when Mayor Adams promised to “fully fund” Fair Student Funding, fingers crossed behind his back, he knew he could save money by decreasing FSF’s per-student allocations by assuming an across-the-board average teacher salary reduction, irrespective of a school’s actual payroll.... Banks’ idea of adding volunteer members from the PEP and community is a scam unworthy of someone committed to real change.... David Bloomfield, Gotham Gazette

Over the past few weeks it's been hard to follow the bouncing ball - especially if you're at the beach with a beach ball. It's hard to get me out of Rockaway in the summer, but I'm pissed off enough to go into the city on Aug. 4.

Check the doc to sign up.

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfVUXz1k8AEV8aHm_3gxcAH7kYS4hxLhNMj8k2DmLmXDfSjrA/viewform?fbzx=-3645005307394680589

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City strikes out in legal pleadings over budget cuts so far; freezes budgets & then unfreezes them; while at least 700 teachers let go

Confused about latest developments in budget cuts lawsuit & NYC's failed attempts to sow chaos to end the court's temporary restraining order?

& How the 700 teachers who've been let go by their schools may NOT lead to savings, contrary to DOE claims.

https://nycpublicschoolparents.blogspot.com/2022/07/city-strikes-out-in-legal-pleadings.html

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New "Lost Student" Number Cited by NYPost: Only 73,000

http://nycdoenuts.blogspot.com/2022/07/new-lost-student-number-cited-by-nypost.html

Yesterday, I wrote about a New York City parent who discovered that City Hall and the DOE greatly overstated the actual drop in enrolled students in city schools. In short, City Hall and the DOE wanted to cut school budgets so much next year that they pretended the city had lost 760,000 children when, in fact, they had not. 

Almost everyone in the press allowed them to share this mistruth with little or no fact checking. 

Almost.

Today,  The NY Post published an article about how the DOE is now fighting for the budget cuts they want so much (the ones that will hurt children and school staff next year) by appealling a court order blocking the cuts. 

As part of the story, Post reporter Cayla Bamberger cited just 73,000 as the accurate number of students the city has lost since the start of the pandemic. 

A journalist didn't even bother using NYCDOE's data. She used IBO data instead. The numbers the IBO published are more than ten times lower than the number the mayor and the chancellor say.

the mayor and chancellor are cutting the DOE budget by just 1% overall but all of those cuts, (totalling $312-$375 million) are coming only from school budgets. No cuts to Tweed. No cuts to supes. No cuts to central. Only cuts to schools. 

Talk Out of School

Listen to podcast of my interviews on #TalkOutofSchool on

@WBAI

w/ those involved in the lawsuit against the

@NYCSchools

budget cuts. Get the #411 from

@leoniehaimson

@LDBarbieri

@paultrust

@NequanMclean

and Tamara Tucker. It’s

The Lawsuit Against the NYC School Budget Cuts Explained

JULY 30TH, 2022 | 58:08 | E102

EPISODE SUMMARY

Daniel facilitated a conversation about the current lawsuit against the NYC school budget cuts for the school year 2022-23, with Leonie Haimson, co-host and Executive Director of Class Size Matters, along with the lawyer for the case from Advocates for Justice, Laura Barbieri, parent plaintiff, Tamara Tucker, and teacher plaintiff Paul Trust. And, he spoke with lawsuit supporter, NeQuan Mclean, CEC District 16 President.

EPISODE NOTES

Get updates about the lawsuit at Class Size Matters 

U listening

@NYCMayor

? https://talk-out-of-school.simplecast.com/episodes/the-l

awsuit-against-the-nyc-school-cuts-exlained

Bird dogging Adams: 

BREAKING: Parents & school social workers confronted @NYCMayor Adams once again about $469M-1B in school and education budget cuts. Eric says he "heard" them but will he actually #RestoreTheCuts NOW? School starts in a few weeks & principals have days to finalize school budgets.

Galaxy fiasco

The DOE just froze Galaxy, the system principals use to spend $$, citing the temporary restraining order. "We know this is extremely inconvenient...but at the direction of legal counsel, access to Galaxy is unavailable at this time," DOE COO Emma Vadehra wrote to principal.

BREAKING: A spokesperson for Mayor Adams now tells me the DOE’s online budgeting application will be back up and running for school principals tomorrow 

 So what changed? The city’s legal interpretation of the TRO or their realization that this attempt to steamroll the court &/or public opinion had backfired?

