New York City's on-time high school graduation rate reached 59 percent for the class of 2009, and according to the New York Times, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the newslast week he said it should get all New Yorkers smiling.
It's certainly a better statistic than the 46.5 percent on-time graduation rate in 2005. The latest figures show that groups with traditionally low rates have also improved: Students with disabilities have gone from a 17.1 percent rate in 2005 to 24.7 percent, and English language learners have increased from 26.5 percent to 39.7 percent.
But can the rates continue to go up -- or even stay where they are now? Graduation requirements are in the process of getting tougher, and this could reverse the trend toward higher graduation rates, particularly for English language learners, called ELLs by the Department of Education.
Many educators, including Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, welcome the change. Noting the high percentage of New York high school graduates who need remedial classes in college, they say more-demanding graduation standards should make students better prepared for further education. But New York State United Teachers, the union for teachers throughout the state, worries that tougher requirements will increase dropout rates.
Both sides make a valid point.
For many years, New York City’s public high schools awarded two basic kinds of diplomas. Students with scores of at least 65 percent on five Regents exams have received a Regents diploma; those who score at least 55 percent on all five tests have received a local diploma.
The state Board of Regents is now phasing out the local diploma on the grounds that it is insufficiently rigorous. In the class of 2009, students needed scores of 65 or higher on at least two of five Regents exams; by June 2012 they will need scores of at least 65 on all five tests.
The stricter requirements may have a particularly hard impact on English language learners, as they must take the same English Language Arts Exam that native speakers do. English language learners are allowed to take their other Regents exams in their native language, so reaching the score of 65 on the other four exams may not be such an onerous task.
I teach English as a Second Language at Bronx Community College, and many of my students are graduates of the New York City public schools. Often these students lack basic reading and writing skills in English even when they have been in New York schools since ninth grade. This makes me sympathetic to those who want higher standards. At the same time, I wonder how the public high schools will keep older immigrant students in school and get them through the Regents exams.
This concern is shared by the New York Coalition for Educational Justice, which last year issued a report on the implications of the new graduation requirements, titled Looming Crisis or Historic Opportunity? The report claims, "Unless the New York City Department of Education seizes this moment of opportunity to strengthen teaching and learning … additional thousands of the school system's high school students will be threatened with the failure to graduate."
The report also notes that in the class of 2007, only 11 percent of all English language earners graduated on time with a Regents diploma. (The numbers just released for the class of 2009 do not show how many English language learners graduated with Regents diplomas.)
One member of the class of 2007 was Wilton Guerrero, an English language learner who received a local diploma after just eight months in the United States. His story illustrates the local diploma's inadequacies. Yet it also raises serious questions about how schools will help immigrant students with limited English meet the new graduation requirements.
In November 2006, Wilton enrolled at John F. Kennedy High School in the Bronx. He was 18 years old, had just immigrated from the Dominican Republic and knew almost no English. Although high school credits transferred from his native country qualified him for 12th grade, he would still need to pass five Regents exams by June 2007 if he was to graduate at the end of the school year. And while he could take four of the exams in Spanish, he would have to take the English Language Arts Exam designed for native English speakers.
The math Regents was no problem. Wilton passed the Spanish version of the test shortly after he enrolled in Kennedy. As a result, school administrators told him he wouldn't need any math instruction. This freed up time for the many other classes he needed.
Wilton threw himself into an academic whirlwind so he could get his diploma with his 12th grade class. He took 14 classes a day, beginning at 8:20 a.m. and finishing at 7:30 p.m. The evening classes were with students in a special program for older students; the day classes were at his high school.
In June 2007, Wilton fulfilled his goal. He earned all the credits he needed and passed all five Regents exams, including English Language Arts. His English Regents score, however, was just 56 percent, one point over the minimum needed to pass.
