Cynthia Nixon, award-winning actress, is an activist for public schools. She ran against Andrew Cuomo for Governor in the Democratic primary in 2018. He had collected $35 million or so before the campaign started and outspent her 35-1. Her big issue was inevitable school
funding. (I endorsed her.)
She wrote an opinion piece in the New York Times contrasting the resources available to make her TV show set completely safe and the inadequate, spotty measures to make the schools safe for 1.1 million children.
Priorities! Kids don’t count!
Two phone calls exposed the differences in resources, planning, and care for health and safety:
On the call related to my show, I heard about the many tours the industrial hygienist had taken of the set and about the renovation of some of our work spaces to be coronavirus-safe. Out of an abundance of caution, even some spaces that looked fairly healthy had been eliminated.
I also heard about how the crew and production staff would be divided into strict pods; they would be tested before they started work and then tested one to three times a week. Actors, who need to remove their masks, would be tested every day. Anyone coming to New York from out of state would need to quarantine for two weeks before being allowed on set.
Air purifiers have been purchased, filtration systems have been upgraded, and an entire department has been created solely to deal with safety protocols and testing. And Covid-19-upgraded vans and shuttles, along with extra parking lots, were available to ensure that everyone had safe transportation to work.
The second call was a meeting of the parents association at my son’s public school. I heard that teachers and administrators could choose to be tested for the coronavirus before the school year began and that people entering the school could decide whether they wanted their temperature taken.
I heard about classroom pods limited to nine students, a restriction made irrelevant by the number of people moving freely from pod to pod — teachers, school staff members and even parents who are now being recruited as substitute teachers by overwhelmed school administrators. I heard about the several hundred school nurses who still needed to be hired in the system.
I heard that building inspections would begin just a few weeks before school was set to open, even though out of the 1,700 buildings to be examined, a thousand already have documented ventilation problems. And I could only shake my head as I later saw that the system for testing these ventilation systems involves using a yardstick with a piece of toilet paper attached to it by paper clip to gauge airflow.
Needless to say, the care and investment given to restarting television and film production in New York looks nothing like the uncertain, chaotic, shamefully underfunded and profoundly unsafe approach to reopening the public schools, which serve 1.1 million children, nearly three-quarters of them deeply underprivileged.
This pandemic has laid bare our society’s inequities, and nowhere more than in our public schools. Gov. Andrew Cuomo, lauded as a hero for his handling of the state’s pandemic response, has overseen a supposedly temporary 20 percent reduction of its payments to school districts since this summer.
In New York City, the decrease would amount to a $2.3 billion loss for the schools over the next year. The city schools chancellor, Richard Carranza, said that the cuts, if made permanent, would mean “game over” for in-person learning, and would lead to programming cuts and 9,000 layoffs in the Department of Education.
Yet the governor has resisted raising taxes on the state’s 118 billionaires (up from 112 last year), who have seen their collective wealth increase by $77 billion during the pandemic, a figure that dwarfs the state’s projected budget gap of $14.5 billion this year.
Even before the pandemic, New York State was second in the country when it comes to inequities in education funding — with rich districts getting $10,000 more per student on average than poor districts. (The state’s failure to equitably and fully fund New York’s low-income school districts motivated me to run for governor in 2018.)
The city has compounded the continuing disinvestment in our public schools. In June, Mayor Bill de Blasio and the City Council pushed through nearly $1 billion in cuts and savings to the education budget. Coupled with the state reductions, the schools are now facing a staggering cut of $3.3 billion.
The mayor has been hamstrung by the governor and his own political miscalculations and leadership failures. As experts warned of a pandemic earlier this year, the mayor, echoing Mr. Cuomo’s confidence that the virus could be contained, resisted calls to close the schools.
By early May, at least 74 Department of Education employees had died in connection with Covid-19. (Researchers at Columbia found that had the city shut down even a week earlier than March 16, the date when schools were finally closed, some 18,500 Covid-19 deaths citywide could have been avoided.)
Over the summer, as schools in Los Angeles and Chicago decided to go fully remote this fall, giving them crucial weeks to prepare for remote learning and make accommodations for the neediest students, our mayor at first stubbornly refused the pleas of parents and teachers and pushed for reopening in person without delay.
The mayor, whom I endorsed in 2013, has insisted correctly that schools are vital for the city’s most vulnerable families. His desire to reopen on time, however, has not been backed up with adequate safety measures.
It is noteworthy that a survey last month by the Education Trust-New York found that Black, Latino and low-income families — many of whom have already been disproportionately hit by the virus — were significantly more wary of reopening schools this fall. Only when threatened with a strike by teachers (who were largely demanding many basic safety measures) did the mayor finally agree to delay opening, albeit by less than two weeks. As a result, all city public school students are now without schooling, remote or in person, for most of this month.
Instead of asking our wealthiest citizens to pay more during a time of crisis, New York is imposing austerity on public schools — even though fewer dollars mean fewer safety measures, more cases and more deaths.
