Funding Inequities In NY School Districts Reach Record Level Under Governor Andrew Cuomo

Andrew Cuomo told the Daily News back in October that he wants to "break" the public school "monopoly" in New York State by attacking teachers and districts.

According to another Daily News article by Ken Lovett, Cuomo's already doing it by failing to properly fund the state's school districts:

ALBANY — In the opening salvo of what promises to be a heated battle this year over education reform, a new report says funding inequities between poor and rich school districts across the state has reached record levels under Gov. Cuomo - and has soared 43% in New York City.

Overall, schools in poorer districts spent $8,733 per pupil less in 2012 than those from wealthier ones, an inequity that grew by nearly 9% from before Cuomo took office in 2011, according to the study by a coalition of education advocacy groups opposing many of the reforms pushed by Cuomo.

While the 100 wealthiest districts spent on average more than $28,000 in state and local funding per kid in 2012, the 100 poorest districts in the state spent closer to $20,000 per student, the report found.

The report, obtained by the Daily News, is set to be released Monday. The coalition includes the Alliance for Quality Education, which is backed by the powerful teachers unions, the Public Policy and Education Fund of New York, Opportunity Action, and National Opportunity to Learn.

...

The inequity gaps were made worse by nearly $400 per pupil, the report says, after Cuomo won a 2% cap on local property tax increases that made it more difficult for needy districts to raise needed money, the report says.

Cuomo has already attacked the report, his spokesman couching the attack in the usual language deformers use - lies and misdirections:

Cuomo spokesman Richard Azzopardi said that the state provides three times as much per pupil in high-need districts than it does in low-need ones.

State education aid per pupil actually went up 9.3% during Cuomo’s first term, with a significantly higher percentage going to poorer districts, he said.

“It’s ludicrous that some special interests are seeking to create a false choice between closing the achievement gap between rich and poor districts and the Governor’s efforts to protect taxpayers, while also injecting accountability and innovation into the system,” Azzopardi said.

Notice the Cuomo flack doesn't address the funding inequity findings in the report at all - instead he states that education aid went up 9.3% overall in Cuomo's first term, which doesn't explain away the reports inequity charges in the least.

Classic Cuomo - here's a number that has nothing to do with the argument, accept it and move on, there's nothing to see here.

State aid goes up, but districts have less money because of the tax cap - that doesn't mean districts have more money, as the Cuomo flack suggests.

In addition, even if we take the Cuomo flack at face value (always a danger actually) and believe that state education aid per pupil went up 9.3% during Cuomo's first term, with a "significantly higher percentage going to poorer districts," that still doesn't address the report charges that "schools in poorer districts spent $8,733 per pupil less in 2012 than those from wealthier ones, an inequity that grew by nearly 9% from before Cuomo took office in 2011."

Even the NY Times editorial page, usually a friend to the kind of teacher-centered education reform Cuomo plans for his next term, gets that funding is the central issue in New York education:

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s forthcoming State of the State address is expected to focus on what can be done to improve public education across the state.

If he is serious about the issue, he will have to move beyond peripheral concerns and political score-settling with the state teachers’ union, which did not support his re-election, and go to the heart of the matter. And that means confronting and proposing remedies for the racial and economic segregation that has gripped the state’s schools, as well as the inequality in school funding that prevents many poor districts from lifting their children up to state standards.

These shameful inequities were fully brought to light in 2006, when the state’s highest court ruled in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York that the state had not met its constitutional responsibility to ensure adequate school funding and in particular had shortchanged New York City.

A year later, the Legislature and Gov. Eliot Spitzer adopted a new formula that promised more help for poor districts and eventually $7 billion per year in added funding. That promise evaporated in the recession, spawning two lawsuits aimed at forcing the state to honor it.

A lawsuit by a group called New Yorkers for Students’ Educational Rights estimates that, despite increases in recent years, the state is still about $5.6 billion a year short of its commitment under that formula.

A second lawsuit was filed on behalf of students in several small cities in the state, including Jamestown, Port Jervis, Mount Vernon and Newburgh. It says that per pupil funding in the cities, which have an average 72 percent student poverty rate, is $2,500 to $6,300 less than called for in the 2007 formula, making it impossible to provide the instruction and other services needed to meet the State Constitution’s definition of a “sound basic education.”