When he received his diploma, Wilton could conduct basic conversations and transactions in English. But his English was far from fluent. He could not write an essay without numerous grammatical errors or read college-level texts. And since he had never studied math in English, he didn't know any English math vocabulary.
Wilton worked extraordinarily hard during his short time at Kennedy. But should he have graduated when he did? Under the tougher standards that will be fully in place by 2012, Wilton's 56 on the English Regents would have prevented him from graduating.
Now a student at CUNY's Bronx Community College, Wilton believes he should have stayed in high school until his English improved. He points out that in fall 2007, he failed all three CUNY basic skills tests in reading, writing and math.
"I knew how to do most of the math but I didn't understand the words in the problems," he remembers. "Also it had been more than a year since I’d taken math, so some things I forgot. On the reading test, I knew some of the words but not enough to understand the passages. On the writing, I was completely lost about what I was supposed to do."
After getting his test results, Wilton enrolled in the CUNY Language Immersion Program, an intensive non-credit English program that provides college-bound immigrant students with 25 hours of instruction per week. At the same time, he took a Saturday class to prepare for the CUNY math test. One year later he had passed the CUNY tests and was ready for credit-bearing classes at Bronx Community.
If the local diploma had not been an option, Wilton would have been able to stay in high school longer. As a result, his reading and writing skills might have improved to the point where he wouldn't have needed to pay for non-credit classes to prepare for college. In fact Wilton's brother Pablo, who is a year younger, did stay in high school one year longer than Wilton, and was able to go straight from Kennedy into credit-bearing classes at City College.
For the Department of Education's purposes, though, it was probably better that Wilton graduated when he did. In reporting graduation rates, the city emphasizes the percent of students who graduate on time and makes no allowances for 12th graders who begin the school year with no English.
Schools with low on-time graduation rates face penalties. Last month the Department of Education finalized plans to shutter 19 schools, mostly high schools where fewer than half the students graduate on time with any type of diploma.
These closures may make other schools reluctant to admit older immigrant students, who are unlikely to qualify for Regents diplomas fast enough to land in the "on-time" graduate category. While schools cannot legally turn away students who are under 21, school administrators can encourage them to enroll in high school equivalency GED programs instead. School administrators could feel pressured to do this if they know that low on-time graduation rates will target their schools for elimination. GED programs are often less academically rigorous than regular high schools.
A high school diploma does not signify much if it's given to students who lack basic skills. But educational administrators won't improve the situation for future Wiltons merely by mandating higher Regents scores. They need to re-assess their whole approach to older immigrant students, particularly those with college aspirations.
Wilton says his English classes at Kennedy focused mostly on basic communication, not on developing the reading and writing skills he would need in college. According to David Loo, who teaches English as a Second Language at Manhattan Comprehensive Night and Day High School, the education department "has failed to provide adequate training and curriculum for ESL teachers preparing students for the English Regents." At his public school, Loo says, the assistant principal for English and ESL found funds to pay him and a colleague to design a new curriculum to prepare English language learners for the tougher graduation requirements.
This type of effort needs to take place on a citywide basis. Math skills need attention as well. English language learners should continue taking math classes even if they pass the math Regents, as unused math skills quickly atrophy. And even English language learners with strong math skills need to be taught English math vocabulary.
The Department of Education should also recognize that non-English speaking students who arrive in 11th or 12th grade will need more time than native speakers to reach academic proficiency. For this reason, it should redefine what constitutes "on-time" graduation for these students. Interestingly, State Education Commissioner David Steiner seems to agree. When the new graduation figures came out, he told the Times, "We need to encourage kids to stay in school a fifth year if they need it."
The end of the local diploma could help immigrant students reach higher standards. But the jury is still out on whether the new state policies will help or hinder these students once the stricter graduation rules go into effect.
Ellen Balleisen teaches English as a Second Language in the CUNY Language Immersion Program at Bronx Community College,
This article originally had the incorrect day for the Panel on Educational Policy's vote on use of school space. The meeting is Wednesday, Feb. 24.
