Testimony of Randi Weingarten before the Senate Finance and Assembly Ways and Means Committees On Executive Budget FY 2009: February 4, 2008
Feb 4, 2008 5:12 PM
I think you’ll all remember just last April. We were celebrating an agreement in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. I, for one, was celebrating not just because it was over – the 13 years of litigation had taken up my entire tenure as UFT president and even before, when I was Sandy Feldman’s counsel — I was celebrating because, at the end, we had all worked together so productively because we understood that resources well deployed would help kids succeed – particularly kids who had been historically underserved. The Legislature, the governor, the CFE and even the mayor had agreed on a four-year plan to give NYC students the so-called “platforms for learning” that schools elsewhere had long been able to give their students. And, to be sure kids benefited. Money and accountability were structured to go hand in hand. Of course, it took months after that to get the city to submit a Contract For Excellence that really held them accountable for giving our students the class sizes they needed. But still it was a transformative moment – full of promise.
Today, however, just a year later, those promises may fray, those commitments might be coming undone.
That’s not to say that we, too, are not concerned about the economy. But did you ever try to tell a kid that you really will get him or her that pony you promised; he’ll just have to wait a year or two when times are better? Well, waiting a year or two for a pony is hard. Waiting a year or two for a decent education is impossible. To adapt a legal truism, when it comes to education, a promise delayed is a promise denied. Our kids can’t afford to lose another year or two.
Education is usually funded with property taxes because education funding needs to be stable. Children’s need for schooling doesn’t rise and fall with the Dow-Jones.
And now, last month kids in New York City got a one-two punch – first, a reduction from the expected CFE increase and now an additional cut in city funds. So today I’m in Albany to say we’re the grown-ups here and we have to keep our promises. Promises are really made for times like these – not for times when it’s easy to keep them, but for times when it’s hard. And we have to keep our promise now, even though it’s hard.
Just to let you know, this is a message that I am delivering here and back home in City Hall and at Tweed. In the past when school budgets were slashed, the Schools Chancellor, supported by the UFT, often led the outcry – sometimes at a dear cost to his career. Still, knowing what the effects on kids would be, most felt duty-bound to speak up on their behalf. And the central Board members themselves stood up for their communities and schools. Today we don’t have those independent voices to champion the kids. It creates great responsibility for our state legislature, City Council, PTAs, this union, and other advocacy and community groups across the city. Sadly, like in any other economic downturn, our parents and teachers, once again, who must fill the breach.
In fact, right now our message to the city has even greater immediate urgency because it is not only planning to take more than $300 million out of next year’s budget, the city has also siphoned $180 million from the department of education’s budget for the remainder of this school year. In fact, despite Tweed’s vows to empower principals, a day after the spring semester began, the chancellor summarily removed $100 million or 1.75% from schools’ online budgets for this year – averaging $70,000 per school, but ranging up to almost a half million dollars for large high schools that are already under considerable stress. Perhaps most revealing of who’s in charge of schools, principals were not even consulted before the funds disappeared from their budgets – let alone staff, parents and School Leadership Teams. This is already causing major mid-year disruptions in some schools.
We will fight this city cut, but one wonders if belt-tightening was required, why were core services to kids, and not the whole new “support infrastructure” or burgeoning testing, touched? Ironically, what will be cut is all the extra help our students get next year to help with the tests or to round out their education.
How can we require schools to reduce class size even further next year and give them less money to work with? How can we demand accountability of principals and teachers when those who provide the resources are not accountable? At the very least, if cuts have to be made, they should be taken from central and administrative budget codes, not from the schools. We have plenty of ideas about how that can be done.
Now, getting back to the state’s responsibility, according to the promises made last year, NYC should be receiving an additional $530 million in foundation aid next year year, from which to fund the next steps in the Contracts For Excellence. However, the governor’s budget schedules only $334 million, almost $200 million less. The problem is once you deduct from that foundation aid inflationary increases and continuation costs for existing programs and the reimbursements to charter schools, barely $79 million in new funding is available for the Contracts, far short of what was promised.
What that means is there will be no discernible progress this year in reducing class size or on the other goals of the Contracts for Excellence, including expanding full-day pre-K, middle and high school restructuring and services for English language learners. At best it will be a stand-still year, and given the city cuts, we may even lose ground.
I have often said that, with the Contracts for Excellence, the question of reducing class sizes is no longer ‘whether’ but ‘how,’ Now, with so little money, we may be going back to will it ever happen?’ As it is, progress has been painfully slow. The reductions in class sizes in this school year were only a fraction of a student, and in many parts of the city have been indiscernible.
One problem has been that the law sets only citywide averages as targets for class size reductions. Given the size and diversity of the city school system, citywide averages are almost meaningless because they allow huge disparities between schools that diverge from the average.
Let me give you a couple of examples. The current citywide average for K-3 is 21, only one student above the target of 20. That doesn’t look too bad. But it masks the fact that nearly 170,000 children in grades K-3, 63% of them, are in classes with 21 or more. And it masks the fact that the first grade classes in PS 105 in District 27, Queens, for example, average 30. And at PS 215 in District 21, Brooklyn, and PS 36 in District 8, the Bronx, they average 28.
