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Addressing NYC's School Overcrowding Crisis


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Protesting school overcrowding in Queens


All parents in New York City deserve the peace of mind that their children will be able to attend a school where they can thrive and grow. Unfortunately, following years of neglect from the Bloomberg administration, our city's school system is plagued by school overcrowding and excessive class sizes, where hundreds of thousands of our children simply don't have adequate space to learn.

With education a top priority for the city, it's critical that our leaders take strong action to address the chronic underfunding of our city's school infrastructure. Key to addressing this issue is investing sufficient capital resources in the city budget, as well as improving the current school planning process, which is broken.

Recently, we've had some good news. When the city Department of Education (DOE) released its school capital plan, it included a commitment from Mayor de Blasio to invest nearly $900 million in additional resources to build more school seats. In the same plan, the DOE raised its needs assessment to 83,000 additional seats, given enrollment projections and existing overcrowding. This is closer to the 100,000-seat figure that Class Size Matters estimated in its recent report, "Space Crunch." Together, these two adjustments are a welcome acknowledgement of the crisis in school overcrowding, and we applaud them.

But more should be done. The number of new seats in the capital plan is 49,000—only about 59 percent of the DOE's own admitted need—and New York City's population is growing faster than any other large city in the nation. The mayor is now urging the City Council to adopt rezoning plans to accelerate the construction of thousands of new affordable and market-rate housing units, which will increase pressure on our school system. At this critical moment, the city has a real opportunity to address housing and education together.

Right now, more than half a million students are crammed into over-utilized schools, according to DOE data. In many cases, this means excessive class sizes of 30 or more, a loss of art, music, or science rooms, and a lack of dedicated spaces for students to receive counseling or mandated special education services – no less the wraparound services inherent in the community school model.

According to the analysis in a recent report by Make the Road New York—"Where's My Seat?"—immigrant communities have especially egregious overcrowding problems and even greater unmet needs in the DOE capital plan. In many of the schools in these neighborhoods, children are forced to eat their lunch as early as 10 a.m. or are bused to schools far away from their homes. Many do not have adequate opportunity for physical education because there is not enough space in their gyms.

We need to build, lease, and expand more schools. At least the 83,000 seats that the DOE projects are necessary. In addition, the process of school planning and siting must be made more efficient. There are many communities, like Sunset Park, which have suffered from extreme overcrowding for a decade or more, even though funding to build more schools in the neighborhood has existed in the capital plan, because the School Construction Agency has not been able to site a single one.

According to the DOE, only 15 percent of the school seats needed by 2019 have sites identified and are in the process of being designed. In seven districts, that percentage is zero. The city will fall even further behind in creating seats if the mayor's rezoning proposals are adopted, unless much more is done to build and site schools. A recent Environmental Impact Statement for the East New York rezoning proposal found it would exacerbate school overcrowding, and, along with other changes, drive high school overcrowding in the borough to 109 percent of capacity. Yet the DOE capital plan does not include a single Brooklyn high school to be built.

That is why we are urging the City Council, along with the mayor, to create a commission or task force of experts and stakeholder groups, to propose reforms to the school planning process, so that schools must be built along with housing, instead of decades afterwards. Among the issues to be considered would be reforms to the zoning process, including whether the threshold to consider the need for a new school should be lowered – especially when the schools are already overcrowded; whether the formula used by City Planning to estimate the impact of new housing on schools needs to be updated; whether the city should require impact fees from developers and/or use eminent domain more frequently; and how the trends in lost seats, utilization rates, and enrollment could be made more transparent and more accurate through regular reporting by the DOE.

As Mayor de Blasio repeated in his recent State of the City speech, the goal across our city must be to ensure that neighborhoods thrive. There cannot be successful neighborhoods unless there are schools with enough space for the children in every community across the city to learn and prosper. It's time to invest all the necessary resources and improve the school planning process to ensure the bright future that all of our children deserve.

***
Leonie Haimson is the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. Javier H. Valdés is the Co-Executive Director of Make the Road New York. On Twitter: @leoniehaimson @javierhvaldes.

As Teddy Roosevelt Did, 2016 Candidates Drag the Supreme Court Into Presidential Politics


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The Supreme Court (Carol Highsmith, via Library of Congress


The Supreme Court is being drawn against its will into the chaotic 2016 presidential campaign.