They stood under the scaffolding outside PS 188, the Island School, separated by a narrow walkway and strongly held viewpoints. One group wore orange shirts and carried matching signs in support of the Department of Education's plan to give Girls Preparatory Charter, an elementary school planning to expand into the middle grades, more room in the building. Facing them were parents, students and teachers from PS 188 and PS 94, the other two schools in the facility. They said giving Girls Prep additional space will squeeze the low-income and local kids at PS 188 as well as PS 94's autistic students.
This rivalry on the Lower East Side represents one skirmish in a fight that has raged across the city -- from Harlem to Cypress Hills -- as the Department of Education attempts to carve out places in its buildings for charters schools.
In some ways, this fight is the classic New York struggle over space. But it goes beyond that.
Years after charter schools established themselves as part of the city's education mix, New York City and state now find themselves in the midst of a bitter fight over the role of the privately run, publicly funded schools. Supporters, including the Bloomberg and Obama administrations, point to the success of charters. They say the schools can provide parents with more choice, particularly in lower income communities where families have had few options. The fight against them, some charter supporters say, has more to do with protecting the teacher's union than with educating children.
Other parents and politicians, along with many teachers, fear that the Bloomberg administration wants to turn the public school system over to private operators who will ignore the neediest children in the system. Rather than setting up privately run alternatives to regular schools, these critics say, the Department of Education should concentrate on improving the schools we already have.
The first charter school opened in Minnesota in 1992. But with unions leery of the proposal (even though United Federation of Teachers President Albert Shanker was an early supporter), New York did not allow charter schools until 1998, when former Gov. George Pataki, a strong proponent, tied the issue to a pay raise for the legislature.
As of September, there were 99 charter schools in New York City. They serve less than 5 percent of public school students, more than 32,000 children, mostly in the elementary grades. Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor Joel Klein envision doubling the number of charters in the city to 200 schools accommodating for 10 percent of city students --more than 100,000 kids.
Charters must be approved by the State University of New York, the state Department of Regents or the city Department of Education and must comply with a number of rules -- for example, they have to select students by lottery not, say, by competitive exam. While charters set their own curriculum, their students do take state tests. The schools also make their own decisions about hiring and firing and do not have to use Department of Education contractors. Although they can have unions, most do not.
While charters receive a per pupil allocation from the government -- based on per pupil costs in regular public schools -- many spend far more than that thanks to the fruit of outside fundraising. For example, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, according to BusinessWeek, donated $18 million to the Knowledge is Power Program, which operates six schools in New York. This along with freedom from many Department of Education requirements help schools offer smaller class sizes and longer schools days.
Since the state law does not provide charters with money to build facilities, Klein and Bloomberg have opened space in school buildings to them. By one count, about two thirds of the city's charter schools are located in Department of Education buildings.
At its meeting on Wednesday, Feb. 24, the Panel for Educational Policy is set to approve about a dozen space allocations involving charter schools. These include placing Lefferts Gardens Charter School in PS 92 in Brooklyn, putting a Bronx outpost of former Councilmember Eva Moskowitz's Harlem Success Academy in PS 146 and having IS 302 in East New York share its space with a new Achievement First charter.
Despite crowding in some city schools, buildings overall are about 80 percent full, the Department of Education says. This means that many -- including PS 188 in the Lower East Side -- have available classrooms, according to the department. But what city officials at Tweed see as underutilized areas, parents and teachers see precious space for small group work, science experiments, rehearsals or computer labs. Their schools, they say, will lose these facilities if they have to share space with another school.
Lenore Brown, whose grown son attended IS 302, which is set to share space with a new elementary charter next year, said the school had been overcrowded, until the education department moved another school out. The staff at 302 now uses the extra space for small group instruction.
In addition Brown said, "Our school is developing a performing and acting program." That, she said has contributed to an overall improvement, so that "children in the neighborhood are looking forward to going to IS 302 because of the progress."
