelley@aol.com; info@queensbp.org; rdarche@queensbp.org; webmail@bronxbp.nyc.gov; jmojica@bronxbp.nyc.gov; dmarciuliano@statenislandusa.com

Dear Mayor Bloomberg, Chancellor Black and members of the PEP:

The proposed five-year DOE capital plan will cut $5 billion from new capacity, and nearly 30,000 new seats from the version of the plan just released in November. Given existing overcrowding, the rapid increases in enrollment and class size throughout the city, as well as Kindergarten wait lists at many schools, these cuts are simply unacceptable. [My borough of X will be cut by y seats; and my district by Z seats].

At the same time, the DOE is proposing to spend nearly a billion dollars to expand virtual learning to hundreds of new schools, with more than half a billion dollars to be spent on technology next year alone. This is a recipe for disaster, given the city’s record in overspending and waste on technology projects, as well as the fact that the Izone is a risky experiment without any independent research to back it up.

Though the Mayor and DOE blame the Governor for capping the reimbursement for school construction, they are ultimately responsible for this fiasco, for refusing to report accurate overcrowding figures, reliable enrollment projections and/or a realistic, transparent needs assessment of new capacity for our schools at any time during this administration.

As a parent, I ask that you to reject this inadequate plan, which disregards the rights of our children to be provided with a quality education in uncrowded schools with reasonable class sizes. You should also immediately freeze the billion dollars to be spent on technology until an independent analysis of the Izone pilot can be released to the public, and parents and experts can thoughtfully evaluate its results.

Otherwise, you will be risking a huge waste of money on a large-scale experiment on our children, without our consent.

I also urge you to restore the full amount ($5 billion) to school construction and new capacity, and to eliminate all PCB-laden lights from schools over a much more rapid time frame than ten years. If you really care about NYC children, you will agree. In exchange, I promise to work with you to persuade the Governor and the Legislature to raise the cap on school construction.

Thanks,

[Name, school, district]

City's claims re school construction are as inflated as the school grades

See today’s column by Juan Gonzalez in which he shows how the administration’s claims as regards school construction are as inflated as the school grades.

Many buildings claimed as “new school construction” are instead space leased in office buildings or parochial schools. What’s the problem with counting leased seats the same as new school construction? For one thing, the city never includes in their calculation how many seats are lost each year, when leased spaces lapse.

See this list of leases for Manhattan schools alone -- with thousands of seats subtracted due to lost leases in recent years. And the list is not even complete. For example, Baruch College HS, which lost its space last year, will spend one year in the former School for the Physical City, until that lease is finished, with no permanent home yet for the future.

The city’s press release also blatantly claims that this year’s total of 13,000 seats plus last year’s total, “represents the most-ever new classroom seats to come on line in a two-year period since the School Construction Authority was created in 1988.”

This is false. As Juan writes, “During three of those years, Giuliani created an average of 19,000 new seats. Under Bloomberg, the city has created more than 14,000 seats only once, in 2005, and school overcrowding continues to grow.”

No matter how you slice it, nearly any two years during the Giuliani administration produced bigger totals. Click on the chart above, with data taken directly from Mayor’s Management Reports.

Also, while the press release claims that “the 2005-2009 Capital Plan [was] the largest school construction effort in the City’s history,” this is not true either. Many previous administrations have built many more seats. Even Kathleen Grimm, Deputy Chancellor, was forced to admit this at a recent City Council hearing, when Robert Jackson presented her with the facts. See this account at Gotham Schools.

And the overcrowding has worsened, contrary to what City Hall claims. According to the DOE’s “Blue Book” 48 percent of students attended overcrowded schools as of the 2007-8 school year. This compares to 43 percent of students the year before. (We have no data as of 2008-9 as of yet.) Hundreds of children were put on waiting lists for Kindergarten this fall.

The new five year capital plan further cuts the number of new seats by 60 percent -- which will provide only approximately one third of the space necessary to eliminate current overcrowding and reduce class size to state-mandated levels -- and will do nothing to address the increased enrollment expected in neighborhoods throughout the city.

Three recent reports, from the NYC Comptroller, from the Manhattan Borough President, and from the Campaign for a Better Capital Plan, have each pointed out how school construction has lagged considerably behind the needs of our growing school-age population.

Just yesterday, the Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer put out yet another report, School Daze, showing how the DOE’s enrollment projections have consistently fallen short, and do not take into count the growth of new residential development, making it likely that thousands of Manhattan children will be left without schools in the near future.

Our classrooms are already overcrowded, and our children are facing a worsening crisis unless the city faces the truth – and builds more schools. In a recent survey, 86 percent of principals said that their class sizes were already too large to provide a quality education.

Indeed, the city is supposed to grow by a million residents by 2030 – without any plan to deal with the increased number of schoolchildren this will entail. Yet the only mention of schools in the PlaNYC report that detailed the need for improvements in every other aspect of the city’s infrastructure was a recommendation that excess school buildings should be renovated into more housing.

Already, the city’s share of capital spending going to schools has fallen sharply – click on the chart to the right. This disturbing trend is likely to continue, given the hugely inadequate new five year capital plan.