Education Higher Standards: The Need for More Time and Money

New York State has a proud history of setting high standards for its schools. Until recently, New York administered one of the nation's few statewide high school exit exams. In the last two years, these exams were rewritten, raising the bar for all of New York's students. The Community Service Society recognizes the promise that high standards represent. Holding schools accountable for preparing all students, not just a select few, to meet high standards could provide New York City's African American, Latino, and other inner-city youth with the solid education they want and need.

The question now faced by the New York City Board of Education is: how much support, mentoring, and resources are needed so that all of the city's public school students are able to graduate? To understand how big a task this will be, we should look at how well the city's public schools are now preparing students to graduate. In 1995-96, only 32% passed the Regents-level English exam in New York City. Regents-level denotes those classes and exit exams considered most challenging; the Board of Regents is the body established by the State Constitution to set public education policy statewide. Passing rates for New York City students on other Regents-level exams were similarly low. (See chart below.) As a result, only 47% of students entering New York City high schools graduate four years later -- some take longer -- compared to 81% in the rest of the state.

Commissioned by CSS, a study by school finance expert Dr. Gary Natriello of Teacher's College at Columbia University considers the fiscal implications of the new policies in light of the system's current levels of performance. As indicated in the chart, the study notes that school districts unable to prepare the majority of students to demonstrate mastery of rudimentary skills are now asked to prepare students to demonstrate a far more complex set of skills -- in English, global studies, U.S. history, math, and biology -- in just five years.

Based on data from phone interviews conducted by CSS with school personnel in low- and high-performing schools, the study identifies six gaps which need to be filled for the system to succeed. Those gaps are: (1) intensive and continuing professional development; (2) new teachers with high skill levels; (3) new or improved facilities, such as science laboratories, classroom space, new technologies, and the building infrastructure to handle them; (4) classroom materials to supplement existing texts; (5) the ability to provide additional assistance to students who need it, such as those with limited proficiency in English or whose academic progress has lagged; and (6) flexibility in scheduling patterns to provide students with more time on certain subjects. While the last can be solved through administrative action, the first five all require additional funds.

Up Front Investment

In the final section of the CSS study, conservative cost estimates are assigned to these items. Factoring in the wide range of resource needs across schools, the study establishes the cost per pupil and extrapolates this to New York City and state levels. Based on the evidence, New York City will need between $1.12 and $1.54 billion in start-up costs. Of that, at most $916 million would be for capital expenses. The state as a whole will require $2.7 to $3.6 billion -- a maximum of $2.1 billion of that for construction and repair -- to begin to implement higher standards. These estimates presume that only 5% of students will be retained in a grade. This figure could well be higher, driving the cost up many thousands of dollars for each child retained. Further, the model only considers costs to high schools. To prepare students to enter high school, districts will have to revise elementary and middle school curriculums as well.

The Board of Regents and the state legislature recognize the need for funds specifically targeted to meet the new higher standards, above and beyond regular state school aid. However, compared to the amounts identified in the CSS study, the Regents' requested funding and the legislature's actual appropriations are limited. For FY'99 the legislature appropriated $740 million in additional funds to be used to prepare schools to meet the new standards. This is only slightly higher than the Board of Regents had requested. The Regents' plan would have allotted more funds for regions such as New York City which are considered "high need." The actual budget, however, provides even fewer funds to New York City than the Regents requested and much less than is really needed. (See adjacent chart.) The Regents requested and the legislature allocated far fewer dollars than the CSS report concludes are realistic.

Even experts consulted by the Board of Regents at the 1997 Education Finance Symposium have raised questions about the adequacy of the funding. One major policy directive which resulted from the symposium was to align the finance system with the differing needs of districts -- adjusting for both environmental and regional cost differences. This directive arose from economic analysis by William Duncombe, associate professor of Public Administration, and John Yinger, professor of Economics, both of Syracuse University. As part of their analysis they constructed an "environmental cost index," an index of factors which are known to enhance or restrict learning, including rates of single-headed households, poverty, and limited proficiency in English. Along with general regional cost differences, the environmental cost index enabled Duncombe and Yinger to establish the actual cost to provide a certain level of educational performance in each region.

These experts estimated that just to raise the bottom 50% of districts to the median level of performance would require an additional statewide expenditure of $25 billion. In fact when environmental and regional cost differences are taken into account, the true cost to provide the same level of educational performance is 3.5 times as great for New York City as for the rest of the state. Here again the experts' estimates far exceed recent appropriations.

Need for Sufficient Appropriations

What will happen if decision makers do not appropriate enough resources to make high standards a reality? Something similar happened in Chicago, stressing an already over-burdened system and costing the taxpayers millions of extra dollars. The public school administration decided to enforce standards by ending a practice known as social promotion, advancing students even though they have not achieved minimum grade-level competency. Ending social promotion is a good practice. Students are not helped when they continue to move up in grade level while they fall further and further behind in skills and knowledge.

Unfortunately for Chicago taxpayers, the public school administration did not fund prevention efforts such as tutoring, smaller classes, and the other practices recommended in the CSS study soon enough. As a consequence, so many students were already behind that even after they attended summer school, the district had to pick up the tab for an additional year for roughly 24,300 students in 1997-98. This figure represents 5.7% of Chicago's public school students. By comparison, if New York City held back 5.7% of its 1,022,465 students, the cost to taxpayers would be almost $513 million. And holding back students does not guarantee that they will pass exams the following year.

CSS recognizes that achieving high standards is not solely dependent on financial resources. Other factors, notably teacher preparedness upon entering the system, staff recruitment and retention practices, technical support from the State Department of Education, information on best practices, autonomy and accountability at the school building level, and incentives and sanctions can all nudge the system forward. Reallocating some existing resources may help as well. At the same time, none of these can be substituted for the additional financial resources needed to get the job done.

Standards, after all, are only a road map. No matter how good the road map, if the car is broken, you cannot reach your destination. Without the time and resources to fix our school system, the majority of our students will not stand a chance of becoming high achievers.