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Teachers' Unions

Education: Big Bucks, Questionable Results

Think spending more on schools will guarantee better results? Don’t try using New York’s record to make the case. Here, as the state’s long-term economic decline has accelerated, spending on schools statewide has skyrocketed—but educational performance continues to drag.

In 2003–04, New York’s public schools spent $12,089 per pupil—more than any other state and 47 percent above the national average.[78] In fact, more than a quarter of the nation’s 1,000 highest-spending school districts are in New York State.[79] Total school spending across the state has roughly tripled in the past 20 years; state aid to New York City schools has grown even faster, especially since the 1990s.[80] (Adjusting for inflation during the same period, Albany’s aid to schools was up 50 percent statewide and 78 percent in New York City.)

Enrollment trends do not justify this spending explosion. During the 20-year period ending in 2001–02, student population was up only slightly in New York City and was generally steady statewide.[81]

So where did the money go? Mainly to more staff and higher salaries. New York State public schools added nearly 75,000 employees between 1982–83 and 2001–02, a 39 percent increase that occurred as enrollment stayed flat.[82] One result: more teachers who teach less.[83] For every ten teachers in a New York State classroom at any given time, there are seven not in class.[84]

As spending soared across the board, school performance has sputtered:

  • The number of New York City schools falling short of minimum state standards more than doubled during the 1990s, a decade that saw steep increases in the city’s education budget.[85] Despite a supposedly stronger emphasis on performance in recent years, the city in mid-2005 was poised to give more than three-quarters of a million dollars in “merit” bonuses to principals of 89 schools deemed failures by state or federal standards.[86]
  • New York State’s graduation rates and “college-readiness” rates, two key measures of school success, were well below the national average.[87]
  • Fewer than half of New York’s middle-school students met the state’s English standards in 2005.[88]
  • Separate analyses of school spending at opposite ends of the state—published in the New York Post and Buffalo News—found that schools with the best test scores were not always the ones that spent the most.[89]
 
Gotham Schools: Rewarding Failure

Nowhere is the dysfunction of New York’s school system more apparent than in New York City—a legendary swamp of administrative dysfunction, inmates-running-the-asylum union power, and educational mediocrity.

The city’s powerful teachers’ union and a network of affiliated advocates exploit the city’s byzantine maze of rules and regulations to squelch any efforts to restrain spending and enact reform. Union work rules ensure that the most experienced teachers effectively assign themselves to the best schools—where their skills are least needed.[97] The teachers’ contract bars merit pay or financial incentives to attract better teaching to the worst-performing schools. Indeed, the system effectively rewards failure by sending more money to the worst schools.[98]

Besides rewarding failures, union work rules also protect mediocrities. Under the terms of their contracts, even the worst teachers are granted extraordinary protections from dismissal: it takes two years of legal proceedings, with multiple appearances before a judge, for a principal to remove a single incompetent teacher. And since 99 percent of teachers who are threatened with removal file grievances (and are granted teachers’ union representation throughout the arduous process), a principal in an underperforming school who wanted to remove five or six bad teachers could easily find it becoming a full-time job.[99]

The hurdles principals must clear to fire teachers are sometimes downright criminal. A Staten Island middle-school dean convicted of drug possession was ordered reinstated to his job in 2003. It took two more years of legal wrangling for the city to win an appellate court decision clearing the way for him to be fired.[100] And this was hardly the first such case: a few years earlier, the union helped a Brooklyn teacher successfully fight efforts to fire him after he was convicted of selling cocaine to another teacher—delivered “in Board of Ed envelopes, no less.”[101]

Underscoring the lesson that bad behavior need never have consequences, the system holds pupils even less accountable than teachers. Student discipline is governed by more than 200 pages of rules, not including voluminous case law.[102] Suspending a student requires 66 discrete procedural steps—with 35 more steps required if the student is enrolled in special education—even before any legal steps are taken.[103]

Despite all this administrative chaos, New York City schools now have the courts’ backing for a new helping of billions of taxpayer dollars.[104] In July 2003, a coalition calling itself the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) won a ruling from the state’s highest court that New York’s long-term funding of Gotham’s schools has been constitutionally inadequate to ensure a “sound, basic education.” Since the decision, CFE has been demanding that Albany throw billions of new taxpayer dollars at New York City schools. Albany is stalling, but some infusion of new dollars seems likely—although it is far from clear that the courts can actually force this remedy on the legislature.[105]

Other coalitions of school districts around the state, naturally, are scrambling to pump up their own state aid,[106] and it is widely agreed that a “statewide solution” that spends more money everywhere is the only politically expedient outcome.[107] The full level of funding sought by CFE would require the biggest state tax hike in U.S. history.[108] But anything less would be unacceptable to the people whose voices speak loudest in Albany—the educational bureaucrats, school boards, and teachers’ unions.
 