Discussing the department's attitude, Brown said, "To me, it seems whatever works, they try to break."
The charter parents see their children's fortunes at stake as well. Hilda Salazar, whose daughter attends Girls Prep, had older children in public and parochial schools and sees charter schools -- particularly Girls Prep -- as a far better alternative.
"It's not only academics" she said. "It's values. It's morals. It's things you need for life."
Salazar wants her daughter to be able to attend a Girls Prep Middle School and is irate over criticism of the school's expansion. "The UFT is behind it all,'' she said.
Suspicions run high. Jacqueline Ancess, the principal at Manhattan East Side School for Arts and Academies, wrote to parents alerting them that the school is threatened by backroom maneuvering that could evict the arts school to make way for a charter.
"In a secret deal between Moskowitz and the DOE … the stage has been set to evict the school from the home it has been in for over 15 years. … This is only one instance of an attack on a public school system by the very people who should be protecting it," Ancess wrote.
The battle over the allocation of space is echoed in the fight over school closings. Last month, the Department of Education, despite pleas from parents, student and teachers, decided to phase out19 schools. Many opponents say the closings are part of a general attempt by the Department of Education to squeeze out the city's neediest and most at risk students and pave the way for more charters.
"Parents are legitimately angry about schools being closed," said James Merriman, chief executive officer of the New York Charter School Center, but the explanation being put forward by opponents, he said, "is a narrative that the UFT is interested in."
"The city is making some necessary changes and ruffling a lot of feathers," said Steven Evangelista, co-director for operations at the Harlem Link Charter School.
Teachers union President Michael Mulgrew has said the union is not necessarily against charters. But at a rally in Harlem last month, he said creating charters and small schools "is not supposed to be about putting one school against the other, one parent against the other." (The UFT's press office did not return calls for this story.)
Space is just one issue. If the city creates more charters, it needs a change from Albany. Current state law allows a maximum of 200 charter schools. Prompted by the federal government's Race to the Top Fund, which rewards school systems that encourage charters, Gov. David Paterson earlier this year sought to raise, if not eliminate, the cap.
The legislature responded by setting a number of conditions, including a requirement that the community approve the placement of a charter in an existing school building. Bloomberg, for one, viewed the Senate proposal as "poison pill." In the end, neither Paterson's proposal nor the legislature's alternative passed, and the charter cap remains stuck at 200.
"This bill, masquerading as a charter cap lift, instead would have shackled chartering beyond recognition," Peter Murphy of the New York Charter Schools Associationhas said. "The teachers union narrowly missed terminating charters, practically speaking."
Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver tied the rejection of Paterson's proposal directly to the fight over space. "People who were supporters of charters previously have become anti-charter as a result of their experiences," he told the Times.
Having lost their bid to raise the cap, charter school supporters have now geared up to fight what they see as a disproportionate cut in state education aid.
Merriman of the New York Charter School Center, which helps charters get started, said the opposition to charters has arisen precisely because the movement has strengthened its position.
For years he said, unions and others "thought we would remain on the margins." Now, he said, New York "has a charter movement that works and is a model and the envy of other people." If charters continue to expand, Merriman said, many students would attend schools where the teachers and staff do not belong to a union. "That political threat is what's at work here. Unions looked and said, 'That's a prospect we don’t like,'" Merriman said.
But State Sen. Bill Perkins, who has opposed the cap, sees it differently. Charters, he said at a recent panel, "have not been accountable in terms of the success they are achieving and in delivering services to all children."
While only a small percentage of city kids go to charter schools, they play a larger role in some communities, notably Harlem. A recent count of the 29 Manhattan charter schools, placed 24 north of 96th Street. The concentration of charters in black and Latino areas of the city, Perkins has said, creates a system that is "separate and unequal."
