The Washington, D.C.-based think tank Education Sector’s new report Trending Toward Reform: Teachers Speak on Unions and the Future of the Profession examines teachers views on policies that impact their jobs and their views of the unions that represent them.  This rare glimpse into the attitudes of those who are on the front lines of education uncovers a growing disconnect between the interest of teachers – which rightfully is in favor of policies that allow them to best meet the academic needs of students – and the interest of teachers unions, which primarily is a focus on creating and preserving strong political influence.  Some noteworthy results include the following:

• Despite unions’ insistence on lifetime tenure being a “sacred cow,” 61 percent of teachers would be willing to give it up altogether and 63 percent view tenure as a “formality that has little to do with whether a teacher is good or not.”

• A majority (54 percent) of teachers support measuring teacher effectiveness by, in part, assessing the growth of student knowledge while in their classrooms.  Teachers are becoming increasingly supportive of the idea of student assessment-based teacher evaluations, with support growing by 5 percentage points over four years.

• 62 percent of teachers believe unions fail to attempt to “identify ineffective teachers and retrain them,” a responsibility that two-thirds (67 percent) feel should be a priority for the union.

• Nearly half (49 percent) of teachers don’t think that their unions “expand the career ladder” by rethinking new roles and responsibilities of teachers, a teacher-centered reform that unions should embrace and negotiate into district contracts.  In just four years, 20 percent more teachers have become critical of how the unions have handled this issue.

• 46 percent of teachers surveyed said that unions do nothing to “update teachers on new instructional methods” and 47 indicated that unions fail to promote adequate job training at all.

To little surprise, an overwhelming majority of surveyed dues-paying teachers approve of the union’s noncontroversial roles, such as filing grievances (81 percent), protecting against unfair treatment (77 percent), and negotiating contracts (77 percent).  This basic functional role has remained the core of union support for years.

What is both very interesting and quite clear in this report, however, is that teachers unions’ public policy positions are no longer reflective of the beliefs and desires of most teachers.  A pivotal moment for the future of teachers unions is at hand, as the report appropriately concludes:

Whether unions really can provide bread and butter protections for teachers and also advance dramatic reforms to the teaching profession remains an open question.  If they can, now is the time to do it.  In the coming years, the viability of the union will be determined by whether teachers perceive them as being part of the problem or part of the solution for public education.

Contributions to this story were made by FERA education policy research intern Ethan Brooks-McDonald.

B. Jason Brooks is director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @bjbrooksNY.

Source: https://twitter.com/timesunion/statuses/222819606786621443

Times Union education writer Scott Waldman’s well-done story on the New York Education Reform Commission’s first hearing, which took place yesterday in Albany, was posted live on the paper’s website shortly after 6:00 pm.  Mr. Waldman’s story was ahead of the pack, being the first online covering the hearings.  I give him a lot of credit for covering the story as bluntly as he did, stating that “[t]he three-hour hearing largely consisted of advocacy groups pushing the points they have made for years in newspaper editorials, public rallies and at school board meetings.”  The headline when the story was originally posted on the Times Union website also correctly summarized the event: “Education hearing rehashes well-known problems”.

Anyone who attended the hearing would tell you that testimony was provided overwhelmingly by the usual cast of characters representing the education establishment at the Capitol saying the same things they’ve been saying for years about the state’s educational system.  I attended the three-hour hearing and afterwards our organization issued a statement making a similar point to what Mr. Waldman’s story claimed:

“Panelists – made up primarily of representatives of teachers, superintendents, administrators, school board members, and politicians – failed to call for the innovative, dramatic policies needed to drive an overhaul of the state’s education system.  Little, if anything, new was presented: repeated calls from public education’s entrenched special interests for more funding and a repeal of the property tax cap did nothing to inspire the commission with the vision it needs to rebuild the public education system from the ground up.”

Mr. Waldman even highlighted our points about the lack of new, innovative policies that should been the focus on the day: “Jason Brooks, research director for the Foundation for Education Reform and Accountability, said speakers at the hearing failed to present any new solutions.”

What was quite interesting is that, despite what actually went on in the hearing, the Times Union went into full spin-mode at 11:14 pm by changing the original title of the story from “Education hearing rehashes well-known problems” to “A new path for education: Panel explores ways to help kids become higher achievers through better schools.”  Contrary to the revised and misleading headline, the hearing included little, if anything, “new” and there wasn’t any “exploring” new ideas going on.  The revised headline no doubt intended to shed a far more positive light on the hearing, and to no surprise, today’s print edition features the story prominently on page 3 with the new happy-talk headline.

