Remember That Thing You Voted For?

We tend to think that once we vote on a resolution, and it passes, our job is done. I'm sure our legislators feel the same way. But in the world of NYS education, that's not always the case. Remember approving the Smart Schools Bond Act in 2014? It was going to put all kinds of new technology in our schools. And it would have, probably, if there were anyone left in State Ed to approve the purchases. Instead, it was a Big Idea for which many legislators and the governor will take all kinds of credit but that in reality had zero effect.

Well, back in 2015, the state legislature approved an exemption for BOCES capital expenses in the Tax Cap Formula. Before that point, regular school districts could bond and build a capital project without the debt service affecting their tax cap, but BOCES could not. The result was that since the districts pay for BOCES capital projects, any such project would likely put them over their limit, so no BOCES building projects could be approved. TST, in our region, hasn't added square footage to its campus in over 20 years. We have kids traveling 50+ miles because they can't fit into programs at TST, and we have kids with serious developmental and emotional needs parked on waiting lists due to lack of space.

So the legislature heard us, and they passed the new law, and they called upon the Office of Taxation and Finance to develop the language that would include debt service for capital projects at BOCES under the same capital exemption from the tax cap that regular school districts have. But the Office of Taxation and Finance, an executive office, chose to stick the request somewhere in their pile of "Big Ideas We Really Don't Give a Damn About Because They Might Affect Something We Do Care About" (the tax cap), and across the state, BOCES continue to wait.

So students in regular ed can learn and play in updated, safe facilities, but students with disabilities cannot. Students who are on a strictly academic track can have spanking new science labs, but students in career & tech programs must learn in facilities from the 1980s. If you sense that this is an equity issue, you sense correctly.

The sad part is that many (most?) of our legislators probably don't even know that this change to the Tax Cap Formula has stalled. Like the rest of us, they imagine that once they vote for something, that something actually happens.

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First, Do Your Job

We rail at the GOP Congress because they are dragging their feet on one of their most important tasks: Voting thumbs up or down on Supreme Court appointments. But we are silent when our own state executive branch fails to accomplish two of its main tasks: Releasing funds that have been allocated and filling key slots in state government.

The State Education Department organizational chart from December 2015 shows several key positions vacant. It's now August 2016, and those jobs remain vacant. This page shows job listings at State Ed, with asterisks indicating those jobs that require Budget Division approval to move forward. The most immediate problem, I believe, is at the School Operations & Management and the Facilities & Business Services levels, where capital project approval has stalled, and what once took four to six months now takes a year or more. This may ultimately affect everything from retrofitting lead fixtures to using Smart Schools monies. It's maddening.

The upshot is that the executive branch can require SED to do various things—monitor the spending of Smart Schools monies, fix crumbling buildings, create a task force to review Common Core—yet withhold the very funds that enable the department to do those tasks. This is a Democratic administration that absolutely fails to put its money where its mouth is. We taxpayers think we are funding our schools. Where's the money going? It's anyone's guess.

I'd encourage parents and others to write to Senate and Assembly leadership and to the Governor to ask: "Where's my money going? Why are the halls of SED echoing emptily when we are paying considerable sums to fund that department? Why isn't the Division of Budget doing its job?"

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John King Doubles Down

Suppose you had the highest education job in the nation for another seven months max. What would you do with that time?

If you were U.S. Secretary of Education John King, you would go out with a bang, not a whimper. King took advantage of the 62nd anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education to declare,

We have failed to close opportunity and achievement gaps for our African-American and Latino students at every level of education. And in far too many schools, we continue to offer them less—less access to the best teachers and the most challenging courses; less access to the services and supports that affluent students often take for granted, and less access to what it takes to succeed academically.

In case people thought he was blowing smoke, the feds came out and found Cleveland, MS, in violation of the constitution after a 50-year court battle. The resegregation of American schools has been a slow-moving but inexorable process since the 1960s. Google "resegregation" to find dozens of intelligent articles about the concept.

King has decided that his best weapon in the battle to equalize resources is the money he controls under Title I. The reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, currently entitled "Every Student Succeeds Act," or ESSA, proclaims that for schools that serve low-income students to to get Title I money from the feds, they must prove that they are using their other monies—local and state—to serve kids equally. It's about civil rights, which is the unspoken bailiwick of the Department of Education and really, the only reason to have a federal department at all. All those Trumpeters and others who want to get rid of the feds' role in education ought to have their children sent to the wrong side of the tracks in Cleveland, MS.

But of course people are squawking, because no one ever wants to give up what they have to give have-nots what they need. Lamar Alexander and Randi Weingarten are on the same side of the squawk battle, which probably doesn't happen very often.

Arne Duncan, the secretary who preceded King, tried to leverage Title I monies to drive reform. It didn't work. King's focus on specific inequities is more within the latitude of the department, but he's still under fire.

Here's what I think: If School A in Cleveland, MS, doesn't have a lot of low income students, and School B does, so that School A gets almost no Title I money, and School B gets plenty, Schools A and B should get equal monies from local and state taxes. It's the law: Title I is meant to supplement, not supplant local and state dollars. If the district uses Title I money to buy Reading 180 in School B and state money to buy a different reading program in School A, even if everything else is equal, that implies a use of Title I money that is supplanting state money.

