Gov. Pataki announced yesterday he will appeal a landmark court ruling ordering the state to fix a school-aid formula that a judge said has cheated city students for decades.
Pataki said it should be up to state and locally elected officials to decide what’s best for New York’s vast school system.
“You can’t have a judge running an entire education system,” he said.
But the decision to appeal left Mayor Giuliani and other state and city officials questioning whether the governor is truly interested in fixing the funding inequities that have plagued the city schools.
“I’m not shocked the governor is appealing,” Giuliani said.
“If the desire is to cure the historical inequity, or to really make a strong down payment on doing that, then you wouldn’t [appeal].”
Added city Board of Education President Bill Thompson: “It shows Pataki will be more supportive of upstate and suburban districts over New York City’s children.”
The governor included a plan to revamp the state aid formula in his 2001-02 spending plan unveiled yesterday, which he says will boost funding for city schools by $146.3 million, or 38.3 percent of the total state aid increase.
That, he said, would give the city its exact share of state funding – 37 percent – as its proportion of student enrollment. He’s also planning to forward legislation that would prohibit large urban districts, like New York City, from using state aid increases to reduce local support of schools.
But the governor’s plan would do little to reduce the per-student funding gap that has the city spending far less per student than other districts across the state, administration officials concede.
Critics say the governor’s budget plan falls “woefully shy” of meeting the city’s needs documented last week by state Supreme Court Justice Leland DeGrasse, who found the aid formula unconstitutional.
And they fear the legal appeal could delay a satisfactory solution for years.
DeGrasse had given the Legislature until Sept. 15 to fix the problems.
“I don’t think there should be any time wasted in changing the educational formula and complying with the decision,” city Schools Chancellor Harold Levy added.
Michael Rebell, executive director for the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which brought the lawsuit against the state, said a “lengthy appeal would only further delay the children of New York State from receiving a sound, basic education.”
Assembly Education Committee chairman Steve Sanders (D-Manhattan) said the governor’s plan would “further exacerbate and deepen the inequity problem the judge pointed out.”
Pataki countered that court involvement is not needed because the state in recent years has begun addressing the funding inequity plaguing city schools with record amounts of state aid.
This year, Pataki is proposing to simplify the state aid formula to give districts more flexibility on how to spend their money by combining 11 formulas into one.