New York wins fail race - again

Disappointing AND familiar... (4.00 / 1)

...true...BUT...NYS' budget woes will not be fixed with "lottery tickets" even if Washington is running the sweepstakes.

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by: Waterloo Native @ Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 16:09:18 PM UTC

Legislative malpractice (4.00 / 3)

if only we could sue them for that

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by: Roatti @ Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 17:54:26 PM UTC

Serious question? (0.00 / 0)

Has there ever been a serious attempt to make school funding mandatory? What I mean is, it should be illegal or unconstitutional to cut or withhold school funding. No one would think its okay to cut or with Social Security benefits. Why is depriving children of a good education allowed?

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by: CaseStreet @ Wed Mar 31, 2010 at 18:11:29 PM UTC

California's Prop 98 (0.00 / 0)

mandates a certain amount for K-12 education.

Of course, the Governator has been "tweaking" the formula. So unfortunately, it hasn't stopped that state from gutting K-12 funding.  

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by: marcs @ Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 05:04:09 AM UTC

[ Parent ]

Before Paying Themselves (0.00 / 0)

Albany should take care of our students.  With our terrible education system, do you blame parents for moving out of NY?  I'm also disgusted with hearing that it's all the UFT's fault.  Lets put the blame where it belongs - squarely at the doorsteps of our elected officials who don't give a damn about our students (let along our teachers).  

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by: ROSALIE907 @ Thu Apr 01, 2010 at 00:35:55 AM UTC

A few things here... (0.00 / 0)

(1) I don't think you can blame the Legislature for this completely. Sure, they share in the blame, but losing out in this contest was because of several factors. Many of these factors are ones that go back years when you look at our report card from the reviewers who graded our application and the things we did and did not implement.

(2) It has been insinuated by Democrats and Republicans alike that NY lost because legislators failed to pass a bill to lift the cap on charter schools. That is actually way off. The reason? Even if we would have gotten a perfect score in the charter schools category (worth 40 points of the 500 total points available for the competition), we still would have lost. We would have moved from 15th to 7th, but winning still would be far off (by about 30 points, give or take).

(Note: My column this week is actually on this very subject because it's a misguided view of our RTTT performance that we lost because of charters. It's also misguided to suggest, as NYSUT did, that our application was still strong. It was not.)

(3) The $700 million figure is the maximum we can win. We aren't guaranteed anything should we win. The group of "big states" that includes New York is eligible to win $350 million to $700 million. Granted, $350 million would go a long way (as would $700 million), but we can't assume that we would have won $700 million. That figure has been used to make a bad situation worse, and thus, has led to the suggestion that the state blew their chance at $700 million. That's actually the most they could have won and even if they did win, nothing suggests they would have been assured of that maximum figure.

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by: NYProgressive @ Fri Apr 02, 2010 at 18:00:11 PM UTC