Waiting for Bruno

The budget Mayor Bloomberg proposed today, which offered only $324 million in cuts spread over a $45.7 billion budget, depends on its predictions for the coming fiscal year on an optimistic assessment of how much aid is to be expected from the state. All the more reason to mark Senator Bruno's expressions of concern earlier this week about the decision handed down last June by Justice DeGrasse in Council for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York. In his ruling, the justice mandated that the state design and implement a new formula for distributing educational dollars intended to ensure that New York City public school students receive a "sound basic education."

Though often cited as part of the state's constitution, this phrase was in fact interpolated from the language of Article XI, Section 1, of the Constitution, which requires the Legislature to provide a system of free schools "wherein all the children of this state may be educated." Justice DeGrasse's decree that the state fix what the CFE Web site refers to as a "cost-based" guarantee of a sound and basic education is a reach. Under Mayor Giuliani, public schools spending skyrocketed 50% to $12 billion in just eight years with no appreciable improvement in test scores or other measurements of academic accomplishment.

Justice DeGrasse has announced his intention of further abrogating the rights of the Legislature by appointing a special master in July of this year, when the judge's ruling takes effect. Mr. Bruno has attempted to avoid or delay this intrusion by claiming that since the state budget is supposed to be passed by April 1, the state need only determine a funding formula by July.

Let's hope Senator Bruno comes to see that the real problem with the state's public schools is that lower-income parents feel they have little choice but to entrust their children to the public school monopoly. What the city — and the state and the nation — needs is not new funding mandates, but rather the introduction of vouchers and charter schools that create educational opportunities and choices, allowing successful schools to flourish and failing ones to close, outcomes that rarely occur in the public school system.