Or let’s look at high school science classes. The target is 23. The current citywide average for Regents classes in Earth Science is 27.6, four and a half students above the target. That’s bad enough. But at Maxwell Career and Tech, those classes actually average 35.5 students, 12 larger than the target and eight over the city average.
This is true in crowded districts in every borough, but it is hidden from view and protected from accountability by the way the targets are defined in law.
This continuation of large numbers of terribly oversized classes even when the citywide averages appear much lower will continue unless the law is changed to specify targets, not in terms of citywide averages, but in terms of caps or school and grade averages. The fact that the citywide average is OK doesn’t help the kid stuck in a class of 35. Discrepancies like those I just cited can’t be tolerated any longer. It’s just too unfair.
Why should some children, often the neediest ones, be able to get the teacher’s undivided attention for only two minutes a day, while others get much more? Why should some children rarely get a chance to be called on, or to be at the computer, while others in smaller classes never have to wait? Smaller classes experience fewer disruptions and less loss of instructional time, so kids learn more. That’s the bottom line that CFE was supposed to address, and we have to make sure it does.
Aside from the inequities, accountability is nearly impossible with citywide averages because it is impossible to monitor independently. Parents can see the class sizes in their own child’s grade or school, but not beyond that very easily. In order to have fairness and accountability, the law must specify limits by school and grade.
Some question whether the DOE has the political will to reduce class sizes – after all, they did resist making it a priority until the governor, the Regents and YOU insisted on it. Still we can’t deny the reality the DOE is up against, and that is the space crunch in many parts of the city. That is why state building aid is so crucial to the success of the class size reduction effort, and it is why the differences between the governor and mayor over building aid are also so distressing. I am sure that neither of them means to deny children needed services or to stymie speedy construction of new school buildings. Yet that is the effect of the governor’s proposal to force the city to fund unanticipated construction costs out of Student Achievement grants. This is something that can be negotiated between reasonable adults for a more kid-friendly resolution. Again, we made a promise to kids when we agreed to a $13 billion-dollar school construction program, and we have to keep it.
Other priorities need attention too. Ask any parent, and their first concern is safety. Talk about keeping promises, that is the vow that every parent and every teacher makes to every child: “I will protect you, I will keep you safe.”
I’m not talking here about weapons and intruders, though that’s what makes the occasional headline. I’m talking about the everyday fears that kids cope with in school. Will some kids push me around in the hallway? Will they shake me down for my bus pass? What happens if I don’t just “go along?”
Bullying and worse are facts of life in our city, and once again, kids look to the adults to help them keep their promises this time to keep them safe.
For the kids who frighten others and disrupt class, SAVE rooms and the support services they are supposed to provide are the best way to prevent small problems from becoming bigger ones and to permit learning to go on. Of the $140 million it would cost for every school to provide and appropriately staff – that means a teacher or guidance counselor -- a SAVE room, only about $20 million is actually spent. The mandate is obviously being honored more in the breach than in the reality. If the Legislature really wants to keep its promise to protect students and staff while ensuring that both behaving and misbehaving children have the opportunity to learn, you must provide the funding for this mandate.
Promises, promises. We promise our kids we’ll keep them safe, we’ll give them a fair shot at a good education. We promise them by implication that if they go to school and pay attention and work hard, they will have good teachers who will help them learn. To keep that promise, we need to fund the finest professional development, like that our Teacher Centers provide through 300 sites in NYC. More schools should have these valuable resources.
And the promise of good teachers also means we have to give intensive help to those who are floundering and then, if they still can’t succeed, we need to counsel them out of the system, as our nationally recognized Peer Intervention Program does. But the existing staff simply cannot meet the demand for their intervention. More funding is needed.
Finally, to our neediest children we must make the biggest promises. Poor kids need a chance to learn like more affluent children get from private nursery schools and enrichment programs. Ironically, however, their families are the very families who cannot take advantage of existing public pre-k programs because they are only half-day, and working parents need full-time child care. If we are going to keep democracy’s promise, we must help children get a solid start.
I do want to thank the governor (and the mayor) for remembering the importance of career and technical programs in engaging students, preventing drop-outs, boosting the graduation rate, and preparing young people for college or immediate employment. As part of our legislative program this year we will be urging other actions to improve C-T education, like better coordination with colleges and employers to ensure that our programs are linked to real jobs, and that college programs articulate with our high schools to provide the best continuum of services. These requirements should be built into industry subsidies and public funding for colleges and universities.
And while thanks are being given out for promises kept, I am going to be presumptuous and thank you in advance for helping to make 55/25 a reality. Let’s remember, since these are tight times, that teachers will buy into this benefit, so the cost to the taxpayers is negligible, but the payoff in terms of retaining quality teachers and enabling them to see a real career is tremendous.
You have some big challenges ahead of you. That is when commitments are tested. But we know too much about how kids succeed and we worked too hard to get here to not keep our promises. I look forward to doing whatever we can to help. Thank you.
