http://archive.nytimes.com/2003/02/27/opinion/27HERB.html
Hijacking the Future By BOB HERBERT After pretending for more than a year that the State of New York was not experiencing a fiscal meltdown, Gov. George Pataki is now waging an unconscionable budget war against the public schools, which in many parts of the state were already in desperate trouble. The governor, never a champion of public education, is attempting to shift much of his budget-balancing load to the backpacks of the state's schoolchildren in the form of cuts that would bring serious hardship to classrooms from Staten Island to Buffalo. Refusing at all costs to raise what he calls "job-killing taxes," the governor has moved instead to impose $1.24 billion worth of dream-killing cuts in state aid to elementary and secondary schools. The kids who would be hurt most by the cuts are those most desperately in need of a quality education. The governor has abandoned even the pretense of caring about education. While he's proposed cutting the overall budget by 3 percent, he wants to cut education aid by a potentially devastating 8.5 percent. The New York City schools chancellor, Joel Klein, told state legislators this week that if the governor's proposals stood, the city would have to increase class sizes in kindergarten through third grade and eliminate its successful pre-kindergarten program, which took four years to develop and serves 43,000 students. "There is no more effective or cost-efficient way of preparing children for success in school than investing in quality pre-kindergarten and early-grade instruction," said Mr. Klein. "Principals and teachers across the system tell me they can immediately tell which children have been through a universal pre-K program and that they are far more prepared for formal instruction in the early grades. If we are serious about reaching our goal to have every child read at grade level, we can ill afford to lose 43,000 universal pre-K seats." If the governor has his way, those seats will be gone. Urban school districts throughout the state, which already spend substantially less per pupil than wealthier suburban districts, would suffer most from the cuts. Officials in Buffalo, Rochester and several other municipalities are actually considering the possibility of a four-day school week. (This may not be legal under state law, but the school districts are desperate.) "We rely on the state for a little over 80 percent of our operating funds," said Andrew Maddigan, a spokesman for the Buffalo school superintendent, Marion Canedo. The governor's budget would provide $32 million less than Buffalo received for the current school year. But to operate the same programs next year would cost the Buffalo school system an additional $30 million to $35 million because of contractual increases and other mandated expenses. So the gap that Buffalo would have to make up is $60 million or more. Mr. Maddigan said that would be impossible. For kids who don't have much to begin with, schooling is the ticket out of a precarious situation. Mr. Pataki's budget proposal is a way of snatching that ticket from their hands. This assault on the prospects of future generations takes on a particularly perverse quality when you consider that it comes as the federal and state governments are ratcheting up the standards for these youngsters. Raise the bar and lower the resources. There is no way the children can win. None of this resonates with the governor. These kids don't have high-priced lobbyists to go to bat for them. They don't make campaign contributions. They don't have access to the halls of power in Albany. Mr. Pataki sees them as nobodies and treats them as such. "Governor Pataki is no friend to education," said Leonie Haimson, who heads a parents' advocacy group in New York City called Class Size Matters. Citing data from the National Center for Education Statistics, she noted that since Mr. Pataki became governor, New York had fallen to 40th out of 50 states in the average elementary school class size; 47th out of 50 in the category of pupil-teacher ratio; and 40th out of 50 in the percentage increase in state school aid per pupil. New York spends more than $30,000 per year for each state prisoner, but just a little over $4,000 annually in state funds for each public school pupil. For budgetary purposes the kids would be better off as inmates, which in a sense they are. They're prisoners of a system that doesn't really care about them. _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
