DOE Chancellor Carranza & Mayor de Blasio (photo: Ed Reed/Mayor's Office)

The Department of Education rolled out new standardized testing for thousands of students across New York City last month. For now, the new tests are supposedly targeted to low-performing (aka low-scoring) schools, but all signs point to the expansion of additional standardized testing citywide.

More standardized testing is the exact opposite of what New York City should be doing to help students and, if anything, these new tests could actually hurt our most vulnerable students. Piling on tests is not going to solve any of the problems our struggling students face -- problems like homelessness, learning disabilities, structural racism, and lack of resources. If anything, it will make school even more frustrating and unengaging for children than it already is.

Although it may come as a surprise to the Department of Education, children have social-emotional needs. They are not little robots whose brains we can endlessly reprogram. They need to have fun, they need to feel capable, and they need to feel like they belong. By forcing schools to administer even more tests and report scores multiple times a year, we risk making school even less welcoming for children, particularly for those who already struggle academically. A friend of mine who had to recently administer new tests to her fourth-graders told me that one of her students said “I feel like a dead fish” after completing his test.

No nine-year-old should use the word “dead” when describing their experience in school.

More standardized testing also runs counter to Chancellor Richard Carranza’s stated goal of bringing Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) into every classroom. First of all, standardized tests, by definition, are typically not culturally responsive; often test texts feature only typically white names or use touchpoints that most New York City children can’t relate to, like farms and forests.

There is also the issue of time: standardized testing and test prep eats up hours of the school day that could be used for culturally responsive activities like those in social studies, the arts, collaborative projects, or community building. With this new testing rollout, elementary school students will spend 12 days taking standardized tests over the school year. Middle and high school students will spend even more days on exams. Factor in weeks of test prep and that is well over a month of school lost to the least culturally responsive activity there is -- non-interactive, undifferentiated standardized testing.

Standardized tests are usually neither accessible nor helpful to immigrant students, who are required to take state English Language Arts exams after only one year in the United States. Some of these children may have not even been in school before immigrating to the United States, but after only one year living in New York City, they must endure hours of silently staring at multiple choice questions that will in no way help them learn a new language. Needless to say, this is culturally exclusive, not inclusive.

So what would actually help meet the academic and social-emotional needs of struggling students across the city and foster true culturally-responsive learning?

Smaller class sizes.

Unlike more standardized tests, reducing class sizes would actually make it easier for teachers to get to know their students, build community, and implement culturally-responsive practices in their classrooms. Smaller classes are also proven to help children grow academically. That’s why teachers across the country are striking for smaller classes and why if you were to ask any teacher whether the difference between 32 (the current cap for elementary school) and 25 or even 20 children impacts student achievement and classroom culture, you’d get a resounding “yes.”

Last year we had school on a snowy day right before a break. I had only 13 or 14 kids in a class. Everyone was happy. There were no fights; no other serious behavior problems. I had time to help every student one-on-one. The kids were calm and productive instead of overstimulated or understimulated. At one point, one of my third-grade students with learning disabilities said, “Ms. Olenick, this is the first time I’ve ever finished all of my work without needing extra time.” There is a reason why private school class sizes are almost universally kept to below 20 students, often with an assistant teacher: class size matters.

The DOE claims it doesn’t plan to spend additional money on this testing rollout. But there is no doubt that creating and evaluating tests taken by thousands -- if not ultimately hundreds of thousands -- of students will require staff time and resources. If the DOE has extra cash on hand and actually wants to help all children learn, it should use the resources not for more monotonous, culturally-unresponsive testing, but to shrink class sizes so that every child in New York City gets the support they need to grow academically, socially, and emotionally. 

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Liat Olenick is a public school science teacher at an elementary school in Brooklyn. She is also the co-President of activist organization Indivisible Nation BK. On Twitter @Liat_RO.

Attica (photo: Wikimedia Commons)

As the heated debate over the movement to close the Rikers Island jail complex rages on despite or because of the New York City Council’s vote to build four new jails and close Rikers by 2026, where is the corresponding clarion call to close Attica, Auburn, Clinton Dannemora, or any number of New York State’s brutal and archaic prisons?  

In 2017, when Mayor de Blasio and the Lippman Commission released reports laying out proposals to close Rikers, there were about 10,000 people in New York City jails.  The mayor said that reducing the jail population to under 5,000 was a precondition to shuttering Rikers. Today, there are about 7,000 people held in city jails. The proposal approved by the City Council projects a city jail population of 3,300 by 2026. As the number of people held in cages at Rikers continues to fall, where is the equivalent pressure and effort to reduce the New York State prison population from its present 46,000?

Several rationales were used to support the movement to close Rikers. Most of those same justifications apply with even greater force to New York’s patchwork of 52 state prisons that hold almost seven times the number of people at Rikers. 

Close Rikers advocates pointed out that the Rikers jails, which first opened in 1935, were decrepit and dangerous. Rikers is young in comparison to several of New York’s notorious state prisons like Auburn (1818) or Clinton Dannemora (1845). Even Attica (1931) predates Rikers.  These antiquated and dilapidated state institutions struggle to provide heat in the winter and to cool down in the summer. One can easily imagine the layers of asbestos and other environmental hazards that afflict everyone inside.

Stories of the prevalent brutality at Rikers are legion as it earned labels like Torture Island and Gladiator School, but there is also abundant evidence of violence and corruption in New York’s state prisons, including homicides at the hands of prison guards. The frequency of brutality compelled the United States Attorney’s office to charge five corrections officers with civil rights violations, with then-United States Attorney Preet Bharara declaring that “excessive use of force in prisons...has reached crisis proportions in New York State.” 

