Neil deMause

In the latest Village Voice Education Supplement, I investigate why college is getting so crazy expensive, and what if anything can be done about it:

College tuition is, as any Occupy Wall Street demonstrator will tell you, too damn high. Average fees at public universities hit $8,244 this year, according to College Board figures, and a staggering $28,500 at private schools; add on another 13 grand if you want room and board or such fripperies as textbooks. Little wonder that State University of New York chancellor Nancy Zimpher recently warned at a White House education summit that “the general public might be reaching the tipping point” in their ability to pay for college… [read more]

The deal to close CUNY budget gap includes a five-year, $1500 tuition hike, and many students and professors alike aren’t thrilled:

By Albany’s notoriously dysfunctional standards, it’s already been a banner year for unexpected breakthroughs. The same week in June that the state legislature broke its years-long deadlock over same-sex marriage, it announced a deal that promised to put an end to the year-to-year squabbles over funding for the City University of New York and State University of New York; under the new plan, tuition hikes during the next five years will be coupled with a promise by the state not to further cut funding for the public university systems… [read more]

With Shael Polakow-Suransky looking set to become Cathie Black’s lieutenant atop the New York City schools system (as a condition of Black getting the top job), I dig up my notes from an interview with Polakow-Suransky I conducted back in January. The upshot: Smart, plenty of education chops, digs high-stakes testing just as much as the old guy:

So now that it looks like Cathie Black will become chief publisher of the New York City Department of Education, so long as Mayor Bloomberg appoints longtime school administrator Shael Polakow-Suransky as her editorial director, what do we know about her prospective sidekick?… [read more]

A consortium of 26 states is working on a plan to revamp standardized testing by the year 2014. The road to “college readiness,” though, may be paved with potholes.

For New York City schools reeling from their dismal scores on the newly toughened state exams, another tectonic shift is on the way.

As a winner in President Obama’s “Race to the Top” competition, New York State is directing part of its $700 million windfall toward the Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers, a 26-state consortium that has set itself the daunting task of completely redefining the way K-12 students are evaluated… [read more]

The latest New York City test scores are out, and as I predicted back in January, they show that what looked like improvement was more like a test-score bubble:

The New York state education department issued its annual test scores for 3rd- through 8th-graders this morning, and the takeaway is: They blow. The number of students judged proficient in English fell from 77% in 2009 to 53% this year; in math, the percent earning passing grades plunged from 86% to 61%.

The state, however, was quick to note that it had anticipated crappy scores, seeing as it had raised the scores required to pass — “cut scores,” in testing lingo — after widespread criticism that New York students had been doing better on state tests but not on national ones. The real upshot, then: New York schools aren’t any crappier than ever, it’s just that prior reports of improvement were an illusion.[read more]

My first article for the relaunched City Limits, about the doomsday budgets proposed for New York city and state, is up. (It’s actually the second article I wrote for them, but is running first — I blame the suits at Fox.)

Economists say the nation’s recession is technically over, but whether or not the economy is actually on the mend, the recession’s impact on New York City and state budgets is only just beginning. Over the last three months, Gov. Paterson and Mayor Bloomberg have mapped out a set of austerity budgets that would slash billions in spending – with many of the reductions coming from education and social services.

This year marks a watershed for both City Hall and Albany, but for different reasons, says James Parrott, chief economist at the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, which earlier this month issued extensive briefings on both the state and city budgets… [read more]

No Child Left Behind, Bloomberg’s testing fetish, and their myriad effects on city classrooms.

It was not Mayor Bloomberg’s proudest moment. Last month, the federal government released New York City schools’ rankings on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) math tests for 2009—and their scores had flatlined, even as scores on the state Regents exams continued to rise. “Don’t trust the Regents,” shouted a Post editorial headline, saying that the NAEP gap had revealed New York State’s testing regimen to be “a pathetic joke.”

It seemed like yet another Albany scandal, to go along with Client 9 and state legislators locking each other out of the Senate chambers. Yet according to a growing chorus of parents, educators—and, quietly, school administrators—the test-score brouhaha is just a symptom of a deeper problem with roots in Washington and City Hall… [read more]

Why public schools need their own bailout. And pay no attention to that other guy who ripped off my topic today.

At my son’s elementary school, the news that Gov. Paterson is proposing $223 million in midyear cuts to city schools sparked about the same reaction you’d expect from telling a laid-off autoworker how the ice cap is melting: I’ve already got one crisis to worry about.

Last year’s cuts already cost our school its drama classes, a music teacher, and numerous aides. Library hours have evaporated. And the list of supplies that parents are asked to send in keeps getting longer… [read more]

Also pay no attention to the word “meltinger,” which was an editing error. If you want to read the original, slightly longer version, you can find it here.

Elizabeth Green of GothamSchools.org and I explore the aftermath of the landmark Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that was supposed to guarantee New York City schoolkids an adequate education, and where it went wrong.

In December 2004, it seemed that New York City schools’ pocketbook woes might finally be at an end. For a decade, a coalition of city parents and education advocates had been battling Albany in state court over long-standing inequities in funding that had left New York City schools with only about $10,469 per student, as opposed to $13,760 per student in the neighboring suburbs.

In 2001, a judge had ruled that the state had a constitutional obligation to provide a “sound basic education,” and ordered the legislature to boost funding to city schools, but the legislature didn’t act. Now, the courts were promising to do what state senators and assembly members would not… [read more]

(Note: The Village Voice website runs subheads as its headlines for some reason, so you get the Babylon 5 reference up top instead. [UPDATE: My Voice editor informs me that the web heads are done independently of the print heads, since pithy stuff like "Equity Denied" doesn't play nice with things like Google search engines, which actually makes sense. So it's a feature, not a bug. Apologies to the Voice content management system for any aspersions cast.])

Paul Krugman has an excellent column in today’s New York Times, making some of the same points I made last week about how education and other social services (food stamps, anyone?) are just as deserving as “stimulus” spending as, say, highway construction. Krugman says it better than me, of course, being a Nobel Prize winner in Op-Ed Column Writing and all:

As a nation, we don’t believe that our fellow citizens should go without essential health care. Why, then, does a large share of funding for Medicaid come from state governments, which are forced to cut the program precisely when it’s needed most?

An educated population is a national resource. Why, then, is basic education mainly paid for by local governments, which are forced to neglect the next generation every time the economy hits a rough patch?

Krugman also notes that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland is calling for any federal stimulus plan to include increased funding for education, food stamps, and Medicaid along with infrastructure spending. Maybe Strickland can be the Fiorello LaGuardia of the Obama era.