ALBANY — Here is the transcript of a 50-minute interview with state Education Commissioner Richard Mills.

Q: A report out yesterday (by the Education Trust) said that New York has the biggest funding gap between rich and poor districts of any state in the country. What do we need to do about that?

A: What we need to do is scrap the state-aid formula. ... It's been three years since they've used the formula. The formula as it exists has so many different adjustments to it. It doesn't really equalize at all.

There is tremendous pressure on the political system to increase everyone. If you have to increase everyone, you can't send scarce resources to those with the highest needs.

If you want to close the gap in achievement, you have to close other kinds of gaps.

Teachers in New York City are much more likely to leave than teachers upstate. 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.

The political process requires that everyone come home and say, 'We don't have much money, but I've been able to get you 3 percent or 4 percent more.'

What we need to do is provide the increases where they're needed most. More than 40 percent of the kids are in just five school districts. And they are poor. And in the poor districts we're spending a couple of thousand less (per pupil) than in the well-off districts.

Q: But there is some equalization going on, isn't there? I was talking to people in Rye this week. Their budget is about $42 million and they get $2 million from the state. I was up in Broadalbin-Perth a few weeks ago. They're building a $36 million addition to their school. The state is paying 95 percent of the cost. I think they get something like two-thirds of their operating budget from the state. So isn't there some equalization going on?

A: There is some but it is not sufficient to close the gap the report talked about. … The Education Trust report did not surprise anyone who has been following this. The courts have been talking about it for decades. I'm sure you're familiar with the Regents' state aid-to-education proposal. In all the analysis that goes into it, there is information about income and poverty and all the problems they encounter. Why would you expect a gap to not exist?

Q: So we need even more money for poor districts, you're saying.

A: Yes. The whole idea behind education is a level playing field.

Q: But if a local district wants to spend extravagantly, which I think a lot of them do, that's OK, isn't it?

A: I think they can.

Q: If they want to have an Ultimate Frisbee team or a writing tutor for every high school student they can, but you can't expect everyone to have that.

A: No. But everyone should have the resources sufficient to educate all children to the standards. Standards are not some aspirational level. They are what everyone should learn in math, science, history and the rest.

Q: In Rochester in 1987, there was an attempt made to level the playing field. The teachers got a 40 percent raise over the life of the contract, with the idea being to improve the students' performance to the level of the suburbs. It didn't work. Rochester is now worse off than any of the other of the big five. Critics say just throwing money at the problem is not the answer. … Adam Urbanski (president of the Rochester teachers' union) thinks that kids come to school with such severe problems outside school, like their family situation, poverty, even health issues, that you can't really expect them to perform to the same level as suburban kids.

A: I'm not going to debate Adam. He's not here. Let me take the personality out of it. I don't accept the excuses. It's self-evident that some youngsters come to school with problems. … That's why, for children who can't see the blackboard, (you get them glasses) that's a pretty simple fix. That's why schools have breakfast programs, and lunch programs. It's hard to do well in school if you're hungry. So feed the child. We can't accept the dollars for our salary and make excuses for our failures. If there are health issues, we can provide clinics and health care and find ways to get that barrier out of the way.

I remember last spring, the Regents and I visited schools in the South Bronx. There was one high school (the Health Opportunity High School) where the kids were just like everybody else in the South Bronx. They came from a poverty background.

The school administration decided that all of the kids would set foot on a college campus so they could visualize what they look like. They hired a young guy, set up a very elaborate extra-help program. The principal set up a system so he knew exactly where everybody was in terms of their performance on mid-term exams. …

When you were in difficulty, you were expected to show up for extra help. If you didn't show up, you got a call, and then your parents got a call. Or if you didn't have a parent, then your grandparent or the caregiver or whoever it was. They had a full-court press to make sure these kids got the extra help.

I talked to kids there who had taken the exams five or six times. Youngsters who did abysmally the first time, getting a 14 or 15. The attitude could have been, 'What do you expect? This is the South Bronx. Poor family.'

But this school is organized differently. They got him extra help. … He still had to go on his college visit like everyone else. And four or five attempts later, he passed. I later learned he graduated, and is now attending a SUNY school.

The goal is to educate all these youngsters and do whatever it takes. In New York City, they've always had large numbers of uncertified teachers and those teachers were always in the poorest schools. They weren't at Stuyvesant. The were in schools nobody ever visits.

So the Regents said you can't do that anymore. We will no longer permit uncertified teachers.

We got all kinds of resistance. We adjusted the rules. We allowed them to have alternative-certification programs. They still wouldn't guarantee it. So I sued them and we won. This chancellor, Chancellor (Joel) Klein, has been very aggressive about it and we've made significant progress.