New York’s teachers’ unions and their nominal adversaries at the collective bargaining table, New York’s school districts, work to drive New York’s school spending ever upward. To keep taxpayer dollars gushing, unions and school districts pour millions of dollars annually into prospending ads, lobbying, and campaign contributions. New York State United Teachers, the state’s largest and most powerful teachers’ union, ranks among the state’s top ten spenders on lobbying.[90] The union also spends heavily each year to promote “yes” votes on school budgets: in 2005, the union’s slick TV ad campaign cost more than $1 million.[91] (School districts aren’t supposed to endorse school-budget proposals, but they are known to drop sly hints to encourage “yes” votes.)[92]

Teachers’ unions are also famous for mounting fierce rear-guard actions to stave off reforms designed to improve what kids learn or ease the burden on school taxpayers. To cite just three examples from economically and fiscally struggling western New York:

  • The Niagara Falls Teachers Union fiercely resisted a charter-school proposal with tactics that included a mass-mailing of thousands of form letters to members of the state Board of Regents[93] along with “threats” and “intimidation”[94] that reportedly prompted three members of the proposed school’s board to resign. After some delay, the Regents ultimately approved the charter-school proposal despite the union’s stiff opposition.
  • The teachers’ union in the virtually bankrupt city of Buffalo nixed a school-district proposal to save $27 million by shifting union members’ health coverage to a single insurer.[95] (The school district later followed legal advice and imposed the change anyway.)[96]
  • Teachers in the Erie County town of Clarence bought billboard ads and staged pickets to demand higher taxes for pay raises. “The ability to pay in the Clarence community is there,” the head of the teachers’ union said.

Reflecting a nationwide syndrome common to government bureaucracies, public schools and their supporters in the state Capitol focus on boosting educational inputs (spending on staff and facilities) while resisting accountability for outcomes (student performance, as measured by student test scores). Despite some recent improvements in test scores, the measurable outcomes of K-12 public education in New York are far from commensurate with the inputs.

 

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78. See Rankings and Estimates, published November 2004 by the National Education Association, at http://www.nea.org/edstats/images/04rankings-update.pdf.
79. “New York’s School Spending Is Among the Highest in the Country, Census Bureau Finds,” news story by the Business Council of New York State, March 17, 2005, available at http://www.bcnys.org/whatsnew/2005/0317schoolspend.htm.
80. No Strings Attached?, Raymond Domanico, the Manhattan Institute, July 24, 2004. Study is available at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cr_42.htm.
81. See No Strings Attached?, supra.
82. Ibid.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. “ ‘Failing’ Principals Due 77G Bonuses,” David Andreatta, New York Post, August 8, 2005.
87. Public High School Graduation and College-Readiness Rates: 1991–2002, Jay P. Greene and Marcus A. Winters, February2005. Working paper is available at http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/ewp_08.htm.
88. “Less Than Half Meet Middle School English Standards,” Michael Gormley, Associated Press, May 18, 2005.
89. See “More Is Le$$ on Test Scores at City Schools,” New York Post, July 25, 2005, and “Spending vs. Achievement: Doing the Math Is Revealing,” Buffalo News, May 2, 2005.
90. Data from the state’s Temporary Commission on Lobbying, available at http://www.nylobby.state.ny.us/app_grev.html.
91. “More Than 83 Percent of School Budgets Pass,” Michael Gormley, Associated Press, May 18.
92. See, for example, “Tension Produced Budget Worth Voters’ consideration,” Ithaca Journal, May 13, 2005, an op-ed piece signed by several school-board members from a Tompkins County school district.
93. “Regents Punt, Niagara Falls,” editorial, New York Post, December 20, 2004.
94. “Hope in Niagara Falls,” editorial, New York Post, December 15, 2004.
95. “Punishing the Students,” Buffalo News editorial, May 11, 2005.
96. “A Risky Move,” Buffalo News editorial, May 20, 2005.
97. See No Strings Attached?, supra, executive summary.
98. See ibid.
99. “Free the Schools,” Philip K. Howard, New York Daily News, May 15, 2005, op-ed.
100. “Drug Rap Dean Gets Job Back,” New York Post, August 9, 2003.
101. See “Free the Schools,” New York Daily News, supra.
102. “Over Ruled: The Burden of Law on America’s Schools,” study issued November 29, 2004, by Common Good and available at http://cgood.org/schools-newscommentary-inthenews-183.html.
103. See No Strings Attached, supra.
104. “City Schools Need $5.6 Billion More, Court Panel Says,” Greg Winter, New York Times, December 1, 2004.
105. David Schoenbrod, “CFE Ruling Does Not Bind Legislature,” Policy Briefing, no. 2, August 2005, Empire Center for New York State Policy.
106. See, for example, “More Districts Invited to Join School Aid Suit,” Mary Pasciak, Buffalo News, August 15, 2004.
107. See, for example, No Strings Attached?, supra, “Introduction and Background.”
108. See “The Campaign for Fiscal Fantasy,” New York Post editorial, February 9, 2004.