A Tale of Two Budgets

This spring could almost be a tale of two budgets. One budget is modest but represents a funding level adequate to the new standards. This is the Regents proposal. The other budget, which is proposed by the Executive, pinches schools three ways by shifting nearly $400 million in costs to local taxpayers, limiting the growth in state aid to practically nil, and reducing the local capacity to raise revenues.

Local boards are forced to think in terms of two budgets of their own. Do they bet on ultimate restoration of funds for education and thus expose their communities to a financial catastrophe if they guess wrong? Do they make reductions certain by accepting the low numbers? Or can they delay the whole thing by voting as late as possible?

It seems likely that the Legislature will make every effort to restore the education funds, but if that decision comes late the voters will have already made hard decisions without the information they need. New York must make some long term decisions here. It's not just two budgets that we must choose between, but two visions of our future. In one version of a future, New York will be known for the best educated workforce in the nation. That New York will be able to afford its dreams because it will be able to attract the jobs that it wants. But another future is possible - even probable - if we don't make the right investment decisions now. That is a New York with dreams pushed out of reach by intractable social problems, and too many people with skills that are too low for the marketplace.

Budget choices have a close to home reality for me. As I write this, I have just had to inform my colleagues at the State Education Department that 67 of them will receive a lay off notice this month in the absence of specific actions by the Legislature. These reductions in staff will be necessary to eliminate prior year deficits. I also announced an additional 98 positions that will be lost in the near future if the Executive budget reductions are not restored. Why not wait it out? I can't wait because the meter is running. There are more people on staff than I expect to have funds for. Each week of delay costs an additional $138,000.

It's time to act on the budget. Congress has delayed too long and so has the Legislature. We have accepted a world of perpetual budget making that distracts policy leaders and practitioners everywhere from the real business at hand: mobilization for higher skills. We think short term -- when all of the important problems require long term solutions. New York simply must break out of this short-term thinking.

Let's also put aside a style of budgeting that stresses restoration of things lost. The pattern is of long standing. The Executive proposes cuts, and the legislative branch tries to restore them. All the advocacy groups fall in step. But who thinks about the future? Budget making for the next five years needs to be about some very long-term investments. After the Regents adopt new standards this spring, standards which require 90 percent of the students to be able to read at or above the state reference point in third grade reading, we will discover that a great many New York schools can't perform at that level. We must invest in the fundamentals of reading, mathematics, science. The choices are frightfully complex and require more than the few weeks we usually give. The extraordinary deficit that we have incurred in the quality of our facilities must be paid off. It's not just a New York City problem. On two recent trips to the North Country, it was part of the routine to step around the buckets catching ceiling leaks. And we are far behind in the investments we should be making in technology.

Budgets should be long-term investments in strategies to achieve the future we want. The questions that should drive budget making are simple ones. What results do we want? What are the indicators of those outcomes? What can we do this year and over the next five years to make those indicators move in the right direction?

Instead of the unproductive, annualized, even trivialized budget thinking that we are used to, let's tackle these questions in the budget:

• When are we going to rethink our cost structure in education? Do we want the ratio of instructional to non instructional staffing that we have? Will this really get all students to high standards?
• When are we going to change state aid so that the system is fair, adequate, and incentive driven? The comptroller's brief report from last October reminds us that there is no undiscovered revenue source or strategy out there waiting for us. New York must either choose its method or eventually accept a court imposed system.
• When will we start the first year of the campaign to rebuild New York's stock of school buildings?
• When are we going to bring the costs of preschool special education under control?
• When are we going to make the obviously needed changes in the school calendar to get more time for instruction?

Field notes

• About expectations: Corning CEO Jamie Houghton told a group of educators and business leaders of his sudden realization that as an employer, he needed to explain his expectations of graduates to educators and how different the dialogue between business and education became as a result.
• About results: The Malone VESID office has barely a dozen case workers but their average placement level is so high -- 63 people placed last year for each case worker -- that they have put nearly $6 million into the local payroll in their region. And to cite a school example, Superintendent David Pacienca in South Jefferson Central School showed the first School Report Card posted on the wall at the doorway of the school. I must abandon a favorite line about always seeing the sports trophies but never the academic ones.
• About telling our story: The Watertown Daily Times Editorial Board pushed us hard on issues of school quality and the preparation of youth for the world ahead of them but they quickly agreed to have an editorial board meeting with students to learn how they felt about the matter. That was class.
• About parent involvement: Parents at Calcium Elementary School near Fort Drum work hard with teachers to make the school an island of stability in a community where the turnover rate in the student body is 50 percent a year and more.
• About student performance: Administrators in Beekmantown and the Rome School for the Deaf let the students guide the Regents and me through the school and gave in the process an unmistakable signal of their confidence in students.
• About testing: Students in Waverly transformed a community meeting with the Chancellor and me by engaging us in an impromptu debate over the Regents for all strategy. While they were at it, they demonstrated enormous competence and self confidence to the whole community.
• About teaching: We saw so many fine examples of teaching. Perhaps one example can stand for them all. In Masenna High School, a math teacher, a business teacher, and an English teacher joined with Alcoa to create a remarkable intellectual experience for a group of 11th and 12th graders. They worked amidst a clutter of computers that resembled the work room of an engineering team racing the clock to solve a really significant problem. The problem involved the angles of some molding jets used in the fabrication of high performance aluminum parts. There could be no error. The angles were different, however, the parts were unacceptable and the team needed to find out why and what the optimum angle was.
  They had been working for weeks on this problem in an atmosphere of data gathering, spreadsheets, technical writing, computer simulations, and every bit of algebra they knew. There were human relations and training issues involved because one of the operators of the molding system apparently wasn't following procedures but no one could tell who. The team was getting ready for a presentation of their findings to a team of engineers at Alcoa. It wasn't expected to be easy. They worked in 90 minute blocks, conferred in teams, and they worked with extreme intensity. How do we make this kind of teaching and learning common place in New York schools? How do we measure that performance?