It's not an easy fix. Salaries differ between School A (where teachers stay for their whole careers, because it's an easy gig) and School B (where new teachers are dumped and paid less because everyone knows it's a stepping-stone school).

John King doesn't want his legacy to be "that NY Commissioner who messed up on student privacy and Common Core." He wants to be known for something big, something important. This may be it. But it needs to land in the courts between now and December, and I hope that it does.

Nobody wants to give up what they have. But unless the pot is unlimited, what choice is there? What moral choice, I mean.

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Per-Pupil Spending Nationwide

NPR and Ed Week put together this awesome map that you can get lost in. I wish I could embed it, but they don't make it easy. But check it out anyway!

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One Out of Four

My favorite take on this year's budget for education comes from CNYSBA, which says that they have always focused on the Adequacy, Equity, Predictability, and Sustainability of State Ed aid. The increase in Foundation Aid this year brings us a step closer to Adequacy, they point out, but the other three remain elusive.

The increase in Foundation Aid is $273M less than the School Board Association and other groups had hoped for, but it's still a sizable increase. And the Gap Elimination Adjustment is, finally, gone. Distribution remains inequitable. In our county, Trumansburg and Newfield show a negative change in aid if you figure in building aid—despite the $21K GEA payment Trumansburg gets to zero out that line. Groton gets the greatest percentage increase with building aid figured in. Lansing gets the greatest percentage increase without. Since I don't know whether any of the districts is using building aid (it's a good bet that none is using the Reorganization Incentive Building Aid, since none has reorganized), it's hard to draw conclusions from the runs. But leaving aside the building aid, the range seems to run from Newfield at $673K more than in 2015-16 to Ithaca at $2.85M more than in 2015-16. Still grossly unfair when you compare our schools to downstate schools, but better than it's been in a while.

Other good news: The "Parental Choice in Education Act" was shot down. An employee-funded paid family leave was included.

Other bad news: The tax cap is so low that increases will be consumed by rollover budgets. Another $54M is going to charter schools, although local shares will not go up.

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Second Verse, Same as the First

Last year, the governor proposed a way to let corporations and rich people divert tax dollars into scholarship programs for private and parochial schools. His plan was defeated. Lo and behold, it's back. This year he's sweetened the pot with a tax credit for teachers who buy their own supplies and one for parents who pay tuition for little kids in families with an income of $60K or less.

But it's the same rotten plan, for a variety of reasons neatly laid out by the folks at the Fiscal Policy Institute. To sum up, the Parental Choice in Education Act (PCEA):

1) provides an unprecedented amount of tax reduction relative to contribution, making it the go-to charity of anyone who's paying attention;

2) enables the super-wealthy by avoiding limits on contributions;

3) purports to provide scholarships to poor kids while actually allowing money to go to families with household incomes up to $300K (and higher in the Senate proposal that just passed);

4) directs $150+ million in state revenues away from public schools toward private and parochial schools by letting the private sector dictate state spending authority.

Thanks to Rick Timbs at SSFC for alerting us once again to this horrible plan.

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School Report, 2016

The good news is that the state has a surplus and can afford to restore aid to schools. The bad news is that the state isn't ready to do that.

New Yorkers will hear a lot in the next month or two about how much support the governor's budget is giving to schools and how much more the legislature hopes to supply but just somehow can't. At the Community Forum in Auburn last night, board members and educators learned once again how we on the sidelines will be affected by these internecine budget battles.

First, a short history. In 2007, the legislature created a system of Foundation Aid in response to the state's loss of the court case that sought to fund schools more fairly. That Foundation Aid was meant to grow incrementally over the next 10 years to a point where the courts had determined that fairness lay. Then came the crash of 2008. Foundation Aid was frozen for the budget of 2009, and although it's thawed slightly over the past couple of years, it's nowhere near the 10-year "fairness" point that was originally planned.

After the crash, the state found itself with a gap between revenues and outlays. It chose to nab that missing money from the money promised to schools, creating the prettily named Gap Elimination Adjustment. Over the years since 2010, Central New York Schools have lost over $600 million in promised funds, with each district giving up dollars to plug the state's gap.

Then came the tax cap, sometimes incorrectly termed "the 2% cap." This cap meant that schools could not make up the difference between their original spending plans and the plans decimated by the GEA by raising taxes willy-nilly on the citizens of their districts.

Put it all together, and as Dr. Timbs told Central New York School Board Association members last night, "We have lost a generation of kids waiting for the state to comply with the court order."

But now the state has a surplus and could set things to rights again. However, the governor's proposal adds just $266 million, or 1.7%, to Foundation Aid, and puts back only $189 million out of the $434 million in GEA the state owes to schools. And to add insult to injury, this year's tax cap for schools is as close to zero as you can get. Not 2%. Not 1%. This year it averages 0.12%, which for all intents and purposes might as well be zero. (The original definition of the state's tax cap was as follows: "With some exceptions, the State’s Property Tax Cap limits the amount local governments and most school districts can increase property taxes to the lower of two percent; or the rate of inflation." The CPI, used as the measure of inflation, is 0.12% this year. The formula is complex, and some districts will have a cap higher and some lower—but I don't think anyone will be close to 2% this year.)

