Race to the Bank

I took a journalism class in college where we were always taught to look for telling details. A telling detail was the kind of small, observable thing that was supposed to shed light on a larger truth about whatever we were writing about. The idea always sort of captivated me and I find myself spotting telling details from time to time.

A great example occurred to me yesterday when I checked in on the Gotham Schools website (which everyone should read every day) and read the headline, "On RttT Deadline Day, Paterson Proposes $1.1B in School Cuts." Think about that headline for a moment and what it says about the larger state of affairs for education reform and the reform agenda.

Race to the Top was supposed to be about encouraging states to do be innovative and aggressive about improving their educational performances. That's why Paterson spent a good portion of the day trying to get lawmakers to lift the state's charter school cap - an effort that was ultimately unsuccessful. But let's get back to the telling part of the detail. Mainly, that cutting $1.1 billion isn't seen as being as limiting to educational reform as the fact that the state only allows 200 charter schools. That's incredible to me.

I know that things like funding education are the kind of things that defenders of the status quo always do, but seriously people. Cutting per-pupil spending by 5% has to be considered an impediment to serious education work. Can we really race to the top without funding?

To be fair, I have no idea how to fix the state's fiscal fiasco, which seems to get worse each time I read a new report on how bad things are. So I get that cuts to schools were probably inevitable and that even a huge cut like this is only just a small portion of how much money does go to education in the state. I just marvel at the fact that no one saw the irony in cutting so much education funding while we were trying to show how education-focused we are as a state. That is a telling detail.

Lucky Guy

I never thought I would write that I think the press has gone kind of easy on Governor Paterson. Keep in mind that for about the last year there have been a steady stream of stories essentially saying that he's a lame duck and that Andrew Cuomo is so much better than he is and how the White House hates him and New Yorkers hate him and even people who've never heard of him think that someone else would be a better governor. He hasn't helped his own cause very much, but I can see how it would foster a tough environment in which to govern during difficult times.

But he seems to have caught a break. At least for now.

In his continuing efforts to cut back on spending in the state and close an ever-growing budget deficit, Paterson has announced that, among other things, he's withholding payments to school districts across the state. The New York Times headline read: School Districts Scramble After Albay Delays Aid. That's two breaks in one headline. The first is that the delay was attributed to "Albany" instead of "Paterson the terrible governor who's going to get beat by Andrew Cuomo if he insists on staying in the race." Admittedly, Albany is shorter than all that, so maybe that was the deciding factor.

The other break is a little subtler and is, in fact, repeated in the story itself. That's the use of the word "Aid" instead of, say, "funding". Now that's an interesting distinction that makes the withholding more palatable. Keeping school funding out of the hands of schools sure seems like a pretty cold-hearted move. But if it's just aid, well, maybe it's not so bad. It'll just be a little less help.

I suppose I'm not well-versed enough in the subtleties of New York State's various fiscal policies to say for sure what qualifies for aid versus what is considered outright funding, but it seems like Paterson might have caught a symantic break here, even if it is just a little one.

Zero Sum Funding

When a guy runs for office as the "Education Mayor" you'd tend to think that things wouldn't devolve the way they have in New York in the last few weeks. For those of you who don't read anything, the nation (as well as the states and cities in it) are facing a bit of a tough time coming up. Budgets are going to be tight and spending is almost certainly going to have to be cut. That's where things start getting interesting education-wise in New York.

A few years ago, a lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity won a huge victory. The gist of it is that the state needed to do more to fund schools in New York City. After that landmark decision, both the state and the city pledged to fund the schools at certain levels over the next several years.

Enter the budget cuts.

The minute things got bad both the state and city started looking at cutting education spending. This naturally set off a political firestorm as no one really wants to see school spending reduced. The state legislature, seeing which way the wind was blowing, reversed itself and will now be funding city education at the level that it had promised. So all eyes turn to Bloomberg, who is defiantly not increasing the amount he'd indicated.

(Where it gets complicated is that spending will increase over the next fiscal year, but not as much as promised. Given the increases in the prices of food, gas, and everything else, though, the increase the mayor is currently proposing really just holds the schools even in an actual dollars sense.)

So after weeks of the Mayor saying he wasn't going to increase the amount of spending in schools, the Chancellor released a statement yesterday that just strikes a chill in me for how intentionally divisive it is. As reported in the New York Times, the Chancellor is claiming that the "good" schools in New York City are going to take a disproportionate cut in funding because state mandate (remember the CFE lawsuit) says that certain levels of funding need to go to underserved and low performing schools.

This is a disgusting tactic. It is clearly an attempt to play parents off against one another. Those with kids who go to good schools are going to feel cheated by their own success. Those in bad schools are going to have to deal with those resentments. The kicker of all this is (in the words of Governor Paterson), "If the City were not reducing its own promised spending for schools, it would have sufficient money to balance funds for other schools if it chose to do so."

In other words, Mayor Bloomberg is trying to set parents against each other because he doesn't want to have to pay what he said he would for schools.

The other point that's important to note here is that it makes sense to increase funding for the highest needs schools. Yes, every child needs to learn. However, some need more help than others. As has been drilled into me repeatedly: fair not everyone being treated equally, fair is everyone getting what they need. Clearly higher needs schools have greater needs.

It's a shame that the Mayor has tried to turn this into a zero sum game where the gains of one school are the loss of another. I can think of very little that he could do that would do more to set back the efforts of creating educational equality in the city. Coming from the "Education Mayor" that's just inexcusable.