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Jonathan is already skeptical of the Department of Education’s explanation for why average class sizes are going up across almost all grades, despite an infusion of $150 million over the past year in funds earmarked to class-size reduction. The DOE’s argument, embedded in a Power Point released today: It’s the economy, stupid.

The idea also bothers Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, who pointed out to me earlier today that the state actually increased funding to schools this year, while the city’s budget cuts came with a promise that classrooms would be insulated. “What they’re trying to do is confuse people about the current economic situation to somehow excuse the fact that class sizes went up in the past,” Haimson said.

The economy explanation first arose in a Power Point released today, and the DOE is sticking to it. On the telephone this afternoon, a spokesman, Will Havemann, said the rising class sizes can be traced back to a cut to schools of about $100 million in October, on top of another $100 million cut to schools in the middle of last year. The idea is that, with less money to spend, principals have decided not to hire additional staff when people retire. Not replacing retiring teachers means class sizes get bigger. Havemann said the city this school year had 440 fewer teachers working directly with students than it had the year before. (more…)

Testifying in front of the State Senate today, Chancellor Joel Klein mentioned that the Department of Education and the state had reached an agreement, finally, on how the city will spend $387.5 million in restricted funds.

The money is part of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement, which promised annual funding increases to needy school districts. To get the funds, districts must develop a plan, called a Contract for Excellence, that shows that they will spend the money on certain kinds of programs and to help the neediest students.

The state and the city have wrangled in the past over how much flexibility the city should have over allocating the funds. The agreement, quietly released yesterday, signals that the state has approved the city’s Contract for Excellence for this year and will disburse the funds.

The breakdown of spending in the DOE’s final plan (shown by program type above) is similar to what the department originally proposed back in July. (more…)

In the battle over whether to make class sizes smaller, the city appears to be scoring a win against the state. That’s the picture painted in a report school officials sent to the City Council Friday. The report shows that, two years after the state poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the city with the aim of lowering class sizes, public school classes are on average larger than the target values in most grades. (View all recent class size data reported by the city here.)

The figures are a relative win for the Department of Education, which has repeatedly dismissed the goal of reducing class sizes as a pipe dream that will not improve education. (more…)

New York State Education Building

New York City is one of just three cities that has not yet gotten approval for its plan for how to spend a special set of state funds, known as the Contracts for Excellence dollars.

The funds work like a contract: Districts with needy students and schools get extra money — but on the condition that they spend it only on the neediest schools and only through certain programs. Districts do not get their state allocation until the State Education Department approves the district’s proposal for how to spend the funds.

Last week, SED approved 10 more districts’ spending plans, bringing the total approved this year to 36. Only 39 districts are eligible to receive the special funds this year. (The other two districts still waiting for approval are Rochester and Amsterdam.)

A request from state officials to the city Department of Education could be what’s holding up New York City’s proposal: I reported early last month that SED asked the New York City alone to provide more detailed information about how it plans to use state funds to reduce class size.

“We are working with the remaining districts to finalize their contracts,” SED spokesman Jonathan Burman told me last month by e-mail. “There is no deadline” by which districts must have their contracts approved.

A similar standoff happened last year, in the first round of Contracts for Excellence money ever doled out. Insiders reported that bitter negotiations between the state and the city were behind a months-long delay in approving the city’s plan, but officials said the conversations were “cooperative.” Because of the delay, the state did not approve any district’s spending plan until the end of November.

New York State Education Building

The State Education Department today approved the spending plans for 26 of the 39 school districts required to show how they will use state funds to help the neediest students in the lowest-performing schools. Absent from the list: New York City, along with a dozen other districts that haven’t yet convinced SED that they will spend their money in allowable ways.

After completing oversight of the first year’s Contracts for Excellence spending, the state last month singled out New York City for its failure to reduce class sizes as planned and imposed special requirements for the DOE to meet before its 2008-2009 contract will be approved. In addition to requiring the DOE to submit class size data for all schools, SED also asked for a detailed accounting of how Contracts for Excellence money was spent at the 70 schools that received more than $100,000 for class size reduction last year but actually saw an increase in class size.