Republicans Donald Trump and Ted Cruz dislike the court's decisions affirming Obamacare and gay marriage. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Bernard Sanders object to its Citizens United campaign finance decision. Senate Republicans are threatening to block President Obama's nomination to replace recently deceased justice Antonin Scalia, alleging the appointment would be better left to the next president (a Republican, they hope). Donald Trump was (probably) kidding when he said his sister, Federal Court of Appeals Judge Marianne Trump Barry, would make a credible Supreme Court nominee.

In a recent speech, Chief Justice John Roberts lamented that partisan extremism is damaging the public's perception of the court as an unbiased interpreter of the law that is above politics. People too often accuse the court of taking sides in an issue but all it is doing is objectively judging constitutional merits, he said. "We have no policy views on the matter at all," Roberts insisted.

But dragging the court into presidential politics has a long history.

Theodore Roosevelt was the first presidential candidate to assail the court, during the 1912 contest. TR, president 1901-1909, was attempting to gain the Republican presidential nomination and oust the man who had succeeded him, William H. Taft.

On a speech-making tour in the West in the fall of 1910, he attacked big business. The nation was in the midst of a struggle "between the men who possess more than they have earned and the men who have earned more than they possess."

He lambasted the federal courts for lagging behind the times and criticized them for "a series of negative decisions to create a sphere in which neither nation nor state has effective control."

He cited the 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Lochner vs. New York as a prime example. By a vote of 5 to 4, the court had overturned a New York law regulating the hours and working conditions of bakeshop employees on the basis that it violated the provision of the 14th amendment to the Constitution that no state shall "deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." That amendment, passed in 1868, had been intended to protect the civil rights of newly-liberated African-Americans. But the courts had stretched it so that that "liberty of contract" included the right of employers and employees to work for whatever wages and hours both parties agreed to.

The courts had used this broad interpretation of the amendment to strike down a number of state regulatory statutes. TR knew the Lochner case well. As governor of New York, 1899-1901, he had enforced the bakeshop regulations. As president, he had watched the case come up through the New York State court system. In 1904, the State Court of Appeals validated the law in a decision written by its Chief Judge, Alton B. Parker, who later that same year secured the Democratic presidential nomination and ran unsuccessfully against TR. He followed the case in the U.S. Supreme Court the next year and read the decision, which was written by still another New Yorker, Justice Rufus Peckham. But the president made no public comment on it.

Roosevelt, in 1910, however, declared that the Lochner decision had been particularly egregious because it had ignored the problems that the bakeshop law was intended to address and exercised "the negative power of not permitting the abuse to be remedied." The court had demonstrated that it was "against popular rights" by asserting that "men must not be deprived of their 'liberty' to work under unhealthy conditions....Such decisions, arbitrarily and irresponsibly limiting the power of the people are of course fundamentally hostile to every species of real popular government."

Newspaper editorials and political leaders in both parties expressed outrage at the attack on the court.

Roosevelt, undeterred, went on to suggest something even more extreme, allowing voters to recall judges. He advanced a campaign platform filled with liberal proposals, including federal regulation of corporations, a national health service, and insurance for the elderly (similar to Social Security two decades later). His attack on the judiciary seemed menacing and his other proposals were ahead of their time. TR "startled all thoughtful men and women and impressed them with the frightful danger which lies in his political ascendancy," said the New York Times. Roosevelt failed to get the Republican nomination and went on to found a new party, the Progressive Party, but was decisively beaten in the 1912 presidential contest.

The Lochner decision was influential and was often cited by the courts in striking down state and federal regulatory statutes until 1937, when it was in effect repudiated in the decision of West Coast Hotel vs. Parrish.

Supreme Court Justice Rufus Peckham, in his opinion in the 1905 Lochner case, insisted, a little defensively, that "this is not a question of substituting the judgment of the court for that of the legislature." But TR lambasted the court in 1910 for doing just that. John Roberts, at his confirmation hearing to be Chief Justice in 2005, pointedly disagreed with Peckham's assertion a century earlier. Roberts said that the majority in the Lochner decision was "not interpreting the law, they're making the law...substituting their judgment on a policy matter for what the legislature had said."

Roberts was probably right. Theodore Roosevelt would certainly agree.

But Roberts probably shouldn't be surprised, then, that 2016 presidential candidates are criticizing his court, following the precedent set by TR back in 1910.
They believe the court's objectivity has been tarnished.

And, also like TR, they think they see an easy opportunity to score political points.

***
Dr. Bruce W. Dearstyne's latest book is The Spirit of New York: Defining Events in the Empire State's History, published in 2015 by SUNY Press.

Will the Democrats' Fresh Entitlements Lift Poor Families?