In addition to the Times Union’s tweet for the story posted at 6:28 pm, remaining evidence of the change can be found in the two very different web addresses that now feature the same title and story:

www.timesunion.com/local/article/Education-Hearing-Rehashes-Well-Known-Problems-3697223.php

www.timesunion.com/local/article/A-New-Path-for-Education-3697223.php

Waldman delivered an accurate, timely story on the hearing, but others at the Times Union evidently thought it best to portray the event as meaningful.  One can only hope that Education Reform Commission’s final recommendations live up to “A New Path for Education.”  Albany’s hearing was just the first of many more to come and the commission still holds a great deal of promise for righting the path of the state’s educational system.

B. Jason Brooks is director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @bjbrooksNY.

With a hearty round of congratulatory pats-on-the-back, Governor Andrew Cuomo, State Education Commissioner John King, and the most prominent leaders of New York’s teacher unions, state union head Dick Iannuzzi and New York City teacher union leader Michael Mulgrew, yesterday announced an agreement on a plan to require annual performance reviews for public school teachers.

That’s right: for the first time, New York is on the verge of actually being able to show whether classroom teachers do their job well.  More common-sense than ground-breaking stuff, one could say.

While praise is certainly deserved for Governor Cuomo – who knocked-down the union blockade on this issue with the issuance of a drop-dead date after which he’d take the matter into his own hands – and Commissioner King – who pressed forward tirelessly to ensure the structure of the evaluations were meaningful – any legitimate analysis of what was accomplished here requires at least two components: a sense of context, and questions about the details.

First, some context.

In 2008, Iannuzzi’s NYSUT successfully lobbied the state legislature to prohibit the use of any student test score data at all to any degree in teacher evaluations.  This law actually had to be repealed two years later to make New York competitive for, and eventually win, $700 million in federal Race to the Top education grants.  The feds reasonably required the ability for states to show that teachers were able to be judged on whether they improved student learning.  In addition to repealing the union’s blanket ban on the use of student-performance data, the State Education Department polled district superintendents, school board presidents, and local teacher-union heads and got 91 percent of them to sign a Memorandum of Understanding (essentially a contract) saying they agreed to a teacher evaluation plan based 40 percent on student-outcome measures.

After winning the federal funding, however, the teachers union shifted into full-reverse and sued the state, saying it really didn’t want teachers to be held accountable based on students test scores after all.  In addition to objecting to nearly every other detail in the proposed teacher-evaluation plan, NYSUT wanted to avoid having state grade-level test scores count for 40 percent of the evaluation, and wanted to ensure that at least 80 percent of the entire evaluation could be based on factors negotiated between school districts and the teachers union.  This clearly is not meaningful change.

New Yorkers should not be fooled into thinking that the union now fully embraces the use of data to judge whether classroom teachers are doing their job.  No, instead union officials were dragged kicking and screaming to the table and forced to eat their vegetables by Governor Cuomo and State Education Commissioner King.

Second, the details.

The framework of the new teacher-evaluation plan sounds an awful lot like the plan proposed last year by the State Education Department and which was promptly litigated by the anti-reform teachers union.  As negotiations on the new plan reached their final minutes, NYSUT’s Iannuzzi said that the parties involved were down to debating the use of one word here and another word there, noting that certain words conveyed one meaning to the unions but meant another to those that were seeking genuinely meaningful evaluations.  Until the details of the plan become known, parents and students will not be able to tell how many and how large the loopholes are that have been left in the structure of teacher evaluations.

If there is not a heavy and unavoidable reliance on student performance data, the evaluations frankly will not be measuring whether teachers are causing students to learn.  A December 2011 study by Harvard and Columbia universities found that the impact on test scores is a valid way to measure teacher quality. The study tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years, and found that even having a poor teacher versus an average teacher has a huge effect on a person’s future earnings (almost $300,000). Worse yet, having a poor teacher (as based on student test data) is equivalent to a student missing 40 days of school, or nearly a quarter of the entire school year.  If indeed 80 percent of the entire teacher evaluation is subject to negotiations between school districts and the teachers union, there is cause to worry.  A Buffalo school board member was recently quoted as saying: “No one wants to fight the unions, and this requires us to do that.”  That’s some intestinal fortitude for you.