If city and state leaders cared half as much about our children as they do about television actors, we’d be raising revenue and giving our schools the funding needed to reopen safely. The attention being devoted to keeping the city’s movie sets safe shows that it’s possible. Don’t our students and teachers deserve the same level of care and investment?
What a mess.
Yes I am sure Chgo Board of Ed/Mayor will be watching the Big Apple next Monday. Schools need WPA level investment for this. Or it’s going to be teacher walk outs, and Labor Boards will side with whom? How can they side against UFT and CTU when we can point to these Actors or NFL players, the corruption of CDC, etc?
NY would be a lot better off with Cynthia Nixon as governor.
But the Democratic voters who chose Cuomo got precisely what they deserved.
Nixon makes some very good points.
However, I honestly think that the school re-opening plan in NYC is beyond most people’s comprehension. The idea that in public school system of 1.1 million students that you can just tell over 700,000 students living in severe poverty to stay home – especially at a time that infection rates are incredibly low — is just as unconscionable as a total re-opening.
The one thing that de Blasio did do is to give parents a choice. There was no pressure either way.
I wish I knew what the right answer was. I wish there were unlimited funds to allow the high poverty most disadvantaged students to attend 5 days/week full time in-school if their parents chose that option, while keeping all of those students safe.
To me, one of the biggest problems is that the more “safe” the NYC schools appear to parents, the more parents will want their kids to be in-person with a teacher, which means the less safe it will be possible to make the schools. Catch-22.
Here are the choices given to parents: stay at home or send your kid to a school that refuses to protect your child. Notice that parents do not get to pick a well resourced school that takes all measures like Ms.Nixon is describing that her job provides. I know why parents are choosing home given these terrible options.
We don’t need to be confused. The answer is obvious about what to do. It’s the will that is the challenge.
“send your kid to a school that refuses to protect your child…”
You really sound crazy. I know parents — from well educated parents to parents without high school degrees — who are choosing the hybrid option. I ALSO know both types of parents who are choosing all remote.
You really insult a lot of parents by your innuendo that they are choosing to place their child in harm by forcing them to attend a school that has no interest — none! — and according to you is REFUSING – absolutely refusing! — to protect their children. But that is what you just said parents who are choosing the hybrid option are doing.
I sure hope you aren’t a teacher, because you certainly insulted a swath of parents.
For the record, I chose all-remote. But I would never be so arrogant and smug and insulting to tell a parent — many of whom I know — that they were intentionally placing their children into harm by sending them to school.
I can recognize how complicated this issue is. But people like you – know it alls who are certain that there is a secret way that the children could all go to school that the Mayor and DOE are not willing to do because they have no concern for children. There is not.
There are only two bad choices. And for the record, very rich private schools with the most privileged students who have truly unlimited amounts of money to spend are ALSO having a very hard time figuring out how to manage this.
Can I see a list of those wealthy private schools that have unlimited funds and billionaire parents who have figured out the magic solution for how to teach “safely” in classes that are already tiny? After all, there is apparently an ideal way to this that de Blasio is refusing to do because he wants to save money and doesn’t care about kids.
Given that wealthy private schools don’t care about money and clearly want to please the very rich families who attend, I assume all the students in private schools are going back to school full time because it’s completely safe.
Opening up the New York City schools in a pandemic is a task most generals would find daunting. There are no perfect options, just options with varying risks and values. Sometimes “choice” is not so great when we consider what the options are.
The glaring inequity in funding public schools in New York State needs to be addressed. Cuomo is not the man for the job. He is too busy courting Wall St and his billionaire friends that will help fund his ambitions.
Wow, great piece of writing.
Yes, she is not only smart, but a very good writer too.
But most New Yorkers apparently prefer their governors dumb and illiterate.
Sorry, dumb, incompetent and illiterate.
“As the new school year begins, families and educators across the country are in crisis. Congress has not provided the funding necessary to support child care programs and schools in safely delivering high-quality education and care for children of all ages.”
Not just Congress. Cuomo and other Republican governors have been denying schools billions of dollars in legally mandated funds for years (even during good financial times)
The Wall Street Journal published an article a week or so ago that was very critical of Cuomo’s response too the pandemic. Not his daily briefings but his initial refusal to take it seriously. He was more interested in overruling de Blasio, who wanted to close schools and take action, than in doing anything constructive.
Cuomo gets a pass from his constituency because it’s all about the show and he is a very good showman.
That’s what his daily banter with his quarantined brother was all about.
