The NYS budget cycle is April 1 to March 31, if the governor/legislatures fail to reach an agreement the legislature passes a “continuing resolution” to keep the state solvent, meaning the ability to pay bills and pay state employees. Cuomo prided himself on timely budgets, each of Governor Hochel’s budgets has been late and this year’s budget is more than a month late, weekly “continuing resolution.”
The differences: a change in auto liability insurance that will decrease auto insurance rates, vigorously opposed by trial lawyers, a proposed extension of climate rules, “fixing Tier 6” and a few other issues that do not appear to be insurmountable.
Fixing Tier 6 as reported by the NY Times appears to be unresolved,
Facing pressure from the state’s largest public unions, Ms. Hochul has been trying to determine how to restore certain pension benefits that had been cut for public employees hired after 2012.
Any changes could end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, while also saddling local municipalities and school districts with increased spending burdens. Several of the labor groups have prioritized lowering the minimum retirement age to 55 from 63.
Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the particulars were still being negotiated, but stressed that the cost to the state and local governments would be less than the $1.5 billion that has been requested by the unions.
“We are willing to look at this and make changes, but a much more scaled-back monetary proposal,” she said.
“We will release these numbers as soon as it’s absolutely done,” she added.
Why is the governor holding firm? Who knows? Flexing muscles? One enormous downside is the delay puts the city budget in abeyance, without a state budget the city budget can’t be passed, city funding for schools is part of the state budget. Fixing Tier Six is part of the budgeting process.
Meanwhile Mamdani is struggling to find several billion to fill the yawning shortages. Adams had pushed budget deficits into successive years only delaying a budget crisis.
The NYC budget is proposed by the mayor, negotiated with city council and must be agreed upon by June 30th, the end of the city’s fiscal year, without a state budget the city budget negotiations are stalled, with a ticking clock.
On March 25th the Mayor listed a range of budget reductions including at the time, modest cuts to education.
NEW YORK – TODAY, Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani provided an update on the City of New York’s savings plan, as part of the City’s effort to drive down the budget gap inherited from the former Administration.
“Government must deliver for working people — and every dollar in our budget must work as hard as they do. That’s why I directed every agency to find real savings and cut waste to close our budget gap. This is just the beginning of our work to improve service delivery and make city government the most efficient it can be,” said Mayor Mamdani.
Mayor Mamdani proposed a prudent, fiscally responsible preliminary budget that identifies aggressive saving measures and operational reforms. Years of underbudgeting, unfunded mandates and fiscal mismanagement under the prior Administration left New York City facing a massive deficit, described by City Comptroller Mark Levine as “the biggest budget gap since the Great Recession.” Prior to the last Administration, actual spending tended to exceed projections by approximately 3%; through the Adams Administration, underbudgeting averaged 10%.
New York City Public Schools: NYCPS will terminate underutilized contracts and implement spending caps, generating $30.3 million in savings in FY27. In addition, NYCPS will introduce controls on central office spending across supplies, equipment, professional development and travel, resulting in $27.5 million in savings in FY26.
As the Albany budget talks stalled and the clock kept ticking the Mayor released more drastic detailed cuts by agency, especially as it appeared the Governor may not be bailing out the city.
A City Hall spokesperson said the Education Department would be expected to cut from the city’s contribution to the agency’s budget, which includes state, city, and federal funding. In total, that suggests the Education Department could be expected to cut over $800 million. Officials did not confirm an exact dollar amount figure the agency has been asked to cut.
“We’re only getting pieces of information,” said Ana Champeny, the vice president for research at the Citizens Budget Commission, a watchdog group. “They chose to release a very small subset of reductions that they say they’ve vetted so far.”
Rumors are flying, what is on the chopping block?
One of the rumors, and I emphasize rumors, is the Department is going to defund the Affinity District partner organizations. A terrible idea! Maybe defunding Tweed would be a better idea.
The NYC Affinity District is a collaboration between the NYC Department of Education and six non-profit organizations supporting roughly 160 high schools through specialized, decentralized supervision and support networks. It focuses on improving school systems through partnerships, data-driven coaching, and performance-based assessments, serving diverse student populations.
The Affinity District is a district within the larger school system, an extremely successful creation. The six not-for-profit organizations function like Charter Management Organizations, except, they are not, the schools operate under the UFT contract, although many of the schools utilize the school-based options section of the contract or participate in the PROSE, a UFT program to allow schools wide latitude in school organization as well as instructional modalities, with excellent academic results.
Norm Fruchter, an academic as well as former school board member tracks the origins of the Affinity District, read the blog posts below,
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/new-york-citys-affinity-district-part-1-what-it
https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/news/new-york-citys-affinity-district-part-2-origins
The keys are leadership. collaboration and instruction.
Leadership who understands the best educational decisions are made by the folks closest to their students: teachers and school leaders, and holds them accountable, referred to as “ownership of practice.”
Collaboration, a school staff that shares, that interacts, teamwork, the evidence is overwhelming, collaborative staffs are far more effective in all the measurements of success.
Instruction, improving instructional skills, not by lesson observations, by peer observations, by school leaders who are master teachers,
David Didau, writes an enlightened substack tells us,
…people are more inclined to respond positively when they have first been shown trust, generosity or concession.
Unsurprisingly, schools are not exempt from this. Leaders ask teachers to do difficult things in public: to be observed, to hear criticism, to abandon familiar habits, to risk looking less than competent in front of colleagues. When all of that runs in one direction, trust is stretched, sometimes to breaking point. Observation begins to feel less like professional learning and more like a circus in which fiery hoops must be jumped through. But when leaders are willing to teach, to be watched, and to shoulder some of the same risk, the terms of the relationship change. Reciprocity does not remove hierarchy but it does make it bearable.
That, I think, is where many schools go wrong with lesson observation. They assume that because feedback is offered, improvement will follow. But people are much more likely to invest in change when they can see that the obligation is mutual. If leaders want teachers to be vulnerable, they should go first.
For some years now I’ve been of the opinion that while lesson observations can be useful learning opportunities, the person doing the observing tends to learn far more than the person being observed. This is a bit of a problem because, in the main, the people who observe the most teach the least. Many schools therefore end up with a group of staff who know an incredible amount about teaching but don’t do much of it themselves.
Consequently, I usually advise school leaders to use some of their non-contact time to free up colleagues to observe more. There are practical reasons as well as principled reasons for this. The evidence on professional development suggests that what changes practice is not generic comment but sustained, practice-based work in which teachers see techniques modelled, rehearse them, receive feedback, and then revisit them in context. Merely watching a lesson and offering post hoc comments may produce insight for the observer, but by itself it lacks several of the features most consistently associated with improvement. Indeed, a 2021 EEF trial of structured teacher observation found no overall improvement in student outcomes, and no evidence that schools doing more observations got better results. By contrast, programmes which combine collaborative professional learning with repeated practice and peer support have shown more promise, especially when observation is only one part of a longer cycle of trying, refining and embedding new habits.. As a senior leader, then, offering to cover a main scale teacher’s class on Monday morning is more likely to lead to meaningful professional development than observing that teacher teach, because it gives teachers access to the thing they most often lack: time to watch, think, compare, and return to their own classroom with a clearer model of what to do next.
The Affinity District partner organizations and schools, for the most part, are mirroring the core of what works in schools, to defund the Affinity District schools, would, to be precise, criminal.
We should expand clusters of schools, highly collaborative, highly collaborative among teachers and among schools: ownership of practice.
Doing the same thing over and over again, that is not working is called: insanity
Ed in the Apple: Blogging on the Intersection of Education and Politics Title 