Using student test score data to evaluate teachers is not a novel concept: a dozen other states already require 50 percent or more of teacher evaluations to be based on student outcomes.  New York isn’t breaking new ground here, it is late to the party.

Good evaluation structures include not only objective measures but subjective ones, too, as the agreed-upon plan does.  Teachers should be repeatedly observed in their classrooms to see how well they’ve implemented the art of teaching.  But we’re talking about real, meaningful observations, not the type that can be found in virtually every public school today.  In fact, NYSUT itself rightly criticized the current process of classroom observations calling them “drive-by evaluations,” with an administrator briefly sitting in the back of the classroom checking boxes on a checklist.  A solution to this would be to have an independent third-party expert observing classrooms guided by a comprehensive and meaningful rubric.  Will local teacher unions allow this?  Will local school boards demand this?  Surely an important detail not to be overlooked.

Critical, too, is to see how the plan handles the four categories of teacher ratings: “ineffective,” “developing,” “effective,” and “highly effective.”  Will those teachers rated “ineffective” be allowed to be fired quickly and easily?  Why allow even one more class of children to suffer?  How long will a teacher rated “developing” be allowed to languish there?  Shouldn’t improvement be required in at least, say, two years?  Will “highly effective” teachers be allowed to earn more than their lower-rated peers, a merit-based concept historically rejected by the unions?

There is little denying that this was a problem needing fixing: the National Council on Teacher Quality recently graded New York a D+ in delivering well-equipped teachers, a C+ in identifying effective teachers and C- in exiting ineffective teachers.  The required use of teacher evaluations is a welcome step in the reform of public education in New York.  Parents, students, and the public in general should be able to know whether teachers are getting their job – educating children – done successfully, and if not, why administrators are continuing to subject students to their classrooms.

Brian Backstrom is President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @nyedreform.

When New York failed in its first attempt to win hundreds of millions of federal dollars in the competitive Race to the Top (RttT) grant program, it was clear that the state’s education leaders had not proposed enough reforms that were designed to increase accountability for increased student learning.  Seeking to avoid being blamed for the loss of an estimated $700 to $800 million in school funding during tough financial times and under intense public and political pressure, leaders of the statewide New York State United Teachers union and the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s large and influential teachers union, caved and ended their long-time opposition to including student achievement results as part of teacher evaluations.  (In 2008, the unions successfully lobbied for a law banning such practice, making New York one of only a few states in the nation with such a policy.)  Without repealing this law, New York didn’t stand a chance at winning a RttT grant.  With great fanfare, the state education commissioner took the podium with these union leaders and announced a plan that included requiring up to 40 percent of each teacher evaluation to be based on some measure of student achievement results.

The state legislature swiftly adopted the plan and it was signed into law by then-Gov. David Paterson in order to put New York in the most competitive position possible for the federal RttT grant.  An impressive 91 percent of the state’s district superintendents, school board presidents, and local teachers union leaders signed memoranda of understanding (MOU) supporting the new teacher evaluation program as part of the state’s round-two RttT application and agreeing to implement the reforms in their local schools.  As clearly stated in the MOU, districts and unions would have to negotiate new contracts in order to implement the plan and implement the new evaluations:

Implementing a comprehensive evaluation system for teachers and principals based on multiple measures of effectiveness, including student achievement measures, which would comprise 40% of teacher and principal evaluations and ratings in accordance with the following minimum requirements:

– 2011-2012: 20 percent student growth on state assessments or comparable measures for teachers in the common branch subjects or ELA and Math in grades four to eight only, and 20 percent other locally selected measures that are rigorous and comparable across classrooms;

– The remaining 60 percent of the evaluations and ratings would be based on locally developed measures (e.g., classroom observations by trained evaluators), according to standards prescribed by the Commissioner.

The seven-page MOU signed by superintendents, school board presidents, and local teachers union leaders required the education leaders to certify that they were “familiar with the State’s Race to the Top grant application [including the teacher evaluation plan] and [were] supportive of and committed to working on all portions of the State Plan.”  The state wisely wanted to ensure that districts fully knew that the grant funding came with an unavoidable commitment for real reform.

The effort on the new teacher evaluation plan and the overwhelming local support paid off, with the federal government awarding New York a $700 million RttT grant in August 2010.