The racial disparities at Rikers Island are reflected as well in the state prisons as black and Latino people make up 73% of the prison population, nearly double their numbers in the general population. The undeniable link from slavery to incarceration is nowhere more evident than in prisons in northern and western New York, where an almost exclusively black and brown prison population is overseen by an enclave of almost exclusively white correction officers as the local prison is the primary source of employment. 

Visits to Rikers Island are notoriously exhausting and humiliating, but visits to state prisons add another layer of torment – many are hidden in remote corners of the state, some near Canada, even though most state prisoners are from New York City. Visits are necessarily infrequent, and families are decimated. 

Vast financial resources are poured into city and state corrections budgets. The fiscal 2020 preliminary budget for the New York City Department of Correction was $1.4 billion. The state prison budget is seemingly ever expanding. From 1999-2015, the budget grew to almost $3 billion even as the number of incarcerated people dropped. Estimated spending for the New York State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision for 2019-20 is $3,248,250. 

The average stay on Rikers is 61 days. People are harmed physically, emotionally, spiritually, and in other concrete ways such as lost jobs, housing, etc. The average minimum stay in New York state prison is more than 10 years. The devastation caused is incalculable. 

The initial call to close Rikers focused on the brutality of life at Rikers. That long overdue recognition led to revelations about who was held inside. The Close Rikers movement gathered steam when it became common knowledge that most people held at Rikers -- upwards of 70% -- are pretrial detainees, people not convicted and presumed innocent. That realization was coupled with the awareness that countless of those pretrial detainees were in jail simply because they couldn’t afford to post bail, often in amounts under $2,500.

In short order, the close Rikers refrain was coupled with statements from advocates and elected officials alike that freedom should not depend on the size of your bank account. Soon added to the mix was the awareness that many people were on Rikers for minor parole violations such as missing curfew or being late for appointments with a parole officer. Now the movement was less about closing an old, vicious jail, and more about getting people out of jail altogether. 

So why hasn’t the movement to close Rikers carried over to New York’s state prisons? Most likely, it has to do with perceptions of who is held in city jails versus state prisons. State prisoners are not incarcerated because they are too poor to post bail or because of technical parole violations. For the most part, they are serving sentences after having been convicted of violent crime. Yet an examination of who is being held inside state prisons should lead to the same result as with Rikers – the prison population can, should, and must be dramatically reduced.

New York State is notoriously punitive, as prosecutors have routinely asked for maximum sentences and judges have been happy to oblige. According to the Sentencing Project, New York is one of eight states where the proportion of prisoners serving life or “virtual life” (50 years or more) sentences is at least one in five. Almost 10,000 people in New York prisons are serving life sentences or its functional equivalent, a number topped only in Texas, Louisiana, Florida, and California. 

As a result, New York State prisons are filled with a rapidly aging population even as studies reveal that people “age out” of criminal activity. There are more than 10,000 people over the age of 50 inside state prison. Almost 3,000 are over 60. According to the Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, the average age of death of those who died from natural causes inside New York state prison was 57. The vast number of people who are largely condemned to die in prison is unjustifiable and barbaric.

Thousands of New York prisoners have served their time, often several decades, remarkably.  There are countless stories of transformation, redemption, and profound change. Yet these men and women languish in prison for no reason other than to satisfy a seemingly unquenchable thirst for interminable punishment. 

New York can in several ways decarcerate its state prisons, with no threat to public safety and with an enormous gain in talent and contributions to society. The notoriously unforgiving parole system must be overhauled. Parole Board members must be people steeped in clinical and therapeutic services who recognize and value the capacity for rehabilitation.

Passage of the Fair and Timely Parole Bill (S497A) can transform the process by dictating a forward-looking approach that examines evidence-based risk assessment scores and the individual’s institutional record, as opposed to looking backward and focusing exclusively on the crime of conviction, a factor the individual can never change. 

The discretionary power to grant clemency is enshrined in the New York State constitution that vests the Governor with the power “to grant reprieves, commutations and pardons after convictions, for all offenses except treason and cases of impeachment, upon such conditions and with such restrictions and limitations, as he may think proper.” To date, Governor Cuomo has commuted the sentences of only 18 people. Thousands of meritorious clemency applications are pending. The governor, with the stroke of a pen, could send those men and women home.    

The punitive sentences of the past 40 years must be corrected. The American Law Institute (ALI) sought to address the decades of punitiveness that led to the current state of mass incarceration, made more shameful by the racial disparities in American jails and prisons. ALI now calls for state legislatures to enact “second look” mechanisms that reexamine a person’s sentence after fifteen years no matter the crime of conviction or how long the original sentence.

In similar fashion, the Elder Parole Bill (S2144) that gathered momentum in last year’s legislative session in Albany provides that anyone who is over 55 years old and has served at least 15 years would have the opportunity to appear before the Parole Board.  

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez is advocating for legislation that would permit resentencing where prosecutors deem it appropriate in the interests of justice after a person has served 20 years for the most serious crimes. There are similar calls for prosecutors to establish sentencing review units to reevaluate the cases of all people serving lengthy prison terms. 

The Supreme Court now recognizes the mitigating qualities of youth and, relying on growing scientific awareness of adolescent brain development, concluded that youth are less culpable than adults and have greater capacity for rehabilitation. As a result, judges must now consider youth and its attendant traits before sentencing young people to die in prison. There are nearly 1,200 people in New York State prison serving life sentences for acts committed when they were teenagers. Each of those cases now demands reconsideration.

Important questions remain since the City Council’s vote to close the Rikers jails, but there is one thing on which everyone should agree -- the movement to get people out of jail and close Rikers Island should be applied with equal force to New York’s state prisons.  

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Steven Zeidman is a professor of law at CUNY School of Law. On Twitter @SteveZeidman.

