Cuomo’s school aid cut a disastrous choice
Anyone who pays attention knows the Albany City School District has struggled to educate many of its students, poor kids especially. Despite gains in recent years, nearly a third of Albany students fail to graduate from high school on time. Just 23 percent of children in grades 3-8 test as proficient in English. A smaller percentage is proficient in math. As distressing and depressing as the numbers are, they’re from a time when students traveled to school each day, sat in classrooms with teachers, played sports and could stick around for extracurriculars. It’s when school was not virtual.
Then came COVID-19. And now we have the 20 percent budget cut, recently imposed by Gov. Andrew Cuomo on schools statewide, that will change nearly everything about teaching in Albany and other needy districts that rely heavily on state aid.
A few days ago, the Albany school board decided it had no choice but to go ahead with a drastic, terrible plan that parents in the city feared. Among other steps, the plan makes school fully virtual for grades 7 and up. And not for reasons tied to public health, mind you. This is about money.
Fully virtual? One shudders at the long-term implications for the city and its children.
Consider that more than half of households with kids in Albany are headed by a single parent. How will those parents juggle work with their children “learning” at home?
Nearly a third of children in Albany lived in poverty before the virus walloped the economy. How many more families will be pulled down the economic ladder by virtual schooling and the child care it demands?
How many more students will lose interest when their school is just a laptop sitting on the kitchen table? Heck, how many Albany students lack decent laptops and reliable internet connections?
It is obvious that a year without the touchstone of a bricks-and-mortar school will be disastrous for the poorest kids. It will make the grim statistics at the start of this column that much worse.
Yes, it is true that the Albany school district hasn’t always been frugal with its spending. Few school districts in New York are.
And sure, it’s fair to believe, given the long-term failure evidenced by those test scores and graduation rates, that education in cities like Albany needs to be reconsidered and reimagined.
But indiscriminately slashing aid to schools isn’t a path toward progress. In a country riven with deep economic and educational inequity, the changes forced by Cuomo’s cuts will only be an engine for future inequality.
The loss isn’t just about reading and writing and math and science. It’s also about human connection.
Think about the intolerable violence Albany has been experiencing this summer, mayhem caused largely by young men struggling to find purpose and meaning. How many more teenagers will be lost without the stabilizing inf luence of face-to-face contact with teachers and coaches? How many teens need school like a drowning man needs a lifeboat?
Albany isn’t alone. Lansingburgh schools are imposing entirely virtual learning for students above the third grade. Schenectady is laying off hundreds of teachers and staffers. Albany may lay off hundreds, too. Similar things are happening all around the state, thanks to Cuomo’s cut.
The governor makes it sound as though he has no alternative but to withhold money for schools, given the federal government’s refusal to rescue New York from a massive budget deficit that stems, in part, from the pandemic. But Cuomo’s claim isn’t really true. You’re shocked, I know.
The Democrat could cut elsewhere first, if he wanted. In a state that spends money like a sailor exploring the pleasures of a new port, there are many places to save that wouldn’t doom the state’s neediest children.
A suggestion: Defund
Empire State Development, the state agency devoted to wasteful crony capitalism. Eliminating ESD won’t save all the money the state needs, of course, but it would be a start.
Cuomo could back a new tax on the wealthy to avoid the cut to schools. Big donors might not like it, but their hurt feelings would fade.
Cuomo and the Legislature could freeze pay for all state and local public employees, delaying scheduled raises school districts can’t afford. The Empire Center says that would save a combined $1.9 billion, which is hardly chump change.
The governor could even forgo partisanship (stop laughing) and urge Democrats in Congress to reverse their opposition to a Republican coronavirus stimulus package that, despite its flaws, would provide $105 billion to schools.
One last suggestion: The governor might want to stop hiring new, handsomely paid staffers for his office while schools are slashing. The optics, sir. The optics.
Cuomo’s devastating cut to schools is a choice, in other words. There are other options. He doesn’t have to do this.
The big irony is that the cut is happening in the midst of a national reckoning on race and new attention to the hurdles faced by Black Americans and the poor. Across the country, politicians are wondering at the inequities, as if they had nothing to do with creating them.
“It always seems that the poorest people pay the highest price,” Cuomo said a few months ago, mulling the oversized impact of COVID-19 on Black and Latino communities. “Why is that?”
It’s an excellent question.