Public Advocate Letitia James, the author, with two children (photo: @TishJames)
With so much uncertainty in our country, there’s never been a more critical time to invest in our future and safeguard opportunities for our children. That’s why we must ensure that education funding is protected and our schools have the resources to prepare students for college and the job market.
Our children cannot perform at their best in overcrowded classrooms with outdated technology and slow internet access -- or, for that matter, with an obsession with test scores over well-rounded instruction. Our children cannot perform at their best if school libraries are closed, music and art classes are cut, and there is limited access to advanced courses. And our children cannot perform at their best if there is one guidance counselor for 800 students and no English language learning classes.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the lack of funding that often leads to unacceptable educational environments disproportionately impacts low-income students and students of color. New York City is home to one of the most segregated school districts in the country, where 96 percent of black and 95 percent of Latino students attend majority low-income schools. Within this system, over three quarters of our public school students qualify for free or reduced-price school lunch, a universal metric for student poverty.
Every day that these students attend underfunded schools, they face both immediate setbacks in their daily lives and harm that is damaging to their futures. A recent study found that a 10 percent increase in school funding available for a low-income student results in a 9.5 percent increase in that student’s earning as an adult. With New York City schools owed almost $2 billion from the state, this is a legal and moral failing that we can no longer allow to persist.
While there is across-the-board agreement on the need to address these challenges, as a state we still haven’t put our money where our mouth is.
In 1993, New York City school parents sued New York State for failing to provide their children with the quality education they deserved. After a 13-year legal battle, in 2006, the state’s highest court found that New York State was failing to provide every student with the opportunity for a “sound basic education” due to lack of adequate funding.
Following the landmark ruling, then Governor Eliot Spitzer and the New York Legislature created the Foundation Aid formula to ensure schools in New York State were being funded. For two years, New York State increased funding to public schools -- a welcome boon to students who were struggling to receive sound basic education. Then the Great Recession hit and spending was cut across sectors, including education. This effectively reversed the two years of increases and further cut already lacking funds.
Our economy rebounded from the recession years ago, but funding for our schools has not been restored. Put simply: our state government refuses to prioritize the education of our students in public schools.
It’s alarming that Governor Andrew Cuomo’s proposed 2017-18’ budget does not adhere to the Foundation Aid formula – a failing that will rob our schools of the resources they are entitled to.
If we believe a high quality education is the foundation for our children’s success, the Governor and the Legislature must restore Foundation Aid and live up to our state’s legal and moral responsibility.
We owe it to our children.
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Letitia James is the Public Advocate of New York City. On Twitter @TishJames.
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Ana Oliveira, the author
A study released last month in the journal Science found that by age six, girls are already less likely to see themselves and other girls and women to be as brilliant and capable as boys. While this applied to girls regardless of race and income, a report released in November by The New York Women’s Foundation highlights the particular challenges faced by low-income girls, particularly immigrant girls and girls of color, and the critical need to support their mothers and caretakers in order to promote their progress.
New York City is home to 450,000 girls under the age of eight. Fully three-quarters live in communities of color or immigrant communities. As many as 40% live in poverty.
These girls clearly embody the vibrant, diverse future of our city. Last fall, every poster announcing New York’s new universal pre-K program prominently displayed at least one of those little girls’ shining faces, inspiring deep feelings of warmth and protectiveness.
The problem is that tender feelings and a single additional year of schooling are far from sufficient to meet these girls’ needs. The first eight years of a child’s life comprise a period of both unique vulnerability and unparalleled cognitive, physical, and social-emotional development. Ensuring solid health and progress for low-income girls thus requires ensuring that they receive strong, consistent nurturance from well-supported and well-prepared adults – 24/7 – across all those critical years of learning and growth.
And that is where we run into trouble.
Our report, Blueprint for Investing in Girls Age 0-8 from The New York Women’s Foundation, clearly shows that our society has remained stubbornly resistant to adopting measures that would ensure fair protection, just compensation, adequate support, and strong preparation to the low-income women of color who are raising these girls.
Here are the facts:
--Low-income mothers have highly-limited access to the basic guidance, reassurance, and respite that all mothers need to be effective nurturers and first teachers. While mothers of means can typically avail themselves of an array of supports – from culturally-appropriate parenting groups to knowledgeable nannies to classes explaining just how to boost a child’s reading skills – there exist no comparably- and consistently-accessible resources for all the low-income mothers whose core childrearing challenges are inevitably further exacerbated by the tolls of poverty.
--Low-income women of color are overwhelmingly both the main (or sole) wage earners and the main (or sole) caregivers for their families. They are concurrently responsible for paying their families’ core bills, providing or arranging for their children’s round-the-clock care, and serving as the backbone of our city’s low-wage workforce. Yet, New York City currently provides only some 36,000 slots of direct, subsidized childcare to cover the needs of the hundreds of thousands of working mothers who cannot possibly afford market-rate care. And even the families that qualify for the subsidy often find the slots to be geographically inaccessible, financially unaffordable, or unavailable at the moment that they need them.
--The (predominantly non-white, female) workers who staff the city’s subsidized childcare programs earn salaries that put them barely over the poverty line themselves. And the even larger cadre of informal caregivers employed by most working mothers have only limited access to the ongoing training, support, feedback, and supervision that their vitally-important work merits – and requires.
