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State budget agreement keeps ed funding promises
Apr 10, 2008 1:19 PM
Despite facing one of the largest budget deficits in recent memory, the state Legislature and Gov. David Paterson kept their promises to New York City schoolchildren by fully restoring all promised state education aid to city schools.
The state budget agreement reached on April 8 provided a $622 million increase in city schools foundation aid, including more than $275 million in Contract for Excellence funds earmarked for class-size reduction and other proven reforms, including for the first time model programs for English Language Learners.
State lawmakers and the governor also pledged to contribute the state’s full share this year of the historic five-year, $13.1 billion capital plan that the city and the state announced last spring. In his preliminary budget in January, then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer had proposed capping state building aid this year.
Notwithstanding a nearly $5 billion budget deficit and declining revenue, the state budget agreement increases spending 4.5 percent and includes a record $1.8 billion increase in school aid — to a total of about $20 billion.
“By restoring Contract for Excellence funds as well as school building aid, they are allowing educators to continue helping more and more students succeed by spending on reforms such as class-size reduction that we know have a track record of helping kids,” said UFT President Randi Weingarten.
The state budget, which was due on April 1, was held up by the battle over congestion pricing and the full-court press by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein to gain the right to use student scores on high-stakes tests as the basis for making tenure decisions.
“The chancellor has been relentless in his advocacy against us on tenure, while he has been totally missing in action in the fight to restore state funding for New York City kids,” said Weingarten.
Ultimately, state lawmakers decided to clarify last year’s budget language by making the bar on using student test scores as a teacher tenure criterion explicit, rather than implicit [see story above].
The union and its community partners in the Keep the Promises Coalition made their presence felt in Albany in the busy weeks leading up to the agreement.
Daily bus rides to Albany, organized by the Alliance for Quality Education, took parents and children to the state capital to lobby legislators in the countdown to the new state budget. Billy Easton, director of AQE, said the numbers of parents showing up daily for the long upstate trek proved how much support the coalition had and how deep the understanding was that city schools were at risk if full state funding were not restored.
With state operational and capital aid for city schools achieved, the budget fight now shifts to the city, where Mayor Bloomberg is holding fast to his plan that all city agencies — including the Department of Education — share the pain of lower tax revenues caused by the lending and housing crises.
With city schools facing some $500 million in city budget education cuts — the outcome of the mayor’s 2.5 percent across-the-board reduction for schools this January, as well as a 5 percent cut that will hit in September — the Keep the Promises Coalition isn’t letting up. Full education funding to make up for decades of city and state neglect of schools is a priority that the coalition says must be maintained.
