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February 9, 2004
STATES: Fighting for funding in New York
Newsday reports that "a coalition of school boards and parents last week released a report recommending that the state increase its per-pupil school aid from $11,093 to $12,520 over the next few years, ultimately a $7 billion undertaking." The Campaign for Fiscal Equity's (CFE) recommendation would require a substantial political and financial commitment from lawmakers who say that they don't want to raise taxes and that the state faces a budget gap of potentially $5.1 billion. No one in Albany knows how this issue will be resolved. "[W]here is the money going to come from?" said Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Brunswick). An analyst with the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, laughed off the proposal. Diana Fortuna of the Citizens Budget Commission, a business-financed fiscal watchdog group, said, "This is going to be very challenging for a state government that can't do the ordinary things right, like passing a budget on time."
But William Duncombe, a Syracuse University professor who co-wrote a study on New York State education financing last year, said the figures "sound like in the ballpark of what's going to be necessary." Jay Chambers, the American Institutes for Research economist who led the new New York study, explained its methodology last week at the 2004 Educational Adequacy Conference co-sponsored by NSBA and CFE. He said that the study was conducted conscientiously by a politically diverse group of experts who were strictly independent of CFE. As we explain below, look for heated debates over studies like this in other states.
Posted February 9, 2004 12:00 AM
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