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De Blasio on a school visit (photo: Ed Reed, Mayoral Photography Office)


Circle time at preschool teaches much about civility and unity, how best to contribute to a pint-size society.

So when little Lela whispered from the corner, "I'm ready to come back," teacher Katie Wassel in Washington Heights figured lesson learned, the 4-year-old rejoined a tight crescent of fidgeting peers seated on a colorful rug. You can't elbow your neighbor at circle time.

Hillary Clinton draws a wide and inclusive circle all her own, pitching fresh entitlements to ease the financial angst of families – parental leave, universal pre-kindergarten, tuition-free community college – and nudged leftward by young voters, many women, Senator Bernie Sanders, and diehards who continue to 'Feel the Bern.'

Fiscal conservatives warn of ballooning costs for existing social guarantees. But a thornier question confronts Democrats: Might they inadvertently worsen inequality, rather than close disparities between poor and well-heeled families?

Take Mayor Bill de Blasio – poster boy for novel entitlements – and his well-meaning spread of free pre-K for all families, no matter how rich or poor.

His original yarn was a tale of two disparate cities. "The best and the brightest are born in every neighborhood," he declared after winning election, seeking to narrow early gaps in children's learning. A half-century of research findings does show that quality preschool can lift impoverished children.

But Mr. de Blasio pushed for a universal benefit, crawling out on a thin policy limb, ignoring three national studies, including my own with Stanford economist Susanna Loeb, that discern just minuscule and fading effects of pre-K for children from better-off families.

Why? Because most middle-class parents – two-thirds of whom nationwide already enjoy access to pre-K – offer important nurturance at home as well. And if the mayor's pre-K proves to elevate all kids, how would this narrow gaps in children's early growth?

The mayor's fuzzy logic reveals a deeper dilemma for Mrs. Clinton and Democratic candidates: How to rekindle opportunity for the middle class, while delivering on their perennial promise to lift the poor.

White Americans have seen their earnings slip by 3 percent since the late 1990s, falling to $60,300 in mean wages last year. But total income ticked upward, thanks to middle-class tax cuts and rising aid for health care, says the Congressional Budget Office. In stark contrast, nearly 24 million children under age six live below or near the poverty line. Affordable pre-K remains out of reach for half these families.

More than 103,000 four-year-olds populate New York City and are eligible for preschool. Mr. de Blasio has added more than 38,000 full-day pre-K seats citywide, totaling more than 68,500, many in depressed parts of the city. But over 30,000 potential preschoolers remain outside any public program, two-fifths being raised in the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Entitlement hawks also teach us that one size can't fit all, especially when serving the nation's kaleidoscopic variety of families. At first Mr. de Blasio aimed to mainly enlarge the count of preschool seats in city schools, pleasing the teachers union but stirring protests from the city's 1,900 private, mostly nonprofit pre-K's, which have resisted cookie-cutter programs for over a century.

Take parents who prefer half-day pre-K, allowing quality time at home for parent and child, but who now lose their subsidy, given the mayor's insistence on full days inside classrooms. Jewish educators seek more instructional time to advance religious teaching. Charter schools last month appealed Albany's siding with the mayor that he, not charter authorizers, can regulate independent pre-K programs.

New York's experiment also reveals the risk of obsessing on what's new and shiny when regimented entitlements arrive. The mayor largely ignored existing supply, incenting middle-class parents to migrate into tuition-free preschools. This emptied up to 14,900 children from older programs, rather than widening access - what economists dub a substitution effect. "We lost two full classrooms of 4-year-olds," said Don Williams, manager of a Midtown pre-K.

President Obama and Republican governors, like Michigan's Rick Snyder, dodge the risks of unbridled entitlements, opting to expand pre-K access for poor youngsters, while easing middle-class costs via tax credits. A rising count of companies, from Netflix to Goldman Sachs, help shoulder the burden of essential human supports: from paid leave for parents nurturing a newborn to insuring security in old age.

Instead, untethered entitlements go awry when benefits tilt toward better-heeled players, say how price supports for farmers became welfare for the well-off, or when taxpayers underwrite pre-K or high-priced universities for parents who can afford to pay.

The campaign season may prompt serious debate over the future of entitlements, along with how to bolster working families. But as Mrs. Clinton and leading Democrats embrace new social guarantees, pursuing middle-class voters, they should be honest about who they aim to buoy and who they would leave behind.

***
Bruce Fuller, professor of education and public policy at Berkeley, is author of Organizing Locally (University of Chicago Press).



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