Over the past two weeks I have been struck by the overwhelming response to Insideschools’ post on banning parent-funded assistants from public schools. After reading through the numerous, impassioned comments, the old saying “crabs in a barrel” came to mind. It is a metaphor that I have heard commonly applied to African Americans over the years. It refers to the supposed tendency of one segment of the community to attempt to hold back another upward-bound individual or segment. The eventual result is that no one succeeds. It seems that once again parents are pitted against each other in a battle for the finest education.

One parent noted that the PTA-funded assistants have allowed some schools to continue to thrive where they may have otherwise faltered due to overcrowding. Another parent voiced concern that schools serving the working class are left out completely because they receive neither Title I funds, nor a wealth of money from parent donations. Still another parent commented that the average family in New York City cannot afford several hundred dollars in yearly school fees. (more…)

Mayor Bloomberg has got to be feeling the pressure to restore education funds to the city’s budget. On Wednesday, parents gathered at City Hall to urge City Council members to vote down the proposed budget. This morning, State Assembly leader Sheldon Silver presented the mayor with an assembly resolution asking him to restore school funding. Anti-cut rallies are scheduled for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx in the next week. (See the Insideschools calendar for details about dates and locations.) And the Keep the Promises Coalition has just launched a new TV spot urging New Yorkers to call 1-800-961-6198 to tell the mayor to fund the schools.
Some kind of changes may be brewing. Patrick Sullivan reported last night on the NYC Public School Parents blog that the DOE has delayed the Panel for Education Policy’s vote on the executive budget, originally scheduled for Monday, saying that it is working on reducing the impact of cuts to schools. Of course, it could be that the DOE needs time to fix serious inconsistencies in the proposed budget — Eduwonkette’s noted one and it’s not hard to find others.

Eduwonkette’s been taking a close look at the city’s proposed budget for fiscal year 2009 (pdf)— and she reports today that the $8,287,282 slated for the Division of Assessment and Accountability includes $7,789,623 for 18 staff positions, or $432,757 per position. Eduwonkette uses these figures to point to the DOE’s “selective attention to budgeting issues.” But I’d prefer to look on the bright side — the money earmarked for DAA isn’t going up next year. Not getting a raise is like a cut, right?

One more dispatch from last night, where I was surprised to hear several speakers thinking about the possible long-term economic effects of the budget cuts.

Ziporah Steiner, principal of Maxwell High School, offered a real-world example of what the budget cuts could mean once she cuts all after school programming. “Our students have a choice: they can join the chess club, the drama club, the dance club, or they can join the Crips or the Bloods,” she said, noting that once students have joined a gang, “We cannot reel them back.”

In a statement read by a member of his staff, Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz echoed Steiner’s concerns, saying, “I strongly disagree that cutting school budgets is logical, productive, or even, in the long run, economically sound.”

And Liz Phillips, principal of PS 321 in Park Slope, said, “If this is truly a recession, schools will need more money, not less,” because children whose families are affected by the struggling economy will need additional services.

Preserving school budgets sounds great for the short term, but it sounds even better when you take a longer view. Let’s hope lawmakers and the mayor can be made to agree.

While the response to the budget cuts started quietly and informally, it’s now shaping up to be a loud, organized expression of years of frustration with the way the mayor and chancellor have managed the city’s schools.

At the Borough Hall meeting last night, it was the repeated calls for transparency at the DOE and meaningful inclusion of parent opinion in decision-making that received the most applause.

City Council Member Bill DeBlasio recited a litany of circumstances when the public has found out that “policy decisions have been made that don’t reflect the on-the-ground reality” and when DOE officials “didn’t get approval from anybody” but went ahead with their plans nonetheless, including last year’s school bus fiasco, the cell phone ban, increased testing, and the progress reports.

Describing Time Out From Testing’s six-point plan for how the DOE can save money without hurting students, Martha Foote said the DOE should open its books to the public, creating greater transparency about who works at the DOE and how much they’re paid.

The rest of the plan: eliminate the $80 million contract to create interim assessments; cut ARIS, the $80 million data tracking system the DOE bought from IBM; cut the $16.6 million contract to provide security for ARIS; stop hiring expensive consultants; and stop accepting no-bid contracts.

NYC’s students are taking action.

In response to the city’s and state’s recent education budget cuts, a group called Students Against DOE Budget Cuts has organized a protest on the steps of Tweed Courthouse for tomorrow, Valentine’s Day.

This is no surprise to me. These cuts have sent a shock down the spine of NYC’s student body to larger extent than any education issue since the cell phone ban. Students feel betrayed. We feel as though the state and city are disrespecting us and demeaning our status as learners.

