Don’t skimp on schools
Think of New York’s education system as a single school. You’ve got great ideas to make it better, but it’s sitting on a foundation that has been eroding for years. What will you do with limited funds — fix the foundation or load more onto it?
That’s essentially the question the state Legislature faces as the April 1 deadline for the 2019-20 budget looms next week.
In his executive budget, Gov. Andrew Cuomo proposed a $1 billion increase in school aid, a 3.6 percent hike. But the increase in the basic aid to operate schools day-to-day — what New York calls Foundation Aid — was only a third of that: barely 2 percent.
Foundation Aid was created in 2007 to consolidate several dozen funding formulas in order to make school aid more predictable and — though Mr. Cuomo disputes this point — to address the issues raised in a lawsuit by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. In that case, the court determined that the state had failed to live up to its obligation under the state constitution to provide students a sound basic education.
That case focused on New York City, but just about everyone — besides Mr. Cuomo — acknowledges it also exposed how the state had shortchanged many districts for years, especially less affluent ones that can’t make up the difference with property taxes. So while the CFE suit was technically only about New York City, morally it was about inequalities across the state. Foundation Aid was created to address that with a formula more based on need. Billions were promised to needier districts.
Unfortunately, that plan was interrupted by the 2008 recession. The state postponed increases, and, schools say, has never caught up.
Under Mr. Cuomo, New York has been increasing education spending, but behind the big numbers he touts a very different aid process than that envisioned under Foundation Aid. Rather than end a system driven by politics and backroom horse trading, the state is arguably as deep in it as it ever was. Not that Mr. Cuomo isn’t pushing good ideas — expanded prekindergarten, community schools, after-school programs — but they come at the cost of Foundation Aid, not in addition to it.
Ultimately, this is a way of increasing state control over how districts spend money, something Mr. Cuomo wants to do even more of with his new idea of having districts submit schoolby-school funding plans for state approval. The governor says his goal is to ensure that districts spend money where it’s most needed. He also notes that 70 percent of this year’s increases are aimed at high-needs districts.
But, to return to the one-school analogy, is the state just loading a lot onto a weak foundation? Can schools do an effective job of meeting their core mission of educating students with the Foundation Aid the governor proposes? And if they can’t do that, how can they do all the other things Mr. Cuomo would rather pile on?
And just who should be making this decision: the schools, or the state that has shortchanged them for so long?