Now that the time has come for the new teacher-evaluation plans to be implemented – evaluations which actually take into consideration whether students are learning or not from individual teachers and thus have one of the first real elements of accountability for the state’s public school teachers – leaders of the entrenched local education bureaucracy are thumbing their collective noses at the state’s new teacher-evaluation law and the leadership at the State Education Department that is desperately trying to implement the plan. Despite districts signing on to the state’s new evaluation system a year and a half ago when money was at stake, more than 4,500 principals now have signed onto a petition opposing implementation of the evaluations, instead arguing for watered-down alternatives that in the end fail to hold teachers and principals accountable for genuine student achievement.

In addition to the push-back from principals, school boards, superintendents, and teachers unions are ignoring the commitments they made to reform.  As announced earlier this week by state education commissioner John King, an amazing 80 percent of of districts eligible for $105 million in School Improvement Grants (SIG) to fund reforms to fix chronically-failing schools have failed to implement the new teacher evaluations, a required component of the grant.  Unless districts have the new teacher evaluation plans in place by January 1, 2012, grant funds to fix their most broken schools could be lost.

When districts and union leaders agreed to implement the teacher-evaluation plans back in May 2010, the MOU signed by 91 percent of the state’s school districts outlined the recourse the state had if districts failed to live up to their commitments, consequences that include the withhold of funds and requiring districts to pay-back grant funds they may have received:

“If the State determines that the LEA is not meeting its goals, timelines, budget, or annual targets or is not fulfilling other applicable requirements, the State grantee will take appropriate enforcement action, which could include…putting the LEA on reimbursement payment status, temporarily withholding funds, or disallowing costs.”

Commissioner King stated on Tuesday, “The last thing the students need is to lose resources because the adults who run those schools won’t fulfill their responsibilities…The clock is ticking.  When the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the money drops off the table, and it will be difficult to get it back.”  King went even further claiming that failing to follow through on implementing new teacher evaluations could result in districts losing federal Teacher Incentive Funds and RttT funding.  These were tough words from the reformer now in charge of overseeing the state education department.  But astute observers couldn’t overlook the wiggle room that the commissioner left for himself and those dissenting districts, claiming that “it will be difficult” – not entirely impossible – for districts to somehow keep the grants even if they fail to follow through on their commitments to implement the new teacher evaluations by the deadline.

Opponents pounced.  The day after Commissioner King’s statement, the superintendent of the Schenectady City School District, John Yagielski, announced that the commissioner had backed down and was allowing districts to keep their grants as long as it simply submitted a progress report outlining where the negotiations between the school board and the teachers union stood.  If the progress report provided insufficient information, the state would then take the step of calling for a “hearing” to examine the matter more closely.  If the hearing found that the steps taken by the districts and teachers unions was insufficient, the grant funds would then be “frozen.”  So much for the tough claims of “When the ball drops at midnight on New Year’s Eve, the money drops off the table.”

If districts and teachers unions are going to continue stonewalling the state’s new teacher-evaluation mandates – well-founded, well-intended, and reasonable reforms that make student achievement a significant factor in determining who has done a good job of teaching and who hasn’t – the State Education Department and Commissioner King should slam closed any perceived loophole and use the tools at its disposal by revoking the grants uncommitted districts have received.  Otherwise it becomes nothing more than simply throwing money at failing schools, a course we know from generations of such practices won’t achieve the dramatic improvements that are needed.

B. Jason Brooks is director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @bjbrooksNY.

The state Board of Regents today will vote on a committee-approved proposal for state aid to school districts for the 2012-13 school year. The Regents proposal, developed over several months by the state Education Department, is merely a recommendation for the governor and state legislature to consider. It otherwise has no effect.

While the Regents proposal is worth a read and has much to commend, its details are likely to be a dead letter that will gather dust after today. That’s unfortunate.

The Regents proposal recommends a $755 million increase in overall school aid, to more than an amazing $20 billion in total for next school year. An increase of this magnitude was once serious money, even as recently as the go-go nineties. Now it’s merely a shade less than 4 percent more than the current year’s state aid.

