The story has circulated in the media that megastar Cynthia Nixon may run against Andrew Cuomo for governor. You may have seen her on television or on Broadway, but what you don’t know if that she is a public school parent in New York City and cares deeply about public education.
In this article, she explains that New York City public schools have been denied funding that was promised by the courts. She also explains that Andrew Cuomo is no friend of public education. He is a cheerleader for the charter industry, whose wealthy patrons have underwritten his past campaigns.
Nixon knows more about education that any other candidate who will be on the ballot in 2018 in New York state.
She writes:
As a public school parent, I am fearful about what our new U.S. Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos has in store for our nation’s public schools.
The Trump-DeVos agenda includes more support for privately run charter schools — which in DeVos’ home state of Michigan are known for being some of the worst performing in the country — and a dramatic expansion of school privatization through vouchers. It could also greatly reduce federal funding for public schools. For New York State that could mean a cut of up to $2.5 billion.
Frightening. But equally frightening is how much Betsy DeVos and Andrew Cuomo’s policies echo each other.
Governor Cuomo wants to eliminate New York’s obligation to provide schools statewide with $4.3 billion in additional funding, including nearly $287 million for schools in Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties. There is no doubt that high-needs schools require this support: Guidance counselors in Yonkers carry a caseload of 750 students. Ossining and Peekskill struggle to find resources to serve a growing influx of English language learners. And parents in Mount Vernon are suing the state to receive their fair share of education funding. We have the same problems in New York City.
In 2001, on the day my oldest child Sam began kindergarten, I was shocked to find that two thirds of the school’s paraprofessionals, the art teacher, the music teacher and the assistant principal were all gone since the spring tour I had taken a few months earlier — casualties of a woefully inadequate budget. On that day, I joined the fight for New York State to fully implement the ruling from the landmark Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit against the state…
In 2007 and 2008, the state made progress towards its constitutional obligations to students by funding Foundation Aid, but after Cuomo took office he did everything he could to avoid paying this debt, and now he wants to eliminate Foundation Aid outright.
He also wants to increase the number of privately-run charter schools in New York City by more than 50 percent. And he has been a loud proponent of private school tax credits, essentially a backdoor voucher system. These are policies we expect from Betsy DeVos, but from Andrew Cuomo?
Whoever runs for office in New York and in other states should go on the record about whether they support public schools. We know the answer from Cuomo. He wants more charter schools. This will be an albatross around his neck if he runs for president in 2020. That is, unless Cynthia Nixon beats him!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Since Nixon wrote this opinion piece, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that the state has complied with the CFE decision.
Click to access 75opn17-Decision.pdf
Funding lawsuits brought against the state will need to prove line by line how spending $25,000/student isn’t enough to provide a sound education. Simply pointing out that a handful of wealthy nonintegrated spend more does not suffice.
Better education4all
Ah, Tim, our old Eva troll returns to complain about public schools, knowing that Eva’s charters are funded by taxpayers and billionaires
Let’s see, the private schools that take only children with no special needs or ELL or families that are at-risk and checked out spend over $40,000/year in NYC to educate children whose parents ALSO pay for private tutors quite often to subsidize their education.
It takes a special chutzpah and nastiness for Tim to post that a public school system where over 70% of the students are economically disadvantaged, 22% have disabilities, and 13% are ELL students should have to justify spending $25,000 per student.
Especially when his favorite charter school spends far more than that while drumming out every student who will cost them too much and sending them to the DOE to educate.
Tim is a cheerleader of Daniel Loeb and the oversight of the SUNY Charter Institute which has said that Success Academy – due to their truthfulness in identifying all the violent 5 year olds in their school — should get early renewals because there is no reason to spend any time overseeing a charter that suspends 25% of the 5 year olds in a school that has almost no white kids.
Tim agrees.
She’s got my vote !
We so need many more people willing to fight back and run for public office because they CARE DEEPLY ABOUT PUBLIC EDUCATION. It is a wonderful thing to hear.
BREAKING: the “Opt Out,” “My Child Is More Than a Score,” and “Fair Test” movements have been embraced in nonintegrated suburban districts but have gained no traction in New York’s big cities. It turns out the city parents have a great reason to be skeptical: the suburban schools are cooking their gradebooks!
“This is one of those things that works like a contagion . . . if you’re a suburban school and you’re giving Bs and the school in the next community is giving A-minuses, you start to feel like those kids are going to get a leg up. So you start giving out A-minuses.