(photo: the governor's office)

Our broken system of school finance is currently the subject of roundtables led by the State Senate's new Democratic majority. The hearings are focused on reforming the Foundation Aid formula that determines the bulk of state aid to local districts.

Broken? According to the Alliance for Quality Education, the gap between the average per pupil spending in the 100 wealthiest and 100 poorest school districts has grown to a record $10,218 per pupil. These stark differences are reflected in teacher salaries and class sizes, counselors and librarians, facilities, and technology, among other social and academic supports. Flowing from these inequities are pervasive proficiency challenges among students of color in our poorest districts, robbing them of their inherent rights to educational and economic justice.

The school finance system has long been a source of political in-fighting. The Foundation Aid "pie" is largely dictated by the Governor through the executive’s power over the state budget. The Legislature then slices the pie among the state's 750 school districts based on a combination of need and political muscle. In Albany, that's not a fair fight.

The winners tend to be wealthier suburban swing districts where voters keep close tabs on their elected representatives to bring home maximum funding. Every dollar in state aid is a dollar less in local property taxes, the driver of the inequitable system of American school finance where school quality it directly related to the property wealth of its citizens. 

Individual legislators’ accountability to rural and urban school districts is less direct and party control of these seats more assured. As a result, school aid is not the make-or-break electoral issue it is in the suburbs. The profound effect of this political mismatch is that the needier districts are disproportionately dealt out of Foundation Aid, which was originally meant to close the gap.

So merely reforming Foundation Aid will not solve the problem of inequitable and inadequate state aid. The formula is broken because, at bottom, it is based on political rather than educational considerations. The solution is to rearrange the legal equation to reflect educational finance as a right, not subject to the exigencies of political might. We need to see the issue as one of promoting the civil rights of all students.

Solving such a big problem requires a big idea: a constitutionally required escalator that automatically raises the level of each district’s state funding to match per pupil spending by our wealthiest districts. This new funding structure based on a standard of educational excellence would permanently correct the otherwise intractable power imbalance favoring wealthy districts, bringing a new level of educational quality to all the states’ children and an ensuing level of prosperity for all New Yorkers.

The Excellence Escalator: How It Works
Today, our state constitution provides a lowest common denominator right to a “sound basic education” pegged at the level of a “meaningful high school education” by the New York State Court of Appeals in its 2003 opinion in Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York (“CFE II”). The Foundation Aid formula was developed in response to CFE II but has never realized its promise of meeting the fiscal equity demanded by the Court of Appeals decree. Stifled by the iron rule of political power, the CFE II and its predecessor and successor decisions have proven of little use in Albany’s hotbed of competing school district interests vying for self-limited state funds.

Moving beyond the false promise of judicial rescue through Foundation Aid will require a constitutional amendment to replace the Court of Appeals’ “sound basic education” adequacy standard with a standard of “educational excellence” tied to funding levels our wealthiest residents deem appropriate for their own children.

The excellence escalator will assure that state aid meets or exceeds the per pupil spending in our wealthiest districts. While expensive, the sticker shock of the state providing highest-level funding can be mitigated by adjustment of aid for individual district measures of student need and local capacity, formulaic data already available and largely immune to political manipulation.

In practice, our wealthiest districts would receive zero state dollars but no ceiling on local spending. Districts of similar wealth that chose not to tax at that level would also receive zero by failing to meet local capacity. But districts that taxed to the max would be rewarded by state assistance to meet the highest levels of per pupil district spending.

As a result, the excellence escalator is less radical that it seems. It does not discourage local spending and maintains local school taxes as the bulwark of our system of school finance. But, as a constitutional guarantee, the provision assures that the state will match funding to levels of real world spending that currently benefits only our most well-off students.

Besides providing a greater degree of educational equity, the escalator would dramatically encourage desegregation by removing a major obstacle to families’ movement between districts: the quality of schools. By diminishing the gap in per pupil spending between districts, a major reason for our entrenched enclavism, a growing hole in our social fabric could be mended.

The path forward for the excellence escalator is not free of the same politics that currently traps us in the broken system of Foundation Aid. But it is a one-time fix, requiring approval by two successive legislative sessions and a voter referendum. Today’s problem is a constant battle, fought every year against impossible odds. A constitutionally mandated school funding excellence escalator would turn the tide toward educational equity and quality, a big idea whose time has come.

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David C. Bloomfield is Professor of Educational Leadership, Law and Policy at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Graduate Center. This essay is adapted from testimony presented to the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. On Twitter @BloomfieldDavid.

(photo: Metropolitan Transportation Authority/Patrick Cashin)

MTA Chair and CEO Pat Foye says the transit authority’s operating budget is in “dire” condition and independent budget watchdogs are alarmed its deficit is growing to unmanageable levels. Citizens Budget Commission estimates the MTA will be $740 million in the red in 2023 -- and this does not include new debt payments for the new, massive $51.5+ billion 2020-2024 capital plan. Separately, NYPD data shows subway crime is down 3% from last year, and Police Commissioner James O’Neill says the subway, which carries 6 million passengers a day, averages only six major crimes a day. 

Given the gaping budget hole -- which recently led to cuts in bus service on the B46 -- and the low crime rate, we wonder how the MTA justifies a costly increase in the size of its police force by 581 more officers and supervisors as first uncovered by Gothamist to address “quality of life issues.” This larger MTA force will cost the authority an additional $260 million more in operating costs over the next four years, as calculated by Citizens Budget Commission, and will force cuts elsewhere in the operating budget -- including, logically, in transit service.  

