New York State Executive Chamber | Governor Eliot Spitzer
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A Contract for Excellence
State Education Building
Albany, NY
January 26, 2007
[As prepared for delivery]
Chancellor Bennett, Members of the Regents of the University of the State of New York, Commissioner Mills, friends – I cannot think of a better place to discuss the important topic of education reform than in this great building and its historic hall. And I cannot imagine a more critical time to address this issue than now, at a moment when New York spends more on education per capita than all but one state in America, yet offers our children an education that is nowhere near the top.
That is why we are poised to begin implementing what may be the greatest reform agenda directly tied to the largest infusion of resources in our state’s history. Because for New York to become the economic engine it once was, to create jobs, opportunity and prosperity, we must change the way we educate our children.
The goal of our education system must be to produce responsible citizens who have the tools to participate productively and meaningfully in the world around them – to be the leaders of tomorrow in all areas of culture, science, business, service and government.
My vision for education reform is built on a single premise: to be effective, new funding must be tied to a comprehensive agenda of reform and accountability.
That is what I want to discuss with you today.
The dynamic in education is about to change dramatically. With the reforms and accountability we will propose in our upcoming Executive Budget, and the resources we will commit to fully fund our schools over the next four years, there will be no more excuses for failure. The debate will no longer be about money, but about performance; the goal will no longer be adequacy but excellence; and the timetable will no longer be tomorrow but today. And that is as it should be.
Performance as a Function of Accountability
Improving our children’s performance must be our goal. And the way to do it is to inject greater accountability into the system – financial accountability, programmatic accountability, and performance accountability.
We need financial accountability because we must make sure we know where our tax dollars are going and what our children are getting in return. We need programmatic accountability because we must concentrate our resources on what we know works to improve educational performance. And most of all, we need performance accountability, because unless we have meaningful consequences for good and bad performance, we will never be able to change the status quo that is failing too many of our children.
These principles of accountability will be expressed in my upcoming budget in the form of an agreement that each district receiving significant new funding must enter into with the State – what I call a Contract for Excellence. Every district receiving an increase in funding of at least $15 million or 10 percent more than in the previous year through our new foundation formula will enter into a contract that will govern how those new funds are spent.
Let me describe how this Contract will work to implement the structure of accountability essential to real reform.
Financial Accountability
First, financial accountability.
Accountability begins with knowing where our tax dollars going and what our children are getting in return. New York State already spends more on education than any state in the nation but one, and yet, at both the state and local levels, too often we can’t explain how that money is allocated, how it is spent, or what we get in return. The main culprit are Byzantine and politically-driven school aid formulas that are annually manipulated to produce predetermined results.
As a first step, our upcoming budget will replace this flawed system with a straightforward and transparent mechanism – what experts call a “foundation formula,” much like what our Regents have been advocating for years. This formula will distribute educational funding based on the needs of our children, not the needs of our politicians. We don’t need 65 different formulas to allocate money, each one more complicated than the next, artificially adjusted every year so our educational dollars end up allocated according to predetermined shares for various parts of the State rather than according to the educational needs of our children.
And second, what money we do spend must be more tightly tied to educational outcomes – especially as we plan major new investments in our schools. Those districts receiving significant increases in funding under our Investment Plan must be able to show how that money is allocated, school by school, and show how they are using their money to produce the outcomes we expect. Then for once we’ll know what’s working and what’s not, so we can make our policies smarter every year.
Just about every education reform expert agrees that a more efficient, transparent and reform-minded school aid formula will get the best education for our buck. We just need the political will to make it happen.
Programmatic Accountability
Second, programmatic accountability.
Knowing what works for every child, or every school, is not easy, and no one should pretend there is a simple answer. But a number of specific initiatives have been shown to be effective and our new investments in education should be limited to these programs that research has shown really work.
For example, the impact of smaller class sizes is clear to every parent and teacher, and we know that, especially in the earlier grades, fewer children in a room can make a difference. In schools where classes have grown to unmanageable proportions, where teachers have lost the ability to keep contact with children, smaller classes even in later years may also be warranted. Class size reductions should be an element of the reform program that every district should consider.
More time in the classroom – whether in the form of longer school days, a longer school year, after-school programs, or changes in the structure of the day – can also make a difference. When used wisely and in tandem with other reforms, we have seen it work in both regular public schools and some of our best charter schools.
And we all know that nothing is more important than improving the quality of teaching in our schools.
