Brendan Scott of the New York Post reports - “he Assembly and the city struck a tentative accord last night to more than double the number of charter schools in the state from 200 to 460.

“A final draft has to be worked out,” said Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, (D-Man). “I have every reason to believe that people will be on board.”
The state Senate and Gov. Paterson would have to sign off on any compromise. An Assembly vote was expected early today.”‘

To read more click here.

This week is the deadline to raise the cap on charter schools in New York if the state wants to compete for $700 million in federal Race to the Top funding. So far the Assembly is blocking the increase in the number of charters, which the Senate has passed.

The Executive Director of The New York Foundling Bill Baccaglini writes an op-ed in The New York Post on why the charters are important.

He writes: “We’ve all heard the arguments. Charter schools succeed be cause they’re selective in who they choose as students. Charters are unfair to teachers because some aren’t unionized. Some charters have failed to achieve better results for students. Some have lost their charters because of financial issues. Some are operated by profit-making entities. The list goes on and on.

These arguments are nothing more than red herrings intended to protect the status quo and special-interest groups. They are designed to protect the interests of selected adults in the system — but not our children.

As Albany considers lifting the statewide cap on the number of charter schools, our lawmakers need to understand that charters are the place where innovation is happening. They’re where the progress is often dramatic — after generations of stagnation. Charters are where our poorest, most vulnerable children — children who might otherwise be lost and forgotten — are having their lives transformed by education.

Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein should be applauded: They’ve been unafraid to try new things, to challenge this huge school system with new models, to put children first and create schools around their needs.

Consider the case of the Haven Academy, in Mott Haven, the most poverty-stricken neighborhood in our city. We at The New York Foundling deal with children in the child-welfare system every day — and that work led us to sponsor this school.

We believed that if we could place a special focus on at-risk children in their school, we might be able to prevent cases of child abuse, recognize troubled family situations at an early stage and do a better job of protecting children and setting them on a positive path forward in life.

The critics complain that charters “cream” — select only the students most likely to succeed. But at Haven Academy, two-thirds of the children are either in foster care or receiving formal preventive services. The final third are from the community at large, which is obviously disadvantaged. We wonder what those critics would say about a school like ours, which does what you might call “reverse creaming.”

When critics talk of financial issues, they should also point out that traditional schools receive 34 percent more government funding than charter schools ($16,678 per student each year, vs. $12,443). Whatever the structure of the sponsoring organizations — and, despite what some would have you believe, they are overwhelmingly not-for-profit organizations with track records of helping their communities — we are all doing the job with less tax dollars.”

Read the rest of the column.

The Empire Center’s E. J. McMahon takes a look at this week’s school budget votes in a column in the New York Post

He writes: “Voters in New York’s suburban, rural and smaller city school dis tricts approved 92 percent of proposed school budgets on Tuesday, according to preliminary results. This was above the 40-year average approval rate of 83 percent — and it was in sharp contrast to last month’s results in similarly high-tax New Jersey, where voters rejected more than half the proposed school budgets.

At first glance, the outcome in New York might seem shocking. After all, the conventional wisdom in political circles — consistently backed up by polls — points to a wave of discontent among economically stressed voters.

But Tuesday’s results are less surprising when viewed in historical context. Since the 1997 enactment of the multibillion-dollar state School Tax Reduction program, New York has seen a pattern of relatively high school-budget approval rates — even in tough times.

Consider 2004, when the state economy was only sluggishly emerging from the recession, the 9/11 attacks and the Wall Street downturn at the start of the decade. School districts that year asked voters to approve hefty average tax hikes of 8 percent. Yet fully 85 percent of budgets managed to pass.

Most school officials shrewdly anticipated tougher sledding this year — and their budgets reflected it. The average proposed rise in school spending was 1.4 percent and the average tax-levy hike was 3.2 percent — both well below the norms for the past decade or so.

Plus, as usual, districts used every tax-funded promotional device at their disposal to urge a “yes” vote — supported by a heavy barrage of advertising funded by the chief organizational beneficiary of school spending, the New York State United Teachers union.

New Jersey is New York’s perennial rival for top spot in school-spending rankings, and its property taxes are similarly sky-high. But Garden State school-budget votes generally have been more negative. Since 2000-01, the approval rate in New York has averaged 90 percent; in New Jersey, even excluding this year’s blowout, just 72 percent.

In past decades, the Jersey approval rate has dipped as low as 44 percent (in 1976); New York’s rate has never fallen lower than 66 percent (in 1978).

New Jersey schools were also less restrained than New York’s this year: Last month, Jersey districts were seeking average tax levy increases of of 4.8 per-cent — half again as high as the average in New York this week.

