Neil deMause: The Website

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.

New York is looking at massive cuts in school spending - should an education bailout be part of Obama’s economic rescue package?

Anyone reading headlines of late has to feel like we’re on the fast track to apocalypse: Unprecedented bus and subway fare hikes; a slash of more than $2 billion from state education funding; and that’s before even getting into the indignity of paying $1.06 a song on iTunes.

The trick, as always, is figuring out which of the harbingers of doom are real, and which are scare tactics meant to shock the populace into finding other ways to stave off disaster… [read more]

Despite a court ruling ordering New York state to give New York City more money to reduce class sizes, city officials have resisted doing so:

For public school parents, last week’s declaration by Gov. Paterson that next year’s state budget will include massive education cuts had to send chills down their spines. In a city where teachers have to beg parents for basic supplies, the prospect of even skimpier school budgets is the sort of thing that gets people researching parochial schools, if not other cities to move to.

It also should draw more attention to how the school system uses what money it already has… [read more]

When the New York City Department of Education announced last fall that it would start admitting schoolkids to gifted and talented classes solely on the basis of standardized tests, it said the new system would be fairer to all. Initial reports show it isn’t exactly working out that way:

Brooklyn mom Natalie Barratt had a bad feeling when her four-year-old son Luke Serrano emerged from his February testing session for admittance to the city schools’ gifted and talented programs. “The teacher who had administered the test wasn’t clear if he’d finished the test,” she recalls. After weeks of phone calls with the Department of Education, she had Luke retested. His score this time: an 89, one point too low for acceptance into a G&T kindergarten class. For want of a single correct answer, Luke was officially non-gifted.

In past years, this would have been just one setback in the tangled swirl of bureaucracy and arm-twisting that is commonplace in navigating the city’s Department of Education. This year, however, is different… [read more]

Another look at the new New York City elementary school application process, which is slowly becoming clear - or not:

It’s springtime, and the streets are filled with the sound of parents of 4- and 5-year-olds freaking out. This is normal behavior for March, when city parents traditionally bum-rush the schools of their choices and try by hook or by crook (or, according to persistent urban legend, gift of cookies) to get their kids to the front of the line. This year, though, the stress level is up a notch, thanks to a new application process… [read more]

NOTE: After this column had gone to press, schools spokesperson Andrew Jacob contacted me with several clarifications/corrections:

• Kids who don’t get into any schools on their list will be admitted to their zoned school; enough spaces will be held open to guarantee this. If they do get into another school on their list, however, they relinquish the right to automatically get into their zoned school - no backsies, in other words.
• The parent coordinator who said that gifted and talented test results won’t be in until May 16 “is wrong. We will be sending the results by mid-April” - only a couple of weeks later than originally projected.
• The DoE is promising to provide buses to take kids to gifted classes if they’re elsewhere in their district.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has ordered every school principal in the city to cut $100,000 from their budgets, but says it will have “no impact whatsoever.” Yeah, that was pretty much my reaction:

When Gov. Spitzer and Mayor Bloomberg issued their yearly budget proposals recently, they contained a nasty surprise for city schoolchildren: close to $400 million in cuts to public-school budgets, with more reductions planned in the future.

Those cuts will take a sizable bite out of the cash expected from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit that found the state wasn’t providing enough money to guarantee city kids a decent high-school education… [read more]