The poorest local schools will have 100% of their GEA restored this year. Candor's and Newfield's will be at $0, bringing them back to 2010 levels. Other local schools will get anywhere from 34% to 45% of their GEAs restored. But all of our local districts will face the ongoing deficit in court-promised Foundation Aid, and they will not be able to make it up with an increase in the tax levy. Keep in mind that a rollover budget includes contractual salary increases, health insurance (about 7% locally), workers' comp, debt service... This year, Dryden is managing to roll over retirement, utilities, and equipment/supplies with no increase to any of those—but that's not going to be true of all districts.

The upshot is this: CNYSBA is calling for elimination of the entire GEA in this year's budget. The money is there; there's no point to the GEA's existence except to manipulate spreadsheets to make NYS's situation look better than it is. CNYSBA is calling for $880 million in improved Foundation Aid, distributed fairly so that the districts that need it most get most. Legislators may point out that poor districts get the most aid now, which is true, but as I've quoted Timbs before, on average, poor districts in NYS get around 8 times more state aid than wealthy districts do. However, our wealthy districts are overall 14 times richer than poor districts. And this year, NYS's wealthiest districts, those with the largest tax bases, won't be able to raise the millions they usually easily raise through property taxes, so they will be competing fiercely for the same aid our needier districts require.

It takes 60% voter approval to override a school tax cap. I don't think you will see many schools trying; such votes rarely succeed. What you will see are more districts entering that netherworld of "fiscally stressed" schools, a world where inequity reigns, and the poor stay poor.

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Minimum Wage v. Housing Costs in Ithaca

We're talking a lot in the county about raising the minimum wage to a living wage. The Dems supported a resolution to phase in such a plan, relying on the state to permit the county to effect such a local change.

When I was in college, minimum wage rose from $2/hour to $2.30/hour (except for farmworkers), a 15% increase. During the same period, my Collegetown rent in a three-bedroom apartment rose from $75/month to $90/month, a 20% increase.

Today, minimum wage is $8.75, a 280% increase over minimum wage in 1976. Meanwhile, Olivia's Collegetown rent in a three-bedroom apartment next year will be around $895/month, an 894% increase over my rent in 1976. I rest my case.

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Still Fighting the Same Old Fight: Reauthorizing the ESEA

The fight we're still fighting is the one between federalists and states' righters. More than anything, that fight defines this nation and differentiates it from any nation on earth. Some nations have tribal warfare. We have a constant tension between centralization and decentralization. If you believe, as I do, that the only way we'd have any sort of civil rights in this country is via a strong central government, it's often disheartening to see slippage back toward states' rights. But that's where we're sliding, and the Senate's revision of ESEA is just one result.

A little history: LBJ signed ESEA (the Elementary and Secondary Education Act) into law back in 1965 as a Great Society civil rights act, one that aimed to ensure equal rights in education. The original law offered federal grants for impoverished districts and children and gave money to the states to improve educational quality. It provided a large infusion of federal dollars into what had been a state- and locally-funded arena. The original law gave us Title I through Title VI; later amendments added funds for "handicapped children" and for bilingual education.

And for the first two decades of the ESEA, we saw progress in shrinking the achievement gap, especially between African-American and white students. But as other pieces of the Great Society came undone, so did the ESEA. The Reagan Administration took away some of the regulations in Title I in an attempt to move control back to states and localities. The Clinton administration's 1994 Improving America's Schools Act was a critical reauthorization of ESEA, because it merged the new standards-based reforms with federal funding. Now states had to prove that their schools were improving overall, based on those schools' meeting rigorous state standards. Accountability was now built into the system. States had to develop state assessments, measure progress, and report it publicly.

It wasn't much of a leap to the dreaded No Child Left Behind reauthorization of 2002. It's worth remembering that both George W. Bush and Ted Kennedy promoted this bill, for very different reasons. Again, accountability was key; the NCLB called for annual testing and AYP, annual yearly progress, that measured schools against each other and against the state-designed yardstick. Now schools that did not meet standards were punished by being labeled "failing." At the same time, resources were drying up at the state level, and the federal support was not adequate to help schools meet the goals. Even educators who had strongly supported ESEA now turned against it.

Many other things occurred in the 1990s and 2000s that slowed the progress that had been made post-ESEA. Head Start came under fire, and much of its funding went away. Desegregation efforts ground to a halt. The nation stopped thinking that giving money to poor people was a good thing, and we saw the final death throes of the War on Poverty. But it's the focus on accountability that probably changed ESEA in the public eye from a civil rights act into a punitive unfunded mandate.

To see the tension in living color, all you have to do is to look at the polar-opposite reactions of the NEA, our largest teacher's union, and the Leadership Conference, our biggest lobbying group for civil rights, to the Senate's new proposal for ESEA reauthorization. The new legislation is titled "Every Child Achieves." It gets rid of AYP. It sets a cap on test time. It funds community schools—schools that act as a central clearinghouse for social services as well as education of children. It allows states to design their own accountability systems that involve more than just testing. The NEA is all for it.

