General News
City Council slams Klein over school cuts
Apr 10, 2008 11:54 AM
Schools Chancellor Joel Klein (left) listens as City Council Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson (right) takes issue with the budget cuts and Klein’s Leadership.
On the heels of the huge, rain-soaked Keep the Promises Coalition’s budget rally at City Hall, City Council members ripped into Schools Chancellor Joel Klein for failing to be an advocate of schools and for fronting for the mayor’s effort to cut key education programs.
At a March 20 City Council budget hearing at which UFT President Randi Weingarten also testified, Education Committee Chair Robert Jackson called the $800 million in cuts “totally unacceptable” and told Klein that “people want to see leadership as far as [it is] shown and communicated to them. The people of New York are looking for leadership, advocacy and results.”
An unrepentant Klein blamed a weak economy and a crash in city and state revenues for necessitating cuts, which he supported.
“I have no apology to make for my leadership,” Klein said. “This city has added $4 billion to school spending [since 2002]. I will look every citizen of this city in the eye and say that’s a product of the mayor’s leadership and my leadership.”
UFT President Randi Weingarten says the cuts “will affect every classroom and wipe out successful and necessary programs while maintaining the administration’s costly priorities.”
Klein insisted that “if education were excluded from this year’s reductions, agencies like police and child welfare would have to absorb a significantly larger cut, and obviously nobody wants that.”
The chancellor also denied there were savings to be gotten from cutting the Department of Education’s central office. “We’re probably as lean an operation as you could imagine,” Klein said. “We don’t have people just sitting around.”
While seemingly less critical of Klein than was Jackson, Council Speaker Christine Quinn suggested that savings could be found in cutting the DOE press office budget.
Klein did admit that the $10 million cut in lead teacher mentoring funding “was a mistake, and I apologize for that. It will be restored,” he said.
But he also defended continued spending on the $80 million ARIS computer program that is central to his efforts to judge educational effectiveness based on student grades on high-stakes exams. Both the Council and the UFT have argued that the program is wasteful, comes out of classroom dollars and is overprized by the city to the detriment of other methods of ensuring schoolchildren are educated.
And when Klein defended the mayor’s claim that “every commissioner thinks his department is important, but it’s the mayor who makes the final decision,” Brooklyn Councilman Bill de Blasio insisted that “we never made enough progress [in schools and school funding] to say that education can be treated like any other department.”
De Blasio is the sponsor of a bill that would restore all education cuts. Forty-four of the Council’s 51 members are co-sponsors.
Following Klein, Weingarten told the Council that, unless cuts are reversed by the Council, they “will affect every classroom and wipe out successful and necessary programs while maintaining the administration’s costly priorities.”
Instead of cuts, Weingarten suggested that members in the Absent Teacher Reserve (ATRs) be given the chance to have a full-time assignment, not just be relegated to sub status. She suggested this would save millions of dollars. She also urged the Council to back the Assembly bill that would place a 1 percent surcharge on all taxable incomes above $1 million and target the estimated $1 billion in added revenues to restoring school funding; and demanded that Tweed “open the books and provide the public transparency they famously claim exists in their budgets.”
The full text of Weingarten’s Council testimony is available at www.uft.org under News and Issues.