At the state level, we should encourage new models for teacher preparation, including expanding our alternative certification programs. We should measure the effectiveness of our teacher education programs as we do the performance of every other aspect of our educational system. And we must ensure that tenure comes to be recognized as something we as a society honor and respect, and that means it should be granted the way other professional decisions are made – based on the review of the supervisor, an evaluation by professional colleagues, and an examination of data as well as qualitative information about how a teacher’s students perform over multiple years.
At the district level, new State funds will be available to improve teacher quality in a number of ways. These include: supporting research-based training and development programs; increasing compensation for qualified teachers moving to hard-to-staff schools or hard-to-staff subjects such as math and science or special education. It could also include supporting other teachers in a new “Master Teacher” role, and rewarding the whole faculty in schools that show real performance improvements.
No single investment works for every school district, and the state should not be in the practice of dictating to every district how to run their schools. So drawing on the best minds of practitioners and researchers from across the country, the State will establish a menu of approved strategies and initiatives that have been demonstrated to improve learning outcomes based on hard data and professional research. Under these new Contracts for Excellence, districts will choose interventions from among these approved measures to reflect the particular needs of each community – thus ensuring that the state’s investment will not just be wasted on programs that fail but instead ensuring that it makes a difference in improving educational performance.
Performance Accountability
Third, performance accountability.
Money can no longer be an excuse for failing our children anywhere in the state. Now, if children fail, adults must be held accountable. And accountability means consequences, both good and bad, for the performance of schools and school districts. The Federal No Child Left Behind Act sadly demonstrated that accountability without resources is a false promise. But we also know that resources without accountability are a recipe for waste.
Again, this is where the Contracts for Excellence come in. The agreements with districts will demand a serious reform plan that specifies the uses of any new funds, how current programs will be changed, and – very importantly – the improvement in educational performance the districts will achieve as a result. Such a plan will need to be developed in consultation with all the stakeholders that are involved in education in every district, including parents, teachers and administrators.
It will be up to each district to establish real measures of improved performance. That means telling parents, as well as the State, how many more children will read and do math at grade level, how many more students will graduate from high school with Regents diplomas, and how many of them will go on to college in each of the years of the Contract. Without these goals, it will be impossible to measure success. These reform plans should sunset every three or four years, requiring zero-based re-assessment to see if districts are making the progress they promised. And parents should have the right to press their districts to be true to the commitments they make.
Schools and school districts that are meeting their targets should see positive consequences, the kind that matter to professionals, including school-based performance incentives and statewide recognition.
School and district leaders who show real achievement should be recognized as “Distinguished Educators” and asked to assist other struggling districts. Districts that make meaningful, if incomplete, progress deserve a chance to demonstrate that they will
continue to improve. And the best performing schools and districts across the State should be held up for us all to learn from.
The harder question is what to do when districts that have received substantial new funding continually fail their students. Under our proposal, there will be real consequences for districts that do not demonstrate real progress. Failing districts should first be supported by the cadre of “distinguished educators” working to help improve their performance. If after this intervention and substantial new State investment, some districts are still failing their students, will demand an overhaul in their leadership. That means new management. We will seek to have every district in the state sign contracts with their superintendents that will require dismissal after substantial failure over multiple years. And for school boards that fail their communities year after year, we will seek their removal by the Commissioner of Education.
Accountability should run through the system from top to bottom. We should make sure districts hold principals and other school leaders accountable for their actions with individual school leadership report cards. From now on, our children and schools should not be the only ones receiving report cards. We must insist on annual “School Leadership Report Cards” that track the performance of principals and superintendents. For the first time, we will be able to rigorously compare the performance of principals and superintendents across the state.
And we should be ready to close more schools that fail – perhaps as many as five percent of all the schools in the state if we have to – through a tougher and more comprehensive program for schools under registration review.
Taken together, these new measures will send the message to all that we take accountability seriously.
Holding the State Accountable: Enacting Comprehensive Education Reform
This focus on accountability does not end with school districts. The State should be held accountable for providing the right tools that our districts need to succeed. Our government needs to engage actively in supporting districts using every tool of reform – research, standards, testing, accountability, choice, finance – and at every level of our educational system.
One of the core features of our new Four Year Investment Plan will be to establish universal access to quality pre-kindergarten education – something that has been a priority of Speaker Silver for many years. We know that effective pre-school education can help make all children ready to learn the day they start school, and, more importantly, can help close the enormous gap facing children in poverty. We know that Pre-K education that is aligned with the K-12 curriculum, taught by skilled teachers, and offered in safe environments, can make a real difference. That’s why our upcoming budget will ensure that high quality Pre-K programs are made available to every child who needs it within the next four years.