Yet by moving away from federal oversight, the ECAA opens us up again to civil rights violations, and that's where the Leadership Conference gets up in arms. "We do not have confidence that the law would be faithfully implemented or that the interests of our nation’s most vulnerable students would be protected," says the conference. "The hard-learned lesson of the civil rights community over decades has shown that a strong federal role is crucial to protecting the interests of educationally underserved students."

The Leadership Conference remembers, as few do, the original purpose of ESEA. It was not supposed to be about punishing teachers or schools but about providing equal opportunities. For a while, it seemed to work; then new philosophies and priorities took over, and the achievements of the '70s stalled. The new ECAA moves so far away from the goal and so far back into local control and options that I tend to agree with the Conference: It runs the risk of codifying "a system of achievement gaps and opportunity gaps, with no one to answer for them but the affected students, their families, and communities."

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Not Pearson, but Still

There are honestly so few companies able to cope with developing a testing product for a whole state that it is unusual for an RFP to get more responses than you can count on the fingers of one hand. In NYS, the account has gone back and forth between McGraw-Hill/CTB and Pearson, with Pearson winning a five-year contract in 2010. Instead of renewing that contract, NYS has decided in 2015 to go with Questar, formerly Touchstone Applied Science Associates, a company out of Minnesota that does nothing but tests.

When the Common Core Standards were being developed, two consortia started to develop accompanying tests, to be called PARCC and Smarter Balanced Assessments. But after spending enormous amounts of money getting those tests off the ground, states started dropping out one by one, or, as in NYS's case, never opting in and deciding to create their own, state-centric tests. Pearson holds the contract for PARCC, and McGraw-Hill/CTB holds the contract for Smarter Balanced. From the original 26 states that signed on for PARCC, fewer than 10 are left. Mississippi dropped out early this year and signed on with Questar. Arkansas dropped out this month, and who knows what they'll decide to do.

It's a little surprising to see how pleased the unions are at NYS's move from Pearson to Questar. The teachers themselves seem a bit more cautious, at least on the UFT's FB page, recognizing, as one person posted, that this might represent the "same crap, different company." It helps that the new commissioner is promising that teachers will have significant input into the new tests.

To a large degree, Pearson brought this on themselves with some awful errors that were widely publicized. But there's also a level at which Pearson became the scapegoat for a testing regimen it did not birth. NYS's even larger contract (by $12 million) with Questar is for the same thing that the Pearson contract was for—tests at grades 3-8 and a plan for computer-based testing.

So what are we celebrating? Well, maybe we can celebrate the fact that this is a US-based corporation. Maybe we can be glad that it has an office in Brewster, NY. Maybe it's nice that the teachers will be involved, as they are for the Regents exams, although we'll have to see how that plays out.

But it's worth remembering that tests are written and edited by people, and the same people move around quite a bit. Questar's VP of Assessment Design spent two years at Pearson. When I look up Questar folks on LinkedIn, I find lots of connections to people I know, because people I know have written test items for Pearson, and McGraw-Hill, and Questar, and probably the other two testing companies. We all tend to go where the work is.

Here's what we've lost by scapegoating the tests: Any means of making intelligent comparisons between and among states. If only nine states out of 50 are using PARCC, that's not very useful. If we go back to a system by which each state can develop its own tests, we're right back where we started, with different states determining what "proficient" means to them, as in this chart:

chart by ICLE

When you let the nation determine what learning is state by state, you come up with a mythical system in which Mississippi kids outrank Massachussetts kids in reading and math. Hey, 81% of our kids are proficient in math, so suck it, Massachussetts, with your lousy 39%! That's where we're headed, once again. States' rights forever! We might not let them fly their Confederate flags, but we can let them pretend that their kids are learning. Is that really what we want?

Questar isn't Pearson. That's about the best I can say about them for now.

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TC3 to Become TC2?

Tompkins Cortland Community College spans two counties and is supported by financial donations from both. This year, the college went to the counties to request an increase of 4%. Cortland votes first; Tompkins votes in July. At their budget and finance meeting in early June, Cortland legislators agreed on a 2% increase, with all committee members but George Wagner voting yes. Then at their legislative meeting in late June, the whole body voted against any increase at all, with the chair of the budget committee flip-flopping on his original vote. Now either Tompkins picks up the slack, which is doubtful, or the counties allow the college to suck up its reserves, or the college continues to lay off personnel—or renames itself TC2.

George Wagner is quoted as saying that he thinks the college should become its own self-supporting organization. I wonder if he feels that way about all public schools.

The community colleges of New York State were established postwar as state-supported institutions, primarily technical schools at the start. Early on, the state asked local communities to start pitching in to support the technical colleges, which were to become part of a system of community colleges. Funding was set in a 1/3-1/3-1/3 model, with 1/3 coming from the state, 1/3 from the community, and 1/3 from tuition.

Legislation in the 1970s was supposed to increase the state portion to 40%. In 1999, Comptroller McCall put out a report explaining that the state had only met that goal once since it was imposed, and that it had in fact dipped below 30%, causing tuition to increase. Since that time, the legislature occasionally proposes increases on the part of the state, but funding of the colleges continues to be a battle, with students generally taking up the slack as tuition rises, and two-year education becomes out of reach for many families. Most recently, Governor Cuomo has asked to tie college funding to a variety of performance standards, just as he has for the pK-12 schools.

