By Charles Barone, DFER Director of Federal Policy and Omar Lopez, DFER Policy Analyst
Last week, SUNY-New Paltz issued a paper authored by Kenneth Mitchell, Superintendent of the South Orangetown school district and head of the Lower Hudson Council of Superintendents. The paper’s major claim is that New York’s Race to the Top funding would cost districts millions in unfunded mandates and would therefore not be worth implementing. After closely reading the report, we’ve found that though it is cleverly worded, it is also fundamentally misleading.
First and foremost, no district is required to take Race to the Top (RttT) funding. Any district that thinks the advantages of accepting the funding are outweighed by disadvantages can decline the money and, along with it, any of RttT’s specific requirements. So talk of an RttT “mandate,” a word that appears 25 times in the paper, is nonsense.
For purposes of comparison, the term “achievement gap” appears in the report once, and somewhat glibly at that. Terms like “equity” or “disadvantaged” do not appear at all. This disparity – between the interests of a fairly privileged group of school administrators and the majority of New York State students who are most in need of RttT’s fundamental reforms – turns out to be pretty thematic of the overall report.
Not that the author doesn’t do his best to whitewash such distinctions. Opening headlines of the report in big font imply that its findings extend to New York State as a whole. Results from Rockland and Westchester Counties are first cited as “examples.” After a closer read, however, it becomes clear that the findings of the report are only from these two counties. As such, the implied generalizability of the findings presented here to all districts in the state is entirely bogus. For most of the districts encompassed by the report, one could say giving the money back to less privileged New York communities would be not only prudent but darn right principled.
Let’s take a look at the South Orangetown District where Mitchell is Superintendent. Per-pupil spending is $18,574, more than $2,000 above the state average of $16,387. Multiplied by more than 3,400 district students, that’s about an extra $7 million per year. If we were South Orangetown partisans, we’d be grateful for this advantage and keep our mouths shut about resource problems.
The district is also, not surprisingly, fairly homogeneous and wildly different demographically from the Empire State as a whole. Seven percent of the students in South Orangetown are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch; the state average is 44%. Black students make up 2% of all district students compared to a state average of 19%; Hispanic students make up 7% of students, one third of the state average of 21%.