Testimony of Randi Weingarten before the City Council Education Committee Fiscal 2009 Preliminary Budget Hearing: March 20, 2008

Mar 20, 2008 10:35 AM

Thank you Chairman Jackson, 

 Less than a year ago, the city budget for Fiscal 2008 provided decent funding for the schools. It was the kind of funding support that allowed teachers to do their jobs, parents to want to have their children attend public schools, and students to learn and achieve.

After that, I thought we had moved away from the annual battle over dollars to discussions over how best to structure the schools and develop pedagogy that brings the best out of our 1.1 million public school students. Now, after the proposed state and city cuts, we’re sadly back to the same old fight.

My union has been lobbying Albany to keep its promises. We’re demanding the city keep its promises, too. Yesterday, thousands of parents, educators, students and busloads of other supporters and members of the Keep the Promises Coalition rallied in the pouring rain by City Hall Park to oppose city and state education budget cuts and reductions that could cost New York City public schools from $800 million to $1 billion. This preliminary education budget is not what was promised. It’s not what our kids need. It’s reneging on a promise to ensure demography is not destiny.

That huge figure includes cuts reflecting City Budget Director Mark Page’s March 4 order to all city agencies to make an additional 3 percent slash in their budgets. For the DOE, that means another $200 million cut in September on top of the $324 million cut that was already slated by the mayor on top of the $180 million cut taken this year and the nearly $200 million loss in foundation aid the former governor promised, then backed away from.   

In addition to the operating cuts, state reductions in school construction aid will have ripple effects, too. In 2006, the state committed to significant increases in building aid that would allow full funding of the city’s $13.2 billion school construction plan. The DOE itself estimates that building aid reductions in the proposed Executive Budget will put at risk $1.5 billion in bonds for school construction for the coming year. It will also seriously compromise class-size reduction efforts.

Yes, the economic news is bad. The six-year economic bubble has burst. Yes, city budgets have to reflect city income. In bad times and good, elected officials have to make choices about what are the spending and revenue priorities. But public education—underfunded for decades until last year—needs to be held harmless. City leaders must make wise choices that ensure the future of our students and our schools is not mortgaged, and that we do not have to spend decades more rebuilding the structure that can offer a sound basic education. We cannot repeat the mistakes of the 1970s, when the fiscal crisis wreaked such havoc on the schools that it took decades to repair and contributed to the city’s social and economic decline.  

It’s not yet clear how Albany will respond. The state Assembly’s vote to restore every dime of state school funding for foundation aid and capital construction, while imposing a modest personal income tax surcharge on state resident and nonresident incomes over $1 million to pay for that funding, is great news. We thanked Speaker Silver for his leadership. And we appreciated state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno’s kind words, when he told some 1,300 teachers, parents and supporters during our March 11 Albany lobbying effort that his Chamber, which has not yet formulated its budget plan, would in fact propose a record-breaking statewide increase in education aid. That was great and much appreciated news to hear. So were the actions of the two houses to leave the capital budget whole.

So Albany looks like it’s on the road to safeguarding its promises, but it’s up to the city to keep its promises as well.

But if it is not amended, this austerity school budget will harm children As the report of your council committee notes, the mayor’s preliminary budget "almost entirely reverse(s)  the school budget increases made in the FY '08 budget"   And the council has seen the effect the mid-year cuts have had on our schools. You’ve seen it in every school in your home districts, suffering from a 1.75 percent cut in the current operating budget. Your constituents tell you it means:  

Cancellation of after-school and weekend tutorial classes;

Elimination of arts and other special programs

Combining classes because principals do not have the money to pay for substitutes. 

These cuts fall directly on schools, not on Tweed. They will wipe out successful and necessary programs while maintaining the administration’s costly priorities.  For example, every school still must fund a data specialist and an inquiry team, among whose functions are to identify the specific needs of low-performing children and help the school meet them. However, the schools are already eliminating much of the available remedial help just to meet the Fiscal 2008 cuts.

Here’s another example of how implementing the administration’s philosophy needs to be re-examined. The DOE has spent millions on closing schools, some of which were in good standing. Those teachers displaced must find new positions via the free market. As a result, hundreds of qualified and experienced teachers remain on payroll without classroom assignments while principals hire new teachers. The system is paying for them, and the union since September has aggressively tried to get them placed. But the system’s school budgeting process blocks it. The principals in this regard are in a no-win situation. They are told their budget is based on actual teacher cost -- (so called fair student funding), so in a budget downturn, how could they hire experienced teachers at higher salaries instead of lower cost teachers?