Half of Cortland High's graduates who go to college go to a two-year school, and I'm willing to bet that 98% of those go to TC3. If they're like Dryden's graduates who attend TC3, probably half of them or more need the community college's remedial courses to advance any farther educationally.

Sure, we need to improve pK-12 so that we're not teaching high school make-up courses at TC3. But until we do that, we'd better think about what we get out of our community colleges and whether or not that's worth supporting. The current funding structure isn't working.

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Win Some, Lose Some

Here's what the Big Ugly NYS session-ending craziness looks like for schools.

The Good: 1) No tax credit/deduction for private school tuition or scholarship "investment." 2) No raise in the cap on charter schools except in NYC. Since we're not near the cap yet upstate (we have 130 unused charters!), it never made sense to raise it except as a PR move. However, the state is releasing some charters that have been revoked in past years and re-adding them to the total in NYC plus moving four charters from outside NYC to inside NYC. So the increase, even in NYC, is minimal. 3) Money for production of 3-8 tests that will enable State Ed to release items in time for that release to be meaningful. 4) Changes to the tax cap that allow for the creation of rules that exclude certain BOCES capital expenses from a district's overall costs. It remains to be seen what exactly that means for local districts. 5) Changes to the tax cap that take into account development on tax exempt land. Again, the details are sketchy. 6) Inclusion of student characteristics (ELLs, students with disabilities) in the calculation of growth scores for teacher evaluations. 7) Plans for a "review" of the state learning standards, to include "stakeholders."

The Bad: 1) No yearlong delay in implementation of teacher evaluations. 2) The use of independent observers is still required for teacher evaluations. (This is an issue for small [usually poor] districts with a single building—they will have to hire independent observers with administrative certification to observe teachers. Other districts may just move administrators from building to building as needed.) 3) Failure to complete evaluations in a timely fashion is still linked to state aid. 4) $250 million to private schools for mandated services. Although this is to pay for past services, the release of this money is new. I believe the private schools still have to request the funds, as detailed here. 4) Property tax cap still exists. 5) Dollars better spent fixing schools will now be shipped to taxpayers in the form of election-week rebates. 6) No additional funding for needy upstate cities (except for Yonkers).

The Ugly: Well, it sure wasn't pretty.

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The Right Move

Very pleased to see our assemblywoman standing up for what makes sense rather than bowing to the pressure from those who rely on the Cayuga Power Plant tax revenue and can't imagine life without it. As I wrote back in February, that still leaves Lansing with seven property owners worth over $10 million, compared to Dryden's two.

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Tioga Update

Not only did the budget pass by 1076 to 441, a 71 percent "yes" vote, or 11 percent more than the supermajority needed, but also the turnout was higher than in the original election, which never happens. Some 1517 voters (plus absentees) came out this time, compared to 1180 last time. So either the cuts Tioga made were enough, the publicity Tioga put out was effective, or the lure of easy casino money made the whole thing seem worthwhile to the voters.

Or maybe it was the threat of half-day kindergarten. We may never know. Let's hope that this correction helps Tioga stay on course for the next few years.

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Private Funding of Public Schools

A Little History

Back in 1895, a judge from Pennsylvania by the name of Handley gave Winchester, VA, a town he had come to love, $1.6 million to use to build schools "for the poor." Because of the judge's request that the bequest be allowed to accumulate interest for 20 years prior to its use, and the board's cautious decision-making, documented in a treatise that you may still read today, the endowment continues to reap benefits for the students of Winchester.

In 2004, our town of Dryden established the Dryden Youth Opportunity Fund, into which residents may deposit money that is in turn used to fund mini-grants for a variety of school and community projects dedicated to the children of Dryden. Typically, the applicants are teachers, 4H leaders, or librarians with special events or programs in mind.

Private funding of public schools is not new. I remember turning away a bid from Coca Cola to establish pouring rights in the schools of Dryden in exchange for significant funding. What I cannot remember is anything like what happened recently to the Tioga Central Schools.

The Tioga Story

Tioga was marked by the comptroller as a school under "medium financial stress" back in January. This rating was based on a variety of things, from the debt held by the district to dwindling reserve funds. In Tioga's case, it appears that the tax rate had been held down artificially for a number of years by dipping regularly into the reserves. In 2014, Tioga residents paid $9.30 per $1000, significantly less than anyone in our county, where the lowest rate is nearly twice that amount.

Anyway, Tioga suddenly recognized that dreaming of better state funding was just that, a dream, and that to keep what they had, they needed to increase their tax levy substantially. They were blocked from doing this by the tax cap. So they went out with a proposed levy increase of 30 percent, praying that the local population would recognize that such an increase would still maintain a lower rate than anyone else around.

To pass over the cap, the district needed a 60 percent "yes" vote. They got 53 percent. Their only options were to go out again with cuts in the budget, to go out again with the same budget, or to revert to a contingency budget that would severely limit their options. They've chosen to go the first route; their new budget has a levy increase of 17.26 percent.

