April 1996
BY STATE EDUCATION
COMMISSIONER RICHARD
P. MILLS
A Tale of Two Budgets
Somewhere in New York students must be reading A Tale of Two Cities today. It
is indeed the "best of times and the worst of times." That it is the best of times is
abundantly clear to anyone who visits schools, libraries, colleges, and cultural institutions
around the state to sense the abundance of talent all around us, and the commitment to
move on high performance goals. But it is also the worst of times in this budget season
that is hanging fire.
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?
The answer to all of those questions could be: "this year." Instead of a budgeting
process that flows from standards, that aims for performance, and that stresses the long-term,
we are just trying to get through the night. It doesn't have to be this way. It's
time to put the 1996-97 budget to bed. Then all across the state, someone should throw
a copy of the math standards on the table and ask this question: What are we going to
do right here, starting now and continuing over the next five years, to mobilize resources
and resolve to bring those standards to life for our children?
Field notes
In the last month, the individual Regents and I visited the Southern Tier, the
Rome and Utica area, Yonkers, and a good portion of the North Country. We have
seen VESID District Offices, libraries, business leaders and higher education, and many
schools. There are problems everywhere, but the overwhelming impression is of New
York's vast capacity to improve education. Here are some of the images that came
home with me:
- 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
Last month more than 40 Governors and an equal number of corporate CEOs
gathered in Palisades, New York for a Summit on educational standards and technology.
The first day was about the need for high standards, the obstacles to their
accomplishment, and how to overcome those obstacles. President Clinton spoke on the
second day to endorse nationwide standards and assessments and to outline forceful
strategies to accomplish that. On the second day we explored a dozen technology
applications related to high performance education.
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
Six of the seven teams in the Department have completed fourth quarter
performance reviews. This is the first of a series of performance reviews that is part of
our action on the problems identified in the Rockefeller Institute Report. Each quarterly
review involved managers, the Chief Financial Officer, the managing Deputy
Commissioner and myself. These were public reviews attended by many Department
staff. Each team explained their contributions to strategic planning, management of the
budget, management of diversity in staffing, and to making this a better place to work.
All of the teams have made dramatic progress in creating strategic plans. There is a
great deal of data on performance. Many familiar systems are being completely
redesigned and there is an insistent demand from all teams for better financial data. In
spite of great budget uncertainty, morale appears to be high.
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
A month ago, the Higher Education team in the State Education Department
had a backlog of more than 600 requests for modifications in higher education degree
programs. Today, they have cut this backlog in half.
Using Technology to Talk About the Standards
As I write this, I am looking at two maps of New York. One is from a year ago
and shows the locations of nine regional meetings on the Curriculum Frameworks. The
second one, a year later, shows 240 down link sites where educators and others gathered
to learn about the new Math, Science and Technology standards. In the interval between
the drawing of the two maps there was a very rapid expansion of our capacity to
communicate with the field.
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
Regents will cast an historic vote in April to decide on a proposal to eliminate low
standards Regents Competency Tests and phase in Regents for all beginning with the
ninth grade entering in September. This action will lead to redesign of the Regent's
examinations themselves one by one, and decisions in the late Fall on testing at the
elementary and middle grades. How will we get all the students ready? Many people
worry about that, but from what I have seen in schools, the worry is unfounded. But
we do have a tremendous amount of work ahead of us.
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.
PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT: Regents meetings in the communities, talks with local board
members, business leaders, students, higher education, and many others all help to
mobilize the will and resources needed. We must avoid distractions. Understandable
public concerns about school violence will distract from the reform effort if we fail to
respond. The repeated call for the end of teacher tenure is also a distraction that will
drive a wedge between labor and management just when all need to pull together. It is
possible to remove incompetent teachers, but only if management evaluates teachers
and provides honest assessment.
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.
A monthly publication of the State Education Department