Communities cut services, raise taxes
to plug gap in state pension funds

NEW YORK — P.S. 18 fits with the light-industrial ambience of its neighborhood in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan.

The converted candy factory sits amid a city Sanitation Department garage, a cable-TV truck depot and an MTA bus terminal a block from the Harlem River.

The playground is a small patch of asphalt surrounded by a fence and tucked next to the garage. The gym is small (about 3,000 square feet) and interspersed with posts that make playing most games impossible. There are no crossing guards to help the children, most of whom range in age from 5 to 14, cross the four lanes on Broadway near the school on Ninth Avenue, far from the glitter of Times Square about 8 miles to the south.

"When one of my students gets killed, then we'll get some crossing guards,'' the principal, Aurea Porrata-Doria, commented bitterly.

Teacher Crystal Felix readies her windowless classroom for the 28 sixth-graders she's expected to teach. Last year she taught first grade, but the school was shifted from an early childhood learning center to a K-8 school.

"I can adjust," she said.

Rosemary Salce is trying to adjust, too. The school's only guidance counselor was sitting in her office, which had been converted from a bathroom. It smells when toilets are flushed elsewhere in the building, she said. The office is so tiny that it has barely room for two chairs.

"It's frustrating," she said. "I'd love to have groups of four or five in here," or talk to parents in private.

"We never get enough money for what we need,'' Porrata-Doria complained. "We need literacy and math supplies. Science material is always short. We don't have enough books. Dictionaries are a luxury."

P.S. 18 is neither the best nor the worst of the 1,100 public schools that serve 1.1 million children in New York City. But it does embody many of the problems the state's highest court cited when it ordered the Legislature to provide more money for the city's schools: overcrowded classrooms, paltry supplies and inexperienced teachers.

The Legislature punted the court's mandate this year, failing to agree not only on how much extra the city schools should get, but on how to raise the money to pay for it. In the wake of the failure of the Legislature to act, the court appointed a three-member panel to decide the money issue. Its report, due out at the end of the month, is expected to kick off another round of legislative proposals and, potentially, lawsuits as well.

Meanwhile, as Michael Rebell, head of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group that started the lawsuit more than a decade ago, said, "kids can't wait for this to go through the Court of Appeals." He hopes to use a court order, expected to be handed down in January, as a lever to get the Legislature to pass a bill to increase aid to needy school districts all over the state.

While education is arguably the most important service the state provides, the Legislature and Gov. George Pataki haven't come to grips with the fact that, as the Court of Appeals put it, many public-school students in New York City are not getting the "sound, basic education" to which the state constitution says they're entitled.

Many New York students are getting far more than that. Overall, test scores are up. New York is among the nation's leaders in high school graduates going to college; New York students dominate many national awards and its teachers are among the best trained.

But even Thomas Hobart, the president of New York State United Teachers, acknowledges, "Excellence is not everywhere."

Beyond New York City

While the difference is narrowing, there is a significant gap between the performance of suburban and urban schools, and between white and minority students.

The problem isn't limited to New York City. Schools in other large cities, including Yonkers, Rochester, Buffalo and Syracuse, as well in other smaller districts, are failing their children as well.

Judgments like that can be made because education is one of the few services government provides where there is a reasonably accurate measurement of results: student test scores.

Those scores and financial records show that while New York spends more per pupil than all but one other state, the results are only middle of the pack.

A few numbers: New York spent $39 billion on education last year, or $11,827 per pupil, the most of any state except Connecticut and 41 percent above the national average.

The state, however, ranked only 27th in the scores of fourth-graders on math tests, and 24th in eighth-grade reading tests. It had the worst rate of graduation for black students (35 percent) and Hispanic students (32 percent) in the country.

Some analysts point out that many factors outside school, like poverty, health and family structure, affect student performance. To try to measure the effects of outside influences on school performance, a researcher for the Manhattan Institute tried to quantify those factors. The researcher, Jay Greene, concluded that New York gets less value for education dollar spent than any other state except New Jersey and Connecticut.

The major reason for the high cost is teacher salaries and benefits, which account for about 60 percent of all school spending — an average of $56,927 a year or $43.71 per required work hour, according to figures from Rochester's Center for Governmental Research. Starting teacher salaries in New York, $36,387 last year, were ahead of all other states except Alaska and New Jersey, according to the National Education Association.

Difficult conditions

Teacher salaries in New York City are not among the state's highest, even though arguably they have the greatest challenges.

"I have a classroom with 34 students, which is too many,'' said Julia Haltiwanger, who teaches seventh-grade math and science at P.S. 189, which is on the border of the Brownsville and Crown Heights sections of Brooklyn.

She graduated from college in 2002 and earned $39,000 last year as a first-year teacher in the city system. "We have four computers in the classroom, none of which works, and a printer that doesn't work," she said.

"We're missing some textbooks," she went on. "For 1,200 students, we have one gym teacher. The classrooms aren't big enough. My phone is hanging out of the wall.

"I thought it was going to be hard but I didn't know how hard," said Haltiwanger, 24, who is considering leaving teaching next year to go to graduate school.

Conditions such as she described and the P.S. 18 officials complained about are a major reason for the relatively poor performance of the city schools, advocates for spending more money there say.

