Reflections on Campaign for Fiscal Equity
By Mayor
Michael Bloomberg
Ensuring that every public school student has the opportunity
to get a high-quality and meaningful education has been one
of our administration's top priorities, which makes the opinion
of the Special Referee Panel especially gratifying. It reaffirms
the importance of education, recognizes the longstanding need
for improvement in our City's schools and finds that our schools
additionally need $5.6 billion annually, plus $9.2 billion
in capital funds. The decision also acknowledges that improvement
in the schools cannot be solved by money alone but also requires
the right plans and the right leadership.
The decision finds that the changes Chancellor Klein and
I have begun to implement, including our proposed plan on how
to spend the additional monies called for by the Campaign for
Fiscal Equity (CFE) decision, are leading the schools toward
the goal of providing each student with the opportunity for
a sound basic education. As the Panel noted, our reforms and
CFE plan were developed with significant input from teachers,
principals, parents and community leaders. It includes four
major initiatives: the establishment of better training, recruitment,
and retention of staff, including incentive and merit pay;
early childhood education (universal pre-K) and early grade
intervention programs; secondary school reform, including creating
smaller schools; and providing additional support for special
education students and English Language Learners.
I am very pleased that the Referees found that the City's
accountability standards are adequate.The Referees properly
recognized that the imposition of additional layers of bureaucracy
are simply unnecessary, and would impair the ability of the
Chancellor to use additional funds in the most efficient way
to rapidly improve the education of our children. Simply
put, additional regulations would be a step backwards, towards
the days where everyone was in charge but no one was accountable.
Our children paid a terrible price for that dysfunction. The
Mayoral control that the State Legislature put in place at
my urging is more than sufficient to assure the public that
the additional funds will be well spent.
The Special Referees reached the same conclusion that virtually
every distinguished analysis has: that the City's schools have
been drastically shortchanged by Albany for decades by a system
that disregards the needs of its school children when it calculates
the amount of State assistance the City receives. The grievous
wrong imposed on the City's school children resulted from the
State's failures; it must be remedied by all the State's taxpayers.
As the Panel recognized by quoting from the conclusion of
the Citizens Budget Commission report, the City already suffers
from a “high local tax burden” and that mandated
additional education expenditures would “force cuts for
necessary services other than education or force tax increases
that harm the City's economic viability.”
We already have a projected $3 billion deficit for the next
Fiscal Year as a result of uncontrollable, mandated expenses
such as Medicaid, health care and pension costs. For the City
to fund even a portion of this $5.63 billion would require
us to cut after-school programs, close libraries and make severe
cuts to essential City services, even in the area of public
safety. Such actions would harm the very children this lawsuit
is designed to help.
I look forward to
working with Governor Pataki, Speaker Silver, Senator Bruno
and all the members of the Legislature to ensure that our
schools get the funds they deserve.#