An Ace in the Hole

But Tioga has an ace in the hole in the person of would-be casino tycoon Jeff Gural, who has promised the district nearly $600,000 over two years. Whereas Judge Handley's money came with the caveat "for the poor," Gural's comes with a couple of stipulations: If the voters don't approve the budget tomorrow, they get bupkes. Oh, and if Gural should happen to win a full casino license for his beloved Tioga Downs, the school gets three more years of funding. Our local paper has been all gung ho about the Gural proposal, while at the same time calling shrilly for making the tax cap permanent.

Caveat Emptor

At a lecture Saturday, Zephyr Teachout told us her number-one solution to the problem of corruption in government: Public funding of campaigns. Her point is that private money inevitably comes with strings attached. Coca Cola wants unique rights to fill kids with sugary drinks. One of our local Dryden residents wanted to donate money to get a Bible (New Testament exclusively) into every child's hands. Gural wants people to vote his way and apparently to help him lobby for casino rights.

Back in the 1980s, I met with an exec from Volvo, which had commissioned a guy to write a curriculum based on Volvo's definition of work. The exec was charged with getting this curriculum into U.S. schools, with some dollars attached for the schools that accepted it. It was pretty lousy writing, but what I told the exec was that here in the U.S., we don't just build curricula willy-nilly. Curricula are designed to fulfill the needs of the many, not to satisfy the agenda of the few. I told him what at the time went into the setting of goals and designing of textbooks to match those goals, and he understood. Volvo went away with its curriculum. Maybe it's still part of schools in Sweden.

We open the door to benefactors like Gural at our peril. For the sake of our own future as a nation, we'd better decide once and for all what it is we expect and need from our public schools and then fund them accordingly.

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Scholarship Tax Credits

As of last year, 15 states offered the kind of scholarship tax credit Governor Cuomo plans for NYS. Typically, donors to private schools (and sometimes to public schools) get a nice little break on their state taxes.

Not only does this threaten the separation of church and state, since religious schools are of course included, but it also siphons money directly from public to private institutions. In doing so, it secondarily rewards the rich, because who is likely to contribute to a scholarship fund in the first place?

Here is a map showing the states that have a similar plan right now. Not a lot of blue states there, right? But a lot of early primary states, right? Interesting.

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Playing Around with Budget Data

Our newspaper consortium provides us with this nice database, which is excellent for playing around with and viewing NYS schools through a fiscal lens. The average spending increase this year is 1.9 percent, and the average tax levy increase is 1.6 percent, but as usual, the interesting factoids are in the outliers.

For example, you can see by sorting for tax levy that poor Tioga CSD is going out with a 2.4 percent spending change that translates into a 30 percent tax levy increase (yes, that is above the cap). It appears that Tioga has pretty well spent down its reserves and is viewing this as a one-time correction. Watch this space to see if they get the supermajority they'll need to approve that leap.

Then there's little Jasper-Troupsburg, west of Corning, which reduced spending this year yet still faces an 8 percent tax levy increase. I'd tell them to consolidate, but they already did, back in 1987.

Sorting by enrollment indicates that Tuxedo, which I wrote about here, is declining by a terrifying 45 percent. Port Jefferson in Suffolk County declined by 10 percent but still managed to increase its budget by 5.1 percent. Port Jefferson's tax levy is nearly Dryden's whole budget, for 600 fewer students.

A better comparison might be Montauk and Groton, one with a budget of $18.9 million for 339 students and the other with a budget of $19.0 million for 825 students. Per student, Montauk's kids are getting an education with the same monetary value as Olivia's at Cornell. (Fire Island and a few other tiny districts cost substantially more per student than any Ivy League School and show clearly what people mean when they talk about economies of scale.)

Sorting by county shows that in Tompkins County, Groton has the smallest proposed tax levy increase and the greatest drop-off in population. Enrollment in Dryden and Newfield has grown slightly. Ithaca's spending growth is smallest; Trumansburg's is largest. Everyone seems to be within the tax cap.

Go ahead, play around. It's not often that you see statewide inequities laid out quite this neatly.

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How Competitive Are Those Competitive Grants?

John Sipple from Rural Schools was on WSKG today speaking sensibly about the fact that those big Pre-K grants last year mostly went to big schools with the personnel to fill out the copious paperwork.

Last year 62 districts in upstate New York won funds, but those winners are pretty unevenly distributed around the state. A lot of them are down near New York City. The Southern Tier had four awards, and the North Country had just one.

Well, we voted in November for another enormous competitive grant program, that super-duper Smart Schools Bond Act that gives us everything from crazy-fast broadband to new and improved security systems. (I say "we" voted for it, but "I" did not, for the reasons stated here.) And now, five months later, here are the guidelines for the competitive grant. I call your attention to my favorite parts. Boldface is theirs, not mine.

Adequate Technological Infrastructure:

In order for students and faculty to receive the maximum benefit from the technology made available under the Smart Schools Bond Act, their school buildings must possess sufficient connectivity infrastructure to ensure that devices can be used during the school day. Smart Schools Investment Plans must demonstrate that sufficient infrastructure that meets the Federal Communications Commission’s 100 Mbps per 1,000 students standard currently exists in the buildings where new devices will be deployed, or is a planned use of a portion of Smart Schools Bond Act funds, or is under development through another funding source. Achieving this speed standard is a precondition for the purchase of devices as described further in the school connectivity section.

