NYTimes Editorial 2Dec04: A Sound Basic Education

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/02/opinion/02thu1.html?ex=1103001827&ei=1&en=9d6b5d6e640532a9

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December 2, 2004
EDITORIAL

A Sound Basic Education


Anybody who knows about public schools in New York City has known for a long time what the problems are. Too many classes are overcrowded. Too many books are outdated. Equipment is too often antiquated or broken or missing altogether. These and other deficiencies are so alarming, so debilitating and so unfair for the city's 1.1 million public school students that New York has now officially joined other states that have the courts, not educators or politicians, taking charge of the schools.

After 11 years of litigation in place of government action, three court-appointed referees finally reported this week on how much money it would take to fix the city's schools. To give students the "sound basic education" promised by New York's Constitution, these referees said, the state and city should phase in a mountainous $5.6 billion more a year in spending for operating costs, plus $9.2 billion for new classrooms and other facilities.

The numbers are huge, but should not surprise city and state leaders, who allowed the courts to seize control of the city's schools by refusing to fix the problem themselves. Now New York has to pay this long overdue bill.

Politicians - mainly Gov. George Pataki, the State Legislature's leaders and Mayor Michael Bloomberg - have been negotiating with the lead plaintiff in this case to try to shave a little off the bottom line. That won't solve much. Even with a slight discount, it is hard to see how New York can pay this hefty tab without raising taxes.

Nobody wants more taxes, especially in a state with such a heavy tax burden. And politicians at all levels have huffed that raising taxes is unthinkable. So they are floating proposals like using gambling proceeds or adding to the state's debt. Gambling shoves the school problems disproportionately onto the poor, and borrowing doesn't avoid higher taxes - it simply delays them for tomorrow's taxpayers.

As the Citizens Budget Commission has noted, some of the money can be raised by closing loopholes for sales taxes and corporate income. And it says the city should go to a 12-month school year as quickly as possible, a move long overdue, to relieve overcrowding. But even the commission's tax-averse analysts had trouble seeing how to avoid a tax increase in New York State if the additional cost for city schools was around $3.2 billion a year. The court referees topped that by just under $2.5 billion.

On a basic level, the referees' report stands as another reminder that New York's politicians - particularly those in Albany - have failed to do their jobs. Justice Leland DeGrasse of the State Supreme Court set a deadline a year ago for the Legislature and Governor Pataki to act by the end of July. August came and went, and still there was no plan.

Justice DeGrasse has 90 days to react to the referees' proposal. Representatives of the nonprofit group that started the lawsuit and of the governor, the mayor, the state leaders and the unions have a last chance to come up with a decent proposal to pay for schools and make administrators more accountable for a much bigger budget. As sad evidence from other states has shown, a negotiated settlement would be far better for the students than making the schools wards of the court.