LeBrun: A disaster dressed up as 'reform'
Fred LeBrun
"I'm big on knowing what I don't know ... If you don't know, don't dabble.
— Gov. Andrew Cuomo on the decision to ban fracking in the state.
Cynics among us might snort that this classic platitude from the dark prince is yet another example of his word rising to nothing more than the essential stuff that grows mushrooms best.
I prefer to see it as a rare example of blinding insight, which the governor does everything he can to suppress.
Properly and justly dealing with the considerable problems of public education in this state has been his greatest failure.
But he continues to fiercely dabble in it anyway, because he can. Now he's trying to convince us that by giving him more power and taking key decisions away from local school boards, he can "reform" public education. In reality what he proposes is a formula for disaster.
Additionally, he says that in the coming legislative session he aims to pin the tail on the wrong donkey yet again — on teachers, for failures in student achievement. They and their union had the audacity not to support him in the last election, and they have to be punished. Never missing a chance to bully your enemies is a Cuomo trademark.
Where that tail actually belongs is well within the governor's reach. Chronic underfunding of public education by the state, particularly in high needs districts, has become scandalous and is entirely in the governor's hands to correct.
Half the school districts in the state, including most of those high needs districts, are getting less state aid today than they got in 2008.
It seems that the governor is trying to starve traditional public education. It's more than just being tone deaf to public education and prone to listening, not for the first time, to the wrong people. He's caught up in the national, deeply conservative charter school movement, dear to the hearts of the 1 percent in this country.
The cynics I mentioned earlier might see this as a grand design to prepare the field for privatizing public schools with more charters at taxpayer expense; which would accomplish another Cuomo trademark gesture, rewarding his biggest donors, those hedge fund billionaires who wolfishly look at public education in New York as a profit making opportunity.
As to public school funding by the state, we're in crisis, and something's got to give. As we go forward in 2015 with a $5 billion state budget surplus, if a significant portion is not applied to the deepening imbalance that is crippling public education, to help relieve the pressure on LeBrun: A disaster dressed up as 'reform' - Times Union: