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Klein’s cuts ‘unconscionable’

by Michael Hirsch

Jun 5, 2008 3:06 PM

While UFT President Randi Weingarten tells the City Council what's wrong with the Department of Education funding cuts, members cheer from the Council balcony.

The battle lines were drawn starkly on May 27 as Chancellor Joel Klein defended the city’s cut of $450 million for school funding while claiming that state restrictions would force him to chop 3 percent from the budgets of more than 400 schools and as much as 6 percent from 74 high-performing schools. Without those restrictions, he said, he could impose a uniform 1.4 percent cut on each school.

UFT President Randi Weingarten, speaking after Klein at the budget hearing, excoriated the chancellor and Mayor Bloomberg for blaming the state — which fully funded the schools, just as the Keep the Promises Coalition demanded — for forcing cutbacks.

“This is a false choice!” she said. “Indeed, one could argue — given the city’s promises and current surplus — that this is an unconscionable choice.”

In what The New York Times described as “a nearly four-hour hearing filled with skepticism that bordered on hostility from council members,” Klein defended his plan to “equitably” cut school funding by 1.4 percent per school.

The plan was denounced by many committee members as a naked effort to turn parents with children in higher-performing, largely middle class schools against those whose kids attend lower-income, lower-performing schools that were the target of state Contract for Excellence funds.

The UFT and its partners in the Keep the Promises Coalition have insisted that no cuts, equitable or inequitable, are needed.

“If the city had not reduced the funds and reallocated them, we wouldn’t be talking about who gets more and who gets less,” said Weingarten. “All our schools are underfunded. All our children deserve the quality education the court [in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit] ordered. The state required this in good times and bad; unlike the state, there is a record surplus.”

Klein defended the Department of Education budget as an increase in real dollars — though the dollars barely keep up with inflation — and he praised the Bloomberg administration for a history of education funding increases that outstripped increases in state and federal school aid.
Council critics reminded him that the bulk of this and the coming year’s school funding increases came from state funds, and that the city’s past largesse was actually an effort to make up for years of underfunding schools by previous mayoral administrations.

When asked why the mayor did not simply restore the full $450 million promised, Klein replied that the mayor had a “fiduciary responsibility” as the “fiscal steward” given projections of falling city revenues. The mayor predicts multi-billion-dollar shortfalls down the road, though his office has routinely underestimated city revenues and now has a more than $5 billion budget surplus.

“There is no doubt and no way around the fact that this city, state and country are in difficult economic times, but even with that reality those levels of cuts are not ones that I can, in good faith, support,” said Speaker Christine Quinn.

Education Committee Chairman Robert Jackson blamed Klein for “a prevailing perception that you are playing off rich against poor and black against white. It’s the low-performing schools that need more, not less.”

Echoing a common complaint that Klein — unlike former chancellors — is not an advocate for the schools, Brooklyn Councilman Lew Fidler reminded Klein, “You are not a commissioner; you are a chancellor. And I don’t understand why you can’t join with this council in taking on the mayor.”

The gallery was packed with UFTers and other members of the Keep the Promises Coalition, who festooned the Council gallery with signs reading “Keep the Promises.” Led by Ernesto Maldonado of the Coalition for Educational Justice, some opponents of the cuts chanted “Chancellor Klein, don’t cut a dime!” until Council security removed them.

In her budget testimony, Weingarten blasted the chancellor for trying to foment division in the name of equity.
“He is using city funds to pit school against school, community against community, hoping to stir enough outrage so the state will relent and he can escape accountability,” Weingarten said.

“The Department of Education claims it wants the flexibility to spend state education funds as it sees fit, but what it really wants is the flexibility to mask the extent of the cuts,” she said.

Weingarten noted the effect of the $100 million in midyear cuts in canceled after-school and weekend tutorial classes; in reduced or eliminated art, music, physical education and other special programs; in combined classes where many principals no longer can pay for substitutes; and in fewer resources and basic school supplies for students.

“The anticipated cuts for next year would be much deeper,” Weingarten said.

She reminded the Council that the UFT was one of 40 member organizations in the Keep the Promises Coalition that had united to ensure that the schools are fully funded.

“Rather than playing the blame game, the mayor and the chancellor should do right by our kids by providing the resources necessary to help schools most in need and immunizing schools that are doing well against budget cuts,” she said.

Weingarten asked that the Council to:

• Fulfill the city’s CFE commitment by putting every dime of the $450 million the mayor wants cut back into the budget;
• Ensure that the extra funding for English language learners, special education students and low-income students continues;
• Require the chancellor to open the books now — and keep them open — for independent public review;
• Demand that the chancellor be a genuinely aggressive advocate for the public schools;
• Help the coalition lobby the state to impose class-size caps, instead of merely targeted averages, in future years of the Contract for Excellence; and
• Restore the $36 million the City Council added last year for Teacher’s Choice, teacher work stations and computers, Provider’s Choice, Dial-A-Teacher and other Council initiatives.

Following Weingarten, a number of UFT members, includ

ing Alfred Gonzalez, a dance teacher at PS 116 in Manhattan, testified in the public comment period. Gonzalez said that his high-performing school would likely lose per-diem substitutes who conduct classes while classroom teachers are involved in professional development

“A high-performing school requires that teachers have the latest information; how much longer can we be high-performing if these cuts go through?” he asked.

UFT: Build schools where they’re needed Weingarten speaks to the press while UFT Vice President Michael Mulgrew leads the chanting outside City Hall on May 21. Unlike the Department of Education operating expense budget, where the mayor cut some $450 million in promised funding, the School Construction Authority’s five-year capital spending plans were untouched. That doesn’t mean the capital budget is perfect, Vice President of Career and Technical Education Michael Mulgrew told a joint hearing of the City Council’s Finance and Education Committees in written testimony for May 21. “The big questions are: How is it being spent? And how well is the city planning to spend it? The answer: Not that well, we believe.” The key problem with the capital budget, in Mulgrew’s view — and something both Comptroller William Thompson and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer have also asserted — is that new schools are not being built in neighborhoods where the crowding is worst and the need is greatest. While new schools are going up in affected school districts, they are not necessarily going up in newly growing areas within those districts, he said. “What we have is a disparity between a building boom and a school construction bust,” Mulgrew said.