Professional Development:

The district must describe a plan to provide professional development to ensure administrators, teachers and staff can employ the technology purchased with funds from the Smart Schools Bond Act to enhance instruction successfully. Districts will demonstrate that they have contacted the SUNY teacher preparation program that supplies the largest number of their new teachers to request advice on this issue. Please note that Smart Schools Bond funds may not be used for professional development.

Technical Support:

The district should provide sufficient on-going tech support to ensure that the technology (hardware and/or educational technology-related infrastructure) purchased with funds from the Smart Schools Bond Act will be distributed, prepared for use, maintained and supported appropriately. Please note that Smart Schools Bond funds may not be used for technical support. Districts are encouraged to work through BOCES for technical support.

Sustainability:

As part of their Smart Schools Investment Plans, districts are required to demonstrate a long-term plan to physically maintain the investments made under the Smart Schools Bond Act in a useful condition. This sustainability plan will demonstrate a district’s capacity to support the recurring costs of use, for which Smart Schools Bond Act funds may not be used. These recurring costs include, but are not limited to, issues such as device maintenance and timing of replacement, as well as other technical support, internet and wireless fees, maintenance of hotspots etc., ongoing professional development, building maintenance, replacement of incidental items etc., as appropriate.

So to compete for this grant, not only must a district already have the infrastructure needed to support any devices purchased, but it must also prove that it has the funds to support its purchase in a sustainable way AND to provide adequate training for the people who will use the technology. All that in addition to having the personnel available to write the grant in the first place. Who will "compete" for this grant? As with the Pre-K grant, it will again be larger, urban districts. They are the most likely already to have the connectivity, and they have the personnel.

Our local districts are eligible for anywhere from $600K (Lansing) to over $2 million (Ithaca). If they don't apply, will they be perceived to be ungrateful? or just realistic? If they apply and don't succeed, will they be thought of as unworthy? or simply cash-strapped? Stay tuned.

How competitive are those competitive grants? Well, picture yourself falling off the couch and into the NFL Scouting Combine. It might be a competition, but how well do you think you would do?

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Checking In on Oklahoma

Since I believe we've reached the tipping point on the Common Core State Standards and will soon backslide toward developing standards at the state level, again, I thought I'd check in on how one state is already doing that. Oklahoma decided to drop CCSS in 2014, as Governor Fallin, once a strong proponent, decided that they represented a federal takeover. Three months later, the feds revoked Oklahoma's NCLB waiver. The state was under the gun to come up with new standards that were similar to CCSS in rigor but completely unlike them in every other way. Quite a challenge.

The state put together a timeline with steps that pretty much mimicked CCSS's steps, except that the steps were bracketed by the approval of the Oklahoma Board of Education and the legislature and were MUCH compressed timewise. I thought I'd look at that Board of Ed, which has the ultimate say in OK's new standards. It's much smaller than our Board of Regents. It consists of a former teacher who ran Kumon Math & Reading centers for many years, a retired Army Major General and defense consultant, the one-time-schoolteacher wife of retired general Tommy Franks, the brother of former Governor Keating, and a US attorney who is also on the board of a Christian camp for underprivileged kids.

But they won't be writing the actual standards, of course. The direction will be set by a steering committee: Amy Ford, Chair; Joy Hofmeister, Superintendent of Public Instruction; Glen Johnson, Chancellor, State System of Higher Education; Deby Snodgrass, Secretary of Commerce; Marcie Mack, Director, Career and Technology Education; Major General Lee Baxter; Don Raleigh, Superintendent of Pryor Public Schools; Barbara Bayless, Reading Specialist, Choctaw-Nicoma Park Public Schools; Elaine Hutchinson, Mathematics, Fairview Public Schools; Mautra Jones, Parent.

Okay, so Oklahoma knows that teachers and parents ought to have some input, and they've included two teachers and a parent on their steering committee. And on their actual writing committees, they anticipate having "Co-chairs reporting to the Steering Committee, K-12 teachers, K-12 administrators, Grade level content experts, Post-secondary content experts, Post-secondary andragogy experts, Assessment expert, and a 'Scribe.'" Again, though I'm not sure about the Scribe, this isn't too different from the CCSS work teams. I do notice that there are no early childhood experts, a failing of the CCSS work teams, but maybe they'll remember to put some on the reviewing teams.

The steering committee has had input from experts who helped create standards in other states, which is interesting in light of the governor's insistence that the new standards be "By Oklahomans for Oklahomans." The meetings are open to the public, which is good, because the website still doesn't have summaries up, so there's no telling what decisions have been made on those writing teams unless you've dragged yourself to Oklahoma City to sit in. Apparently the Chancellor will choose the writers from higher ed, and the Superintendent (Ms. Kumon Math & Reading) will choose those for "common ed." Anyone not chosen will be part of the review process.

Oklahoma plans to have public review of the standards in August/September of this year. I wonder if they will get appropriate feedback from teachers at that time of year. CCSS went out in March and got 10,000 responses, 48 percent of which were from K-12 teachers, but that still was not enough to make people feel that teachers were adequately involved.