Q: What do you feel about changing the governance of the other big four? Do you think putting the mayor in charge is a good idea?

A: It's too new for me to generalize. In New York City, (there are) 1.1 million children. Albany is very different, I'm very skeptical about identifying the one best thing we can do. There's not a good record for that kind of approach. …

But generally, there are some things we have to do to have strong leadership. Focus on performance. We need principals and superintendents and commissioners and chancellors losing sleep about poor student performance.

We have to have very strong teachers. We have to find a way to keep and support able teachers. Not geniuses, but good teachers.

Q: Is paying them more the way to do that?

A: It's part of it. Just paying teachers a lot of money isn't going to be any more successful than just paying physicians a lot of money. You've got to have a system that supports them. You have to have a strong curriculum. All the teachers have to be pretty much on the same page as far as the curriculum is concerned. ... You can't have professional development unless every teacher is on the same page. It's like a team without a playbook.

There has to be a system of extra help because some kids get it the first time, and it takes others three or four tries. And the money has to match. It doesn't have to be superabundant, but it has to be sufficient.

Q: In Yonkers, Rochester, Syracuse and Buffalo, the responsibility for educational policy is put with the school board, but the responsibility for raising the money with the mayor and city council — unlike the suburbs where the school board proposes a budget and voters get to decide whether to approve it. The structure in the cities seems to lead to constant conflicts because the school boards think they could always make good use of more money, while the city governments see the schools getting big increases from the state every year while they have to pinch pennies. Wouldn't it be better to align the decisions how the money is spent with decisions on how it is raised?

A: That doesn't necessarily imply mayoral control.

Q: That's right. Either mayoral control or fiscally independent districts.

A: I think there is great value in having a degree of separation between the education and the political arenas. In New York, you have a Board of Regents that is appointed by the political process, and have to be responsive, but they are independent and therefore I don't have to check with people when I talk about what kids need and that's very useful.

I try to be very respectful of the political leaders. I try to steer a middle course. But when I testify about the Regents' budget proposal, I just begin by talking about what the youngsters of this state need. People accept that. They know I'm not a political figure.

Q: Isn't that frustrating to you, because as you pointed out you have a very strong opinion about what needs to be done about distributing state aid to education differently, but you don't have the political power to get that implemented.

A: I don't have vote one. I'm not an elected official. But there is tremendous power in the data. What the Regents and I can do is say after a long process of consultation with everyone, 'Here's what everybody needs to know and here's what we need to do.'

I can go to the business community and say, is this what they want and they say yes. … I can go to the higher education community and they say, yes, standards are going up. ... I can go back to the Legislature and say, here are the results. They're getting better and better and better. We can say you bought this. You own this. So keep going. ...

In the middle-school situation, nothing was happening. People were saying the tests are too hard, they're not fair, but the Regents didn't blink. They just kept going. So now in the sixth year, the results show a three-year upward trend. They still have far to go. That's a powerful argument.

Q: Couldn't that lesson be taken a different way? We haven't changed the funding formula, we haven't implemented CFE (Campaign for Fiscal Equity), and yet scores are going up and the achievement gap is narrowing. Isn't that in a way an argument for the status quo?

A: I don't think so because the gap is still great, while it is closing in the elementary grades, the big five cities are still far below the affluent communities.

At the middle level, everyone has gone up. I would say these gains point to the fact that this spending is a good investment. It worked. Don't pull the rug out now.

Q: No, don't pull the rug out, but don't the results lessen the urgency of the redistribution argument?

A: I think the argument is even more urgent from the economic point of view. The generation now in school is smaller than the baby-boom generation. Work-force planners point out that the baby-boom generation is getting ready to retire. When they leave, there are literally going to be fewer Americans of working age. So you need everyone of working age to be skilled.

The problem is at the same time this is happening, the skill content of jobs is going up rapidly. So even from a cold-eyed economic point of view, every single person needs to have a good education. And right now, New York has a large number of people not well enough prepared for these responsibilities.

It's also not just. One of the goals is to educate everyone enough to work, but we also are about building a just society here. It is not right to allow some people to emerge from schools looking at a bright future, and others to lack the knowledge and skill they need for a good job and all of the other things that are good in life.

Q: Are charter schools part of the solution? Do they have a role in closing the achievement gap among schools or do you see them as a drain on public schools?

A: I've seen strong charter schools and I've seen weak ones. The strong ones are very impressive. ...

The principles are similar to the ones in strong public schools: focus on leadership, focus on high expectations, focus on extra time for the youngsters who need it, concentration on the data. I've seen these at successful public schools.

Q: What do you mean by concentrating on the data?

