By Joe Williams, Executive Director
There’s been a lot of noise in New York State lately about K-12 school funding, ranging from concerns over inequitable funding of low-wealth districts to whether or not Gov. Andrew Cuomo should be allowed to insist that school districts enforce common sense measures like adequately evaluating the grownups who care for and educate our state’s children.
All the while, we see school districts around the state whose expenses are rising faster than property tax caps can handle, and taxpayers from Montauk to Niagara Falls wondering why their schools aren’t getting the job done despite the fact that New York State leads the nation in per-pupil school spending.
This thing is a mess. And it has been for a long time.
Rather than complicating things any more than they are by offering knee-jerk, reactionary band-aids in the state budget, why not think much, much bigger and tackle this beast head-on?
Gov. Cuomo’s Education Reform Commission has the chance to boldly go where no men (and women) have gone before. They can dive in to the murky pond that is public education in New York State and separate the good, the bad, and the ugly once and for all. Blow it up, and start all over with an eye toward equity, adequacy, efficiency, and innovation.
Stop paying for stupid stuff. Pay more for the good stuff. Get things under control. Make excellence matter.
If not now, when?