For the kindergarten through 12th grade years, the most important role for the State is to maintain – and over time increase – standards for every grade and for graduation, building on the nationally-recognized progress that you, our Regents, have forged in our state. We must make sure having a high school diploma in New York means a student is ready for college and for the workplace.
One way we will do this is to ask the Board of Regents and the State Education Department to implement, with resources from my upcoming budget, a state-of-the art value-added assessment system that tracks the individual performance of every student in our schools. For the first time, parents and teachers will be able to understand an individual student’s progress in learning from one year to the next.
When it comes to many of our children with special needs, we must also do more. The State must help districts attract the special education teachers they need by producing more such teachers through our schools of education. At the same time, in those districts where referral rates – especially for young boys of color and those in poverty – are running way above the norm, the State must intervene with districts by supplying specialized teams to ensure that referrals are in the best interest of children and not serving some other purpose.
Charter schools also have an important role to play in achieving educational excellence. That is why, in my upcoming budget, I will propose to raise the charter school cap from 100 to 250. Charter schools help demonstrate educational innovations that work, many of which can be adapted to other parts of the public school system. Charter schools make other public schools compete, which is why many strong school administrators welcome their presence. And charter schools must be held accountable, which is why they will be required to submit their own version of a Contract for Excellence every five years to keep their charter in effect.
But if charter schools are going to be sustainable and expand beyond a tiny percentage of schools in the state, we need to fix a number of fundamental problems: First, we must fix the funding formula for charter schools by providing transition aid to districts – such as Buffalo and Albany – with a high percentage of their students enrolled in charter schools. Second, we must ensure that there is adequate notice in a school district before a charter school is opened, so that budgeting decisions can take into account the opening of a charter school. Subject to implementing these key reforms, I will strongly push for raising the current cap on charter schools.
Many private and parochial schools do an excellent job of educating many of our kids and they deserve our thanks and support. Our first priority must be funding public schools, but to the extent the law and our fiscal resources allow, we should support parents who choose to send their kids to private and parochial schools. We also need to ensure that all children in our state – whether in public or non-public schools – receive the basic services to which they are entitled, including the books, transportation, and specialized support they need to learn.
Finally, the State should be held accountable for making sure that the right kinds of resources go to districts that face different challenges, whether it be under-funded schools or overtaxed communities. That means more educational investment better targeted at the children who need it, but it also means focused tax relief for taxpayers struggling to support the schools in their communities. We cannot have real educational reform without addressing the inequitable and burdensome property tax system, and we should not provide property tax relief without ensuring our children have the resources they need to learn. These issues are two sides of the same coin, which is why our new educational investment must be paired and enacted with our new $6 billion property tax relief plan.
And just as communities support their schools through property taxes, schools should support their communities through increased community service so our children’s hands-on learning can benefit the community around them, as well as help them achieve academic success through teaching leadership, problem-solving and critical-thinking skills.
Our Four Year Education Investment Plan and the Contract for Excellence are ambitious plans, involving record levels of investment, different layers of government and countless agencies and actors. This is not an agenda the Governor, or the Regents or the Education Commissioner can implement alone. Our entire government must work together to make it a success.
As a start, my upcoming budget will include the first significant increase in state funds for the Department of Education in more than a decade, so that it will have the resources to meet the challenge ahead.
I will also appoint a Children’s Cabinet, a unique body in the history of this State, which combines Regents, heads of those state agencies which affect the lives of our children, and the Commissioner of Education – all focusing on how our entire state government can be engaged in this great cause.
Finally, my commitment to this reform agenda reflects more than my belief in the importance of education. It reflects my belief that education policy should be driven by those with the wisdom of practical experience and proven results. That’s why today I am announcing the appointment of my Deputy Secretary for Education, who will be charged with implementing this agenda. And I am honored to say that one of the leading educators in the State and in the nation has agreed to join in this effort. A former teacher, principal, a nationally acclaimed Superintendent of the Year, Manny Rivera of the Rochester School District will bring a lifetime of commitment to children and reform to my office and to the implementation of this program – and I thank him for making the considerable sacrifice to join my team.
We have great choice before us – a choice that will define this generation and many more to come. We can settle for more of the same but at a higher price, or we can set out to change the course of history. We can choose a past of high property taxes, poor performance, and morally indefensible inequality - or a future of knowledge, opportunity and hope. I have already made my choice. Together I know we will redefine the future of New York.
Thank you.