Across parts of the country, governments and public labor unions are wrestling with tight fiscal times that may require them to forge a new relationship. In Wisconsin, the governor’s success at stripping public employees of many of their collective bargaining rights has Republicans and fiscal conservatives cheering, and Democrats and unions predicting a backlash in their favor. Here in New York, our budget problems are impossible to solve without an overhaul of the government-union marriage.
For most of 2009, Rochester ranked in the Top 20 in the Brookings Institution’s regular reports on the impact of the recession. Indeed, for 2009, Rochester had the 15th best job report among the nation’s 100 largest metros. New York’s job creation record was the best of the 15 largest states.
By the end of last year, Rochester had slid to #41 and New York State to #11. What happened? Well, not much. In Rochester, at least. Our job performance over the last decade has been quite consistent from year to year: We lost jobs, but never more than 2% in a year. The Great Recession was triggered when the real estate bubble burst, the construction and real estate sectors suddenly cooled and millions found their jobs gone or at risk. Having missed the boom, Rochester also missed the bust and continued the trend of the early part of the century—slow shrinkage as the economy struggled to absorb cuts at Kodak and other large employers. Read more »
Confronted by a Regents study declaring that only 5 percent of Rochester City School District graduates are college-ready, Jean-Claude Brizard declares the findings “terrifying.”
One of Brizard’s best qualities is his persistent willingness to look the facts in the face. Too often our education leadership—the district administration and the Board of Education—has been unwilling to state the obvious. It is a natural reaction: The task is herculean. The need is desperate. The consequences of failure are tragic. Read more »
If you read this column regularly, you’ve heard about my mother’s bad back. The pain can be debilitating. She worries that she’ll be confined to a wheelchair if it gets worse and lose her independence. Mom gets along quite nicely on her own for the moment, however. I was pleased to see that she was still eager to play Scrabble when we visited at Christmas. She lost—but only by two points to my son, a grad student in Physics. I didn’t play, figuring I’d avoid the indignity of being whipped by one or the other.
She’s rejected spine surgery before, but revisited the issue with a different surgeon. She emailed his conclusion that “because I am in such good physical condition at the age of 85, I will probably live until I am 100 – so don’t spend your inheritance yet! Surgery would involve two rods, 14 screws, and a steel plate. I would have about four days of pain and then feel better the rest of my life.” Read more »
Despite the scale of the state’s financial problems, Gov.-elect Andrew Cuomo and the wizards in the Department of Budget could probably find ways to paper over them for a few years and hope an eventual rebound in revenues will eliminate the need to inflict any real pain.
But to be considered truly successful, Cuomo should embrace the challenge of putting the state, local governments and schools on a path toward a long-term stable financial future. Read more »
I was transfixed by the recent riots in France over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62. All the more striking was the participation of high school students in the riots. That, more than anything else, convinced me that France was in trouble.
My suspicions about the French were confirmed after I consulted the OECD PISA scores (that’s the Program for International Student Assessment from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development). In the percentage of students performing at an advanced level in mathematics, France ranked 20th, barely ahead of Estonia and way behind educational powerhouses like, oh, the Czech Republic and Liechtenstein. Clearly, these poor young people can’t do the simple math of retirement. If their parents and grandparents are going to continue to retire at the cushy age of 60, the younger generation’s taxes are going to go through the roof.
Hail, Regents! The most important task of the NYS Board of Regents is the selection of the NYS Education Commissioner. It is hard to imagine that they could have done better than David Steiner (see GothamSchools.org profile) .
Keynote at CGR’s teacher preparation symposium last week, Commissioner Steiner just kept talking sense all morning. From his formal address to each question response, he was ever gracious but direct, balanced and uncompromising.