New Jersey is also in even worse shape, economically and fiscally, than New York. Prior to the April voting, Gov. Chris Christie urged Jersey residents to reject budgets if local teachers did not agree to wage freezes.

New York’s Gov. Paterson, by contrast, has been unwilling to risk a confrontation with teacher unions over compensation. Nonetheless, Tuesday’s results were something of a moral victory for him.

The school-spending plans approved this week reflected Paterson’s governor’s 5 percent cut in state aid — the same cut many school officials implied they couldn’t live with. Assembly Democrats want to restore half the cut, at a cost of $600 million — one of the reasons for the current state budget impasse.”

Read the column.

In a New York Post opinion column Raymond Keating says that New Yorkers should scrutinize their school budgets very closely this year.

He writes:  “New Jerseyans voted down a record number of public-school-district budgets last month. New Yorkers will have a chance to do the same on May 18 — and should.

According to state Education Department data, New York’s biggest statewide rejection of school budgets in the last four decades was just 34 percent in 1978. On the other hand, the 58 percent rejection rate that Jersey logged last month was its largest in 35 years.

The Empire State’s public-school establishment is hoping it will be business as usual. The New York State School Boards Association, for example, is trying to claim that school districts are proposing spending hikes averaging “just 1.4 percent for 2010-11,” with the statewide average property-tax levy rising 3.2 percent, which is “lower than the five-year average of 4.8 percent.”

In fact, the Empire Center for New York State Policy reports, statewide spending would rise 2.1 percent on a per-pupil basis – with the average per-student tax levy jumping 4 percent.

On the same per-pupil basis, proposed spending increases average 3.2 percent in Nassau County, for an average tax hike of 4.1 percent. In Suffolk, spending would jump 2.6 percent and taxes 3.8 percent; Westchester districts want 1 percent more per pupil, for a levy increase of 2.3 percent.

But the district-to-district variation is far wider — some would actually cut the per-pupil tax levy, while four Suffolk and two Westchester districts want hikes above 10 percent. A total of 191 districts across the state want to increase spending faster than inflation.

The districts reducing taxes deserve kudos. And, since New York property-tax burdens are already too stiff, and countless taxpayers are suffering along with the economy, those districts seeking tax hikes should be ashamed.

But will West Islip voters actually turn down the request for a 10.2 percent jump in the per-pupil tax levy? Will Mt. Vernon City reject a 12.8 percent rise, or North Bellmore a 9.8 percent jump?

Both New York and New Jersey desperately need a tax rollback. For example, on the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s “Business Tax Index 2010: Best to Worst State Tax Systems for Entrepreneurship and Small Business” (which I author), New Jersey ranked 50th among the states and New York 47th.”

Read the rest of the column.

Jennifer Medina reports for the New York Times - “The State Education Department and New York’s teachers’ unions have reached a deal to overhaul teacher evaluations and tie them to student test scores, brokering a compromise on an issue the unions had bitterly opposed for years.

The agreement, reached in time for the state’s second bid at $700 million in federal education grants, would scrap the current system whereby teachers were rated simply satisfactory or unsatisfactory. Instead, annual evaluations would place teachers in one of four categories — highly effective, effective, developing and ineffective. While the deal would not have any immediate effect on teacher pay, it could make it easier for schools to fire teachers deemed subpar.”

To read more click here.

Karla Cruz of the Legislative Gazette writes - “Businesses, local government and community organizations across New York are commending the State University of New York and Chancellor Nancy Zimpher for unveiling a plan they say will revitalize the state’s economy.

The groups are urging the Legislature to pass a proposed higher education reform plan to allow SUNY campuses to set their own tuition, lease resources and make purchases without prior authority from the Legislature.”

To read more click here.

A recent Buffalo News op-ed provides insight into SUNY’s continued fight to get university reforms through the State Assembly.

“Count on Assemblyman Mark Schroeder to tell it straight. The Buffalo Democrat on Wednesday laid into Speaker Sheldon Silver for blocking a bill that would let the University at Buffalo and other SUNY campuses become the economic powerhouses that upstate needs them to be.

Not only is Silver hindering the region’s development through his obstructionism, but Schroeder says the speaker is also breaking a promise to support the bill if SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimpher endorsed it. Zimpher has, emphatically, yet the bill remains bottled up in the Assembly. Silver could move it along, but he won’t. What is this man trying to do?