“High-need” v. “Low-need” School Districts

The Regents proposal calls for further shifting educational funding from so-called “low-need” (suburban) school districts to “high-need” (urban) districts. That is, most of the recommended $755 million increase would go to the latter districts.  Suburban communities typically have much more property wealth, meaning they have a substantially larger property tax base from which to raise locally-funded revenue for education, and these communities in turn tend to spend much more per pupil than high-need areas of the state. Contrary to the ongoing claims from the union-backed Alliance for Quality Education that urban school districts are being “shortchanged” under the current funding system, state aid formulas already heavily favor high-need districts, which receive an average of 4.5 times more aid per pupil than low-need districts, a fact honorably shown by the Board of Regents in its proposal.

In the legislature, where the actual school aid increases will be determined, attention will also be paid to politically influential suburban areas, communities populated by mostly middle class residents who pay very high property taxes and get a relative pittance in state aid. Their state legislators are a sure bet to resist a further shifting of state school aid “shares” among the state’s school districts.

Reforming Building Aid

While political factors on both sides will affect the debate over state aid distribution, many of the details of the Regents aid proposal are worthy of serious consideration by the state legislature. Most important are “expense based aids,” primarily building aid, which the Board of Regents is proposing to change from a spend-to-get entitlement to a more restrictive formula to reduce the long-standing incentive to build more than is prudent or affordable.

From the 2005-06 school year to 2010-11, state expenditures for building aid increased 10 percent annually. A greater share of state aid being skewed toward bricks and mortar means less for general education needs, including staff and supplies. Another cost-shift is skyrocketing pension costs, the elephant-in-the-room that the Regents continually avoid but which belongs front-and-center in any education financing discussion.  It is another issue that may come up in the budget negotiations between Gov. Cuomo and the legislature.

The Regents’ proposed changes for building aid would not take effect until after the next school year to allow for current-year expenses to be reimbursed in the subsequent year. That necessitates the governor and legislature to enact changes now to take effect by state fiscal year 2013-14 and following for any savings to be achieved.

School aid formula changes are often slow to be realized, so it behooves the Regents and Education Department to prioritize from their comprehensive proposal on what really needs to occur now.

Brian Backstrom is President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @nyedreform.

For every claim that class size matters, there are plenty of reputable studies that say it doesn’t, at least within a certain variance of students.  A quality instructor that is able to provide differentiated instruction for various learning levels within a relatively large classroom of students often is more likely to generate better academic results than an average teacher using unwavering direct-instruction techniques in a smaller class of students.

Teacher unions’ efforts to push for smaller class sizes, essentially lobbying for more funding to hire more staff,  is analogous to some self-interested corporation sponsoring research that in the end does little to advance its institutional interest (cigarette manufacturers claiming tobacco use is not injurious, oil companies claiming that drilling has no negative effects on the environment, etc.).  Research funded by a party such as a union or a corporation does not necessarily indicate the research is faulty, but the bias of the source should be understood.

This week the union-supported group Class Size Matters released a PowerPoint showing that class sizes have been increasing annually in New York City since 2007, even when state school aid was still on an upward trajectory (that is, before the cuts of the past two years).  For example, Class Size Matters notes that K-3 classrooms increased from 21 students to more than 23, and from 26 to 26.6 for grades 4-8.

To have a shred of respectability, any discussion about the number of students per classrooms also should include a trend analysis of student-to-teacher ratios, which is the number of students per teacher.   If plenty of adult instructors remain in the classroom providing instruction and assistance to students, class size may not matter at all.

In New York City, there were 14.4 students per classroom teacher in 2010-11.  While class sizes have indeed been inching upward, the student-teacher ratio for New York City has been declining in the last decade, from 15.8 in 2001-02, to 14.6 in 2004-05 to the current leveling off number of 14.4.  Statistically, slightly higher class sizes in the last four years have not resulted in more students per teacher.  This is an important point, but one that often goes unmentioned by those hammering away on the class-size issue.

There is cause for concern about New York City’s schools, however, even when looking at student-teacher ratio figures.  The city’s ratio of 14.4 students per teacher remains higher than the state average of 12.9, and the state average is lower because the average ratio outside of New York City is lower still, at 12.2 students per classroom teacher.  With a greater concentration of high-needs students in New York City compared to the rest of the state, the regional discrepancy in student-teacher ratios lends support to the argument to shift funding from lower-need districts to the city.