“Public schools in urban areas seldom seem to feel the same pressure.”
http://hechingerreport.org/newest-advantage-rich-america-higher-grades/
That’s not BetterEducation4All!
Tim,
If big-city parents were not threatened with severe penalties for their child, they too would opt out. If they were not warned that their children need test scores or they won’t be admitted to middle school or high school, they would opt out. If they weren’t afraid of being picked up by ICE, they would opt out.
Testing does not promote a better education for all. It ranks children based on a phony measure.
I know who you are.
These are all made-up excuses for opt-out’s failure to launch in NYC. There are no penalties, no being held back, no impact on admissions (and the vast majority of MS/HS seats don’t consider state test scores anyway). I hadn’t heard the ICE excuse before, though–extra points for outlandishness on that one!
Grades are influenced by parental wealth and power–so much for the level playing field promised by holistic measures.
“I know who you are.”
great! If you ever want to step outside the echo chamber, meet some families for whom charters are a lifeline, meet some families whose traditional public schools don’t function quite as well as PS 321 or PS 29, or chat with someone who has nothing more than a different opinion on how to deliver a better education for all, then you know where to find me.
I can find you at the headquarters of Success Academy, where you get a bonus every time you post a hostile comment about public schools, teachers, or unions. Bonus points for telling us how wonderful Cuomo, Dan Loeb, Eva, Ivanka, Trump, and Paul Ryan are.
“meet some families whose traditional public schools don’t function quite as well as PS 321 or PS 29”
Tim, you have so much chutzpah I wonder if you are actually Eva Moskowitz. Are you still defending Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos?
Eva Moskowitz DEMANDED the right to drop lottery priority for at-risk students whose public schools were failing.
And when those students get into one of her charters, she drums out any and all who don’t meet her “high standards” and simply lies about it because she is like Donald Trump in her inability to understand anything except how it affects her own well-being.
That is why Tim defends the lie that 25% of the 5 and 6 year olds at some Success Academy schools that serve almost no white children are violent. That is why Tim defends the lie that the very low suspension rates in the Success Academy schools with lots of white children and lots of middle class students reflects how those kids are just so much less violent than the children in Eva Moskowitz’ charters that serve mostly low-income non-white children.
Tim will deny he defends the lie but he has a chance here to call it a lie and he won’t. He will say those children ARE violent because Eva Moskowitz said they are and he trusts her implicitly to recognize the most violent 5 year olds and punish them the way they deserve.
Eva Moskowitz will only teach the children from those failing schools who are easiest to teach. She lies about it, which is part of what makes her so truly nasty. And Tim lies about it which is why I sometimes wonder if he is Moskowitz herself.
And then Tim and Eva Moskowitz say why should those kids who I refuse to teach be at schools that get a penny more than they do now because I just proved that those schools don’t need it with my students’ high test scores.
Shame on you and your outrageous defense of Betsy DeVos, Eva Moskowitz and Daniel Loeb. They are all people you admire and that says it all.
No wonder you fight so hard to take away funding for the most vulnerable children in NYC. So do all the people you admire most.
NYC PSP,
YOU ARE RIGHT!! Tim is Eva!
Tim,
If you are interested in a better education for all, I’m sure that you would condemn any malpractices that harm any student. Please feel free to contact me at duaneswacker@gmail.com and I’ll send you a copy of my book “Infidelity to Truth: Education Malpractice in American Public Education”. In it I discuss the purpose of American public education and of government in general, issues of truth in discourse, justice and ethics in teaching practices, the abuse and misuse of the terms standards and measurement which serve to provide an unwarranted pseudo-scientific validity/sheen to the standards and testing regime and how the inherent discrimination in that regime should be adjudicated to be unconstitutional state discrimination no different than discrimination via race, gender, disability, etc. . . .
And if you like what you read just send me a check back for a discounted price. I’ll let you know the price when I send the book. Give me your address (in the email, not here) and I’ll gladly send it to you!
Duane
Actually, Tim points to something that is true of private schools especially because they need to market to parents and their administrators can simply fire a teacher who won’t give a big funder’s kid a good grade.
Guess what? That is exactly what happens in charter schools, too, since they have the same motivation to “sell” their schools to the affluent parents. Their teachers will be pressured to do whatever the administrator decides furthers their goals most.
Sometimes it will be to drum out and flunk an at-risk kid who they want to get rid of.
