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Friday, February 27, 2015

Angry Andy’s Failing Schools & the Finger of Blame | School Finance 101

Angry Andy’s Failing Schools & the Finger of Blame | School Finance 101:



Angry Andy’s Failing Schools & the Finger of Blame



 NY Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office has released a report in which it identifies what it refers to in bold type on the cover as “Failing Schools.”

Presumably, these are the very schools on which Angy Andy would like to impose death penalties – or so he has opined in the past.
The report identifies 17 districts in particular that are home to failing schools. The point of the report is to assert that the incompetent bureaucrats, high paid administrators and lazy teachers in these schools simply aren’t getting the job done and must be punished/relieved of their duties. Angry Andy has repeatedly vociferously asserted that he and his less rabid predecessors have poured obscene sums of funding into these districts for decades. Thus – it’s their fault – certainly not his, for why they stink!
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I have addressed over and over again on this blog the plight of high need, specifically small city school districts under Governor Cuomo.
  1. On how New York State crafted a low-ball estimate of what districts needed to achieve adequate outcomes and then still completely failed to fund it.
  2. On how New York State maintains one of the least equitable state school finance systems in the nation.
  3. On how New York State’s systemic, persistent underfunding of high need districts has led to significant increases of numbers of children attending school with excessively large class sizes.
  4. On how New York State officials crafted a completely bogus, racially and economically disparate school classification scheme in order to justify intervening in the very schools they have most deprived over time.
I have also written reports on New York State’s underfunding of the school finance formula – a formula adopted to comply with prior court order in CFE v. State.
  1. Statewide Policy Brief with NYC Supplement: BBaker.NYPolicyBrief_NYC
  2. 50 Biggest Funding Gaps Supplement: 50 Biggest Aid Gaps 2013-14_15_FINAL
Among my reports is one in which I identified the 50 districts with the biggest state aid shortfalls with respect to what the state itself says these districts require for providing a sound basic (constitutional standard) education.  Districts across NY state have funding gaps for a variety of reasons, but I have sAngry Andy’s Failing Schools & the Finger of Blame | School Finance 101: