Testimony of Randi Weingarten before City Council Education and Budget Committees

Jun 8, 2006 5:10 PM

Good morning Chairmen Jackson and Weprin, and members of the Council’s Education and Finance committees. Thank you for inviting me to testify today and offer the United Federation of Teachers’ views on budget priorities for the coming fiscal year.

The Council doesn’t need me to draw you the big education picture. You know your constituents’ needs and hopes, and we’ve backed each other in a hundred different education fights. Chairman Jackson has been on the same page of the same playbook with the UFT going back at least as long as the filing of the CFE suit in 1993. Speaker Quinn’s proposal to expand pre-K so that early childhood education is available to every four year-old is a bold and long-needed proposal. Right now, just half of all city four-year-olds receive any public-school pre-K services at all. So the Quinn plan to appropriate $45 million this year, and a total of $135 million over three years so that all half-day prekindergarten programs become full day programs is sound. 

Sound, but with two caveats.

First, the state is made to understand that—just as with capital funding—the city is making an upfront investment and showing the state its good faith.

Second, particularly given Comptroller Hevesi’s audit on the failure to spend the K-3 class size reduction where it was meant to be spent, beefing up pre-K schooling cannot come at the expense of K-5 programs. If we can build up the pre-K program  without creating bigger classes and overcrowding for the rest of the elementary school population, it will be money well spent.

So let me focus  on what I think educators need in the new budget.

With the city and state fiscs awash in dollars, and the Fiscal Year ‘07 surplus looking to be another record-breaker, you know we can finally do what needs to be done  to make our schools a success. The Albany budget’s appropriation of billions in school construction aide means we can start laying the groundwork for new, commodious schools with small classes. That’s an environment where teachers can teach and children can learn.

Sure, the big fights aren’t over.

Still to be won: Albany’s following the Campaign for Fiscal Equity decision to massively increase operating aid to schools. Once the governor drops his challenges to the 13-year-old Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit, the city can target a major portion of that funding toward smaller classes. New Yorkers for Smaller Classes and the UFT advocate 25 percent of all CFE dollars go  toward small class sizes. That’s a policy that can only be mandated through revising the City Charter, and the smaller class coalition is in court trying to force the city to put the question before the voters in November. 

For what purpose? With the exception of $7 million to jumpstart the long-needed Lead Teacher program, the mayor is not initiating or funding many new, worthy projects.  Instead, the part of the $450 to $600 million in operating dollars that is not going to fixed costs is going to charter schools and contracting out for special-education services. It’s not going to meet public school parents’ wishes or school teachers needs. The chancellor told your two committees yesterday that funding for individual schools in Fiscal ’07 remains at the same level as it did this year,

Another fight: Being vigilant in seeing that dollars are spent where they are meant to be spent. The city tries—and rightly so—to secure aid, whether it be federal or state aid or even Homeland security dollars, but it sometimes uses it in place of city funds. So instead of increases in services, the aid is channeled in other directions. One thing the Council can do is earmark more monies for specific projects. Persuade the administration to fund the projects you know schools need.

So what is it teachers need to do their jobs? In a nutshell, they need to see improvements in  the quality of their professional lives in the schools. That’s not a perk for teachers, but a way of giving those professionals who spend nearly seven hours a day with the city’s children the support to do their jobs.  

It means providing them with the most basic tools to make classroom materials available, handle paperwork, communicate with parents, and the other things classroom teachers do daily. Helping them is something that can be done inexpensively and expeditiously.

Teachers want to see a doubling in the number of copy machines/work stations in the schools. Currently just one in every four schools has a copier available for staff use. That’s an astoundingly depressing  statistic. It also means targeting funds to ensure vendors provide maintenance agreements for these irreplaceable but often overused machines.