But even student-teacher ratio data should not be viewed as the ultimate force on funding decisions.  More appropriate is the quality of instructor and the school’s instructional model being used.  The KIPP network of public charter schools, for example, average 27 to 35 students per class – a far greater number than those being whined about by the teachers unions – and yet on average KIPP charter schools regularly out-perform district schools.  So before policy makers get too caught-up in any class-size debate, let’s make sure the right person is teaching the right stuff in the right way before giving further credence to limiting the number of students that go into that classroom.  Without the academic focus, the class-size debate is revealed to be more about the wants of adults rather than needs of schoolchildren.

Peter Murphy is Policy Director for the NY Charter Schools Association and writes The Chalkboard Blog and may be followed on Twitter @PeterMurphy26.

Last school year, spending for K-12 education in New York came in at more than $57 billion.  Of that expenditure total, state funding covered just over 40 percent, the lowest percentage contribution since 1997-98, and down from its 20-year high of 48 percent in 2001-02.

Part of the recent decline in the state contribution share is that school aid itself has been cut in each of the last two years, and simultaneously federal “stimulus” funds for education helped boost total education expenditures.

But talk to almost anyone with a pulse here in New York, land of record-high local property taxes, and they would justifiably argue that the state should contribute a much higher percentage for education, which should in turn translate to less reliance on property taxes.   Many other state governments finance more than half total cost for education.

It is critical to understand, however, that the 40 percent New York state government contribution rate is an overall average percentage, with actual rates varying to a wide degree among the state’s 696 school districts.  For districts that have lower property wealth, which mostly are in upstate and rural areas, state aid finances half or more of their budgets.  By contrast, many downstate suburban districts, which generally have much higher property wealth, have as little as five percent of their expenses financed by state aid.

The NY Ed Reform Blog recently compared one upstate and one downstate school district of similar size and found the upstate, poorer district got $13 million in state aid, which worked out to be $9,172 per pupil, compared to the wealthier downstate district which received less than $2 million, or only $1,275 per pupil.  Such a glaring difference in state support would appear to offset to a great degree the income and wealth disparities – exactly the result state policy makers try to achieve with the aid formula.

A study released this week by the teacher union-backed Alliance for Quality Education complained that state aid cuts came in larger nominal dollar amounts from poorer districts (i.e., upstate and western New York primarily) than in downstate “wealthier” districts.  According to AQE’s study Back to Inequality, the poor and poorest districts were cut this school year by $843 and $547 per pupil, respectively, while the “high wealth” districts lost only $269 per pupil.

The simple truth, however, is more complicated.  Any school district that receives more state aid per pupil, and more state aid in nominal terms, and is more reliant on this source of funding, will mathematically receive a higher funding cut in nominal dollar terms as state aid declines.   As AQE’s own numbers show, the same school districts with the higher nominal dollar reductions got higher per pupil aid hikes when school aid was increasing in 2007.

The Cuomo administration – the target of this AQE study and the teacher unions backing this effort – took great care when allocating school aid cuts to ensure that higher percentage reductions were demanded from wealthier school districts.  Because poor districts get so much more state aid than wealthier ones, as they should, the nominal reduction when there is less aid available might appear to be larger, but wealthier districts clearly are getting a higher percentage cut and thus sharing the pain disproportionately, again as they should.

Even after two rounds of state aid cuts, the reality is that poor school districts still receive much higher state aid levels than wealthier districts on a per pupil basis.  But that doesn’t suit AQE’s politically-motivated agenda, and so that fact isn’t acknowledged anywhere in its “study.”

Let’s go one step further.   Even using the term “wealthy” to describe many downstate school districts can be labeled misleading, as only a few on Long Island or in the lower Hudson Valley have Hamptons-style mansions populated by the rich and famous.  Instead, many “average wealth” and “high wealth” school districts are populated mostly by middle-class New Yorkers with two income-earners already paying property taxes among the highest in the entire nation.  These same New Yorkers also pay high income taxes to the state, most of which then goes for state aid to poorer school districts.

No one likes school aid cuts, and poor districts with smaller property tax bases and heavily reliant on state school aid clearly face challenges.  But higher school aid for them is unlikely to come from wealthier areas, whose residents also believe they get gyped by the state.

The quest for more education revenue demands biting the bullet on the expense side – something the teacher unions and AQE are loathed to do and are trying to avoid.  As long as New York’s economy remains in the doldrums, focusing more on the expense side of education, including redirecting more toward actual student needs, is both unavoidable and necessary.

Brian Backstrom is President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @nyedreform.

