After the CFE

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

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NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

Just one thing is missing from yesterday’s Court of Appeals ruling in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. On the face of it, the decision seems comprehensive, featuring an extended discussion of where the court draws the line between constitutional enforcement and usurping the legislature’s appropriating prerogative, a concise summary of the different methods various courts and gubernatorial commissions have used to calculate how much additional money the schools need, and ultimately a pronouncement that the governor can use the $1.93 billion a year he had been planning on spending, instead of having to increase that number. Everyone is claiming victory. But where are the parents who speak for the actual students?

They’re nowhere to be found. To be sure, one can find special multipliers to be used in one of the funding formulae to ensure that public schools receive more money for each special education and “at risk” student compared to regular students. But the fact is that in its conception and its execution, this ruling, just like all the other bricks in the CFE edifice, has nothing whatsoever to do with the customers of our public school system. It’s nice that a majority of the state’s highest judges believes the governor has found an acceptable school funding formula, but it’s also irrelevant if individual parents don’t think their students are being educated properly even after the public schools receive their big infusion of cash.

The court’s ruling is unlikely to change the attitude, ranging from disinterest to contempt, directed toward such parents by the public school establishment. Consider a column in Sunday’s Daily News by the president of the United Federation of Teachers, Randi Weingarten, about one of the more promising options for giving those parents a choice, tax credits to be applied to private-school tuition.” Asking taxpayers to fund those choices is like saying government should reimburse people who drink bottled water instead of tap water — or those who park in a garage even when there is space on the street,” Ms. Weingarten wrote in opposition to tax credits. It’s hard to find in her column even one particle of logic.

Ms. Weingarten’s error is that bottled water and garage parking are luxuries, more expensive than tap water or street parking. The city’s Catholic schools, as the superintendent of schools for the archdiocese of New York pointed out in a piece also in the Sunday News, educate students for $3,600 each, “or one-quarter of the cost of educating a public-school student.” The union president goes on to claim that the nonpublic schools “are not regulated by or accountable to the public.” Not only are there huge numbers of regulations, but how about the tuition-paying parent, who dwarfs the accountability of the public schools to their customers?

The main thing one needs to keep in mind about the CFE lawsuit is that there’s a reason the lawyers had to spend a decade or more fighting in court for the $1.9 billion a year it has produced. The reason is that the taxpayers — that is, the parents who are customers of public schools — don’t want to spend this money in the public schools voluntarily. Ms. Weingarten claims that tuition tax credits are unnecessary because “polls show that most parents are satisfied with the public school their child attends.” Marie Antoinette used the same pollster before she recommended cake. The most recent statewide tests show that 63% of eighth-grade pupils failed to meet the standard for reading and 61% of eighth-grade pupils failed to meet the standard for math. On science tests, 64% of eighth-grade pupils failed. At best, the drop-out rate in 2005 was an embarrassing 42%, and some estimates put it as high as 57%.

The tragedy of CFE is that not one dollar of the money the taxpayers are going to be forced, against their will, to pay over to the schools is going to benefit the children who are forced by law to attend these schools. That’s because if one bothers to read all the research, one can only conclude that there’s little, if any, link between per-pupil spending and educational outcomes. So now that all the drama of this case has heaved up far less in outlays than either the CFE asked for or the schools establishment was rubbing its hands in glee at the prospect of getting, maybe the politicians will look at some real strategic moves to empower parents to make their own choices in education — and give poor children in a failing school system at least some of the chances wealthy children get.

NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.


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