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UFT President Randi Weingarten at today's rally

“We must even in tough times invest in our city, invest in our most vulnerable, invest in our children,” UFT President Randi Weingarten said at the inaugural press conference held today on the steps of City Hall by a coalition formed this week to advocate for the “neediest New Yorkers” during the economic downturn.

Weingarten described the devastating effects of the 1970s budget crisis on the city’s schools, when teachers were laid off and class sizes swelled. “It took decades to turn [the schools] around, a turnaround we’re only starting to make” now, she said. “If I sound passionate it’s because those of us who are history teachers know what the history was.”

Other members of the “One New York: Fighting For Fairness” coalition today described the mid-1970s as a time when the city forced its poor to shoulder the burden of financial crisis, a situation the coalition is trying to guard against as the city enters another era of economic austerity. Billy Easton, who heads the Alliance for Quality Education, told me the coalition originated at an emergency meeting held on Monday in response to the mayor’s instruction that city agencies make across-the-board budget cuts of 2.5 percent. The coalition — which includes more than 80 community organizations, unions, and policy groups — is growing “almost hourly,” he said.

Posts about The Equity Project (TEP) Charter School — that’s the one where teachers will make $125,000 — brought out strong feelings from educators and advocates both at the New York Times Lesson Plans blog and here at GothamSchools.

In our comments, Leonie Haimson, a leading advocate for smaller classes in the city’s public schools, points out that TEP will save money partly by putting 30 students in a class (the TEP website does say this, although not in the section aimed at educators). She points to comments at the Times where teachers question the priorities of the TEP model. Alex, for example, suggests cutting the salary to $75,000 and drastically reducing class size with the extra funds.

GothamSchools commenter Maria Escalan worries that dividing up administrative responsibilities among teachers will end up overburdening them:

Our principal who kept experimenting with different reforms on our already successful school had the brillant idea of letting teachers assume lots more responsibility outside of the normal teaching activities. The consequence was that a lot of my colleagues expended a lot of time and energy on activities that were not instructional and the quality of their teaching suffered.

I think it’s worth noting that the TEP plan is to give each teacher a single clearly-defined “whole school service” role, ranging from dean of discipline to events coordinator to parent and community involvement coordinator. It’s not just asking people to step up as needed, which, in my experience, usually results in a few teachers taking on way too much. And, contrary to the belief of at least one Times commenter, custodial duties are not among the listed whole school service jobs.

In exchange for the higher salaries, TEP expects teachers to work a longer day, (more…)

On “Sex and the City,” they were BFFs, but when it comes to public school funding, Carrie Bradshaw and her red-headed, Brooklyn-bound buddy Miranda are more like frenemies.

Sarah Jessica Parker, who played Carrie, last week helped kick off Shop for Public Schools, an annual event thrown by the city’s star-powered Fund for Public Schools, which focuses on “attracting private investment in school reform.”

Chances are relying on shoppers to maintain school libraries might not sit too well with Cynthia Nixon, who played Miranda — she’s the face of the Alliance for Quality Education, which since 2000 has fought for improved and equitable public funding for schools across the state. Last spring, Nixon took to the streets to protest the mayor’s proposed school budget cuts.

Just three months after the city’s schools managed to escape deep budget cuts, Mayor Bloomberg is asking the DOE, along with all other city agencies, to cut this year’s budget by 2.5 percent — or $185 million — by Oct. 8.

Citing the slowing economy and likely layoffs in the financial sector, which employs many of the city’s residents who pay the most taxes, the mayor yesterday asked agencies to cut 2.5 percent from their already thin budgets for this year and 5 percent from their projected budgets for the fiscal year that begins next July. For the DOE, this means finding $185 million in its $7.5 billion city budget to cut this year and nearly $400 million to excise from next year’s projected budget.

UFT President Randi Weingarten issued a statement calling on the DOE to “immunize kids through these tough times and keep cuts away from the classroom,” as they were, for the most part, this spring, when massive rallies and sustained protest organized by the hastily formed and broad-based Keep the Promises Coalition insulated individual schools from the bulk of the cuts inflicted to the DOE and other city agencies, especially after the City Council took approval of the city’s budget to the wire over the schools cuts. But at the time, the city was sitting on a surplus and had just received a massive infusion of new state funds for education as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement. The financial picture is very different now.

Teacher and blogger Doug Noon imagines what would happen if the government’s attitudes towards schools and investment banks were switched:

If education reform worked anything like the $700 billion Wall Street bailout plan now on the table, we’d have seen government officials immediately call for implementing a plan that, as George Bush would argue, “matches the scope of the problem.” We’d see the debt ceiling raised, with hundreds of billions of dollars committed to resolving the crisis, and no demand for accountability. …

On the other hand, if a Wall Street bailout worked like education reform, we’d have a long drawn-out debate about the financial sector, accountability, and what we’ll count as real indicators of economic well-being.

Noon’s heard more than enough from the business world about school reform, he concludes. Many educators will sympathize; initiatives like the city’s Leadership Academy for principals have turned to business for leadership models, and books like the management bible Good to Great have been promoted as guides for creating better schools (every teacher at the school where I taught was assigned Good To Great a few years ago).

Graphic courtesy of the NY Times.

In July, Freakonomics looked at the eleven Good To Great companies touted as consistently outperforming the market (more…)

Don’t want to wait until November to take a political stand? Besides voting in your local primary tomorrow, consider calling your Member of Congress. The National School Boards Association is welcoming back legislators with a “Back to School Call-in Day” this Wednesday.