Next year's proposed across-the-board cuts will do more damage, too, as they will fall almost entirely on schools and classrooms.

It's also time for Tweed to open the books and provide the public transparency they famously claim exists in their budgets.  Transparent? I feel like I’m staring at a brick wall. There are lots of outstanding questions about where the money goes, and why it goes where it goes. The no-bid contracts, the handsomely remunerated consultants, and the money that the ARIS accountability program and related activities are costing the school system were arranged without public announcement or input, let alone oversight.

We’re still waiting for an accounting of how much in administrative savings was generated by eliminating the districts in the DOE’s reorganization. How can they spend millions in Contract for Excellence funding and show minimal reductions in class size—especially after an audit in the 2004-2005 school year showed early grade  dollars were misspent. 

Providing lots of information on the DOE Website is not the same thing as transparency. The public needs real answers, not millions of bytes of data. 

What we need is an objective review and evaluation of the DOE’s spending priorities, some of which came at the expense of classroom instruction. We certainly need more oversight, perhaps from an independent monitoring agency. 

This lack of transparency is problematic. Here’s a recent example. Last Monday, the Panel for Educational Policy approved an 8th grade retention policy. Regardless of where one stands on ending social promotion, it can’t be done without ensuring that kids left back, or in danger of being left back, have real support to get it right the second time around. Yet, the proposed budget doesn’t mesh with this. The mayor’s proposed budget will require middle school principals to cut back or eliminate exactly those programs that could help students throughout the year avoid being held back. 

How will the cuts affect students?

One, the cuts will make moot our decades long effort to reduce class sizes. Cuts of this magnitude will have to result in reduced staff and larger classes

Two, the proposed $10 million cut to the English Language Learner reserve could reduce services for these students, particularly those in the middle grades.

Three, the expense budget also eliminates $35.8 million in City Council initiatives that have helped to improve the quality of education in our city’s schools. These cuts include Teacher’s Choice for classroom supplies, at the same time supplies are being cut throughout the system, the Urban Advantage science initiative for our middle schools, and—despite Tweed’s glowing talk about increased graduation rates—a $4.2 million dollar cut to the dropout prevention initiative.

Four, the budget cuts will set back the system’s efforts to recruit and retain the best and brightest teachers by worsening working conditions. We cannot go back to a time when few qualified teachers wanted to work here and the school system had more than 10,000 uncertified teachers in the school. An increase in attrition now would be a huge loss, not only financially but educationally, when a system recruits, trains and hires a new teacher, only to see that teacher leave the system within three years, as one in every three new teachers do now.  (Just under half of new city public school teachers leave within their first seven years on the job, and more than 45 percent leave in their first five years.) 

Peer mentoring programs, such as the lead teacher program, can staunch that flow, and the elimination of funding for that program is one more example of misplaced priorities. Here is a successful program that is supported by parents and teachers, keeps the best teachers in the classroom and utilizes the skills of senior teachers to train other teachers in our most needy schools, and its funding is being shifted to schools. Coupled with all the other cuts, principals may well be forced to end this excellent program.

And that's a fundamental problem with this proposed budget.  It shifts the accountability for the cuts away from Tweed, away from those who should be held responsible, while putting the responsibility onto individual schools. Sadly, many now believe, it’s as if Tweed wanted these schools to fail. It forces principals, as one courageous administrator said, "to cut our own throats." Yet, Tweed has decided that those programs, personnel and priorities that are important to them—hiring a "got-cha" squad of attorneys, fully funding its data, ARIS and PR operations; won’t be touched.

In probably the most Dickensian of cuts, schools will have to pay for the cost of meals consumed by students who have not been approved for free or reduced lunch.

So what does my union propose?  

Put every dime back into the schools budget. Keep the promises.

Require the chancellor to open the books now for independent public review.

Demand the chancellor be a genuinely aggressive advocate for the public schools. 

Institute real oversight of DOE policies.

Yes, the economy presents us with tough choices. But we have an historic opportunity to erase the inequities of the past, to really bring down class size in the city's schools, to channel our funds to instruction, not testing, to work together so that we can weather this difficult time and move forward.

Thank you.