Last year, the first that the Contracts for Excellence were required, the state didn’t approve any district’s Contract for Excellence until the end of November in part because of shortcomings in New York City’s plan, which initially earmarked too little money for class size reduction and too much for high-performing schools and standardized testing.

I noted this in a June post, but since the revised Contracts for Excellence continue to peg the Leadership Academy as a “district-wide,” discretionary allocation, it’s worth repeating: Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein have long planned to use Campaign for Fiscal Equity money to pay for the controversial principal training program.

Back in 2005, the program was embattled and its three-year term of private funding was coming to an end. The Times reported then:

Mr. Bloomberg had originally planned on sustaining the Leadership Academy using money from a court order mandating billions of additional dollars in state education aid for the city schools. But the state has appealed the ruling. Absent that money, Mr. Klein said yesterday that he would most likely turn again to private donors but was intent on continuing the effort, suggesting that, if necessary, the city would pick up part of the tab.

Now that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money is finally beginning to roll into the city — 15 years after the lawsuit was filed — Klein appears to be making good on his word. But the state has complicated his plans by requiring the money to be spent on new initiatives that benefit low-performing students and high-need schools. Members of the public, along with elected officials, are right when they say this particular spending line violates the intent of the law, as PS 41 parent Irene Kaufman alleged at the Contracts for Excellence hearing in Manhattan on Wednesday night.

Not convinced? Take a more detailed look at the Leadership Academy and the DOE’s creative approaches to funding it.

Photo by p_a_h

Elected officials, teachers, and parents offered up a litany of concerns about the DOE’s proposed Contracts for Excellence — regarding both their content and the process by which they were developed — last night at the final public hearing in Manhattan.

The hearing, chaired by Terence Tolbert, executive director of the DOE’s Department of Intergovernmental Affairs (and soon to direct Obama’s Nevada campaign), was well-attended by representatives from numerous organizations, including ACORN, Class Size Matters, the Coalition for Educational Justice, the Alliance for Quality Education, the City Council, school level PTAs, the UFT, and others.

Legally, Contracts for Excellence funding must “supplement, not supplant” existing spending; several speakers expressed concerns that the money will be spent to close holes in the budget rather than create or expand programs. Others worried that the new funding would be used to make up losses due to budget cuts in low-performing schools, rather than expanding services for high-needs children in those schools. Complicating these issues, several speakers noted, the plan includes little oversight of whether principals spend the Contracts for Excellence money as intended.

(more…)

Coming soon… notes from Wednesday’s public hearing in Manhattan.

New York City’s Proposed Citywide Contracts for Excellence plan provides:

• 63% or $242 million in discretionary allocations to schools, which may be used for new or expanded programs in any of six areas: class size reduction, time on task, teacher & principal quality initiatives, middle and high school restructuring, full-day pre-kindergarten programs, and model programs for English Language Learners (ELLs).  The DOE has posted more details about options within each program area.
• 20% or $76 million for targeted allocations to schools based on student need and the school’s capacity to carry out programs.  These funds will be spent on new collaborative team teaching (CTT) classrooms, full-day pre-K expansion, new and expanded autism spectrum disorder, and ELL summer school expansion.  An additional $7 million will be allocated this week to a small group of high-needs schools.
• 10% or $37 million to district-wide initiatives, with $10 million going to new and expanded principal training initiatives, $20 million going to school-wide performance bonuses, and $7 million to new and expanded multiple pathways to graduation initiatives.
• 8% or $30 million to maintenance of effort, specifically maintaining summer programs that target the lowest-performing students.

School-based allocations of the discretionary funding were combined with targeted allocations and other funding to produce this overview of Contracts for Excellence spending by program area:

According to the citywide plan, within the class size reduction program area, $100 million will go to reducing teacher-student ratios through team teaching, while $46 million will go to creation of additional classrooms.  The majority of time on task dollars will go to dedicated instructional time ($42 million) and summer school programs ($31 million), and the majority of teacher and principal quality dollars will go to instructional coaches for teachers ($45 million).

Much more information, including summaries and tables of district and school-level distribution of funds to specific program areas and strategies, and a breakdown of spending by student need category, along with model ELL strategies outlined by the state, can be found on the DOE’s website.