• Editorial: Aid to schools goes up while alarms still go off

  • No matter how you measure it, the new state budget includes the kind of increase in funding for education that boards and superintendents have been calling for.
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    As measured by the nonpartisan Citizens Budget Commission, the overall increase will be about $1.1 billion or 5.3 percent above the amount distributed last year. At a time when inflation is low and showing no sign of any upward spike, the amount coming from Albany can only be described as generous.
    That's not the word that most boards and administrators will be using, however. They will continue to sound the alarm as they do each spring in hopes that they can panic the voters into supporting the maximum tax increase allowable under law.
    You can't blame them even if you disagree with their conclusions and their tactics. They and we are the victims of a dysfunctional funding system that has New York spending more per pupil than almost any other state yet delivering results that put us far down the list of achievements. Although boards and administrators are part of state organizations that lobby the Legislature for change, they are on their own where it counts in making requests for more money. Each school competes with every other school, and the winners and losers are more likely to be decided along political lines than along anything measuring need and fairness.
    By looking up and noting that the sky always seems to be falling on them, these local leaders have eroded their credibility over the years. By making weak efforts to enact the kind of sweeping reforms that the state needs and focusing instead on getting more for their own districts at the expense of others, they have perpetuated and strengthened the very system they say needs to be replaced.
    Nowhere is that more evident than in the list of schools receiving supplemental allotments, something that used to be known as pork.
    Despite the formulas determining the amount a school should get, legislators like to keep a few million in reserve to dole out as favors. The presence of so many schools from Long Island on the list is a familiar sign that even as the power structure in the state Senate has changed this session, that region still has enough clout to get the kind of attention that lets politicians campaign with reminders about the extra money they were able to bring to town.
    In our region, the schools on the list and the amounts they get defy any analysis other than a political one. The Monroe-Woodbury district, one of the wealthiest, will get $250,000 as will the Newburgh district, one of the poorest. Middletown gets $50,000 as does Cornwall. Most schools will get nothing at all but dare not complain because they want to be positioned to get a handout next year when the Legislature repeats this annual exercise.
    Schools have themselves to blame for this because the longer they fight one another for politically motivated handouts, the more they delay the kind of real reform that would distribute aid equally and fund it from a much broader tax base.
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