·

Jul 29

Replying to

@leoniehaimson

and

@c_werth

Guess who lost in the game of chicken?

The Latest Education Budget Fiasco Shows We Must Scrap New York’s School Funding Formula

July 29, 2022 | by David C. Bloomfield

https://www.gothamgazette.com/130-opinion/11478-nyc-education-budget-scrap-school-funding-formula

The Trojan Horse called “Fair Student Funding” that allocates $10 billion of city funds to our 1,700 public schools needs to be scrapped. The attractively alliterative system inadequately funds the real needs of schools and, according to an unreleased 2021 Fair Student Funding Task Force study, funnels “additional resources to high schools with “higher achievers” who are disproportionately whiter and wealthier than the overall school population. It concludes “this is not an equitable funding system.”

Fair Student Funding is at the heart of the current school budget crisis, with the mayor mired in debate with an abulic City Council and a lawsuit that may allay his $215 million cut to city schools but fails to address the long-term problems of declining student enrollment and erosion of federal pandemic relief funding.

Fair Student Funding (FSF) was also central to temporary rejection of FSF-based school allocations by the Department of Education’s Panel for Educational Policy (PEP), a usually docile mayor-controlled body, when it mutinied over the system’s inadequacies and inequities. In a hasty compromise in exchange for the PEP’s approval, Schools Chancellor David Banks agreed to look into FSF’s weighting of student needs including, for example, providing additional funds for students in temporary housing and foster care.

But nibbling around the edges of how FSF arbitrarily weights student-based expenses does nothing to get at the root problem of what Banks himself calls “this mess.”

First, Fair Student Funding is based on district-wide assumptions out of touch with school realities. Mayor Adams based his budget reduction on total public school enrollment but individual schools don’t run on these gross totals. The bulk of a school’s budget is salaries and what matters to principals is not overall enrollment but how many teachers and others are needed for a given grade or class. Teachers and paraprofessionals and guidance counselors and others need to be hired based on these sub-groups.

Further, as New York Post reporting showed, when Mayor Adams promised to “fully fund” Fair Student Funding, fingers crossed behind his back, he knew he could save money by decreasing FSF’s per-student allocations by assuming an across-the-board average teacher salary reduction, irrespective of a school’s actual payroll.

Second, FSF only funds about 65% of school needs, so the chancellor’s focus on FSF is a distraction from the larger issue of how overall school budgets are allocated by the central administration.

Check the DOE budget website where no less than five other large, highly-manipulable, opaque streams are listed. Add to this the countless off-budget grants and donations such as those from wealthy parents, which go 100% to their kids’ schools, and we see that the entire scheme of school funding needs an overhaul.

No one trusts the DOE to fix this. Not only is Banks disregarding work already done by the ill-fated 2021 FSF Task Force. He compounded this disregard by designating First Deputy Chancellor Daniel Weisberg to lead the redesign effort. This is classic political rope-a-dope.

Weisberg is too busy to spend much time on the study and he played a leading role in the Bloomberg administration’s original design of FSF under Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. He can hardly be expected to kill his darling. Besides, he doesn’t seem to care how expenses are weighted, just minimizing the bottom line.

Testifying before the City Council last month and defending the $215 million cut to schools, Weisberg challenged the Council members to move money around, creating their own “winners and losers,” while he held fast to the widespread, devastating school staffing cuts by his own agency (that the mayor and Council have been negotiating to reverse).

Instead of  Banks’ suggestion of a new commission heavily weighted to administration personnel and interests, we need the non-mayoral PEP members including representatives of the borough presidents, city comptroller, and independent parent members to constitute their own task force using those officials’ staff resources along with the city’s Independent Budget Office to craft a new school allocation system based on professional expertise from across the country.

Banks’ idea of adding volunteer members from the PEP and community is a scam unworthy of someone committed to real change. These people have neither the time nor experience to design a complex budgeting system for the largest school district in the country with a budget in excess of $30 billion. The symbolism is both demeaning and offensive.

In keeping with good public policy and democratic procedures, the PEP will have the legally-mandated last word on approving the new system. But the technical design assuring fiscal equity and adequacy among almost 1 million public school students needs serious and objective expertise under non-mayoral PEP guidance, qualities the administration has yet to demonstrate.

***
David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Education Leadership, Law, and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.