These communities and others like them are further disadvantaged by having low property values and by a statewide cap enacted in 2011 that limits what money they are able to raise through property taxes. And last year the New York State United Teachers union said that the cap had been particularly harmful to poorer districts.

These inequalities are compounded by the fact that New York State, which regards itself as a bastion of liberalism, has the most racially and economically segregated schools in the nation. A scathing 2014 study of this problem by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, charged that New York had essentially given up on this problem. It said, “The children who most depend on the public schools for any chance in life are concentrated in schools struggling with all the dimensions of family and neighborhood poverty and isolation.”

The Cuomo administration seemed not to acknowledge these issues in a letter last month to the chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents and the commissioner of education in which it promised “an aggressive legislative package” to improve education in the state. Among the dozen issues it said it wanted to address were strengthening the teacher evaluation system, improving the process for removing low-performing teachers and improving teacher training.

The regents agreed that these were legitimate issues needing attention. But they also noted that these reforms were unlikely to improve the schools unless they were paired with new investments along the lines of the $2 billion in extra spending that the regents had recommended earlier. No less pointedly, they urged Mr. Cuomo to address the “deeply disturbing inequalities in resources” that exist between poor and wealthy districts, as well as the destructive pattern of segregation. Mr. Cuomo must take on both of these central issues.

You know Cuomo's not coming in with any significant funding changes - that would make his hedge fundie donors and Wall Street criminal friends very, very sad since they might have to pay a little more out of their pockets.

Cuomo has no intention of making his donors or business criminal friends sad.

As for the segregation issue, well, that's a complex one that can't be fixed by Cuomo sticking some mandates into the state budget - so there's no way he's addressing that problem either.

The Cuomo attack on teachers is coming instead.

But the counterattack is coming too - the education problems Cuomo points to as "statewide" are limited to districts with poverty and income inequality issues and these problems are being exacerbated by Cuomo's current policies and future "reform" plans.

UCLA Civil Rights Project Cites New York For Most Segregated Schools In The Nation

Hey - we're number #1!:

NEW YORK -- New York state has the most segregated public schools in the nation, with many black and Latino students attending schools with virtually no white classmates, according to a report released Wednesday.

The report by the Civil Rights Project at the University of California at Los Angeles looks at enrollment trends from 1989 to 2010.

In New York City, the largest school system in the U.S. with 1.1 million pupils, the study notes that many of the charter schools created over the last dozen years are among the least diverse of all, with less than 1 percent white enrollment at 73 percent of charter schools.

"To create a whole new system that's even worse than what you've got really takes some effort," said Gary Orfield, co-director of the Civil Rights Project and an author of the report.

It does take effort, but with former mayor Michael Bloomberg and his DOE minions having worked very hard to close as many public schools as possible and replace them with charter schools (which are the most segregated schools in the city) and fire as many teachers of color as possible and replace them with young white TFA's and the like, that effort has seemed to pay dividends.

Bloomberg and ed deform are not the only contributor to segregation.

The report also blames housing trends in the city, where neighborhoods have become more racially homogenized over the last two and a half decades (although Bloomberg accelerated the gentrification trends with his vast rezoning of much of the city, so even there he is culpable.)

I'd say these are unbelievable results, except if you've been paying attention to the ed deform wars over the last 15 years or so, you'd know that the report's findings are completely believable:

Pedro Noguera, a New York University education professor, said it's disturbing that policy makers have focused so little on racial integration in recent years.

"We've been talking about reforming schools in New York and elsewhere. This issue was never addressed," Noguera said.

He added, "When you concentrate the neediest kids together in under-resourced schools they tend not to do very well."

New York City can now say that we have re-enacted the Jim Crow south here in 2014 New York City, with the school system more racially segregated than anywhere else in America, except that of course in the Jim Crow segregated schools, black children were taught by black teachers while often here in NYC they are taught by young white teachers.

All I can say about this is, what a disgrace!