Many parents in Harlem and other poor communities counter that it is the conventional public schools that have created a separate and unequal system. "Unfortunately," charter school parent Daniel Clark Sr. said at the panel, "where there are parents of color and kids of color, the schools are failing, district schools."
Merriman agrees. Charters, he said, "are working and parents want them."
Statistics prove charter schools do better, say the Department of Education and charter school backers. A study by Caroline Hoxby, a Stanford University economist, found New York students who went to charters from kindergarten through eighth grade did almost as well on the eighth grade math test as their counterparts in suburbia, nearly eliminating the so-called achievement gap.
Another recent Stanford study, this one by Margaret Raymond, found that over a three-year period city charter school students did four points better on standardized reading tests than similar kids who did not attend charters and 15 points better on the math test.
In an article in the Los Angeles Times, Raymond said not all charter schools in the country show these kinds of results. But, she continued, "charter schools as a whole [were] better in New York than in any other city we have studied." She credited this to the strong support for charters, the organization that can guide new schools and "high quality oversight."
Diane Ravitch, an education historian frequently critical of the Bloomberg administration has cited another reason: Many charters in New York "have wealthy sponsors who donate millions of dollars to their schools. This helps them to have smaller classes and more resources than the local public schools."
While the numbers look good on the surface, critics, notably the United Federation of Teachers, have taken aim at these claims. They say charters do not represent a true cross section of New York students, neglecting, in particular, children who do not speak English, are homeless or require special education. The union's recent study, Separate and Unequal, found that while 14.2 percent of city students are English language learners, only 3.8 percent of charter students are.
Regardless of the results, the very idea of private organizations and companies, however well intentioned, makes some people uneasy.
"Stop the mayor, the public school slayer," opponents of school closings chanted at a rally outside Bloomberg's East Side home last month.
Take the statement of Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep, a charter in Harlem, as he argued for raising the charter cap. "What the legislature hasn’t seemed to understand," he said to the Times, "is that the best charter operators in the country are mobile, and when they do harmful things to charters, the best operators move to more supportive environments."
Traditional public schools have to serve all kids, charter critics say, while charters do not. At the meeting on school closings last month, a representative of State Sen. John Sampson warned, "Charter schools are coming in and the people that go to these [closing schools] cannot enter the charter schools for whatever reason."
Another person declared, "Bloomberg is in a race to put as many charter schools as possible in our schools because it’s all about the money."
Critics point to the several hundred thousand dollar a year salaries paid to some charter executives, such as Moskowitz and Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children's Zone. And they see opportunities for cronyism and favoritism.
Canada of the Children's Zone has had close ties to the mayor. On one hand, he supported the overturning of term limits and the continuation of mayoral control -- and lobbied hard for both. Canada meanwhile has reaped hundreds of thousands in city contracts as well as in personal contributions from the mayor.
Earlier this month the Daily News reported that Canada's Harlem Promise Academy is one of three politically connected charters that will get city capital funding.
Another school slated to receive funding -- PAVE Academy in Brooklyn -- is run by the son of a man who has given millions to Bloomberg's educational charities.
Then there is the case of the New York City Charter High School for Architecture, Engineering and Construction Industries. The city plans to put the school in what has been Alfred E. Smith High School in the Bronx, closing down all but one its vocational programs. The department cites Smith's low graduation rate and mediocre performance. But according to reports in both the Times and the Daily News, the charter has many problems of its own. Its founder and a board member have been charged with embezzlement (they denied it but resigned from their charter posts). Of the 15 teachers at the charter in September, only five remain, and the charter will take fewer students in special education and from low-income families than Smith has.
Reviewing the situation at the school, Juan Gonzalez wrote, " One day soon, our city will wake up to discover that Bloomberg's mad rush to create hundreds of independent charter schools has unleashed bigger financial scandals than in the bad old days of community school boards."
Evangelista, though, said charters are subject to intense scrutiny. "The governing system for charter schools makes them more publicly accountable than the system that existed before mayoral control," he said.
