Spending School Funds Wisely

For decades, New York City students have been denied their right to a sound basic education. This was the conclusion of the courts of New York State, after more than 10 years of landmark litigation led by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE). To remedy this wrong, the courts ordered the state to provide the city school system with an additional annual $5.63 billion for operations to be phased in over a four-year period and an additional $9.179 billion for capital expenses over the next five years.

In order to ensure the best use of these funds, the City Council appointed an independent Commission on CFE to develop a plan and specific recommendations related to the goals of the CFE decision. I am co-chair of the Commission along with Arthur Levine, president of Columbia University’s Teachers College. The Commission’s Executive Director, Anthony Alvarado, is a former chancellor of the city’s public school system.

Commission Report

After extensive public hearings, research, and consultation with education experts, the Commission issued in April the first of two reports. We developed a set of recommendations which we are convinced is the only way to proceed.

The report makes recommendations for teacher quality, class size, and accountability for the entire system and for high-need low-performing schools in particular. A second report, to be released this summer, will focus on leadership, instruction, and facilities, among other subjects.

Unequal Resources

To begin, it is important to recognize that, within the school system, resources are distributed unequally. It is no secret that those sections of the city with the greatest degree of poverty generally have schools with the lowest achieving and highest need students.

An initial recommendation is that an independent study should be conducted to identify low-performing, high-needs schools. They will form a set of target schools for additional reforms needed to address their special problems.

Targeting Funding

Targeting funding to schools that are most in need is something that nobody talks about, but it is crucial to upgrade the effectiveness of the system. This is especially true in a system where, according to Chancellor Joel Klein, “Only half of our high school students graduate and fewer than 20 percent do so with a state Regents diploma.”

Teacher Quality

Teacher quality is the hardest thing to deliver, but the most important. Our recommendations combine salary increases coupled with a rigorous all-new assessment process. We have designed salary incentives so that the largest increases go to those who are in the lowest performing schools. This is the only way to attract high quality teachers for those in less desirable, poor performing schools. An assessment system should be created to evaluate teachers’ skills, knowledge, and performance. Periodically assessments should be a prerequisite for salary schedule increases. Also, the Commission recommends that city teacher wages be placed on par with the rest of the regional labor market.

Class Size

One of the significant findings in the CFE decision was that the city’s schools have excessive class size, which negatively affect learning. Overcrowded classes are the norm. A survey by the United Federation of Teachers at the start of the 2003–2004 school year found that more than 9,000 classes exceeded the contractual class-size limits.

With regard to minority students, research shows that their achievement gains from small classes were at least twice as great as the gains of non-minority students in reading and close to that level in mathematics. This is crucial considering that children of color comprise almost 80 percent of the city’s public school students. The Commission decided that class size reductions should begin in the target schools, starting in the lower grades and extending through grade 12 over the course of several years.

Need for Accountability

Finally, if reforms are to succeed, the measure of success must be based on evidence. In the absence of reliable data on the effects of reform, serious accountability is impossible. Incredibly, there is no current tracking of reform initiatives, no effort to discover what works and what does not work.

The Commission proposes the creation of a fully independent body to track whether resources are being spent efficiently and on meaningful tools for learning, to report on student performance, and to facilitate compliance with the court’s order.

Funding from the CFE decision has the capacity to profoundly improve the quality of our schools and the performance of our children. But only if we invest it well, in educational reform that really works.

From the New York Amsterdam News
June 2 - 8, 2005