Reports are that downstate members oppose letting campuses set their own tuition rates, a key part of the bill, because it could jeopardize the ability of poor New Yorkers to go to college. It’s not an unreasonable concern, but the answer is to deal with the issue, not to reject a visionary program that could jump-start the upstate economy and, not insignificantly, make upstate less dependent on tax dollars generated downstate. That’s what a leader would do. It’s not what Silver is doing.”

To read more click here.

Douglas Turner: Silver’s dominance blocks UB progress

Buffalo News columnist Douglas Turner is even more pointed in his view that the Assembly Speaker is an“obstructionist”.

“To call Sheldon Silver an “obstructionist” is like saying that the absolute lord paramount of the Assembly is from Manhattan and a Democrat.

All Assembly Speaker Silver does is stare, deal and block. However, Assemblyman Mark J. F. Schroeder, D-Buffalo, picked an inopportune time to blurt out the truth.

The reason is that Silver is on the threshold of drawing new election district lines for the Assembly, the State Senate and the U. S. Congress. The occasion is the census.

Silver is apt to reward Schroeder’s candor with a new Assembly district a mile wide running along the Buffalo River, the lake shore and eastward hugging the Pennsylvania border toward the Delaware River. Schroeder’s anger was stirred when Silver broke his word to advance legislation granting the University at Buffalo desperately

needed autonomy from the bureaucrats in Albany. Why Silver is blocking this bill I will tell you below.”

To read the rest of the column click here.

The Business Council of New York State and other influential business leaders in New York along with local government and industry associations today issued an open letter to New York State legislators applauding SUNY Chancellor Nancy L. Zimpher on the launch of a new strategic plan for SUNY and urging legislators to support the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA).

“We are encouraged by the collective support of our partners in business, local government and community organizations across New York State,” said Chancellor Zimpher. “These leaders understand the importance of protecting SUNY students and campuses from the worst effects of the fiscal crisis while maximizing SUNY’s potential as a driver of New York State’s economic recovery.

“Given the positive response from these critical stakeholders, along with endorsements from our students and faculty, we hope that the Legislature will pass the Empowerment Act and fully leverage SUNY’s enormous capacity to create economic opportunities for New York.”

To read more about this issue click here.

To read the full text of the letter click  here.

In remarks made during an Earth Day event, DEC Commissioner Grannis stated that natural gas drilling involving horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing will likely not begin until spring or summer of 2011. The DEC is in the process of reviewing almost 14,000 comments and formalizing final regulations on the drilling practice. These final regulations are loosely scheduled to be released in the late summer/early fall of 2010.

Rather than become frustrated by the delay, the industry should use this time to its advantage. Here is an opportunity for drilling and development advocates to go on the offensive and step up efforts to educate leaders and the citizens of New York about the benefits of Marcellus Shale development. For too long we have sat on the sidelines and allowed the lies and misinformation to go largely unchallenged until they are repeated so often they are perceived as reality. Today’s Times Union editorial (4/22/10) is a perfect example of how the industry is continually portrayed as reckless and environmentally oblivious. While the TU acknowledges that the well contamination in Dimock, PA did not result from hydraulic fracturing as confirmed by the Pennsylvania DEP, they continue to portray the industry as profit-driven scavengers, while the editorial ignores the benefits that natural gas development will bring to the state. Energy companies will profit from development of the Marcellus Shale, but so will landowners, many counties and the entire state. New Yorkers need to know that it is possible to strike a balance between drilling for natural gas and protecting the environment.

This lull is an opportunity to inform leaders in Albany and around the state about the economic benefits that will result from development of the Marcellus Shale. Drilling opponents will continue to spread misinformation. Now is the time for us to go on the offensive so that when the sGEIS is finalized we will have won the hearts and minds of New Yorkers.

“State University of New York Chancellor Nancy Zimpher’s effort to revive the state’s economy is getting positive reviews from business leaders,” reports Kevin Harrigan in The Times-Union. 

“Zimpher this week has been touting her “Strategic Plan 2010 & Beyond,” first in New York City on Tuesday, and then on Wednesday at a news conference in downtown Albany.

The plan focuses on getting more students to complete their degrees and then to convince them to remain in New York state.

It also emphasizes teacher training in rural areas to help students from schools located there better prepare for college.

But Zimpher’s plan would also capitalize on the innovations that flow from SUNY campus laboratories and research facilities, by more quickly delivering them to the marketplace.”

This plan hinges on the passage of The Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, which would give SUNY schools more autonomy, including the power to set tuition. The legislature hasn’t yet acted on the measure.

But business leaders like the Zimpher plan.

“We think she’s spot on,” said Margaret Moree, director of federal affairs for The Business Council of New York State in Albany. “There are so many campuses that they really affect the regional economy.”

Read the full story.