Statement by Billy Easton, Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education
(New York, NY) “Last year, the Governor convened a blue ribbon education panel that deliberated for months and then came up with a set of policy recommendations that virtually everyone in the education community embraced as outstanding.
The gist of what the commission said was this: Three or four key successful programs, including pre-K, and a longer school day or school year, hold the key to improving school outcomes, and the state should make it a priority to implement these programs as soon as possible in school districts all across the state.
Our alliance was heartened by this finding, and we enthusiastically commended the Governor and the commission for coming up with what we thought would be a road map to better schools. In last year’s State of the State, Governor Cuomo committed to support “pre-k for all our children” and said “the state would pay 100 percent of the additional cost” for schools to implement a longer school day and school year. But to date 98 percent of students in the state are excluded from these very programs because the state has cried poverty.
Today, however, we learned that the Governor has created a new task force to figure out how to cut $2-3 billion in taxes next year. He has asked former Governor Pataki, whose efforts in office resulted in the tax system becoming much more regressive, to lead the effort.
We are dumbfounded by this announcement. For $3 billion we could offer full day pre-k to every four-year-old in the state and provide a longer school day or school year to 650,000 high needs students.
In 2011, Governor Cuomo cut taxes on millionaires and billionaires by over $2 billion and paid for it by making crippling cuts to our schools. With funding levels lower than in 2008, our schools are still reeling from cuts to college readiness courses, career and technical education, summer school, tutoring, extra curriculars and much more. The reason that state revenues are up is because the wealthiest 1 percent of New Yorkers have reaped 95 percent of the income gains. Our students suffered when revenues fell, increases in revenue should be used to put our schools back on track.
We oppose this policy choice as incredibly short-sighted. The Governor cannot mean to endorse a situation in which less than 2 percent of students statewide will benefit from the policies that his own commission said were imperative to educational success. He cannot mean to continue to deny our children access to successful education programs when state revenues are up because the top 1 percent of income earners have captured 95 percent of the benefits of the recovery.
And if he is saying that, he will make an absolute mockery of his early claim that under his administration New York has become the progressive capital of the nation. We urge the Governor to reconsider this approach. We are suggesting that he uses available revenues to do what we all know is the right thing in education.”
