Leonie Haimson, of the parents’ advocacy group Class Size Matters
A new math gets applied to local school budgets
By Chris Lombardi
When Dusty Miller, principal of the Museum School on West 17th Street, sat down to put together her budget for 2007–2008, the task was different from years previous. Sitting in her office last week, Miller told Chelsea Now that she had learned to think in a whole new way.
“I had to look at every single item,” she said, “and then look at our goals,” from test scores to reducing class size to discipline. “I had to keep asking: Does this [line] item meet my goals for the students?” This “new way of thinking,” said Miller, is all part of the brand-new funding scheme of the Department of Education, which also puts more responsibility for all aspects of a school’s performance on the principals themselves.
Then, just a month ago, Miller got some unexpected news: In addition to the budget she’d worked out so carefully, her school was receiving $200,000, their share of new “Contracts for Excellence” funds coming from New York State. But with Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s Department of Education, she said, such surprises are almost routine.
“I will tell you,” she said with a trademark smile. “We have certainly moved from a state of stasis to a state of dynamism.” That’s one way to describe the changes at DOE, where if you blink, you might miss a reversal of the laws of gravity.
Chelsea principals, like those across New York City, are beginning this fall with entirely new budgets, as part of the latest wave of changes under Klein’s “Children First” program. It starts with a new budgeting system called Fair Student Funding, which funds schools per pupil enrolled; most Chelsea and Clinton schools are seeing significant increases under the plan. It continues with the DOE’s Contract for Excellence, the schools’ first direct share of the funds from the 1993 Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit, which will bring $258 million into city schools this year and which is being fed into many of the increases in those FSF-driven budgets.
The new budgets are controversial, however. While Chancellor Joel Klein has pledged that “schools will receive funds based primarily on the learning challenges of the children they serve,” many advocates charge that the changes being implemented are only making an inequitable system more so.
Fair student funding, for some
The FSF’s “weighted” funding method, already in use in San Francisco and some other cities, gives schools a static amount per student, then adds more for each student according to special needs. If the student transfers to another public school, that amount moves with the student. The result: Low-performing schools may now receive funds directly proportional to their needs. To Miller, who heads the Museum School, the system makes all the sense in the world: “Each student is individual, and they have a right to the resources demanded by their particular situation.”
Klein, speaking to the District 2 Community Education Council this past spring, called FSF a combination of smart business practices and social justice. The “old method,” he emphasized, reinforced the system’s inequity by maintaining budgets for the best-performing schools at previous-year levels (or increasing their allotments), and leaving the budgets of low-performing, high-needs schools the same as in prior years except for special and remedial programs. Under this system, there was a re-allotment of funds toward high-needs schools, but it was largely insufficient.
One local school that has seen its funding shift dramatically from FSF is P.S. 11/William Harris Elementary School on West 21st Street, whose previous funding level was $2,635,253. Under FSF, its funding has grown to $2,817,623, an increase of $182,370. Another, more dramatic, example is Bayard Rustin High School, which has received nearly a million more this year under FSF for a total of $10,087,918. On the other hand P.S. 33, the elementary school on Ninth Avenue that moved firmly out of the “high-needs” category just last year, would in theory receive about $7,000 less under FSF, in part because they jettisoned their middle school last year, though no school in the entire city is set to lose any funds during the next two years.
To advocates like Leonie Haimson, of the parents’ advocacy group Class Size Matters, and parents like Arielle Hart, of the District 2 Community Council, the new method is both too mechanistic and too unrealistic. In May, Hart told Chelsea Now that FSF’s per-pupil formula worked against more experienced teachers, given the increased amount of discretion available to principals and the market-oriented approach of the school-choice process. “They’re budgeting it so that there’s a greater incentive to have junior teachers teaching,” said Hart. Haimson pointed to a list of 47 low-performing schools that were similarly scheduled to receive no increase, and said, “They don’t get that failing schools need more support, not less.”
Contracts for Excellence, or for elitism?
The controversy over FSF intensified when Klein first unveiled the Contracts for Excellence, his plan for how to spend the funds from the CFE lawsuit. In a letter to the State Education Department in July, Klein said that $138 million would be given to these high-need schools; principals would be given discretion on how to spend it, within the requirements of the CFE suit, which focused on teacher quality, restructuring, class-size reduction and new preschools. The result: “[The principals] have proposed to spend over $66 million of these funds on class-size reduction, most for the purchasing of additional classroom teachers,” Klein said.