I wondered what the website meant by this: "Not only will the resulting standards ensure students are prepared for higher education and the workforce, they will reflect Oklahoma values and principles. This process is designed to be as inclusive and comprehensive as possible, encouraging the spirit of collaboration and a healthy exchange of ideas. These standards are to be created by Oklahomans for Oklahomans." What guiding principles is OK using that the CCSS did not? Here are their guiding assumptions:

Standards will prepare students for success in college level mathematics and English language arts courses

All standards will be clear, concise, objective, measurable, and grade-level appropriate

Standards will not require a specific teaching methodology or curriculum

Standards must demonstrate vertical and horizontal alignment

The standards writing process begins with input from teachers and experts

State assessments align with the standard

Where appropriate the standards reflect critical thinking.

Well, the wording is different, as advertised, but except for that ominous "where appropriate" at the end, the intention does not seem to vary much from the CCSS guiding assumptions:

The standards are:

Research- and evidence-based

Clear, understandable, and consistent

Aligned with college and career expectations

Based on rigorous content and application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills

Built upon the strengths and lessons of current state standards

Informed by other top performing countries in order to prepare all students for success in our global economy and society

The standards establish what students need to learn but do not dictate how teachers should teach.

To be fair, one of their experts did suggest that Oklahoma include a lot of Oklahoma authors and history. Ralph Ellison? Will Rogers? Maybe S.E. Hinton?

So the jury's still out, and we must wait until August to see what Oklahoma's teams crank out and how it compares to the CCSS. My feeling is that the process is and always was the same when it came to the creation of standards, and the more Oklahoma closes its eyes and pretends not to look at anyone else's standards, the more its will resemble everyone else's. But they will be By Oklahomans for Oklahomans, and they will be funded by Oklahoma taxpayers, not the Gates Foundation, so it's all good.

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How Merger-Happy Publishing Harmed Education

How sad is it that one can be "the largest education company and largest book publisher in the world" and still not crack the Fortune 1000? Yes, the corporatization of education is a sorry-looking thing, and publishing of any kind is still a bad bet for your portfolio.

I worked in educational publishing in NYC at a time when you honestly needed a scorecard to keep track of who was buying whom. I got a job at Harper & Row Educational one day, moved to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich the next, and saw the ed division at Harper dissolve before Harper & Row itself was bought up by Murdoch, who later merged it with William Collins, another acquisition, and formed HarperCollins, now Harper. Then HBJ (formerly Harcourt Brace & World, before which it was Harcourt Brace & Company, once Harcourt Brace & Howe) left NYC for Orlando and San Diego, where it was purchased by General Cinema Corporation, which soon divested itself of anything having to do with cinema and started calling the publishing division Harcourt Brace & Company. It is now Harcourt, Inc. and is owned by Reed Elsevier, which sold the educational publishing group to Houghton Mifflin, forming Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

The story of the 1990s, by which time I had left NYC and moved upstate, was all about foreign companies (Murdoch's News Corp.; Reed Elsevier, which is British and Dutch) buying up American publishers. Bertelsmann (German) bought Doubleday, Bantam, and Random House. Maxwell (British) bought Macmillan. Viacom, which is American, and which does appear on the Fortune 1000 at rank 210, tried its hand at publishing but couldn't find the profit in it, so it sold many of its holdings to a British company called Pearson. That's how Pearson acquired Scribner, Simon & Schuster, and Prentice Hall. Along with Simon & Schuster, Pearson got several education-related subsidiaries, including Allyn & Bacon and Silver Burdett Ginn.

So over the course of a few decades, foreign companies gobbled up dozens of American publishers that dated back to the 1800s. (Macmillan was 1843, A&B 1868, Silver Burdett 1888. Prentice Hall and Simon & Schuster were relative newcomers at 1913 and 1924 respectively.) These companies simply were not profitable enough for American corporations to take a chance on them.

When fast food companies conglomerate, you run the risk of all the food tasting the same. When educational publishing companies conglomerate, you run a higher risk. When I started in ed publishing in 1980, there were twenty or so companies right in NYC who were trying to capture some part of that market, and other companies (Dick Jane and Sally's Scott Foresman, for example) were scattered across the U.S. That competition gave genuine choices to school districts who were looking for new textbooks or other educational materials. By the time I left in 1991, the market had already shrunk by more than half. And today we are stuck with a small handful of niche publishers and then gigantic megacorps (though not gigantic enough by Forbes's standards) like Pearson, the company everybody loves to hate. As a source of income, publishing just stinks, so, as the author of this Fortune article states, "Testing has helped Pearson reduce its dependence on old-fashioned publishing."

A lot had to go wrong to get us to this point: American publishers had to wear blinders and ignore the movement toward digital publishing; American corporations had to hold their noses when offered a chance at purchasing a publisher; successful European companies (Pearson does rank in the top 100 on the British Stock Exchange, which shows what a sad state British industry is in) had to see the possibilities in cornering the education market worldwide rather than sticking to their own tiny market shares; and everyone involved had to worship at the fire of the global free market. It's not at all clear to me where we go from here.

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