A Report from the Education Summit 1996

The most striking technology exhibit was about access to the Library of Congress through the Internet. Many years ago when I was a history teacher in New York City, a colleague and I went to the Library of Congress in Washington at our own expense to make photographic copies of Matthew Brady's remarkable Civil War photographs. We were intent on creating filmstrips because we could find nothing suitable on this topic for our students. Today, any student with access to the Internet can rummage through all of those same photographs and can download copies. In fact, it's the only way that a youngster can work with the Library of Congress collections. Other demonstrations involved remote scoring of student work portfolios against standards, and science experiments with custom tailored weather satellite photographs.

The Summit ended with a commitment to create standards in all the states within two years and to build an "entity" to review the quality of state standards on a voluntary basis. The most important result of the Summit was that it made ongoing state efforts visible. In short order, all states will have their standards on the Internet and everyone will borrow from the best. In discussions with chief state school officers since the Summit it seems obvious that most of the states are about where we are with new or nearly completed standards and many questions about how to define the most appropriate testing system to match them.

Management is Accountable

The next set of quarterly reviews will focus on the new performance measures. I will expect all managers to be up to date on individual performance reviews of all staff reporting to them. We also expect to have new unit financial reporting available by the first quarter of FY 97.

Progress in Higher Education

Using Technology to Talk About the Standards

Some of these telecasts have been mounted in less than a week. They start with a visit to a school where I talk with students and teachers about one of the sets of standards. A Department team reduces an hour or more of video tape to five minutes and we use that tape in conjunction with tapes of expert teachers describing their work with the standards. The audience in the remote sites watch the telecast, then work in small groups. Then we return for a telecast panel discussion involving many of the people who took part in the videotapes. Teachers from the remote locations call in questions and we answer them over the air. We plan more than 20 such events in the coming year.

In early September, we will conduct a statewide faculty meeting on the new Regents standards.

Expert teachers and their students are the best possible communicators about the meaning of the standards and how to apply them in practice.

An Historic Vote and its Consequences

New York has most of the elements of a reform in the making, and one need not travel far to see many schools that have the concepts in action. Yet that is far from sufficient. Our challenge is to put the main elements in place everywhere, and to remind ourselves continually of how it all fits together. Unconnected good ideas will not do. These are the elements:

STANDARDS AND ASSESSMENT: Getting the expectations right is vital because they establish the purpose against which all other strategies are judged. By eliminating the low standard Regents Competency Test, we close the escape route and face the problem of instructional practices that don't work for some children. Changes in the graduation tests require changes in the elementary and middle grades tests and the instruction to match the standards.

CLASSROOM PRACTICE: This may be the biggest capacity issue.

• What works. We must concentrate on instructional practices that reflect research. Fads have no place in our schools. The State Education Department and its many partners must produce curriculum and resource guides that explain best practices, and then continually improve those materials as we learn more.
• Time for instruction. We think that we have 180 days of instruction but some schools have more like 155 after all the distractions are counted. The Regents should support 180 days within a 12 month period to give schools flexibility in their operations, and the Department must move whatever we put in the way, such as untimely testing that disrupts teaching schedules.
• Professional development. New York has enormous capacity to renew the skills of educators in the BOCES, Teachers Centers, and countless professional networks. But the professional curriculum that emerges from this training system is disconnected. Those who lead these institutions must join forces and agree on a "Curriculum of Change" that will support all educators in their efforts to educate all students to the standards. They appear very willing to do so, and the State Education Department must back them.
• Institutional consequences. We must be generous in our praise for those who continuously improve student performance, and must not hesitate to pull the registration of low performing schools that don't improve.

PARTNERSHIPS WITH HUMAN SERVICES: The Kids Count data from the Annie E. Casey Foundation shows that New York ranks 37th in the nation on a series of social indicators affecting the well being of children. Virtually all of these indicators can be moved in the right direction through intelligent public policy. In the absence of that policy, the problems simply move along to the school. Educators at every level must follow the example of the Council of Children and Families and the Task Force on Children and Families. We must reach across the boundaries to our friends in human services to enable all children to come to school ready to learn.

RESOURCES: The Regents Budget proposal includes specific amounts for texts, teacher training, and high priority instructional purposes. Yet most of the money we are going to have we have already. The Regents supported research on cost effectiveness must be applied at state and local levels. Through deregulation, rethinking our staffing ratios, new approaches to special education funding, and numerous other actions, we must use what we have more productively. And in addition, the state aid system must be reformed.

LEADERSHIP: This is one set of strategies that has not yet attracted much attention. It should. One common characteristic of all high performing schools is strong leadership. We must examine what we do to strengthen the skills of current leaders and attract the new ones we surely will need.