Teachers on average spend what approaches $500 out-of-pocket on supplies. No other professionals do what teachers do in having to pay out of their own pockets for children’s classroom needs. We need to boost  the current Teachers Choice allocation to at least try to keep up with inflation. Currently teachers get $200 and special education teachers get even less. If adjusted for inflation, which increased by more than 80 percent in the program’s 20-year-life, that $200 should have risen to some $360. We ask instead that you increase the allocation to $250 per general ed teacher and $200 for special ed teachers.

The Teachers Choice program was established by this Council, and thanks for making it happening. But a boost in its allocation is needed.

One things teachers feel viscerally comes from the sorry state of most teachers lounges. Ensuring a professional environment means setting aside monies earmarked for furniture and a teachers lounge in every school. Nothing new has been earmarked in 20 years. It means having a professional area where staff can share ideas, discuss students and school issues and share a cup of coffee. We do need to see some progress made and some consideration in establishing functional lounges.

Ensuring that professional environment also means increasing funding for the Peer Intervention Program. This dynamic project helps those few teachers who are struggling in the classroom. Contrary to what the editorial scribblers say in some of the city tabloids, the UFT has never tried to retain “incompetent” teachers in the school system, and it never will. What PIP does is enroll struggling educators in a program that can help them improve their classroom capabilities. And for those who can’t, it helps them find a profession for which they are better suited. In its 18 years, PIP has serviced some 1,100 teachers — most of whom have returned successfully to the classroom.

There are other programs you’ve backed in the past. We need the Council to step in again, today. These include continued Council backing for Dial-a-Teacher. One of the most useful and educational programs for both kids and their parents , Dial-a-Teacher helps students figure out how to do homework assignments. It teaches parents how to help their kids. It conducts workshops for parents throughout the school year, and sponsors a well-attended citywide parents conference. With the new standards greatly expanding our students’ workload, they and their parents can use the help. Dial-a-Teacher offers that help.

We need the council’s help in restoring the cuts to evening education and
GED programs. The city has an obligation to help young adults graduate from high school by beefing up evening high school and GED programs for those who didn’t make it the usual way. We know that people without such a degree are not going to get very far in society today — and we all may suffer the consequences when they have to be supported, one way or another if they don’t make it. Yet, ironically, these valuable programs are in decline. The DOE’s adult ed programs provide half of all the tuition-free literacy, GED prep, ESL and vocational ed classes available to New Yorkers over 21, but they suffered $6 million to $8 million in cuts in the last two years Where one in seven New Yorkers is functionally illiterate, these programs should be expanded, not cut.

We also need Council backing to see that the DOE increases the number of attendance teachers and guidance counselors.

Unfortunately, our schools all too often have kids who need help. And without it they become disruptive forces or, at worst, headlines in the tabloids. Yet attendance teachers and guidance counselors, who offer such help — who are often the last line of defense for these kids — are few and far between and therefore have unbelievably heavy caseloads. We must start hiring adequate numbers of attendance teachers to safeguard children by investigating why they may not be attending school and guidance counselors to offer counseling to troubled youngsters as well as to provide guidance to all the students when it’s time for them to plan on college or job prospects. Just as the Administration for Children’s Services saw its staff and budget expanded, the schools need those faculty who serve as an early warning signal of child abuse expanded, too.

We know the money is there to do these things. What is lacking is the sense of urgency on the part of the administration, which regularly underestimates revenues even as it manufactures scare stories about deficits in the out years. The Independent Budget Office’s recent analysis of the mayor’s budget shows how the OMB routinely low balls out-year property tax revenue estimates as well as personal and business income tax receipt projections while exaggerating  Medicaid spending costs. Had the city not taken most of the surplus off the table, the city would have shown some $6 billion in revenues over expenses. I don’t fault the administration for keeping an eye on upwardly spiraling debt-service expenses, but what about a solid investment in what children, parents and teachers need. Everyone knows that CFE was about the underfunding of our schools. Correcting that will require city as well as state dollars. Our kids need it now.

Thank you.