THIS week’s legislative “special” session was a pointless mess, suggesting that Albany has resigned itself to fiscal insolvency. The battle over education spending offers the most revealing glimpse into the dysfunction.
Gov. Paterson proposed slashing $686 million from state aid to public schools (out of a total this year of $22.7 billion) to help stitch up a $4 billion current-year gap. Cue the panic-stricken cries of Armageddon from school districts and the teachers unions.
The head of New York’s School Boards Association, Timothy Kremer, sounded like he was reviewing “2012,” the new mega-disaster flick: “It’s more than a perfect storm that we could be looking at. It’s more like an earthquake followed by a tornado followed by a tsunami.”
In fact, the Paterson administration says nearly all districts in the state have reserves sufficient to cover the shortfall.
And the fundamental problem is that the state for years has wildly overspent on education, while ignoring the underlying forces driving up the need for money — pension costs, tenure and seniority rules, mandates that inflate construction costs and labor laws that deprive districts of negotiating power.
All the players have marched along the path of least resistance. The teachers got their raises — an average increase of 5.6 percent this year. Districts preferred to beg Albany for money and raise property taxes, rather than to get tough in contract talks.
Lawmakers, ever more reliant on organized labor to win re-election, happily fed the beast. Voters, they figured, were more likely to punish them for cutting school aid than for lacking restraint. So far, they’ve been right.
All of which has sent spending off the charts. The latest data put New York schools spending at more than 60 percent per-pupil above the national average. And that doesn’t even take into account the record multi-year hikes in aid passed into law under Gov. Eliot Spitzer.
Among the 100 largest school districts in America, New York City’s $16,400 per-pupil spending ranks second highest — $2,500 more than wealthy, suburban Montgomery County, Md. More than half of those districts posted numbers below $9,000.
Even so, the unions and their myriad front groups have danced to the same tune — Money! Money! Money!
The spending comparisons aren’t “particularly useful information,” claims Billy Easton, the executive director of the Alliance for Quality Education, which bills itself as an “independent” advocacy group. Nor is he particularly interested in talking about New York’s stagnant math scores from the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress exams.
AQE is threatening to resurrect the Campaign for Fiscal Equity school-funding case, in which union front groups got the courts to order big rises in state aid to schools. But the group’s ruckus about “broken promises” is absurd: The aid hike to New York City schools is over three times larger than what the court mandated in that suit.
Which brings us back to “independent”: Easton’s group is financed by grants from the teachers union. It rents office space from ACORN in Brooklyn, and was started by one of the founders of the Working Families Party — which last year coordinated with the AQE an ad campaign attacking Paterson because he’d dared speak of fiscal responsibility.
How cynical are these folks? Easton says of his group, “There’s no association with the WFP.” Yet the WFP’s executive director, Dan Cantor, told The Buffalo News last year: “We share values. We share ideas. We share money sometimes. We’re kind of proud of that in a way. These are close allies.”
As they thunder against Paterson, the teacher unions and their fleet of activists don’t need to make sense, let alone tell the truth — because they aren’t engaged in a debate. In Albany, they are the education advocates. There is no coalition for common sense. The public interest is an absentee constituent.
The case for fiscal responsibility is left to be made by a governor depleted of credibility and vacant of any long-range policy goals. (And one who earlier this year blithely put his signature on a $133 billion budget that raised spending 9.6 percent.)
Thus, lawmakers will likely roll back most, if not all, of Paterson’s school cuts, then pat themselves on the back for “saving the children.”
But Albany is drawing closer to its day of reckoning, even if another federal stimulus delays the inevitable crash by a year.
Lawmakers may enjoy this vacation from reality. But they’re sailing away on a sinking ship.
jacob.gershman@gmail.com