The Sunday Albany Times Union published a commentary by James Hoffman, Ed.D, the superintendent of schools for the Fonda-Fultonville School District, a rural area in Fulton County, west of Schenectady that complained about the inequities in spending among school districts.

Not for the first time has a school district official complained that his or her community does not get their “fair share” of state aid.  Travel to every corner of New York State and you’ll hear agreement on one issue:  the state’s school aid formula is unfair and denies their school district its “fair share.”

Dr. Hoffman dusts off the old staple of upstate versus downstate “wealthy districts,” and declares that upstate New York “has been under attack fiscally for the past two decades …and downstate has won.”

That would certainly come as news to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity crowd, which spent years litigating the state’s school aid formula which it believed cheated New York City, that very large downstate school district.  The state Court of Appeals largely agreed with CFE’s case, and the city was given several billions more in dollars beginning in 2007, though every school district in those ensuing years also received state aid increases.

School aid hikes came to a halt last year and are not returning at least in the short-term.  Combine the state’s fiscal frugality with the new state-imposed property tax cap, and upstate school districts are crying foul.  In fact, many of them, according to Dr. Hoffman, believe they will go bankrupt within the next three years.

Dr. Hoffman, like so many upstate school officials, believes upstate gets cheated on funding since the state still provides school aid to wealthier downstate school districts which in turn are able to spend far more per pupil.  For example, he cites the Bronxville School District in Westchester County that spends $10,000 more per pupil than his Fonda-Fultonville District.

Interestingly, both school districts have a similar student enrollment of around 1,500 students.  The inequity, however, may be more of a complaint for Bronxville, since Dr. Hoffman’s Fonda-Fultonville district receives more than $13 million is school aid compared to less than $2 million for Bronxville.  That amounts to about $1,275 per pupil in state aid for downstate Bronxville while upstate Fonda-Fultonville gets approximately $9,172.

Bronxville and most other downstate school districts are indeed “wealthier” than upstate districts and, accordingly, choose to spend far more per pupil based almost entirely from their own local property taxes.  In Bronxville, state aid accounts less than 5 percent of the district’s budget, while Fonda-Fultonville has more than half its budget financed by the state.  Dr. Hoffman’s gripe that Bronxville spends more per pupil is the choice of Bronxville residents, rather than the fault of the state aid formula, which pays his school district more than six times the amount.  Still, upstate school districts like Fonda-Fultonville do not have the property tax base to increase local spending substantially.

Dr. Hoffman’s gripes about school aid aside, he would be better off focusing on his other point about eliminating state mandates that drive school district costs, including employee pension costs. If the situation for upstate districts with a small local tax base is that desperate to provide a sound, basic education, school districts can and should make the case for a voter override of the property tax cap.

Absent any relief from state mandates along with continued stagnant levels of school aid, school district bankruptcy could be the final outcome that would get the state’s attention for drastic mandate relief and other reform.

Brian Backstrom is President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @nyedreform.

At the pace things are going, New York State may be lucky to have a meaningful teacher evaluation plan by the time the next generation of school children begin heading off to class.

Nearly 18 months after the state legislature enacted a new teacher evaluation system, backers of the status quo continue to battle virtually all attempts at this reform.  In the latest salvo, more than half the principals of public schools on Long Island, representing 90 of the Island’s 124 school districts, signed a letter that was sent this week to the state Board of Regents objecting to the plan.  The principals wrote that they are “very concerned” the state-required change is being “imposed in a rapid manner and without high-quality evidentiary support.”

Hogwash.  It is simply part of the ongoing attempt to avoid transforming the public education system into one that actually holds the adults accountable for growth – or lack thereof – in student learning.

The Long Island principals instead want any new system to first be tried out on a “piloted” basis, meaning just a handful of schools would be picked to test out this crazy notion that teachers have some responsibility for whether the kids in their classrooms actually learn anything.  But these principals then go on to discourage any use of individual teacher evaluations, instead wanting to use “school-wide achievement results”–if they are used at all—to rate all teachers in one big blob.  Makes it kind of hard to identify and fire just the bad apples this way, doesn’t it.

It’s a scary thought when so many educators from the Long Island suburbs, places that are home to what many consider to be “good” schools, are recoiling and resisting the notion of using student assessment results even as part of the evaluation of teachers’ performance.