In practice, that meant that P.S. 11’s FSF boost was completely covered by funds from the lawsuit, since its Contract grant was over $200,000, while Bayard Rustin’s extra million was subsidized heavily by over $300,000 from the Contract.
None of that was good enough for either CFE or Class Size Matters, both of whom immediately asked the state, in writing, to block Klein’s plan. CFE’s Javier Gomez told Chelsea Now on Monday that the Contracts for Excellence plan did not fulfill its own goals, as set by Klein in July testimony to the City Council: “Our resources, energy and efforts should focus heavily on those students for whom educational quality historically has been the most elusive: the economically disadvantaged, those who are still learning English, those with a history of persistent academic failure and those with special needs,” Klein said back then.
Instead, said Gomez, too many Contract grants are going to high-performing schools such as Stuyvesant High School. Haimson, of Class Size Matters, added that too many needy schools were left out of CFE funding entirely, and that they face actual budget cuts under FSF unless their allocation changes. Thus, she said, FSF may very well enshrine the inequity the plans claim to address.
When asked about the schools still left behind by the new FSF budgets, DOE representatives would only say that many schools are still receiving large amounts in targeted funds—for literacy “ramp up,” bilingual or special education programs, for example—and that overcrowding will be addressed by the DOE’s new $12 billion capital plan, which includes “60,000 new seats.” (More on that plan in a future issue of Chelsea Now.)
A close look at some of Chelsea’s low-performing elementary, middle and high schools budgets provides support for either side in this debate. In addition to the schools noted above, Adolph Ochs Elementary School in Clinton gained $537,000 under FSF, including its $370,000 Contract allotment, and even the Museum School, which also had a flat budget from having cast off its middle school last year, had a special $200,000 grant for “class-size reduction coaching.”
But advocates also point out that high-performing schools like M.S. 104/Simon Baruch on East 21st Street, the closest thing Chelsea has to a zoned middle school, are also receiving significant increases, and that if the intent was to redirect funds to the neediest schools, these don’t meet that criteria.
Baruch will receive over a million dollars in additional funding this year, including $400,000 in Contract funding for “class-size reduction.” Another example is the huge Lab School for Collaborative Studies, the innovative, super-competitive school on West 17th Street. The school, which even with its overcrowded classes had over 90 percent passing Regents in English and math last year, received close to $400,000 in Contract funds for its two schools.
But education advocate Clara Hemphill, founder of InsideSchools.org, warned against assuming that just because a school’s test scores are good, it isn’t in deep need.
“The Lab School got hit pretty hard in last year’s budget cuts,” she said. With 1,000 students, most in the middle school, she added, some extra support may indeed be needed. “They have huge classes!” said Hemphill.
About those class sizes
Overall, the DOE plan calls for cutting the average class size from 26.7 students to 24.3 students for the school year—a target decried as far too modest by advocates. In addition to the smallness of the decrease, Haimson found the entire Contract for Excellence wanting.
“There are no specific goals, no timelines, no procedures—and no accountability,” said Haimson, using one of the DOE’s favorite words. “What happens when they miss their goals again?”
Haimson told Chelsea Now that the Contracts are just another step in the DOE’s plan to create a “market-based” school system, which is destined to be far more inequitable than the one it replaced. She noted that starting next year, under “Children First,” principals can be removed if students fail to progress, and their schools can in some cases be closed.
“They’re starving the schools that need the funds the most, and setting up the principals for take the rap,” said Haimson.
In many ways, say advocates, the dispute over funding comes down to a difference in philosophy, one not easily remedied. If the market-oriented approach proves a failure, opponents agree, it will take time to do any possible damage.
Museum School’s Dusty Miller isn’t scared by talk of “the market,” or of “taking the rap.” She said last Wednesday that she when she thinks of making needed changes, she often tries to remember organizations like Bloomingdale’s.
“If you look and see ways in which something that used to work just doesn’t,” said Miller, “if your product is no longer sufficient to meet the need—not that children are a product—but your way of working may just have to change dramatically.”