The MTA should make a decision of this magnitude based on a transparent, data-driven analysis that shows why expanding the MTA police force is more worthwhile than expanding transit service -- or even preserving existing service. The MTA should explain to the transit riding public what an expanded MTA police force can do that the current 2,500 NYPD officers and approximately 300 redeployed MTA police officers patrolling the subways and buses are not doing.

Disappointingly, the decision to increase the MTA police -- which is widely believed to be at Governor Cuomo’s behest -- has been made in a fact-free zone. The reasoning used has also shifted from fare evasion to homelessness to worker and rider safety, or a combination of all of the above. The public discussions by some MTA Board members has consisted of anecdotes and unfounded assumptions on these issues, and MTA staff have not provided analyses that examine alternatives or even dig deeply into existing MTA data.

(Note to MTA Board: MTA police officers guarding a turnstile only pay for themselves if fare revenue at that station goes up by at least the cost of the officers stationed there. Can we see some actual data that supports the argument that spending $260 million over the next four years on more MTA police will increase fare revenue by that much? What about the four years after that, etc.?)

If one of the governor’s stated goals is to reduce the number of homeless people in the subways, let’s see some evidence that an expensive increase in the size of the MTA police force will or even can do that, or that spending large sums on more police is even the best way to do that. Again, where is the data showing a relationship between the number of police officers and homelessness in the subways?

What we are seeing with the MTA policing issue is the latest example of a once-respected public authority that has been politicized and compelled to spend huge amounts on political grandstanding rather than objective priorities. Just last month, the MTA’s $51.5+ billion capital plan was approved by its Board before it published a needs assessment that establishes detailed baseline costs for getting the system to a state of good repair. 

Governor Cuomo has publicly called on the MTA to be more professional and efficient. We agree, but competent, professional management is fact- and data-driven, and does not make decisions based on the politics of the moment. The data here does not support almost doubling the size of the MTA police force from 783 to 1,364 -- especially given the “dire” budget. 

Professional, fact-based thinking by the MTA Board and management would mean rejecting this unnecessary expenditure and recognizing there is a direct trade-off between more police and more transit service. 

How Much Money Are We Talking Here?
According to Citizens Budget Commission, increasing the size of the MTA police force with 500 new officers and 81 supervisors for the new hires will cost $56.1 million in year one and $119.9 million in year ten. Over the 2020-2023 financial plan, the new officers will cost $260 million and push the MTA’s projected operating budget deficit of $740 million to $1 billion.

Reinvent Albany and other watchdog groups including Citizens Budget Commission, NYPIRG Straphangers Campaign, TransitCenter, and the Tri-State Transportation Campaign sent a letter to the MTA Board calling on the MTA to identify exactly how it will fund nearly doubling the size of the MTA police force without increasing its growing operating deficit. The groups specifically expressed the concern that an expanded MTA police force will reduce the MTA’s ability to maintain a high level of transit service -- its core responsibility.

The MTA still hasn’t said how it will pay for these officers, and what the true cost will be in terms of reductions in staff and service. Its next budget presentation is due at its November 14 Board meeting, and this is likely to be the first time this new expense shows up in its budget. The MTA Board will then approve a final budget at its December meeting, so it is not too late to reverse course.

The MTA’s Many Justifications for Increasing its Police Force
There are many opinions about having more police in the subways and buses. Some oppose over-policing and some are concerned about service cuts, while others believe more police will increase customer and operator safety.

For Reinvent Albany, what cuts across all of these issues is the consistent failure of the MTA -- or Governor Cuomo -- to make credible, fact-based decisions regarding major spending. The governor and the MTA have access to professional analysts, detailed data about operations and crime, and outside experts who could guide their decisions. Instead, this decision has been made without meaningfully using any of them. 

We at Reinvent Albany are not criminologists or experts in homelessness or fare evasion. But we do believe in and know the value of data and rational decision-making. Given that the MTA hasn’t been allowed to do its homework, we are providing just some of the data and options that need to be examined before any decisions are made.

Crime
Crime on the subways is a clear area where perception and reality aren’t matching up. Governor Cuomo was recently blasted by the NYPD’s own leader for saying that crime in the subways is on the rise, with Commissioner O’Neill noting that the opposite is true. O’Neill instead said there has been a decrease in crime and “I absolutely disagree with Governor Cuomo’s characterization.” According to the latest stats from New York City Transit, total major felonies are down this year versus last (January-September) -- with 1,774 major felonies in 2019 and 1,799 in 2018.

Major crimes have dropped significantly since 1997, when there were 6,218 major felonies in the subways and buses. For the last four years, major felonies have numbered about 2,500 per year. It is worth noting the decrease happened during a period of increasing ridership: since 1997, annual ridership increased from 1.1 billion to nearly 1.7 billion. 

Perception often colors riders’ feelings about crime rather than actual data, as noted in a New York Times piece from earlier this year on subway crime. Social media, for example, is one big driver of perceptions. In speaking with the Times, NYPD Transit Chief Edward Delatorre said that the number of crimes in the subway is so small that “one or two recidivist offenders can enter the system and throw the crime numbers out of whack.” (For scale, there were 95,883 major felonies committed in New York City as a whole in 2018, down from 184,652 in 2000.)

Where particular types of crime have increased yet overall major crimes are flat or decreasing, refocusing existing officers is a more reasonable approach than hiring hundreds of new ones. Two areas that have received considerable attention are hate crimes, which increased from 37 to 65 from 2018 to 2019 (January-September), and assaults against subway workers, which according to the transit workers union (TWU) increased from 61 to 85 when comparing the first eight months of 2018 to 2019. 

