By James N. Baldwin J.D., Ed.D.
District Superintendent, Questar III BOCES
Published January 4, 2012
Register Star, The Daily Mail
Recent articles by the New York Times and Times Union shine a light on a pervasive problem in our communities, childhood poverty – one that affects one in five children today. Childhood poverty contributes to the achievement gap between poor students and those from middle class and wealthy families. And in New York, state aid to public education actually magnifies that inequity.
That childhood poverty has a significant impact on our schools is beyond question. The correlation between family income and learning has been studied for decades. Research does not suggest that poor children are incapable of success, but it consistently demonstrates why it is so much more difficult for them to learn. By age three, children in poverty have just two-thirds the vocabulary of middle-income children. Inevitably, poor children start kindergarten well behind their peers – a problem that compounds over time and many never catch up.
Children in poverty often come to school with their basic needs unmet. Their focus is often about day-to-day survival. The struggles of poor children carry serious social, economic and political implications. Aside from deleterious effects on the quality of their lives, we pay the price with higher costs for special education and health services, lower levels of achievement, a less prepared workforce and worse.
There is no equity in New York’s system for public education funding. Data recently published by the Statewide School Finance Consortium demonstrates that wealthy districts in the State are often receiving more aid per capita than similarly sized poorer districts. There is no equity when residents living in poorer areas pay higher rates of taxes for a less robust educational program and when the range of annual expenditures per student exceeds $50,000 / year in wealthy districts and is a fraction of that in poorer districts.
And the wealth bias in New York is not just a matter of geography, it also happens in our schools. According to a report by the State Education Department, resource allocations within our high schools reinforce achievement gaps. High schools spend $947 more per pupil on Advanced Placement courses compared to remedial courses – courses most often taken by students with high needs or those living in poverty. This same report showed teachers are paid considerably more to teach students at wealthier schools (the average salary is $11,008 more in wealthier districts).
As far back as 1972, the Fleischmann Report said the “quality of a child’s education is determined by accidents of birth, wealth and geography.” In spite of decades of political posturing on both sides of the aisle, little has changed since. According to an Oct. 2011 report by Rutgers University, New York’s school aid inequity “has roots in the decades of public policy decisions made by the executive and legislative branches of government driven by political dynamics at the state, regional and local levels.”
While the State enacted financing reforms in 2007 in response to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) lawsuit, those promised increases have been wiped out in recent years. And the approaches used to spread those reductions have been particularly regressive and unfair to the poor.
Our State has a bi-modal education system – one for the wealthy and one for the poor. Fixing it is not necessarily about spending more and more money. It is about deploying the resources we have more equitably and with greater return on our investment in the form of student achievement.
New York State has a constitutional and moral obligation to provide a “sound basic education” to all children, including those living in poverty. The recent state aid proposal advanced by the State Board of Regents acknowledges that, at a time when financial resources are strained, we should be acting to achieve equity not compounding inequity that further disadvantages poor children.