One issue before the legislature is the future of E-Rate, a program that provides funding for internet connectivity for libraries and public schools in rural and low-income school districts, helping to close the “digital divide.” New York State’s schools and libraries received more than $300 million through E-Rate in 2007, using it to get connected and for email and web hosting services, among other things.

Just for fun, a conversation about tech integration in this century and the last:

New York State has the highest local taxes in the nation, prompting Governor Paterson to propose a cap on how much property taxes can be increased for education funding. But how would a tax cap affect public education?

Studies show that tax limitations decrease revenue for public services and are associated with lower student achievement and higher class sizes, according to a briefing paper by the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Research and Information Services.

The briefing paper reviews more than a dozen studies and concludes that state funding does not replace local funding limited by tax caps; in fact, local funding is often used to make up for state funding cuts during economic downturns. Furthermore, tax caps affect poor families and their communities the most, widening inequality. Studies linked tax limitations with lower student achievement, both when comparing districts affected by tax caps to similar districts not affected and when looking at achievement before and after a tax limitation took effect.

Also, according to a report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP), Massachusetts’ Proposition 2 1/2 made local budgets more dependent on state aid, which fluctuates along with the health of the economy. Prop. 2 1/2 took effect during the “Massachusetts Miracle,” a period of rising state revenues due to economic growth; CBPP warns against enacting a similar law during a slow economy, when state funding is unlikely to make up for local shortfalls. (more…)

Mayor David Cohen of Newton, Mass. The town faces school budget cuts after failing to override a tax cap. Boston Herald

Last Friday, the New York State Senate approved a 4% annual cap on school property tax increases for local school districts, excluding the state’s largest cities. To override the cap would require the vote of 55 percent of voters in a district. The New York Times reports that the bill is unlikely to pass in the State Assembly, where it is opposed by Speaker Sheldon Silver. The tax cap, proposed by the governor, is intended to provide relief to homeowners.

I grew up in Massachusetts under Proposition 2 1/2, a tax cap similar to that proposed for New York. In Lenox, MA, my hometown, when a tax override was considered to build a new school for our town’s increasing enrollment, voter turnout to town meetings swelled, Planning Board, School Committee, and Board of Selectmen positions were fiercely contested, and rhetoric in the papers and at meetings often turned nasty. Dollars for schools were painted as dollars taken away from the elderly. Our neighbors across the street even constructed a sculpture in their front yard depicting the schools going into the garbage! In the end, we got the new school, but the time and energy lost to fighting can never be recovered.

But don’t just take my word for it. Directors of school board associations in Massachusetts and California penned warnings to the New York State Legislature. Glen Koocher of the Massachusetts Association of School Committees, listed five ways the tax cap hurt schools, then concluded,

A bad public policy, once implemented, becomes entrenched and is difficult to rescind. If saving taxpayers money now is your priority, tax caps may be for you. But if maintaining a socially responsible, sound public education policy is important, New York policy makers would be well-advised to be extremely cautious as they consider a tax cap. A poorly crafted proposal will sacrifice the future for many in exchange for short-term benefits for some.

To see an example of Prop. 2 1/2 in action today, read about a proposed override in Newton, MA – and the costs to the schools when the override failed: in May, the town eliminated 79 positions, including all elementary school social workers.

New classroom by EditorB.

It’s unfortunate that in a year when many people are feeling the economic crunch, teachers in the city will likely have to spend more out-of-pocket on classroom expenses, thanks to cuts to Teachers’ Choice funding. The Teachers’ Choice program reimburses teachers for the purchase of supplies ranging from art, science, and physical education equipment to basic office supplies, classroom libraries, and computer software.

Teachers’ Choice was eliminated altogether in this year’s first budget proposal, but thanks to City Council discretionary funds, 60 percent of Teachers’ Choice funding was restored in the final budget. This year, JD2718 writes, teachers will receive $150 (down from $220 last year), social workers, school psychologists, and guidance counselors will get $100, school secretaries $50, and lab specialists $75.

It’s absolutely better than nothing, and I understand that hard choices must be made during economic downturns, but New York’s teachers will certainly feel the pinch. When I was teaching, I could spend my allocation in a single trip to Staples, stocking up on basic supplies that my students would use all year: enough markers, scissors, and bottles of glue that each lab group could have their own, class sets of rulers marked with both metric and standard units, meter sticks, and much more. My school provided basic supplies, but Teachers’ Choice money gave me the flexibility to buy exactly what I needed and keep it in my own classroom where I could make sure it was kept in good condition (not a guarantee when supplies are shared among a whole school, unfortunately). Other schools are much worse about providing supplies; over the years I’ve met a number of teachers who bought small photocopiers because they were paying to have hundreds of copies made when their schools ran out of paper, severely limited photocopying, or failed to repair broken copiers.

The decrease in Teachers’ Choice funding will hurt the newest teachers the most, as a greater proportion of their salaries tends to go to supplies. New teachers are paid least and have not yet accumulated a store of materials for the classroom, as more experienced teachers have. Also, with more years in the classroom, many teachers learn tricks to minimize purchases and keep costs down.

Nationally, Scholastic Administrator reports, teachers spend an average of $475 on supplies, with elementary school teachers spending the most. Teachers can claim a $250 federal tax credit for purchasing materials for school, without needing to itemize their spending, yet for most that is barely half of what they spend on their classrooms.