A: I was thinking of a charter school I visited just over the line from Buffalo. I talked to a second-year teacher. She had a laptop on her desk that had the weekly or biweekly test scores for her students. She could point to parts of the curriculum that were not working. She didn't assume there was something wrong with the child. She looked for patterns and recognized in some places changes needed to be made. She had the data that allowed her to adjust the course. She was getting continuous professional development to help her deal with the problems.

It's like going to a physician who has all of your cholesterol data going back five years.

A low-performing school is usually a school that doesn't have any of that. ...

Q: You've seen good and bad charter schools. So in general are they part of the solution or not?

A: They're clearly part of the solution in New York. It's the law. My sense is it's very hard to start a new school. The law doesn't provide startup money. And most of these charter schools were created in places where the overall performance in public schools is very low. ... They in many ways have the same problems as the public schools.

There are a small number of charter schools in New York state. Unless something dramatic changes, they won't be a major part of the solution.

Q: If it were up to you, would you abolish charter schools, expand them or leave them as they are?

A: I certainly wouldn't abolish them. There's no evidence that as a concept they're a bad idea. But I also don't get the evidence to expand them. The Regents do an annual report on charter schools. Very rich in data. There are positives and negatives.

The search for the one best thing (is futile). It's a package of things. It involves leadership, instruction, curriculum, extra help, resources that match the need. ...

Q: What about STAR? Do you think it exacerbates the problem of misallocation of resources? Would we be better off by taking that money and plugging it into the education-aid formula or using it to help implement CFE?

A: I don't get into that. It's a revenue question. I'm much better off staying out of that.

Q: Doesn't it have the effect of sending more money to districts that don't need it and therefore starving the areas that do need it?

A: It's a political judgment. I don't make political judgments. Evidently it's in response to widespread public concern about the cost of education. I don't make those judgments, and I don't comment on them.

Q: Let me ask you some philosophical questions. Kids come to school not only from different backgrounds but also with different capacities. Is it realistic to think that they can all perform the same, or be educated to meet the same standards? Or should we accept that some kids are just not going to make it? Or can you design programs so that they bring out everyone's potential?

A: If anyone argues that side of the question and goes too far, they can find themselves saying some very distasteful things — very foreign to our values.

We have to have the approach that all of them can learn. We're not asking that they all perform at the same level. We're insisting that they all reach the standards. I hope they go beyond that. But they at least have to graduate knowing the math and the science and the rest, history and so on. ... When someone says, 'This kid just can't read...,' we have listened to reading experts who study the way children develop, the way the brain develops and they have said virtually every child can be taught to read.

But if the teacher is prepared to teach only those who could read to begin with, who come from families where reading is done constantly, then it is not a problem of the child, it is a problem of the instructional program.

New York (City) for example won a very large amount of money from the federal government for reading programs. And you can't get into these programs unless you agree to do it the right way. The funds go to high-need schools. They are competitive. A lot of people that wanted the money feeling they should get the fair share for their cities failed to get the money.

What you have to do is to agree to have all the teachers participate in a very rigorous training program. The reading program has to include phonics — phonetic awareness — the idea that groups of letters have sounds and that's the way the written language works. You have to work on fluency and vocabulary and all of this.

You can't make it up as you go along. Some people believe you can. That's not professional.

Q: New York spends more on education per pupil than any other state. Yet our test results are about in the middle of the pack. Why is that?

A: I don't make any excuses for the results. The results are going up. They have to go up. They have gone up but not yet enough. If you look at a spending map of the whole nation, the Northeastern states — New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts — tend to be higher spenders. Salaries in general are higher there than they are in the rest of the country — higher than the South or West.

When we've had money to invest, we didn't invest it in the highest-needs schools. The money went up for everybody. That's the judgment local officials made. The court ruled the system is not providing a sound basic education for all children. I had hoped that wouldn't have to happen, but it did. Now the courts are going to determine (how to fix it).

Q: Are you saying we don't have the best results because we're not spending the money in the most efficient way?

A: We haven't resolved the inequities in the state-aid system. That's self-evident. That's what the court said. As long as I've been here, the Regents have proposed the increases go to the highest-need school districts. If it's going to increase everyone, you're going to end up with an expensive system.

Q: I understand your position about not talking about political things. And yet the key to your success is being able to redirect the money to where you think it's needed, which is essentially a political question. How do you get more money for places that you think need it if you try to remain above the fray?

A: I'm certainly not above the fray.

Q: Are you apart from the fray?

A: I'm not elected, so I have no right to say how taxes work. The elected officials do. They make those decisions. My obligation as commissioner is to speak as plainly as I can about what the children need. I am across the street (at the state Capitol) at the Legislature virtually every day during the session. I testify to the joint finance committees. I talk to individual committees. I talk to the leadership. I talk to member after member after member. I talk to the people who disagree with my views and disagree with the Regents' positions. I try to spend more time talking and listening to them than to people who are already in agreement.