The principal cabal also objects to the state’s teacher evaluation system saying, without any evidence whatsoever, that it will harm the “nurturing relationship between teacher and student.”  What? Checking to see whether someone actually can deliver instruction effectively harms the teacher-student relationship more than allowing incompetence to remain in the classroom year after year?  Not even the head of the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), Richard Iannuzzi, who was a teacher for many years on Long Island, was buying this pap from the school principals.  “I give a lot more credit to teachers with respect to the fear that they will start to do things differently and make strategic decisions as where they place special needs students,” he told Newsday.

Mr. Iannuzzi may have some pride of authorship and be a little sensitive to criticism since he and his New York City teacher-union counterpart basically negotiated the evaluation system with the Regents and the legislature last year, with not a school principal representative in sight (look who’s NOT is the photo).

Itself reeling from the deal it negotiated, NYSUT subsequently sued the state over the implementation of the plan for, among other issues, allowing through regulation the use of state assessment results to comprise the full 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation.  The union won at the state trial court level, a painful body-blow for those hoping for an increased level of meaningful accountability in public education.  The state has appealed.

While waiting for the next round of legal determinations, the principals – whose role would be to do actual evaluations of their teachers – are even softer on the subject than the state and NYC teacher unions (union locals in Buffalo and Rochester this past week also objected to the state evaluation system).

It is a wonder why these Long Island school principals took so long to state their objections.  What is clear is that the education establishment-types are throwing up roadblocks to real reform the closer those changes come to being put in place.  New York State Education Commissioner John King is right to stand his ground, one that favors good education, even if he does give the Johnny-Come-Lately crowd a courtesy meeting.

If ever the state is going to have an effective evaluation system of the teachers of children, it’s going to have to be a stronger system rather than watered-down further as advocated by Long Island’s school establishment or as is being run through the court system by the teachers union.

B. Jason Brooks is director of research at the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @bjbrooksNY.

Will New York State’s poor performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP) tests this year lure policy makers into raising taxes?

With the recent federal release of the dismal and stagnant performance of New York students, many of us are waiting and watching for that nexus to emerge.  Thankfully, we haven’t seen it made – at least not yet – by the usual advocates for tax hikes to fund more education spending, saying that it is really only more public dollars that will equate to better results.   At the time of this writing, there is no mention whatsoever of the state’s dreadful NAEP results on most of the education establishment, higher spending-type websites.

The results of the NAEP show that only 36 percent of New York State’s fourth grade students are proficient in mathematics, down from 40 percent in 2009, and lower than the national average of 40 percent. Eighth grade math results for New York also were lower than the national average. Reading results on the NAEP for New York were comparatively similar for 8th grade.  Only in fourth grade reading did the state manage to eke out a score better than the national average.  (Eighth grade reading results are here.)

At first glance, the lessening achievement gaps between white students and racial minorities is encouraging, showing a narrowing gap in mathematics since the early nineties.  A minute longer look, however, shows that this has more white students doing worse than anyone else doing better.

New York State’s Education Commissioner, John King, described the NAEP results as “disappointing and unacceptable,” while NAEP director David Driscoll said that New York and two other states “stood virtually still” since 2003.

Before More Money, Reform

One of the loudest chants to tax more has been coming from the state teachers union, New York United Teachers (NYSUT) and the New York City teachers union, the United Federation of Teachers.  But does anyone still really believe that higher taxes will bring about better education results? Annual state school aid increases since the 1990s, and especially from 2003 to 2009, did not result in better NAEP scores. That much is clear, and reinforced even more with the release of these latest data.

What should come before any increase in spending is even considered is the institution of stronger outcome-based accountability measures.  Such reforms include, but are not limited to: a strengthening the state teacher-evaluation mandates, a system that was neutered by the courts when the union sued to make teacher performance assessment only part of collective bargaining; removing high-cost mandates on school districts and charter schools, especially those unrelated to actually doing a good job teaching children; controlling outlandish pension costs including by creating a Tier VI system for new employees; and, providing more options and the means by which parents with children in bad schools can enroll them in better public and non-public schools.

Let’s embrace what we already know: there is not a shred of valid data showing that spending hikes on the public education system as currently structured improves results.

If the proponents of taxing more and spending more on education would show even a whiff of the same zeal for accountability-based education reform, the state is likely to avoid the same shopworn lament about low student academic outcomes two, five, and ten years from now.

Brian Backstrom is President of the Foundation for Education Reform & Accountability and may be followed on Twitter at @nyedreform.