It would be nice if the Michael Bloomberg's and Eva Moskowitz's who contributed to this disgrace would get some of the blame for it, but alas, that's probably asking too much.

It also would be nice if our governor would do something about this, but since he supports charter schools and only charter schools, that's probably asking too much too.

At any rate, here's hoping Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Farina will look to do something about this disgrace in NYC.

The report has some suggestions for what to do:

The UCLA report recommends that state and local education agencies develop policies aimed at reducing racial isolation and promoting diverse schools.

The report suggests voluntary desegregation programs in upstate cities like Rochester, where low-income populations are surrounded by more affluent communities.

In New York City, Orfield said, a system of unscreened "choice" schools would foster more diversity than the current New York City high school choice system, which sees entrance tests at top schools excluding most black and Latino students.

One final suggestion: Call Cuomo and tell him to convene a panel over this state disgrace right away.

I mean, Common Core got a panel.

Why shouldn't this school segregation disgrace?

Bloomberg Brings Jim Crow To The NYC School System

There is a devastating article showing the effects of segregation on NYC schools in today's Times.

It's entitled "Why Don't We Have Any White Kids?" and takes a close look at Explore Charter School in Flatbush, or "the prison school" as it is known to its students.

First, here are the numbers on segregation, first city-wide, then at Explore Charter:

In the broad resegregation of the nation’s schools that has transpired over recent decades, New York’s public-school system looms as one of the most segregated. While the city’s public-school population looks diverse — 40.3 percent Hispanic, 32 percent black, 14.9 percent white and 13.7 percent Asian — many of its schools are nothing of the sort.

About 650 of the nearly 1,700 schools in the system have populations that are 70 percent a single race, a New York Times analysis of schools data for the 2009-10 school year found; more than half the city’s schools are at least 90 percent black and Hispanic. Explore Charter is one of them: of the school’s 502 students from kindergarten through eighth grade this school year, 92.7 percent are black, 5.7 percent are Hispanic, and a scattering are of mixed race. None are white or Asian. There is a good deal of cultural diversity, with students, for instance, of Haitian, Guyanese and Nigerian heritage. But not of class. Nearly 80 percent of the students qualify for subsidized lunch, a mark of poverty. The school’s makeup is in line with charter schools nationally, which are over all less integrated than traditional public schools.

At Explore, as at many schools in New York City, children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality.

The school’s enrollment is even more racially lopsided than its catchment area. Students are chosen by lottery, with preference given to District 17, its community school district, which encompasses neighborhoods like Flatbush, East Flatbush, Crown Heights and Farragut. Census data for District 17 put the kindergarten-through-eighth-grade population at 75 percent black, 13 percent Hispanic, 12 percent white and 1 percent Asian. But the white students go elsewhere — many to yeshivas or other private schools.

And of course the predominantly white teaching staff imposes strict discipline on their black charges:

Explore students wear uniforms and have a longer school day and year than the students in the other schools in the building, schools with which they have a difficult relationship. A great deal of teaching is done to the state tests, the all-important metric by which schools are largely judged. In the hallway this spring, before the tests, a calendar counted down the days remaining until the next round.

Explore’s academic performance has been inconsistent. Last year, the school got its charter renewed for another five years, and this year, for the first time, three students, including Jahmir, got into specialized high schools. Yet, on Explore’s progress report for the 2010-11 school year, the Education Department gave it a C (after a B the previous year). In student progress, it rated a D.

“We weren’t doing right by our students,” Mr. Ballen said.

In response, a new literacy curriculum was introduced and greater emphasis was put on applauding academic achievement. School walls are emblazoned with motivational signs: “Getting the knowledge to go to college”; “When we graduate ...we are going to be doctors.” Teachers are encouraged to refer to students as “scholars.”

Convinced that student unruliness was impeding learning, the school installed a rigid discipline system. Infractions — for transgressions like calling out without permission, frowning after being given a demerit, being off task — lead to detention for upper-school students. On some days, 50 students land in detention, a quarter of the upper school.

Positive behavior does bring rewards, like making the Respect Corps, which allows a student to wear an honorary T-shirt. Winning an attendance contest can lead to treats for the class or the freedom to wear jeans.