As usual Nixon is not quite ready for prime time. She has little understanding of the existential threat and loss of revenue facing NYC and State . “Economic Armageddon” would not be too drastic a description of the tsunami heading NYC’s way. As the Commercial and Residential real estate markets are in drastic decline causing a boom in real estate prices in the suburbs and a drop in foot traffic to local commercial district businesses of 70% . Mattresses litter the streets abandoned by their owners as they move home to mom and dad rather than splitting the rent with 3-4 roommates. Young families paying 4k a month for a cramped apartment on
Cynthia’s cherished Upper West Side, deciding they can work from home and the kids play in the backyard in the Suburbs. Especially when it will be over a year till some semblance of NYC’s social life returns. Good luck to eating outdoors in the Winter, scratch the revenue from NYC’s Restaurant and entertainment sector as well.
This has always been a Federal problem. It will remain a Federal problem until States secede from the Union and print their own currency (sarcasm noted ). States can not increase costs for long, when revenue is in decline. I am all for raising taxes on the wealthy right back to where they were in the 50’s corporate and capital gains as well . But that is not an option for Blue States when Red State legislatures have low to no income taxes and wealth is mobile. And the Red State Republicans know all of the above and have played this game since Taft Hartley de- industrialized the North East and Mid West lured by Right to Work. Years later as Reagan told people “to vote with their feet ” while the 86 tax reform eliminated sales tax as a deduction . As they passed a tax revision in 17 that limited State and Local Tax deductions . “aimed at the heart of Blue States and their Unions” as Stephen Moore of Heritage who designed it , said.
The lack of a response on the part of the US Senate to help fund Cities and states is a raw calculation that they will benefit from a shift of population and wealth to their states.
Moscow Mitch does not give a rats ass about deficits. He like Trump sees this as a Red State vs Blue State issue and the Yahoos that support them think they are immune to the virus.
Joel,
Cynthia doesn’t live on the upper West Side of Manhattan. She lives on the unfashionable lower East Side, near the Bowery.
There is no edit button. I would be very happy if there was. . There are few unfashionable neighborhoods south of 96th street. And the last time I drove through the Bowery it too was gentrifying.
But the central point is states can not print money and there has been a concerted effort to cripple the high tax and unionized Blue states for for multiple decades. Raising taxes on the wealthy when they are mobile and have little reason to make NY their prime residence for several years does not sound like an option. On a federal level 93% sounds good to me.
Cynthia is a successful actress. She lives modestly. Most successful actresses do not live modestly. It’s unnecessary to criticize where she lives. I’ve visited her apartment to brief her on education in the 2018 election. If you think that the richest in New York should not be taxed more, that’s your view. No need to attack the messenger.
Here’s one possible way of dealing with NY States huge shortfalls that does not depend on Congress (which is a very dangerous dependency and one that is actually a significant contributor to NY s current crisis)
https://spectrumlocalnews.com/nys/central-ny/politics/2020/08/05/the-return-of-the-stock-transfer-tax–nightmare-or-easy-money-
https://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/news/200/phil-steck-on-the-new-york-stock-transfer-tax-and-moving-the-computers-to-new-jersey/
SomeDAM Poet
It might not be a good habit . I would argue that NY ranks fifty on return for its dollar from Federal spending contributing 24 billion more than it gets back.
The exchanges threatened to move the data center out of NJ back in 19 in response to a proposed transfer tax. After running the entire exchange remotely for months due to Covid what would prevent them from physically moving the trading floor out of state. .
But I’ll take a Federal stock transfer tax gladly. America needs a tax increase and not just the 1% . We could start with an increase in payroll taxes and M4all.
Did you read the piece by phil steck?
It’s not the physical location of the servers that determines whether the state can levey the tax.
Fromm the piece
”
You will get a complaint from the industry – oh, if you impose the tax, they will move their computers that actually do the trading to New Jersey to avoid the tax.”
“One problem – the computers are already in New Jersey. The tax has nothing to do with the computers. And second, the Supreme Court in the Wayfair decision ruled that you don’t have to have a transaction physically located in a state for it to be taxable there.”
What’s the jurisdiction for the tax?
“The brokerage firms and the exchanges are located in New York.”
Of course, the NY Stock Exchange could move out of NY entirely.
But then they would have to move all their offices (and probably change their name. Somehow, New Jersey Stock Exchange just does not sound as impressive😀)
Are they going to do it to save a small fraction of a percent tax on transactions?
Doubtful, notwithstanding their threats.
Besides, New Jersey is currently trying to get a tax on transactions and NY stock Exchange cuz threatening to pull their servers out of New Jersey.
It appears they are in a pickle.
Ha ha ha.
SomeDAM Poet
The Trading firms are no longer exclusively in NYC. Vangaurd has the second most assets under management on Wall street and it is located in PA .
There is no need for either brokerages or the exchanges to be on Wall Street. What once was thousands of traders on the floor of the exchange was in 2019 less than 250 as more and more trades are electronic. And more brokerages have left the city.
Having seen 60 years of Right to Work bid one state against the next to crush labor ; followed by tax cut mania . I am a bit shell shocked about the mobility of capital.
If there is no need, why don’t they move? There are already stated with lower tax rates.
I have to assume that Phil Steck probably knows more about this than either you or I.