These budget cuts are more of a future-cut than anything else. They show a great lack of concern for the urgent welfare of our city’s students and in doing so forgetting about the future of our city, our state and our society.

The education investment is one for the years to come. It won’t always yield the quickest results but in the long term it is an investment for the future. Through these budget cuts, Spitzer and Bloomberg signaling to NYC students that no, we are not the future.

So now, you’ve got us energized, Mayor Bloomberg, Governor Spitzer. Students are protesting. Facebook groups against the cuts are popping up every day. Petitions are being circulated. At LaGuardia, the Student Government has put together a budget cuts committee to coordinate protest efforts and to examine the school’s budget and make recommendations about how to respond to the cuts.

Do not take our investment in our learning for apathy. When you wrong us we will fight back. Listen.

When $100,000 is yanked out of your school’s budget, every dime that your PTA has raised is more precious than ever. That dime is yours to spend, and no one can take it out of your bank account in the middle of the night. It represents the ability to control your school’s destiny. So whatever fundraising efforts your PTA has planned for spring, remind your parents that the money they raise will be immune from city politics. This year, that will matter more than ever.

Chancellor Klein understands that principals are furious about the mid-year budget cuts. That’s why he emailed them on Monday to tell them how much he wants to help them (through their Integrated Service Centers, of course) and to explain that the city has shielded schools from budget cuts for years and is making cuts now reluctantly and “in such a way that respects principals’ decisions.” He wrote:

More money is always welcome in education. Everyone in our City — from principals to parents to the Mayor and me — always wants to see budgets increase. But we also know that money isn’t everything. Some schools in our City are literally doing more with less. They were shortchanged in the past — but [are now] achieving better results for kids.

No excuses, right? View the whole letter on the Class Size Matters’ yahoo message board.

We just added a dozen more principal responses to our compendium of what schools are cutting as a result of last week’s budget cuts. The most frequent things to go: After school programs, extra tutoring, and per diem personnel. Principals say classes will be more crowded and students who need extra help won’t get it — not quite the “no impact whatsoever” that the mayor promised.

Principals, teachers, and parents aren’t going to take the cuts without a fight. Tonight, parents are getting together in Park Slope to rally against the budget cuts. (6:30 p.m., John Jay building. Map) Tomorrow, UFT President Randi Weingarten and local union leaders are holding an emergency meeting to discuss the cuts. Visit the Insideschools calendar for details on how to RSVP.

On Friday, Insideschools asked principals to tell us how they’re dealing with the mid-year budget cuts, and our record of their responses is up now. We’ll be continuing to add to this as we principals get in touch with us, so tell your principal to email us now.

You must be living under a rock if you haven’t heard about the significant school budget cuts that the DOE made last week. In addition to the $324 million that schools will need to cut from their budgets next year, principals were also lost 1.75 percent of this year’s budget — before they could even stop to think about where to find the money.

As of early last week, the DOE hadn’t actually told principals that they would each have to cut a total of $180 million from their budgets; principals had to learn about the plan from the newspapers. I spoke to a principal on Friday who said she received an email at night informing her that she would have to cut $125,000; when she woke up in the morning, the money was already gone.

While the DOE will be making some cuts centrally, most of the reductions are being passed down to individual schools. The Times reported that the cuts will range from $9,000 to $447,587; for many schools, it’s possible that the cuts will undo the Fair Student Funding gains they might have seen earlier this year.

As the mayor suggested earlier this week, Klein told the Times that principals will “have to tighten some programs.” He suggested that principals might eliminate after-school activities or Saturday tutoring programs. But even if principals were okay with making those cuts, it looks like the losses might go deeper; Steven Satin, principal at Norman Thomas High School, told the Times that he has to cut the equivalent of “six teachers’ salaries for the rest of the term” from his budget. The Daily News reports that schools in Queens have already canceled dance classes, disbanded a class taught by a long-term substitute, and cut tutoring programs. Also on the chopping block centrally: two of the 10 planned citywide standardized tests (NY Times); some ESL teaching positions (NY Times); and the Lead Teacher program (last Monday’s PEP meeting).

Principals disagree with the DOE’s ideas about what ought to be cut, and they’ve been circulating emails with sarcastic (and yet eminently reasonable) suggestions for the DOE. From the Times on Friday:

The principals in their e-mail chain of complaints wondered whether their evaluations would take into account constraints because of budget cuts, and also spoke disparagingly of the city’s contracts with I.B.M., which developed the $80 million computer system, and as one principal put it, “a whole host of other private, for-profit corporations that have entered into our world.”

The DOE considers principals the CEOs of their schools, but it sounds like many principals continue to put their students, not the notion of business efficiency, first. Chancellor Klein is testifying at a legislative budget hearing this morning in Albany. For which philosophy will he advocate?