Study to Examine Public Schools
By Mitchell Landsberg, Times Staff Writer, March 31, 2006

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For years, state Sen. Don Perata recalled, California officials shrugged off the issue of public school funding by saying, "Thank God for Alabama and Mississippi, or else we'd be last."

California isn't scraping bottom anymore, although it still ranks in the lower half of all states in per-pupil spending. But one thing hasn't changed: No one can say with certainty how much money it would take to properly educate all children - if that's even possible.

That should change, Perata, a Democrat from Oakland, and others promised Thursday, with the launch of a major research initiative aimed at determining how California can meet its educational goals and what the price tag will be.

Spearheaded by Stanford University, with $2.6 million in funding from four philanthropic organizations, the project will bring together scholars from around the nation to conduct 20 studies into California's K-12 public school system.

The studies, to be completed by the end of the year, will be aimed at giving state officials the information needed to reform the system, with a focus on whether funding is adequate and whether it is allocated efficiently and fairly.

That will mean taking on some politically delicate topics such as the discrepancies between rich and poor districts, and the difficulty of assigning the best teachers to the neediest schools.

"We admit we have an achievement gap, and that achievement gap is unacceptable," state Supt. of Schools Jack O'Connell said in a telephone news conference about the research project. "We need a clear idea of what it's going to cost to meet the different educational needs of our very diverse student population."

The project will be led by educational economist Susanna Loeb of Stanford and will include researchers from 17 schools or research institutions, including USC, San Diego State, the University of Pennsylvania, the Rand Corp., UC Berkeley, UC Davis and UC Santa Barbara.

Funding comes from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the James Irvine Foundation and the Stuart Foundation.

Loeb said the study would focus on three areas: the current state of school financing and governance; how the state can use its resources better; and what it would take to meet the needs of all students.

Ted Mitchell, the former Occidental College president who heads Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's advisory committee on education, said no state had attempted a comparable study.

"There really is no marker in the history of school reform for this kind of collaborative, bipartisan, independent research," he said. He added that there is broad consensus in Sacramento now about the need for meaningful educational reform.

Perata pledged that the study would not suffer the typical fate of a state-sponsored report.

"Our commitment is that this will not die on the shelf," he said. "It could be and should be the centerpiece of the governor's State of the State (speech) next year, and should be the driving force behind what we do legislatively and with our budget in 2007. We have a lot riding on this."

Looking beyond the Albany school deal
Downtown Express, Volume 18 " Issue 46 | March 31 - April 6, 2006

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The Albany budget agreement to provide $6.5 billion to build schools is a good beginning to ending the historic inequity city children have suffered in education funding. The 21 schools Mayor Bloomberg took out of the budget two months ago - including the P.S. 234 school annex and a new K-8 on Beekman St. - are expected to be put back in once the deal is signed into law, perhaps as soon as the next few days. Although it looks like it is going to end well it won't mean all is well unless the mayor moves to repair the damage he did in working toward a good result.

Clearly the mayor had to threaten to cause some pain in order to get the governor and the state Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno to finally agree to more education money. And perhaps it is true that in order to get the Albany Republicans to agree, Bloomberg needed to manufacture a fight with Democratic Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver by threatening the Downtown schools in Silver's district. Silver and Bloomberg, though they were not working together, both scored big for Lower Manhattan and the rest of the city by getting the money.

In the process, though, the mayor cast doubt on community benefit agreements - a valuable tool to build a better city that does not yet have enough legal protection. C.B.A.'s are deals that benefit neighborhoods made by community representatives and developers or government officials in exchange for agreeing to projects. The Beekman school and the P.S. 234 annex were the result of a Sept. 2004 letter, or C.B.A., signed by Bloomberg's deputy mayor for economic development, Dan Doctoroff, and Councilmember Alan Gerson.

As a direct result of the letter, Gerson convinced his colleagues on the Council to approve two city land sales to Tribeca developers with projects near P.S. 234. C.B. 1 also recommended approving both plans despite concerns that the heights of the buildings would overwhelm the neighborhood.

The letter included a promise to build the annex in one of the projects, on Site 5C, which is under construction, and said the city had $44 million in its capital budget to build the east side school. The agreement was clearly worded, but when the mayor and his aides came up with a new political strategy, they felt free to deny the letter's obvious meaning.

Bloomberg's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, told this paper that he spent the $44 million elsewhere and that without more state money, he had no plans to ever fund Beekman, even though state funds were never a condition for the $44 million. Bloomberg went to a groundbreaking for the other Tribeca site, 5B, and listed all of the planned amenities that would someday come to both sites except for the one parents wanted the most - the school annex.

Would a community be foolish to ever sign another similar agreement with the city or a developer again? Yes, unless Bloomberg provides concrete assurances that these deals will be enforced and not ignored when political winds change. If communities can't trust the city, it will prevent projects that are good for the city from happening.

These deals are often wins for everybody. P.S. 234 and P.S./I.S. 89 were built because of pressure from C.B. 1 and other Downtown residents and they led to rising real estate prices and tax rolls in Tribeca and Battery Park City. C.B.A.'s often involve park improvements, which also increase real estate value.

City Hall has good reason to celebrate today, but tomorrow Bloomberg has to begin fixing what he broke.

March 31, 2006
School Aid: Meet the New Math, Same as the Old
By JENNIFER MEDINA, NY TIMES

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ALBANY, March 30  They call it "the formula": an arcane scheme as unknowable as the recipe for Coca-Cola that is supposed to determine with mathematical objectivity how the state divides education aid among 677 school districts.