Picking Steiner was certainly controversial. While a professor at Boston University in 2003, he authored a study of 16 teacher education programs across the nation that criticized them as ideologically driven and lacking rigor, a finding that hardly endeared him to the education elite. A pragmatist, one of the facts that he found disturbing was the lack of emphasis on skill development, noting that only 3 of the schools used video or audio tape to train teachers. As Dean of Hunter College’s School of Education, he put these lessons to work in Hunter’s program. He also teamed up with three successful charter school operators, Teach for America and the NYC Department of Education to form Teacher U, a new approach to teacher training emphasizing teaching as a craft, not an academic discipline. Steiner reinforced that view last week, noting that schools of education are organized more like liberal arts programs than as professional schools. With his charter school partners, Steiner emphasizes that teaching is a skill that can be taught and must be practiced.
I’ve written before about my mother’s back pain. Despite many different attempts by a pain specialist, she’s experienced no relief. Despite more daily meds, her quality of life has taken a turn for the worse. Last month she made a pilgrimage to a respected neurosurgeon at Loyola University Medical Center in Chicago. Pointing to her MRI, he sadly told her that her problem was very serious and that major spinal fusion surgery might help—but that the procedure is ill advised for an 85 year old patient.
Depressed about the pain and the prospect of being confined to a wheelchair, she’s willing to try anything. A presentation at her retirement community offered bioelectric therapy—“in the comfort of your own home at no cost to you—we will bill Medicare and your insurance. Any copayments are our responsibility.” She signed up and was scheduled for an appointment within a week. The good doctor and his friendly team rolled up to her townhouse, set up a table in her living room and proceeded to inject her back with—well, she’s not sure, he’s the doc—and ran an electric device over her spine. They scheduled her for twice-weekly treatments. A few days later the same group sent another doctor with a portable ultrasound and conducted a complete physical exam (he declared her healthy).
New York’s Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, has made government restructuring a centerpiece of his campaign for Governor—a necessary and welcome platform! As his Plan for Action notes, we’d never have designed the current system. Rationalizing local government can improve the quality of public services and save tax payers money.
Along the way, populist sentiment at the local level has fueled grass roots efforts to “reduce layers of government”. Journalists and politicians alike have cited New York State’s numerous special districts as the source of our problem. I read in a newspaper article recently:
“There are 62 counties, 62 cities, 553 villages, 698 school districts and 932 towns. And then the whopper: 6,927 special districts that include local lighting, sewer, fire, water and drainage districts.”
The article goes on to say that these 10,092 districts (outside NYC) “can tax people”. From my vantage point, however, the problem is largely not with the special districts, even though the number of special districts is the most eye-catching. In reality, not all of these 10,092 districts have the independent power to tax people. Municipalities and school districts have the power to levy taxes. Of the 6,927 special districts, approximately 870 are fire districts that also have the power to levy taxes. But most of the remaining 6,057 special districts (60% of all districts) are governed by municipalities.
Nearly three years ago I wrote a piece for the now-defunct New York Sun complaining about delays from New York’s Kennedy International Airport (JFK). In August 2007, nearly a third of scheduled departures were late. The average delay was an hour and many planes waited far longer. But why would a plane leave the gate only to get in a big line? As it happens, at most major U.S. airports the FAA grants permission to take off on a “first come, first served” basis—and “first come” is defined by pushing off from the gate, even if this means queuing up behind 40 or 50 other planes, burning fuel to keep the plane’s cabin temperature tolerable and roll the plane forward a few feet every couple of minutes. Thus the FAA rule guarantees a level of tarmac congestion that can spiral out of control when other factors—like weather—intervene.
Across parts of the country, governments and public labor unions are wrestling with tight fiscal times that may require them to forge a new relationship. In Wisconsin, the governor’s success at stripping public employees of many of their collective bargaining rights has Republicans and fiscal conservatives cheering, and Democrats and unions predicting a backlash in their favor. Here in New York, our budget problems are impossible to solve without an overhaul of the government-union marriage.
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Hail, Regents! The most important task of the NYS Board of Regents is the selection of the NYS Education Commissioner. It is hard to imagine that they could have done better than 
New York’s Attorney General, Andrew Cuomo, has made government restructuring a centerpiece of his campaign for Governor—a necessary and welcome platform! As his Plan for Action notes, we’d never have designed the current system. Rationalizing local government can improve the quality of public services and save tax payers money.