Homelessness
The MTA recently released a 9-page “report” of recommendations from its Homelessness Task Force. To be clear, this is not a “report,” as there is no credible analysis: it is essentially a directive from the governor to the MTA. The "report," which came after repeated complaints by the Governor about homelessness on the subways, found a 20% increase in homelessness in the subways from 2018 to 2019. The total increase found from a January 2019 survey was from 1,771 to 2,178, an increase of 407 people. This single data point was then used as the sole justification for a directive by the task force to increase the MTA police force by 50%. 

 Despite the report saying that the task force was “charged with delivering a set of recommendations to the MTA Board of Directors for actions to address the growing number of homeless individuals,” the report says that the MTA will increase its police force.  

 The MTA Board has not yet approved a budget for these new officers. At the direction of the governor, MTA staff is moving forward with these hires, undermining the fiduciary responsibility of the Board, who must consider how the MTA can best serve riders with its scarce resources. 

Fare Evasion
Fare evasion has become a fixation for the governor and some of his appointees to the MTA Board, with more and more demands being placed on MTA staff to address the issue. According to the MTA’s June 2019 data, it lost $240 million to fare evasion over 12 months. But while the MTA has said fare evasion is growing, its Inspector General, who is appointed by the governor, in an audit said the MTA’s fare evasion stats are not credible. 

 At the same time, the MTA has ramped up enforcement efforts with redeployed police, new signage, and more cameras. If you believe the data, this may not be working. The MTA IG’s audit said that the “impact of these initiatives would be difficult to assess without reliable data on evasion levels and trends.” 

 The MTA can’t make rational decisions on fare evasion unless it better understands the problem first, and can trust its own data. And before jumping to any solutions, it would be worth assessing any number of other options to get more riders to pay the fare.

 Rather than punitive approaches, options include providing better service so riders feel like they are getting what they pay for. The MTA and New York City could enroll more people in the Fair Fares program, which provides low-income riders a 50% fare discount. A Wall Street Journal report found an approach from behavioral psychology of praising paying customers decreased evasion in other systems.

 The MTA could also examine further expanding station infrastructure like cameras and more signage to deter the use of emergency gates. (This was the original stated purpose of $40 million in funds coming from the Manhattan District Attorney, which the MTA has erroneously claimed will largely cover the cost of new officers.)

 Yet another option is deployment of more cost-effective civilian staff. The MTA has said that more orange-vested staff could provide a deterrent to fare evasion, while providing more customer service. Additionally, the MTA’s Select Bus Service enforces fare payment with its Eagle Teams, who are not police officers. Unlike on other buses and the subway, Select Bus riders do not have to dip their Metrocards on the bus to pay the fare, but instead pay in advance and must show proof of payment upon request of the Eagle Teams. Ironically, the MTA’s Eagle Teams saw 22 staff members cut in the MTA’s 2018 budget reduction program, which in retrospect seems highly questionable as the MTA has said they do indeed pay for themselves.

The MTA Board Must Reject this Proposal
Before spending scarce transit operating dollars that almost doubles the size of the MTA police force, the MTA should work with its own officers and those from the NYPD to establish clear goals and expectations and improve the effectiveness of existing policing. The MTA Board needs to hear fact-based arguments with cost/benefit analyses of the various options to address safety, homelessness, and fare evasion. The MTA Board should reject hiring more police officers until its members and the public have real information about the opportunity costs of this proposal.

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Rachael Fauss is senior research analyst for Reinvent Albany. On Twitter @RachaelFauss & @ReinventAlbany.

(photo: Design_Miss_C via pixabay.com)

To the Editor:

As co-leaders of New York’s JustGreen Partnership, a coalition of over 50 broad, diverse organizations representing over one million New Yorkers, we’ve led the charge for environmental health and justice for New York’s people and communities. Securing the same protections for New York’s children that other states like Washington and Vermont require has been a top priority of this coalition. That’s why Governor Cuomo, a national leader on children’s health, should further demonstrate his long-standing prioritization of these issues by signing the Child Safe Products Act.

We’d like to set the record straight regarding the threadbare, timeworn mistruths in Matthew Lenz’s opinion piece, “Toy Companies in New York and Across America Put Child Safety First,” (Oct. 23, 2019), which was itself a response to a column by Christine Appah of New York Lawyers for the Public Interest asking the governor to sign this important legislation.

Lenz states that “U.S. toy safety requirements are among the strictest in the world,” and cites extremely limited and widely unenforced laws. He states, “these regulations make it illegal to sell toys or children’s products containing substances harmful to children and to which they might be exposed.” What Lenz doesn’t say is those standards allow toy manufacturers to put formaldehyde in doll clothing, organohalogens in toddler furniture, PFAS chemicals in changing pads, and much more.

Likewise, Lenz also fails to disclose that Toy Association members, including toy manufacturers in New York, submit to Washington State thousands of reports of the presence of nearly a hundred  chemicals hazardous to children. How can both things be true? They can’t.

Clean and Healthy New York, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and our allies purchased toys around the state and Clean and Healthy New York screened them using x-ray fluorescence technology. The results prove Appah was accurate when saying “there are many toys and products on the market today that do indeed contain chemicals that are hazardous to children’s health.” 

Lenz further touts a failed, old-school, risk-based approach to regulating chemicals in children’s products. This approach concerns itself with how much of a chemical produces a specific health outcome and grounds that determination on a protocol that uses a healthy, 30-year-old white male as the reference model. This scheme is not based on the unique vulnerabilities of the child, does not fully factor in all of the exposure pathways to a chemical, and does not consider other factors affecting disease, such as race, heredity, diet, and stress. In short, it is set up to allow the continued presence of toxic chemicals in children’s products.

Despite observable proof that there are no empty store shelves in states with common-sense measures to disclose and limit toxic chemicals, Lenz attempts to scaremonger with this claim. Not a single job has been lost due to more protective chemical regulation. In fact, there is a strong business case for disclosure of toxic hazards, and restrictions when appropriate.