Sometimes it will be to favor the affluent child who they want to keep.
And of course, without unions to protect them the teachers will go right along.
Tim just provided the best reason for teachers’ unions.
Tim
I guess you have never taught in a low SES school. There is always pressure about how you give grades. One has to outline it very clearly from day one, keep parents informed constantly, and justify yourself to principals who have a higher-up watching over his/her shoulder. Then there are the parents who are convinced their child’s low grade is because the teacher personally hates the child.
Get real.
I feel about Cuomo the way I feel about Kasich- I get that they’re charter/voucher proponents. They’re advocates for charter schools and private schools. Okay.
What I don’t understand is why public schools don’t get an advocate in government, why that is somehow disallowed.
As it stands now we have no affirmative representation. We get this kind of passive, grudging acceptance of our existence as some kind of necessary evil or something. I don’t accept that as representation. It’s not good enough. I think kids in public schools deserve passionate, committed representation in their government. They’re not some lesser “default” to the “choice” schools to be attended to reluctantly sometime after ed reform gets their wish list.
The median school budget in NYS will shower $24,551 upon each student next year. The portion that comes from the state alone is roughly equal to the national average for total per-pupil spending. The dollar amounts that are spent in depressed upstate New York are astronomical given the low cost of living. All of this in the face of a recession that crushed the state’s economic engine, the downstate financial industry.
http://www.syracuse.com/schools/index.ssf/2017/05/nys_school_budet_votes_2017_does_your_district_want_to_spend_more_or_less_than_o.html
What exactly is it that Cuomo has done to harm public schools, again? Delivering that kind of $ to schools speaks volumes, no?
BetterEd4All
Ms. Ravitch, will I get banned from posting here if I call Tim and idiot?
No. He is Eva M pretending to be a guy named Tim
“an” – see, the idiocy might be catching.
If the two chiefs of the teacher unions, Randy Weingarten/AFT and Lily Eskelsen-Garcia of NEA, had organized their huge teacher rank-and-file to vote against any Democrat like Cuomo or Malloy who favors private charters over public schools, they could have forced the renegade Dems to honor their responsibilities to the public school kids, teachers, and families. The failure of the teacher union leaders has allowed Cuomo and his ilk to push public funds into the pockets of characterizers and their Wall Street backers. Cynthia Nixon is a smart, articulate candidate who can expose the perfidy of Cuomo and his Wall Street sponsors, but if the teacher unions continue to back this governor it will be a tough fight. All of us need to sign on and send donations to push Cynthia Nixon’s campaign.
Cynthia Nixon spoke at a NYSUT rally I was at back in May 2003. She was very impressive. Wow…the fight for equitable funding has gone on THAT long. 2003. My daughter was a baby back then. Now, she’s almost as tall as me and she’s zooming around on a trapeze at summer camp. Nixon gets RESPECT for keeping to this fight..
I hope Cynthia runs, if only to make Cuomo’s views against public education front and center.
Who knows, maybe she can get him to do a 360? Or should it be a 180?
More charter schools run by the 1% ers = more money in the pockets of them and less education for the students. No accountability and plenty of stolen taxpayer money.
Syracuse mayor Stephanie Miner is also contemplating a run against Cuomo. Does anyone know where she stands on issues relating to education?
I am glad she speaks out, but I don’t support rich celebrities who think they can skip ahead to top spots while dismissing the need for experience in politics. Nixon should run for School Board or City Council. Democracies can’t have our political pipelines clogged with the rich and famous.
Like!
Tim says:
…”the vast majority of MS/HS seats don’t consider state test scores anyway”
TIm Seats don’t think, they don’t consider. They are not interested in test scores. They are usually made of wood or fiberglass. Many are well worn.
Your jargon is sad.
New York still has a highly inequitable education funding system according to most analyses. Whether or not the court enforces the CFE decision — and there are other legal cases that are still in progress challenging the equity and adequacy of the state education funding system — there is no doubt that Cuomo has refused to address this huge problem, and at every turn has favored privately run charter schools over our public schools. What this has to do with the opt out movement I’m not clear, but there are many reasons that it has not taken off in NYC compared to the upstate and the suburbs, including a large population of immigrant and low-income families, who are worried that their children might be held back or otherwise punished if they don’t take these exams. In general, elsewhere in the state parents feel more empowered; for one thing, they have elected school boards that actually have to listen to their concerns.