At Harlem Link Charter School on West 112th Street, these controversies seem far away. In one class students work on their own in small groups. In another students devise a Venn diagram to chart the similarities and differences between strawberries and oranges. One difference most agree on: You can eat all of a strawberry, but few people eat orange peels.
Siri Cortes, a fifth grader who has been at Harlem Link since kindergarten considers that. "You can't eat the leaves," she said.
In the hallway, Siri expresses enthusiasm for a lot of what goes on in school and gets excited when Evangelista tells her about a Madeleine L'Engle book featuring a character named Siri.
Asked whether she likes Harlem Link, Siri pauses, "I don’t know how I could dislike it when it's the only school I've ever been to," she said.
A plan to give the City University of New York and the State University more autonomy is being praised by the chancellors of those schools. But many in the legislature, as well as advocates, worry the proposal represents a step toward privatization of the two systems and could put their programs beyond the reach of many of the state's less affluent residents.
Gov. David Paterson's Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, would allow SUNY and CUNY more control over how much they charge for tuition, how they set prices for different programs and how they do business in general. Currently the legislature sets tuition and generally reserves tuition hikes for times when the state is in financial trouble -- times like now.
"We have a crazy system in New York in how we finance higher education" said State Budget Director Robert Megna during a recent budget presentation, adding that the system is "at the heart of why they [SUNY and CUNY] haven't been able to accomplish things they wanted to."
At state budget hearings on higher education Wednesday, Senate Finance Committee Chair Carl Kruger and Assemblyman Joel Miller used the term "privatization" to describe the proposal. Supporters of the governor's initiative prefer to call it "empowerment."
The legislation would allow the boards of trustees for SUNY and CUNY to implement a tuition policy that would enable them to raise tuition by an amount equal to two and a half times the five-year average of the Higher Education Price Index. That is a nationally recognized inflation index that tracks what drives the price of higher education.
Under the governor's plan, SUNY and CUNY would collect tuition and disburse it to individual universities freely, rather than funneling it back into the state's general fund. Trustees would also be allowed to charge differential tuition rates for different academic programs and campuses. Currently all four-year CUNY campuses charge in-state residents $4,600 a year; SUNY campuses charge $4,970.
Megna said that the plan makes sense but will likely give legislators pause. The plan also will give the universities more flexibility in purchasing and in use of land. Megna relayed a story about two administrators, one from Cornell and one from SUNY, who needed the same device. Cornell got it in six weeks; thanks to the state's control of SUNY's contracts and purchasing it took SUNY six months to acquire the same tool.
"It's a fundamental rethinking of how we should have a stable relationship with SUNY and CUNY," said Megna.
Opponents of the measure like Miller say that Paterson wants to give state colleges the ability to raise tuition themselves, rather than having the legislature set tuition as it currently does, because the state is in financial crisis and can no longer properly fund public higher education.
They say Paterson's measure will lead to steep tuition increases that will hurt low-income families. Miller and other critics worry that differential tuition will lead to lower-income college students being priced out of some SUNY and CUNY campuses and programs.
SUNY Chancellor Nancy Zimcher said that SUNY is committed to making all programs affordable and accessible and would use tuition increases and differential tuition responsibly. She and other supporters of the measure say most universities around the country vary their tuiton.
CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein testified that he basically supports the governor's legislation. He said it would essentially institute the kind of rational tuition policy he has been advocating for years. "CUNY has long supported differential tuition by program, informed by market competition and price elasticity," Goldstein said in his testimony. He said the new tuition structure will give students a better idea of what their college education will actually cost.
Miller countered that state has been extremely predictable in the way it cuts funding and raises tuition during tough economic times. "It’s a shame. Its wrong," he said. "But it is predictable." Paterson has proposed cutting SUNY funding by $95 million and CUNY funding by $47 million this year.