Certain companies, such as New York-based Community Playthings, commit to selling only toys and other childcare items without any toxicants disclosed to Washington State. New York’s law, when signed by Governor Cuomo, will not only provide parents with the right to know about the presence of more toxicants than any other state, but will place long-overdue restrictions on some of the worst, such as asbestos, formaldehyde, and organohalogens. Toymakers will no doubt comply, as they do elsewhere. Together we can build a toxic-free future for our most precious resource: the next generation. 

Sincerely,

by Kathleen A. Curtis & Cecil Corbin-Mark
Curtis, LPN, is Executive Director of Clean and Healthy New York. Corbin-Mark is Deputy Director of WE ACT for Environmental Justice.

(photo: Demetrius Freeman/Mayoral Photography Office)

New Yorkers heading to the polls this fall have the opportunity to vote on amendments to New York City’s Charter – our city’s foundational governing document – that include changes to how we vote, police accountability, and budgeting. But one big topic will be missing: truly addressing our city’s broken land use system.

This didn’t have to be the case. When the City Council, then-Public Advocate Letitia James, and Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer came together to create this Charter Revision Commission in spring of 2018 there were high hopes for what it might accomplish. Unlike previous commissions charged with a narrow focus, Commission Chair Gail Benjamin announced, “This is a commission that received a broad mandate to overhaul the charter, which has not been done since 1989.” Instead of looking small, this commission would be going big. 

Given the land use expertise of many of the appointed commissioners, including Chair Benjamin - and the expressed hopes of the elected officials who helped create the commission - advocates, New York City residents, and our elected representatives believed this broad mandate included the way our land use planning is done. During public hearings in all five boroughs, the commission heard more complaints about our broken land use process than any other issue.

The Thriving Communities Coalition formed in response to what we believed was a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul our land use process, provide more access and accountability to average New Yorkers and address the needs of low-income communities and communities of color by working to end, rather than perpetuate, the legacy of historically racist planning.

As a coalition of grassroots organizing, advocacy, policy, and technical-assistance groups working across issue areas and neighborhoods, we knew first-hand the ways in which the planning process isn’t working: from the affordable housing and homelessness crisis - fueled in part by the rampant gentrification and displacement of formerly affordable communities - to the income and race inequalities that make us one of the most segregated and unequal cities in the country.

Throughout the charter reform process, the Thriving Communities Coalition fought for the commission to take up a comprehensive planning process that accounts for historical divestments from communities of color and a budget that equitably distributes resources - sharing our perspectives on the urgent need for real reform to empower disenfranchised communities and fight deeply entrenched racial and socio-economic inequality.   

And yet in the end, the commission chose not to advance any meaningful land use reforms. Faced with the opportunity to make historic changes after hearing from a groundswell of folks about the urgent need, and after acknowledging in its preliminary report the “level of public disillusionment” with regards to land use and planning processes, the commission chose to settle, offering “tweaks” to the charter and rejecting calls for more transformational change.

Instead of comprehensive planning and the equitable distribution of resources, we have been offered an extended review period for Community Boards over the summer, and development plans being made public 30 days before the official public review starts. Instead of looking big, this commission went small.        

We cannot wait another 30 years for a Charter Revision Commission that embraces its broad mandate to come along. Continuing the current land use process is unacceptable and unsustainable. While the status quo might work for developers and the powerful few, it does not work for most New Yorkers. Without meaningful changes, the processes we have now will only exacerbate inequality, segregation, and displacement. We will need more vision from our elected officials and leaders if we are to become a city where everyone has a chance to grow and thrive.

***
Chris Walters is the Rezoning Technical Assistance Coordinator at the Association for Neighborhood and Housing Development and a member of the Thriving Communities Coalition – a coalition of community-based and policy-oriented nonprofits focused on equitable land use and planning processes. On Twitter @ANHDNYC.

(photo: Dave Sanders)

At 2 a.m. on Friday October 18, I walked out of the Manhattan headquarters of the City University of New York (CUNY) having helped to line-edit a labor contract memorandum of agreement (MOA) for the sixth time that day.

I sit on the bargaining team of the Professional Staff Congress, an American Federation of Teachers local that represents some 30,000 employees at CUNY. The bargaining unit includes adjunct and full-time faculty, professional staff, graduate employees, college laboratory technicians, and many others. More than half a million students, a majority working class and people of color, attend CUNY each year.

When I left the building, we had a deal that moved tens of millions of dollars to enhance pay for some 12,000 adjuncts, an accomplishment with national resonance for institutions of public higher education. On top of that, the tentative agreement included significant enhancements for a couple thousand graduate employees.

PSC Delegates are currently discussing the MOA, and will vote on recommending it to the membership on November 7. Assuming the contract is ratified, by Fall 2022, the bottom of the adjunct pay scale at CUNY will move from the current $3,222 per three-credit course to $5,500, for a three-credit course and a paid office hour, a 71% increase.

Adjuncts across the country have been organizing in recent years, at universities like Tufts, George Washington, and many more. They are fighting for better pay, job security, benefits, and other improvements to working conditions. Though adjuncts have long been organized at CUNY, they have faced an uphill battle as decades of austerity have been foisted on the country’s largest urban university by powerful political and financial forces. Yet this round of bargaining represents a significant reversal of the inequality between full- and part-time faculty that has characterized the work life of 12,000 CUNY adjuncts.

One piece of the raise comes from a traditional hourly increase, but the other comes from a so-called “office hour.” Adjunct faculty at CUNY are as dedicated as any to the students they teach. They have long held offices hours and met with students as much as those students need, but mostly without compensation. This new hour of pay for every course begins to recognize the many hundreds of thousands of hours of uncompensated labor that CUNY adjuncts perform every semester.

