The "21st century schools" swimming in cash

In today's Daily News, Meredith Kolodner describes how DOE is further undermining the supposed fairness of its "fair student funding" system by awarding lots of extra cash to its new pet project -- the high-tech "21st century" schools.

These schools are receiving increases of up to 31% of their budgets to hire more teachers and equipment, while other schools, including those with many more "high needs" students, are having to deal with big budget cuts and are laying off teachers and aides. See for example, this report from WNYC, about what layoffs one school in Brooklyn is facing.

As we earlier pointed out on the NYC education list serv , Tweed is hiring lots of extra staff to oversee the expansion of the highly promoted "School of One", which is part of the 21st century school project. In hiring ads, they say they are "looking to add several new team members to support this expansion" -- despite the supposed administrative hiring freeze. Presumably , the salaries of these "team members" are not even counted in the spending spree described in today's paper.

Like charter schools, which are not subject to "fair student funding" and receive lots of hidden subsidies and extra space, as with the new small schools , DOE likes to provide extra support and privileges to certain schools; and then gleefully point out how much better they are doing. Indeed, despite the PR spin, inequities have flourished under this administration.

Bloomberg on charter schools etc.

At the Working Families Party Debate on July 2, a parent asks the Mayor:

“My children’s school is successful Harlem school, but they are downsizing it to make way for charter schools. But charter schools only educate 2% of public school students. Meanwhile many of the large schools that have thousands of students continue to fail. what is your plan to turn around big schools and failing schools?”

Bloomberg responds: "I went to public schools, I believe they are the future of the society.... Charter schools are useful, they’re open, they give us a bogie (?) to go after.

But look at what we’ve done with the big schools….Bushwick, Amanda Childs (!!!), we took the the same number of students but broke them up into smaller schools, better management. Graduation rates up. And Harlem is one of the great success stories…..

I am in favor of fair funding. We did not fund schools in poor minority neighborhoods anywhere near as we did in more affluent neighborhoods. We put all new money to give them schools underfunded. We’ve been able to upgrade teachers through training….If there’s anything I’m proud of is the progress we’ve made its whats happened to the public school system over the last seven years."

Actually, the so-called fair student funding formula the DOE devised would have cut the funding for 47% of failing schools in NYC, as we discussed here. And the additional state funding this year that was supposed to go to low-performing schools instead went to plug holes caused by the city's budget cuts to schools, as CFE recently revealed.