But as every legislator knows, politics, not formulas, actually govern the allocation of school aid, more than $17 billion this year. And guiding that process, which riles Albany every budget season, are a couple of unwritten rules.

No. 1: Every school district will receive more aid every year, even if it loses students or has a tax windfall.

No. 2: New York City's share of an increase in basic state education aid will be capped at 38.86 percent  even if its student population grows faster than that. With this comes a corollary: Long Island's portion of the increase will never decrease, even if its student population does.

Gov. George E. Pataki once called the school aid system an incomprehensible "dinosaur" that should be discarded "on the ash heap of history."

And education activists have long complained that the formulas  there are actually dozens of them  are a stew of political calculations with rules so ingrained that legislators recite them with ironclad certainty, even when they cannot be found in law.

But now, the system is facing its toughest challenge in many years: a lawsuit filed by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a group of parent and community groups, resulted in a ruling in 2003 by the state's highest court that students in New York City have been denied a sound, basic education because of the inequities in state aid.

And last week, an intermediate appellate court ruling in the same case found that children in New York City schools are being shortchanged by $4.7 billion to $5.6 billion a year, and directed the Legislature to develop a plan to fix the problem. The plaintiffs in the suit say that without overhauling the formulas, Albany is only taking a "half-step" toward compliance.

Yet despite those rulings, the budget that lawmakers are expected to approve today does little to break from Albany's decades-old rules. Under intense pressure from Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the Legislature's budget includes a plan to issue $1.8 billion in bonds to help New York City rebuild aging schools. But it largely keeps intact the system of allocating money for classroom programs.

The Assembly, dominated by Democrats from New York City, has advocated overhauling the formulas to allocate more money to urban and poor areas. But they have met resistance from the Republican-controlled Senate, whose base is in upstate and suburban counties.

On Thursday, the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno, questioned whether the formulas need to be changed, asserting that "there are high needs throughout the entire state."

"When dollars go out the door, they're going to go and be distributed where the sound, basic education requirement applies, whether it's New York City, upstate or on the Island," Mr. Bruno said. "And we think that we did a pretty good job in that distribution."

There are actually as many as 40 school-aid formulas on the books. The dizzying system is so complex that a long-running joke in Albany keeps tally on how many people understand it: six, says one estimate.

Even the office in charge of sending state checks to local schools finds it difficult to nail down the total number; more than a dozen apparently haven't been used for years.

Lawmakers often view those dormant formulas as standbys, ready for use in case they need a mechanism to justify funneling money to a particular district, education experts say.

In theory, the formulas are supposed to send more money to districts that have less ability to pay for schools through local property taxes, using a number known as the combined-wealth ratio that measures relative affluence.

In reality, those experts say, the process works backward, with leaders determining how much money certain regions will receive and then manipulating the formulas to conform.

Burt Porter, director of education finance for the State Education Department, says that trying to explain the system is like trying to diagram a sentence from "Finnegans Wake."

"We've gotten to the point where we have so many layers, that it's impossible to see how it works without precise technicalities," Mr. Porter said. "The more technical it is, the more easily it can be manipulated. And nobody in the public can get it or debate it."

Even the lawmakers who vote on the state aid for public schools year after year as part of the state budget acknowledge the problems understanding the system. Comparing similar districts across the state proves just how inscrutable that system can be.

Johnstown and Crown Point are both small, rural districts in northern New York, each with a chunk of poor students. Last year, the state sent Johnstown about $6,000 a student. Crown Point received close to $11,000 for each of its students.

One reason? A rule known as "hold harmless" that prevents districts from losing state aid, even if they lose students.

Thus, even though Crown Point has slowly hemorrhaged students over the last few years, the amount of money it receives keeps inching up.

In another example, Miller Place, a well-performing and wealthy district in Suffolk County, receives about 75 percent more in state education aid a student than its counterpart in Bethlehem, a suburban Albany district with similar demographics.

That is partly because costs are higher on Long Island. But it is also because of another rule, known as "shares," ensuring that a certain portion of any increase in state aid will always go to Long Island districts.

"The Senate and Assembly both jealously and tenaciously guard their education share from the state," said Steven Sanders, formerly chairman of the Assembly's education committee and now a lobbyist. "Who benefits the most? I wish I could say the school districts and children, but clearly that has not been the case, and that has not changed."

Even the political calculus that dictates how money is sent to schools is murky. Sometimes, the more power legislators have, the more money their districts receive. Other times, the aid is doled out to protect vulnerable members.

"Once the budget is passed, it is the first thing the legislators are judged on," said Thomas Rogers, executive director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents. "Everyone wants to know: how much money is my school getting?"

To meet those political demands, legislative staff members isolate a formula and then funnel more money into it, thereby ensuring that targeted districts get additional aid, experts and legislators say. A school district with a large number of gifted students, for example, would collect more aid if that formula were weighed more heavily one year.

The result is that while certain politically potent districts may get additional aid, less powerful ones may lose out. Many experts say that kind of trade-off has hurt struggling urban districts like Syracuse. Though its student poverty rate is climbing and its property values declining, Syracuse receives less aid than some more affluent districts.

"Formulas don't reflect the changes in wealth or enrollment," said Robert N. Lowry, of the state council of superintendents. "Instead, you have political reasons that carry more money to particular districts. It's not serving anyone  certainly not anyone in the schools."