This wage increase is a moral victory. It will matter in the lives of the 12,000 adjuncts who labor at CUNY, many at the very bottom of the pay scale. But it is also a structural victory that I hope will be repeated throughout the country.

There is not a president, provost, or department chair at our university who will fail to do some basic math and realize that converting adjuncts to lecturers – CUNY’s title for college instructors who have full-time work, job security, and strong benefits, but who do not have a research obligation – will become a much more rational choice with this contract. In this sense, this outcome may mean the beginning of the end of adjunctification at CUNY.

But there is also a host of gains for graduate employees, the group that I (and many others!) have spent the past six years cohering into a political force at CUNY. When we started organizing, membership rates for Graduate Assistants – the title of many though not all graduate employees – were at just 22%. Today, the chapter is vibrant, and membership has increased three-fold. The gains from this round did not come from magic, but rather from the power that comes from dozens and then hundreds and then thousands engaging in union activity.

Starting next semester, those employed at CUNY in their sixth and seventh years of doctoral study will no longer pay tuition if they are New York residents, and will have their tuition reduced by some $2,700 annually if they are not. Gone are the days of getting tagged for exorbitant fees, just as we are trying to finish our dissertations!

The outcome that I am most proud of, though, is the huge step we have made toward eliminating an entire tier of doctoral students – so-called “tuition-only fellows,” who lack stable funding and access to health insurance. CUNY has committed the money to provide health insurance for this entire group, and we will work with the Graduate Center to construct an employment system that will allow them consistent access to these funds. This will require some work – and organizing – in committee, but when we are done, this highly exploited class of graduate sometimes-employees will be eliminated.

There is yet another way to understand the combination of graduate employee and adjunct demands the tentative agreement represents: at the end of this contract, doctoral students who have a standard five-year funding package (which includes a stipend) and who adjunct for their full workload will bring in approximately $50,000 annually.

On the one hand, I do not want to overstate this. As many know, living in New York on even this much money is not easy, and the full workload is a lot. But I don’t want to understate it either. This amount of money enables those from working class backgrounds to obtain a PhD without accruing debt. It is a substantial improvement over current conditions, and we achieved it even while making a huge step toward eliminating altogether the bottom tier of graduate employees.

Union contracts are, in the end, a measure of power. The many good, even transformative, gains in the proposed PSC-CUNY contract are a precise reflection of the power that we have built as members and as an organization. But we did not win everything. Adjunct faculty deserve yet higher wages; we have more work to do to drive home the win for tuition-only doctoral fellows; and a more fundamental political project remains substantially unaddressed: will the city and state directly and fully fund CUNY the way it was when the working class of New York was whiter than it is today?

This is of course a fight – a political project – that extends well beyond CUNY. Institutions of public higher education are under attack everywhere. Our local fights are fundamentally national ones.

Members of the PSC have a lot to be excited about in this proposed new contract. Many of us are taking a moment to celebrate. But tomorrow – later tonight, even – the work continues.

***
Luke Elliott-Negri is a non-teaching adjunct at the School of Labor and Urban Studies and a doctoral candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, where he is the PSC chapter chair. He serves on the PSC Bargaining Committee, the PSC Pension Committee, and the Working Families Party State Committee.

Note: this column has been updated to clarify information around covered doctoral students.

(photo via PayLock)

The only thing worse than getting a parking ticket is having your car towed for unpaid fines. For decades, it was the ultimate New York hassle: spend hours looking for your car only to find out you’ve been ticketed, towed, charged a storage fee, and forced to rescue your vehicle from a distant decrepit parking lot.

Driving has its place in New York City, which is why there are two million registered cars in the city. With those cars comes tens of millions of dollars in unpaid tickets and fines. That’s why the city embarked on a pilot program in 2012 designed to address motorist inconvenience while increasing the ease and efficiency of collecting overdue fines that help the city pay for schools, parks, and other priorities New Yorkers care about. The idea was to introduce a simple technology designed to end this municipal headache.

Seven years ago, PayLock, where I serve as CEO, presented the city with an innovative solution to the draconian policy of impounding a person’s vehicle for unpaid infractions. Rather than towing, PayLock places a patented immobilizing self-release car boot on a vehicle when they have fines over $350. Once in place, the boot can only be removed after the driver pays their fines.

Through a mobile-friendly website or call center, the driver receives a code to unlock their boot and has 48 hours to return it. As a result, the city gets its money, and motorists get their car back hassle-free within minutes. In fact, PayLock’s focus on making a tough situation better recouped over $50 million in unpaid tickets for the city in 2018 alone.

Sadly, New York City will transition to a new program on Friday, November 1, and New Yorkers should ask why.

Last Spring, the city announced a public request for proposals (RFP) to select a company that would run the program for the next five years. The city called for companies with at least three years of experience to apply. We were happy to put our expertise and technology up against any other company. Our seven year track record in New York would speak for itself. We are the only company in the United States successfully operating in over 20 municipalities, including Los Angeles, Seattle, and Baltimore.

To our amazement, the bid was awarded to a newly formed company called RIS NYC, which was incorporated three months after submitting its proposal to the city and brought together one of the city’s tow truck and parking lot operators.

RIS NYC has never implemented a self-release booting program for any major city. It also appears that the city went so far as to extend the proposal deadline to respond to the RFP several times just to give RIS NYC time to apply. Then it was awarded the contract even though it lacked the one thing the RFP said was most important: experience.

How is it possible that an untested company was selected to run the largest self-release booting program in the country?