Still, some students have taken to referring to Explore as “the prison school.”

25%-35% of the teaching staff turns over every year.

But one thing remains constant.

65% are white.

Now an integrated school environment doesn't ensure an excellent education for children.

It doesn't ensure that kids will learn racial and ethnic tolerance.

But it does ensure one thing:

When you have an integrated school, you do NOT have a predominantly white teaching staff imposing strict (and sometimes harsh) discipline onto a student body that is overwhelmingly black.

Explain to me how there is a difference between Bloomberg setting up a school system run by white people to "discipline" students of color and a police policy which, in the words of Commissioner Kelly, seeks to "instil the fear in black and Hispanic youth that every time they leave their homes they will feel that they could be stopped"?

On Thursday I posted that P.W. Bloomberg had built South Africa on the Hudson.

Today's Times story does nothing to undercut that statement.

Welcome to Bloomberg's South Africa on the Hudson - a racist, fascist police state.

Watch out for the truncheons, orange netting, pepper spray and stop-and-frisks.

Duncan Claims Education Is Civil Rights Issue, But Promotes De Facto Segregation, Other Harms, Through Education Policy

The NY Times runs a story today that says black students, particularly boys, receive harsher discipline in public schools, than students of other backgrounds:

Black students, especially boys, face much harsher discipline in public schools than other students, according to new data from the Department of Education.

Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions, according to the Civil Rights Data Collection’s 2009-10 statistics from 72,000 schools in 7,000 districts, serving about 85 percent of the nation’s students. The data covered students from kindergarten age through high school.

One in five black boys and more than one in 10 black girls received an out-of-school suspension. Over all, black students were three and a half times as likely to be suspended or expelled than their white peers.

Then the Times offers the obligatory boilerplate quote from the cliche-meister at the USDOE:

“Education is the civil rights of our generation,” said Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, in a telephone briefing with reporters on Monday. “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise.”

Do you mean like segregated schools, Secretary Duncan? You know, like all those charter schools you promote?

Or schools where white teachers drill students of color on how to behave or toss them out of school?

Or schools where white teachers do nothing but teach to the test so that students do not learn critical thinking skills?

Or promoting policies that target black educators for firing?

Because if those are the things you mean by your boilerplate quote that “The undeniable truth is that the everyday education experience for too many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise," then look no further than at yourself and your boss, President Obama, as the prime culprit for this at the federal level.

Ironic that the first black president promotes policies that are re-segregating schools and diminishing the kinds of educational experiences and critical thinking skills so desperately needed by young people in a time of social and economic change like we have today.

But that's exactly what President Obama is doing, through his education policies.

And the damage from these policies is horrific.

As Glenn Ford of Black Agenda Radio put it:

Educational policy in the Obama era isn’t about education at all. It’s about replacing skilled, experienced teachers with rootless temps better suited to serve in the privatized holding tanks they wish to turn public schools in poor neighborhoods into, for a population on its way to low wage jobs and prisons.

So Secretary of Education Privatization Arne Duncan can bemoan how public education is harming students of color and offer platitudes about civil rights all he wants.

The fact of the matter is, he and his boss are at the vanguard of the destruction.

So Much For Diversity

This sounds like another example of a Bloomberg/Black Mission Accomplished:

A city program aimed at diversifying the city's specialized high schools is not making a lot of progress with black and Latino students, stats show.

Just 19% of black students who went through a city-funded prep course aimed at recruiting lower-income students to elite high schools were accepted, down from 21% last year. About 21% of Latino students were successful, down from 24% last year.

Gotta love when the program aimed at bringing more diversity to NY's specialized schools actually makes them less diverse.

Oh, no wait, you don't have to love that.

The return of the Jim Crow days - encouraged by the policies of Bloomberg, Klein, Rhee, Obama, Booker, Duncan, et al - continues.

Anything ironic about the first black president promoting policies that encourage segregation of the school system?

Or that reformers like Klein and Duncan, who talk about how education reform is the civil rights issue of our time, actually are working to re-segregate the school system?