--The service and retail jobs that low-wage working women overwhelmingly hold are typically characterized by minimal pay scales, erratic hours, and total lack of flexibility. Low-wage working mothers therefore not only battle to simultaneously meet their families’ caregiving and economic needs – they struggle fiercely to dovetail those childcare arrangements to the sudden fluctuations of their working hours and to ensure that someone is on hand to handle the emergencies that can arise in any family.
Fortunately, the situation is not completely grim. Across the city, a range of sterling efforts are leading the way to improvement on all those critical fronts.
They include:
--The Nurse-Practitioner Partnership and Healthy Families programs, which offer up to two years of intense, culturally-appropriate in-home guidance and support to a small but crucial segment of the city’s youngest and most vulnerable mothers.
--A range of service agencies – like BOCNET, Whedco and the five members of the Child Care Resource and Referral Consortium (CCRC) – that are working to improve and extend low-wage families’ access to high-quality affordable childcare and provide robust training and supports to formal and informal childcare providers.
--A group of advocacy organizations – for example, A Better Balance – which are doggedly seeking fairer and more viable employment practices and conditions for working parents.
These and other similar efforts are creating a track record of solid success. All are eminently expandable and replicable – given the will and the resources.
The experts strongly agree: If we want the low-income girls of our city to be as healthy, stable, and successful as possible, we need to better recognize, respect, and bolster the strengths of the low-income women of color who hold these girls’ futures in their hands.
For not only are those women these girls’ main caregivers and providers, they are also their main role models. And so, if we continue to underpay, exploit, and under-support those adult women, we are offering those girls a very discouraging vision of their own potential adult destinies.
Don’t we owe the future leaders of our families, communities, and workforce something better than that?
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Ana Oliveira is President & CEO of The New York Women’s Foundation.
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Gov. Cuomo (photo: The Governor's Office)
Governor Andrew Cuomo’s unconventional whirlwind State of The State tour has, once again, gotten political pundits pondering the depths of his national ambition, three years out from the next Presidential election.
Much like his father Mario’s legendary Danish Prince act in 1988, as well as his encore performance of 1992, Cuomo the Younger has openly flirted with a White House bid of his own in the past, and with the Democratic bench now resembling an intramural volleyball team, you’d think the chances of Cuomo securing his party’s nomination would be looking pretty good.
Assuming his ever-expanding campaign coffers, currently $21.9 million fat, buy him a third term as governor in 2018, Cuomo would then enter 2020 an automatic top-tier presidential candidate. But what’s his constituency?
Cuomo will likely have to compete with charismatic rock star candidates Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren, maybe even Kamala Harris, in addition to Amy Klobuchar, Chris Murphy, Martin O’Malley, and possibly his own home state’s junior Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, though she says her primary focus is running for re-election next year. Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper might also join the fray, among others.
After accepting $18 million in campaign contributions from the financial, real estate, lobbying, and insurance industries, it is doubtful Cuomo’s candidacy would resonate very deeply amongst the fiercely populist, anti-corporate liberal grassroots millennials and other left wing special interest groups that are a natural fit for Senators Warren and Booker.
Meanwhile, others, like O’Malley and Gillibrand, might find common cause with the more centrist New Democrats of the Clinton era – a group that ought to be a key Cuomo demographic.
But why would Iowa caucus-goers cast their vote for a career politician and successor to a nearly 40-year-old political dynasty rather than a fresh face? What does New Hampshire get with Cuomo that they don’t get with someone like Warren? Will African-Americans in South Carolina pull the lever for a 63-year-old Italian-American from Queens if Cory Booker or Kamala Harris is on the ballot?
Since being sworn in six years ago, Andrew Cuomo has largely toed the yellow middle line of caution, displeasing hardcore Democrats enough to draw two primary challengers in 2014, who went on to garner 40% of the vote. Cuomo’s infamous Working Families Party “hostage video” is a stark reminder that Cuomo has struggled to consolidate or inspire the base of his party. “Progressive” efforts since have smacked of desperation as he apparently eyes 2018 and 2020. Most Democrats in New York still don’t trust Cuomo.
And if he can’t inspire the base then how can he expect to emerge triumphant from a Presidential primary rife with younger, more appealing progressive leaders?
On Cuomo’s watch, New York has become a state with the second highest debt in the nation, according to the most recent U.S. Census Bureau data (2014); second highest Medicaid costs, based on a 2015 Kaiser Family Foundation analysis; seventh highest income tax rate; eleventh highest property tax rate; a shrinking population; crumbling infrastructure; habitual spending increases; and 3 million residents receiving food stamps.
Also, lest we forget, the governor’s second term has so far seen the convictions of both former Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos on charges of corruption, as well as the arrests of top Cuomo advisor Joe Percoco, former aide Todd Howe, SUNY Polytechnic Institute President Alain Kaloyeros, and seven others amidst a massive bid-rigging and corruption scandal.
Were he to run for President, it seems unlikely Cuomo would be able to escape the ubiquitous scrutiny of his administration’s failed ethics as well as its failure to provide substantive ethics reform to New York government and politics.
Cuomo has made a career out of being a pragmatist. Despite all the buzz from talking heads trying to fill out their round-the-clock coverage, even he would begrudgingly admit that a third term in Albany might very well prove to be the apex of his decades long political career.
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John William Schiffbauer was the Deputy Communications Director for the New York Republican State Committee 2014-16. Last fall, he served as campaign manager for Republican Melinda Crump’s State Senate campaign in New York’s 31st District.
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