Two Views

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.

The New York Sun
NY Sun
NEW YORK SUN CONTRIBUTOR

New York is on the verge of raising its state and local taxes – already the nation’s highest – by billions of dollars a year to accommodate the point of view that the problem with the New York City public schools is lack of money. That is the point of view pressed by the plaintiffs in the lawsuit brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, and that is the point of view that a panel appointed by Justice Leland De-Grasse of the State Supreme Court adopted this week when it recommended tens of billions of dollars in additional spending on the city’s public schools.


There’s another, opposing view – that the problem facing New York’s schools is not a lack of money but rather a crippling and dysfunctional system of regulations, laws, and contracts administered by a sclerotic, centralized bureaucracy. The rules make it hard to fire bad teachers, reward good ones, or suspend disruptive students. The solution, in this view, lies not with increasing taxes and spending, but rather with creating more charter schools that operate free of the red tape, striking simpler and better contracts with the unions, and allowing money to follow students to parochial schools that achieve better educational results at lower cost.


For a look inside the folly of the tax-and-spend view, we commend the editorial in yesterday’s New York Times, illustrated herewith. It’s a nearly perfect encapsulation and summation of the problems of the tax-and-spend approach, so please stay with us for a thorough dissection.


“Anybody who knows about public schools in New York City has known for a long time what the problems are,” the Times begins.


They’re off to a bad start. Never mind the pomposity, the arrogance and the false dichotomy between those who “know”- i.e., the tax-and-spend-crowd – and those who don’t, i.e., everyone else. These benighted others are assumed not merely to have a differing opinion but, with classic Times condescension, are assumed therefore also to be ignorant.


Focus instead on the reactionary approach taken by the supposed progressives over at the Times. Truth is, the problems facing New York’s schools now are a lot different than they were five or even 10 years ago. Five or 10 years ago, there was a problem of incompetent and unaccountable leadership. Now, the schools have a capable, energetic, tough, and intelligent chancellor in Joel Klein. He has imposed uniform curricula on most of the schools, making sure that students don’t lose their place in their studies when they move neighborhoods or change schools. And, with the elimination of the old, unaccountable Board of Education and the establishment of mayoral control, the voters have a genuine opportunity to hold an elected official – the mayor – directly accountable for performance.


The funding levels of the city’s schools have also changed since the “long time” ago to which the Times refers. E.J. McMahon of the Manhattan Institute notes on his nyfiscalwatch.com that state aid for education in New York has increased over the past decade at more than twice the rate of inflation. In New York City, the public schools budget has soared to $12.5 billion in 2004 from $9.5 billion in 1999, during a period that saw the city’s overall economy suffer from the effects of a recession and the terrorist attacks of September 11.


What are the “long time” problems of which the Times complains? “Too many classes are overcrowded,” the paper says, voicing a common complaint of the tax-and-spend crowd. But if overcrowding is a problem, it is a result of the widespread, union-contract-protected mediocrity that sends students fleeing and cramming into the few good schools, not the result of lack of funds or adequate space in the overall system. An “Educational Plan for the City of New York” issued this year by the chairwoman of the City Council’s Education Committee, Eva Moskowitz, says there are more than 70,000 empty seats in the city school system. She attributes overcrowding in particular classrooms in part to “poor planning” by the city Education Department. Why the taxpayers should pony up more money to relieve overcrowding in a system with more than 70,000 seats sitting empty is beyond us.


The next problem on the Times list is that “Too many books are outdated.” Well, forgive us if many of the books from which we learned – say, Mark Twain’s “Huck Finn,” or Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” or, for that matter, the Bible – are timeless classics that aren’t at risk of being outdated anytime soon. We’ll grant that history textbooks should be updated to include, say, the Nixon administration, and that science textbooks also need to be new enough to reflect recent developments.


But again, the evidence here indicates that what problems exist are not the result of a lack of funding. An audit released earlier this year by the state comptroller reported that in the 2002-03 school year alone, the city Education Department spent $175.4 million on textbooks. Even divided among 1.1 million students, that can buy a whole lot of paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. And considering that these books are supposed to be retained by the schools and reused from year to year, such a budget should be more than ample if properly managed.


