Gov. Cuomo says he won’t back any hikes in school aid beyond those already baked into future state budgets. Thank goodness.
That’s giving critics, who look out for the school unions rather than kids, fits. But the gov would be nuts to do what they ask: As he noted Monday, New York already shells out more per student ($23,000) than any other state — double the national average. Indeed, every district here spends more than the US mean.
And what does that cash buy? Not much: On the most recent National Assessment for Educational Progress tests (the gold standard for comparing school quality), New York student scores were “not significantly different” from the national average in math and reading — except among fourth graders, who did worse in math.
Plus, state aid to schools has been growing by more than 4 percent a year — far faster than inflation. Albany should be racing to slow growth, not speed it up. Especially when the state faces multibillion-dollar budget gaps in coming years.
What really got the critics’ goat, though, is Cuomo’s observation that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit and the Foundation Aid program, which started and stopped when Eliot Spitzer was governor, “are ghosts of the past and distractions” — indicating that he won’t OK bigger bumps in state aid than are already planned.
That prompted Spitzer, who resigned in disgrace amid a hooker scandal, to blast the gov’s “Orwellian relationship with the facts.” State Sen.-elect John Liu slapped him as “Gov. Scrooge.”
The unions’ stooges say CFE and Foundation Aid still obligate Albany to boost school aid by billions more. Yet the suit, in which the state’s top court found New York City schools got too little cash to provide a “sound basic education,” was resolved way back in 2006 — a full 12 years ago.
And it had little merit from the start: The state Constitution merely requires Albany to “provide for the maintenance and support” of “ free common schools.”
Nor did the court’s stretching of that language make the Constitution any less silent on funding, a fact the justices themselves conceded when they declined to dictate specifically how much money Albany needed to pony up.
The kicker: Aid to Gotham and other districts in effect already incorporates all the extra funding the parties agreed on, having soared a whopping 80 percent, from $15 billion in 2005 to $27 billion today.
The critics want to pay for the extra school aid by socking high-income taxpayers yet again, even beyond the “temporary” millionaire tax that lawmakers keep extending. No wonder New York continues to lead the nation in outflow of residents to other states (see below).
If higher school aid drives up taxes and prompts more working New Yorkers to flee, who’ll be left to fund the schools?
Source: Read Full Article