"The majority of the city's public high school students leave high school unprepared for more than low-paying work, unprepared for college and unprepared for duties placed on them by a democratic society," the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, the group suing for more state aid, said in court papers.

"Teachers in New York City are much more likely to leave than teachers upstate," said state Education Commissioner Richard Mills, long an advocate of sending more money to urban districts. "Kids going to a city school are more likely to have a brand new teacher, a brand new superintendent. They're more likely to have old books. These deficits accumulate."

Critics: City could make do

There's a reason that Haltiwanger's phone hadn't been fixed: The city Division of School Facilities management gets 30,000 work orders a year, but completes only half to two-thirds of them, according to the court papers.

The advocates of the city schools eventually want another $5.6 billion spent on them annually. If other needy districts are counted in, the price tag rises to more than $8.5 billion, plus almost $9 billion more for capital projects in the city.

While some critics say the city could make do if it spent the $12 billion it has now more wisely, few politicians have made that case. The sticking point instead has been where that money is to come from, especially in light of the fact that New Yorkers are already the highest taxed people in America. Beyond a proposal by Pataki to dedicate a few hundred million dollars from new gambling revenues, politicians haven't been specific about the source.

It's not hard to see why. To fund the new spending through the state income tax, which proponents see as the most "progressive'' way to raise the money, the top rate would have to increase far above the current 7.7 percent.

And to many who don't live in the cities and other poor districts that would get more money under the plan being pushed by the courts, the idea of sending even more state tax money to needy schools looks very different.

"We hardly get anything back now for our schools from Albany. It's absurd,'' said Denise Cypher of Rye, a financial analyst who is married to a lawyer and who has two children in the local schools. A third child graduated from Rye High School last year.

"Sending more? That's not going to happen,'' she said. "We should keep more of what we have."

Her district, which plans to spend about $40 million this year, is getting only about $2.2 million from Albany, or only about 5.5 percent of its budget. The statewide average is about 47 percent, while New York City gets about 51 percent.

While advocates for the low-wealth districts think that people in affluent communities like Rye could afford to pay more — since the average household income in the city is about $275,000 and the median value of homes is about $500,000, according to the 2000 census — most residents are already paying school property taxes far into five figures and are loathe to pay more.

"Two-point-two million, whoop-de-doo," Cypher said. "Given the income taxes we pay, how little we get back from it in the form of education aid … I don't understand how we can do any more."

Divided responsibility

Like most states, New York divides the responsibility for raising money to pay for schools between local school districts and the state. This year, the state share of education expenses is about 47 percent, localities 49 percent and the federal government about 4 percent. The state raises the bulk of its money from the income, business and sales taxes, as well as lottery receipts. Most local funds, however, are raised through the property tax.

In an attempt to lessen the disparities between districts, the state parcels out aid based in part on the average income and the property wealth of the district. Even though that system has been distorted by a political deal that divides the state money by geography as well (13 percent for Long Island, 37 percent for New York City and 50 percent for the rest of the state) the formula does have the effect of lessening spending disparities, although not nearly as much as critics would like.

In Rye, for example, the per-pupil spending is about $16,000. That allows the district to pay teachers as much as $107,000 a year and pay attention to individual students in a way that most urban districts can just dream about.

Cypher recalled that her older son, who likes to write, had a teacher mentor in all four years of high school who helped him develop that talent.

"Robert could go to him and talk about the structure, the development of his writing," she said of her son. "Our schools, I love 'em. I feel blessed to live here.''

New York City parents have long been aware of this disparity. The seeds of the CFE lawsuit were sown in Washington Heights, where Robert Jackson, a parent and school-board member a decade ago and now a member of the City Council, was angry that the schools his three daughters attended had to cut programs because of reductions in education aid from Albany.

"As a school-board member, I was the bearer of bad news," he recalled, "and things were bad enough already.

"This was the most overcrowded district in the city," he recalled. "We had double sessions; involuntary busing; 1,000 kids bused to a district south of here; 1,300 Spanish-speaking kids and one bilingual coordinator."

He helped to form the CFE, which sued to make the state provide all children with equal educations.

But in 1993, a court ruled that the state constitution didn't require the state to provide equal education to all children. It suggested another line of attack: that there was a requirement that each child receive a "sound, basic education." The parents filed another lawsuit.

Walking the walk

On the first day of the trial on that issue, Oct. 12, 1999, Jackson led a group of about 40 people on a 12-mile hike from his neighborhood to the courthouse in Foley Square in lower Manhattan.

Later, he would be part of a group that walked 150 miles to Albany when the case got to the state's highest court, the Court of Appeals. That court ruled in their favor on June 26, 2003, and gave the Legislature until the end of July 2004 to craft a solution — a deadline the Legislature failed to meet.

Jackson has a solution to that as well: "Albany is not working. We should put 'em in jail. All 213 of 'em," he said at a recent CFE meeting in Manhattan. "Bet they'd come up with a solution real quickly."

Short of that, it's unclear what the solution will be, since, in the end, the court cannot appropriate money and seems to have no way to force the Legislature to do that, either.

CFE officials are hoping that the court order expected in January will spur the Legislature next year to pass a bill increasing aid to New York City and other needy districts.

Some lawmakers are skeptical.

"I think New York needs some big changes, but New York is not so good with big changes," said Assemblywoman Sandra Galef, D-Ossining.

© 2004, Gannett News Service