On the textbook topic, too, regulations and management are an issue. “All the schools we visited reported that retrieving textbooks from students at the end of the school terms is a significant problem. While schools send dunning letters to the families of the students who fail to return their textbooks, any direct sanctions against the students for not returning textbooks are not permitted,” the state audit says. Meanwhile, some schools are suffering not from a lack of textbooks but from what the state audit calls an “excess.” The audit reported that at Cardozo High School in Queens, there were 8,402 science textbooks on hand, of which 4,722, or 56%, were not in use. “Some school personnel stated that they are hesitant to distribute excess textbooks be cause they may need them in the future,” the audit says.


The Times goes on to say, “It is hard to see how New York can pay this hefty tab without raising taxes.” Truth is, it isn’t hard at all. One simple way, as the Public Policy Institute of New York State points out, would be to bring New York’s Medicaid spending – currently 64% more for each recipient than the national average – in line with reasonable norms. If New York’s Medicaid costs were brought in line even with those of neighboring states such as Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, whose health care systems are certainly nothing to sneeze at, the taxpayers would save $8 billion a year, according to the Public Policy Institute, which is the research arm of the Business Council of New York State.


“Nobody wants more taxes,” the Times claims. Nobody, that is, except for the Times itself, which in an October 2, 2004, editorial came out for increasing the payroll tax, a tax that falls most heavily on the poor and middle class. The Times also endorsed Senator Kerry for president after Mr. Kerry campaigned on a platform of increasing taxes on those who earn more than $200,000 a year. The Times editorial goes on to bemoan that state-run gambling imposes disproportionately on the poor, which is a point that somehow isn’t an obstacle for the Times when it comes to the payroll tax.


This Times editorial, for all its professions of how “nobody wants more taxes,” goes on to suggest tax increases. It cites the Citizens Budget Commission’s suggestion of, as the Times describes it, “closing loopholes for sales taxes.” But the CBC’s suggestions, backed by the Times, amount to huge tax increases. They’d impose sales tax on legal and accounting fees. They’d crack down on tax-free purchases from Internet sites likeAmazon.com. The Times also supports “closing loopholes” on taxation of corporate income – which amounts to an increase on taxes for businesses. The Times opposes corporate tax loopholes except when the New York Times Company itself is taking advantage of them, as it did with the special tax breaks it got for its new headquarters building in a Times Square “brownfield” created by the Times by demolishing the existing businesses that were there.


The Times claims “Justice Leland DeGrasse of the State Supreme Court set a deadline a year ago for the Legislature and Governor Pataki to act by the end of July.” But in their lead editorial on the most pressing problem facing the state and the city, the Times, with its vast resources, its armies of reporters and editorial writers, has even the basic details incorrect; that deadline was set not by Judge DeGrasse but by the state’s Court of Appeals. And contrary to the Times’s claim that “Justice DeGrasse has 90 days to react to the referees’ proposal,” the judge can actually take as long as he wants. Most expect him to move much more quickly. The court-appointed referees did recommended that Judge DeGrasse impose a 90-day deadline on the Legislature, but the judge hasn’t done that yet.


The Times concluded by urging Governor Pataki to negotiate a deal that gives school administrators “a much bigger budget.” But New York State is already tops in the nation in funding for schools. The city’s government-run schools are already spending two times what Catholic schools in the city spend, and getting worse results. Rather than taking the Times’s advice and negotiating a settlement that pours more money into an already-troubled system, the governor could press for reforms, such as more charter schools and vouchers, that would allow the existing money to be spent more efficiently, for better results.


As it is, the entire mess reminds us of the wisdom of an article in a 1996 issue of the Yale Law & Policy Review. Its lead author was one Michael Rebell, who is now the executive director and counsel of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity. “It is clear that court involvement rarely provides a fully satisfactory solution to complex educational controversies,” Mr. Rebell wrote then. “Given the intense fiscal constraints under which most legislatures now operate, increased judicial pressure is likely to impede rather than promote effective solutions.” Words that Mr. Rebell and Judge DeGrasse would do well to remember in the coming days.

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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