According to the Professional Staff Congress, a union that represents CUNY staff, the state's funding for full-time equivalent students has dropped precipitously over the last two decades. In 1990, the state provided about $14,000 per full-time equivalent student. Now that figure has dropped to $9,000. And CUNY has seen its enrollment explode during that time: CUNY now has 260,000 degree credit students, with 65,000 more students enrolled than it had in 1999.
Community colleges have seen the greatest spike. Paterson's current budget proposal would reduce aid to community colleges by $285 per full-time equivalent student. That means tuition for a student attending community college will increase.
And to make things more difficult for students with moderate resources, Tuition Assistance Program funding would decrease by $93 million overall. All students would have their aid reduced by $75, while students studying for two-year associate degrees would have their maximum possible tuition assistance grant lowered from $5,000 to $4,000.
Groups representing students such as the New York Public Interest Research Group and unions such as the Professional Staff Conference say that Paterson's empowerment act is designed to let the state off the hook when it comes to properly funding public education while making higher education increasingly unaffordable.
"By allowing CUNY and SUNY to set their own tuition levels, free from legislative oversight and public accountability, and by making zero commitment to match any tuition increases with additional state dollars, the governor's proposal essentially takes the public out of public higher education," testified Barbara Bowen president of Professional Staff Congress.
"While the governor is proposing privatizing education he is also proposing major cuts. They are pulling the rug out from under us," Bowen told the Gotham Gazette.
"Public education ought to be funded publicly," said Fran Clark of NYPIRG. By giving the universities more autonomy, the new system will make it easier for the state to impose cuts." Clark said he finds it hard to believe that legislators will rush to support Paterson's proposal. "I don't know of any legislative body that is in a hurry to cut the purse strings."
Legislators certainly seem to be wary of the act. Senate Higher Education Committee Chair Toby Ann Stavisky said she shares concerns that lower-income students may be priced out of SUNY and CUNY. "I am committed to making sure SUNY and CUNY remain an accessible, affordable, quality education."
Sen. Jose Serrano said that public higher education is heading in the wrong direction in New York. "For a generation, CUNY was free, and it produced great attorneys, great public servants," he said, "It really did pay for itself. We got back what we gave ten-fold."
Now, Serrano said, Paterson is looking to let SUNY and CUNY raise tuition without guaranteeing any increase in education aid, and he thinks that is a recipe for ensuring that residents of his Bronx and Manhattan district will not be able to afford higher education. He said that, in effect, will mean that public higher education in New York has failed.
Not many of Paterson's initiatives are finding much support from legislators but Serrano said his analysis of the Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act will come down to how it will affect the communities he represents. "In the end we will look at the numbers and proposals and ask does this promote stability?"
"Jonas Salk," said Bowen, bringing up the man who discovered the first safe and effective polio vaccine and was a graduate of the City University of New York. "Think about all the good done by that one person!” She added, “This system is meant to train our next generation of public servants."
Bowen and others are concerned that differential tuition could prompt schools to charge more for such intensive programs such as pre-med or engineering, driving low-income students out of them.
Goldstein told legislators that differential tuitions will mostly be used in graduate programs, and any tuition increase would likely be put back directly into the program. Zimpher insisted that SUNY is committed to making sure its programs are accessible to low-income students.
Bowen said she thinks the financial downturn is exactly when the state should better fund its higher education system. She thinks this is the last moment the state should cede any of its involvement.
The union wants the state to restore $121 million in funding to senior colleges and $39 million in funding to community colleges that has been cut over the last two years. And that is something unions, students groups and university heads can agree on -- they want the state to reconsider all of Paterson's proposed cuts.
"It's crazy during this crisis to make public education less accessible," said Bowen. "We want the legislature to fight back against the proposed cuts. We hope the governor's empowerment act isn't enacted. We want the legislature to restore some of what has been lost. We are well aware the state is in financial dire straits, and it may be difficult, but we need to support public education."