This is why PayLock formally submitted protest letters and later filed an Article 78 legal petition to fight an unfair and nontransparent process. We submitted a proposal backed by data and experience. We brought to the table a total of 14 years of experience collaborating with local governments to run self-release booting programs across the country.

In good faith, we continued to improve and add services at no additional cost to New York taxpayers over the course of the past seven years. We have a great working relationship with the city and the many outstanding Department of Finance employees that we work alongside everyday to help make this program a success. These city employees and our own New York City-based team have shown great care for what is best for New Yorkers.

Instead of providing answers, the city has unfortunately moved the goal posts and built an opaque procurement process that leaves New Yorkers scratching their heads. We pioneered this program and remain a committed partner to the city with a proven record of solving a citywide problem, generating revenue, and reducing administrative costs.

The people of New York deserve better. Companies like PayLock, which deliver innovative solutions to large- and small-scale problems, deserve better. New York City and the Department of Finance have a lot of work to do to ensure companies competing for work in the greatest city in the world have the greatest procurement process in the world.

***
Justin Kennedy is the Chief Executive Officer of PayLock.

(photo: Edwin J. Torres/Mayoral Photo Office)

It’s well-known that homelessness in New York City continues at crisis levels. Roughly 60,000 men, women, and children -- near record-highs, down just slightly from recent years -- are sleeping in the city's homeless shelter system every night. Another estimated 3,500 poor souls are living on the streets and subways mostly because they fear the crime that occurs in the city shelters.

It has gotten so bad in the subway system, which according to the MTA has seen a 23% increase in homeless people present, that Governor Cuomo has declared the MTA must do something about it, insisting on additional MTA police officers and sending the State Police underground.

However, the MTA is a transportation organization and not a social service organization like the city's Department of Homeless Services, which runs the shelters and where I was at one time a deputy commissioner, and the city’s Human Resources Administration, which runs efforts to keep people out of shelter or move them from shelter to housing.

The plan Mayor de Blasio unveiled two years ago was designed poorly and has been a failure; even the very low goal of reducing the population by only 1% a year has not been reached. The plan also promised reduced dependence on costly hotel rooms, however it has been reported that hotel use is actually up by 36% in the past two years. The number of single adults in shelter is up by 60% over the last five years and many of them are being housed in hotels.

In addition, the budget to fight homelessness has skyrocketed to $3 billion a year, according to Comptroller Scott Stringer, and is going higher as a recent contract for two family homeless shelters in Park Slope has revealed that the city is going to pay $10,000 a month per unit for 253 units for a total cost of $30 million a year.

The city's efforts to stem the tide of incoming families by providing free legal counsel and one-shot payments for rent-arrears is not working well enough. For example, on July 30, 161 families arrived at the city's intake centers for families, on August 1 it was 164 families, and 146 families on September 6.

It is apparent that the system is broken and in need of a true makeover. That is why I am suggesting the creation of a Homelessness Review Board to oversee the system.

This board would be made up of 11 members, with five appointed by the Borough Presidents (one each), one by the City Council Speaker, one by the Public Advocate, one by the Comptroller, and three by the Mayor. This board would have oversight of the Department of Homeless Services budget, power to appoint the DHS Commissioner, and approve contracts of over $1 million.

It would be required to hold at least four public hearings a year and issue two reports a year on the status of the homeless system.

This new structure would provide the accountability that is now missing over homelessness policy.

***
Robert Mascali is a former Deputy Commissioner at Homeless Services and former VP for Supportive Housing at Win.

from Chernobyl (photo: Where Can I Fly?)

To the Editor:

I respectfully but fundamentally disagree with the op-ed column by Leonard Rodberg and Herschel Specter, “Keeping the Lights On, and Saving Billions, While Addressing Climate Change” (Oct. 24, 2019), about keeping open the nuclear reactors in New York state.

The column does not mention the greatest dangers nuclear reactors present: those from nuclear waste. This waste has been accumulating around all the 415 nuclear energy plants of the world for nearly 70 years, and no satisfactory solution has been found to deal with it. It has to be constantly watched; if it gets released in the environment it starts its destructive work.

In Chernobyl it caused large numbers of cancers that manifested themselves many years after the 1989 accident. Recently some waste got away at Fukushima in Japan as a result of a tornado. The amount of radiation in these places was small compared to what is present in the waste stored all over the world. Large amounts (even if released in only one place) would have world-wide catastrophic consequences. And the way things are going, with natural catastrophes increasing in number and power, with genocides, armed struggles, millions of would-be refugees, sudden political changes, and more, the loss of control over nuclear waste at one place or another is almost certain to happen.

The authors say if we don’t keep open the nuclear plants New York will not and cannot fulfill its clean energy plan. This may be true (even with the plants kept open). We have seen similar things before: in Kyoto, Canada undertook to cut its emissions by 6% over the period 1990-2012; instead, it increased them by 24%, then repudiated the Kyoto Protocol in 2011. In 2007 the CUNY college where I taught made a ten-year environmental plan: one item was to use the huge southward sloping roof of the sports building for solar heating panels. Well, 2017 came and went. Big repairs were made on the roof in question, but there are no solar panels on it.

It is hard to do things in a hostile environment. As long as United States national policy does not fundamentally change, most local environmental efforts are likely to fail. With a federal Green New Deal, a concentrated national effort with huge public investments and effective support for renewable energy, the New York plan will succeed.

Some might object that just as New York cannot do it without the national government, the country cannot do it without worldwide cooperation. Quite true. But the only way to get international cooperation is to start with the national Green New Deal. Then the competitors on the world scene, who are now in a mad rush not to stay behind in industrialization and development, can slow down and become open to agreements aimed at saving as much of the planet’s environment as possible.

Sincerely,

Adam Koranyi, former professor (retired) at Lehman College, CUNY