Budget no Success for charter schools
“Backroom manipulation” by Albany lawmakers will cost charter schools more than a billion dollars in funding over the coming years, according to some critics.
Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz ripped portions of the state’s new budget plan for charter schools, calling the funding policy a “travesty” that leave charters “dangerously shortchanged.”
Moskowitz complained that lawmakers decided to raise charter funding by only 2.9 percent instead of linking new funding to the 9.4 percent hike conventional public schools got last school year.
“This budget includes significant gains for public charter-school children, but it also perpetuates fundamental inequities,” Moskowitz said. “Previously, state law increased charter funding at the same rate as district funding. Now, the Assembly has manipulated the funding formula to deprive charters of Mayor de Blasio’s 9.4 percent spending increase in 2015-16.”
Success Academy said Gov. Cuomo’s $40 million supplement to charter schools in the state budget was helpful but would ultimately have no bearing on “a new baseline of tuition for charter schools” moving forward.
“The Assembly’s new formula means a loss of $50 million for the charter sector next year, and a cumulative loss of $1.7 billion by 2025-26,” the Academy said in a statement. “While it is true that New York’s charter sector made some gains in this year’s budget, backroom manipulation by the state Assembly ensures public charter school children will be dangerously shortchanged for years to come.”
Albany-based Northeast Charter Schools Network also derided the future funding setup.
“After days of analysis and numbers-crunching, the results are clear: While charter schools will see a boost next year, the new formula which will be put in place will prevent funding parity with other public school students,” said NECSN director Andrea Rogers.
Other charter leaders, however, drew sunnier conclusions.
“This budget agreement was hard-fought and we deeply appreciate the tenacious commitment of Governor Cuomo, Majority Leader [John] Flanagan and Coalition Leader [Jeffrey] Klein to treat public charter school students fairly,” said James Merriman, CEO of the New York City Charter School Center.
“Under their leadership, rental assistance for new and expanding New York City charter schools will increase, translating into more high-quality schools being opened.”
Success Academy has called for a significant increase in the number of charter seats.
The group has been engaged in a running political battle with Mayor de Blasio in recent years, accusing him of purposefully stanching charter-school growth.
De Blasio has offered glancing praise for some sector accomplishments while spotlighting its ability to prune problematic students to preserve top marks.
Regular public schools, de Blasio has argued, don’t have that luxury.
This budget includes significant gains for public charterschool children, but it also perpetuates fundamental inequities. Eva Moskowitz (right)
GOV. Cuomo, and even some charterschool advocates, are projecting Albany’s just-adopted budget as a modest win for the state’s hard-pressed schoolchoice movement. It is anything but. Yes, the budget tosses a few bucks into the charters’ tin cup — ostensibly to close per-pupil funding disparities between New York City’s traditional public schools and its 216 charters.
This is as it should be. After all, charters are public schools too — and their students have as strong a moral claim on the public fisc as conventional pupils.
Alas, morality counts for little against the never-ending effort to scuttle school choice in New York. Thus the new budget manipulates future aid formulas in a way that one advocate says will cost city charters some $1.7 billion over the next several years.
That short-changing, along with the Legislature’s continuing refusal to raise New York’s statutory cap on new charter schools, marks a significant shift in strategy for school-choice opponents.
Hitherto, they fought the charter invasion right at the water’s edge. The teachers union and their elected retainers threw every obstacle at their command in front of charters. And they likely would have killed the baby in the cradle had it not been for hard-nosed charter champions like ex-Gov. George Pataki, former Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein — and, once upon a time, Andrew Cuomo.
But fighting retail didn’t work. New York City’s hugely innovative and deeply committed charter movement grew in fits and starts, and now educates more than 106,000 students in grades K-12 — with another 44,000-plus on waiting lists.
And educate is the operative word. By virtually every objective standard — competitive tests; graduation rates; college-readiness — most charters outperform hidebound, heavily unionized conventional schools.
Over time, communities notice this — and many have begun to demand the opportunity for similar results for their own children.
So now the unions appear to have enlisted time to serve their own purposes.
The UFT and Mayor de Blasio agreed to a nine-year, $6-billion contract in 2014 — a deal providing salaries and benefits so lush that charters, constrained as they are by current aid formulas, can’t hope to compete. Idealistic young teachers may be attracted to the challenge of charters — but bills pile up and payday is payday.
Going into this year’s state budget cycle, average per pupil charter-school spending in the city was just shy of $19,000 — 5.7 percent lower than average spending for conventional schools.
Again, the new state budget eases the disparities — albeit modestly and only temporarily. Formulas that needed down-to-bedrock reform got nothing of the sort.
In particular, the budget means that New York City charters will never see a rise in per-pupil funding that matches the jump for other schools from the 2014 UFT contract.
Yes, the pro-charter group Students-FirstNY praised the budget: “New York made history by investing in . . . charter schools in a manner that will dramatically assist in educating public school children.”
But one veteran of the charter wars had a different take: “They took the prisoners off half-rations and put them on three-quarters.”
In any event, the city’s premier charterschool network, Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academies, is having none of it: “While it is true that New York’s charter sector made some gains in this year’s budget, backroom manipulation . . . ensures public charter school children will be dangerously shortchanged for years to come,” Success asserted in a press release.
And: “While underfunding seems modest in the near-term, it is absolutely massive over multiple years . . . a loss of $50 million for the charter sector next year, and a cumulative loss of $1.7 billion by 2025-26.”
Success blames all this on Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, and to a certain extent that’s fair. No institution in state government is more receptive to teacher-union extortion than the Assembly.
But the fact is that the new budget is Cuomo’s, tittle and jot, as he hourly announces to all who’ll listen. If the governor wanted funding disparities erased, they would have been erased. America’s aspiring progressive icon didn’t — so they weren’t.
The same can be said of the statutory cap on new charters, the other teacher-union tool for rubbing out the charter movement in New York. It was never even discussed.
The Legislature insisted on a hard cap on the total number of these schools when it authorized charters in 1999 — Pataki had to bribe lawmakers with a pay raise to get them to go that far — and only 30 remain. That’s scarcely enough to provide middle- and high-school seats for charter children now in grades K-4 — let alone provide for even a minimal expansion of the program.
There’s the plan, nice and neat: Simply refuse to allow the movement to grow, dampening pressure from parents who want their own kids to be a part of it — while counting on funding disparities to erode the charters’ ability to compete in the market for good teachers and support staff.
The not-at-all-unreasonable expectation is that, over time, this so-far-astonishingly-successful movement will wither and die.
Thus will the United Federation of Teachers maintain its hammerlock on the city’s $26-billion-a-year public-school shipwreck while the political class lines up for its cut every campaign season. The only losers are the kids — and they’ve never been more than incidental to the equation anyway.
It was very much a business-as-usual budget.