It's not just me. It's all of my colleagues. The Regents, all of the deputy commissioners, are constantly presenting the facts as we see them. Every time there is data, we make a big deal out of it. We talk to people at the schools and urge them to talk about it. During the court process, CFE, we provided thousands of pages of documents to both sides. I spent a whole day on the stand. So did the chancellor. So did the vice chancellor. So did (deputy commissioner) Jim Kadamas. We were all giving information on what was needed and what has been provided.

The people's representatives make the judgments. But I certainly do everything possible to inform the debate.

Q: So you're essentially lobbying for what you think needs to be done.

A: I'm not a lobbyist. I'm advocating. I'm providing information. Look at these loafers. They're not Guccis. ...

Q: Do you expect CFE to eventually get the state to where it needs to be in terms of school finances?

A: It's going to take more than one jump probably because the CFE case is about New York City. It's not about the rest of the state. (State Chief) Judge (Judith) Kaye and the Court of Appeals pointed to the opportunity the Legislature had to have a solution that's statewide. It's evident from the way the CFE group has conducted itself that they tried to bring in other groups.

Q: They have broad support upstate. The upstate groups see this as their chance to get more money as well. Mike Rebell, the head of CFE, said a couple of weeks ago he hopes the expected court order to provide more money to New York City, expected some time in January, will spur a statewide bill. There's no way they're going to increase aid just to New York City. That's politically not feasible. Eventually, it will mean more money for every high-needs district, don't you think?

A: That's right. I think that's probably right. The Legislature was unable to break this pattern. The courts have intervened. It's possible the court will break the pattern by simply directing adequate funding for part of the state. It's hard to imagine that kind of solution could not long endure without the rest of the system changing.

Q: Doesn't New York City already score better on standardized tests than the rest (Buffalo, Rochester, Yonkers and Syracuse) of the big five?

A: At the middle level, New York City scores have surged past all of the big four. In the elementary grades, Yonkers is the top performer.

Q: Do you talk to the governor much?

A: From time to time. Not a lot.

Q: Do you try to advocate with him, the way you do the Legislature?

A: I have in the past, but most of the interaction is with the Legislature. There are conversations at all levels. I talk to DOB (Division of the Budget), I talk to the executive branch. With the Legislature, I'll talk to the (Assembly) speaker (Sheldon Silver) the (Senate) majority leader (Joseph Bruno), I'll talk to (Assembly Education Committee chairman Steven) Sanders, (Senate Education Committee chairman Steven) Saland and all of the other committee chairpeople. Then my colleagues talk to them as well and also the legislative staff. We try to keep adding things to the soup of information to keep them apprised of what we're doing.

Q: But the governor is the most important guy. Would it be helpful if you had a closer relationship with him?

A: On a personal basis, the relationship has never been a problem that I know of.

When I first came here and was discussing the position with the Board of Regents — I had had experience with strong, effective governors in other states — I asked, 'What is the governor's view of education?'

So Carl Hayden, the chancellor at that time, said OK, sit here. He put me in a room and I sat down. About 10 minutes later the phone rang. I picked it up and it was Governor Pataki. I was impressed the board had that relationship with the governor.

I asked him, 'What is your hope and expectation for this state?'

He said to me what he has subsequently said many times: He wants a world-class education system. He wants to get spending under control and he wants a strong economy. I think that's a position the governor has to take. He's certainly been consistent in all of my dealings with him over the years. ... There's room for disagreement. Every time I begin my testimony, I talk about the kids. I talk about the data. Express appreciation for what they've done in the past and then point out areas where I think we need to do more. It's never personal.

In fact, in the budget process, I talk about the executive. I don't personalize it. It just doesn't help.

Q: In the other states you worked in, did the top education official report to the governor?

A: In Vermont, where I was commissioner for seven and a half years, no. I was appointed by a board of seven people. The board was appointed by the governor. They are very different kinds of states.

Q: Was Howard Dean governor then?

A: Howard Dean later became governor. Madeline Kunin was the governor.

Q: Do you have an opinion about which is the better system?

A: The states are so radically different. In New York, I'm responsible for 3 million children. In Vermont when I was there, it was 106,000. The legislators had no offices. They were either in session or in their committees. They had no staff, so everyone knew everything. The commissioner was expected to know the entire budget cold.

Go to a community meeting, and a fourth-grader might look you in the eye and deliver a speech. It helped me immensely.

In the other place I served, New Jersey for 13 years, not as commissioner but as a staff person, the governor appoints the commissioner. In fact, the governor appointed almost everybody.

Tom Kean (co-chairman of the 9/11 commission) was governor then and it worked splendidly because of his character and tremendous ability.

© 2004, Gannett News Service