New York State stumbled in its ‘Race to the Top’ for federal grant money.
Monday, January 18 was supposed to be the night that New York’s application for a federal education grant received the legislative boost it needed to maximize the state’s chances of earning top dollars. It didn’t work out that way.
The following day, the state still met the application deadline for the U.S. Department of Education’s Race to the Top program, but without eliminating New York’s charter school cap – a provision championed by both Governor David Paterson and the Obama Administration, whose grant initiative favors charter school reform.
A special session of state legislators convened by Paterson on Martin Luther King Day failed to bring his bill to the floor for a vote and thus fell short of the Governor’s goal of packing in the most Race to the Top points needed to earn up to $700 million in federal funding. Instead, state lawmakers introduced their own bill, which the Governor said fell short in core areas.
The Race to the Top Fund, authorized under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, rewards states that emphasize educational innovation via charter schools and other achievement benchmarks. The program mandates that recipient states realize significant improvement in student and teacher performance and close achievement gaps; improve high school graduation rates; and ensure student preparation for success in college and the workplace. States must also create systems to focus on underperforming institutions.
“Today is a sad day for the children of New York, for the tens of thousands of students on wait lists for charter schools and for the thousands more who need and deserve better educational choices,” Paterson and Mayor Michael Bloomberg said in a joint statement.
While the two leaders called the Legislature’s failure to act “unthinkable,” they maintained that New York’s Race to the Top application was still strong.
However, State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver pointed the blame at Bloomberg. Silver asserted that the Mayor and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein put their own interests above those of the state, in not accepting the legislators’ compromise. The two “were willing to sacrifice the creation of 200 more charter schools rather than accept any limitation on their unchecked power…,” Silver said.
Meanwhile, the New York City Charter School Center, a nonprofit partnership between the city and the philanthropic community, pointed the finger at the State Assembly for using the occasion to “attack” charter schools. New York’s school children, the center’s CEO, James Merriman, said, “are the real losers today.”
Along the same lines, newly elected City Councilmember Dan Halloran, a charter schools supporter, said the substantial federal dollars earned by eliminating the charter school cap – per Paterson’s bill – could have been used “to keep much-needed resources in our public schools, which may very well now be diverted to charters.”
But the finger-pointing was far from over. The Alliance for Quality Education (AQE), a statewide nonprofit, said the charter school industry itself was to blame for the charter school cap remaining at 200 – with less than 40 slots available. Paterson’s bill, according to AQE executive director Billy Easton, “did nothing on charter school accountability.”
With New York’s Race to the Top application submitted – along with the Phase I submissions of 40 other states – New York must now wait until April for the results. Until then, The Empire State’s charter school saga is certain to drag on.
