Wall Street Journal. February 22, 2022.
Editorial: A Ruse to Block New York’s New Charter Schools
The teachers union tries to limit who can authorize new charters.
The union war on charter schools never ends, and the latest ruse in New York is to limit who can authorize a charter. A bill from Democratic state Sen. John Liu would give the state Board of Regents veto power over all charter applications—including those approved by the state’s biggest authorizer, the State University of New York.
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The New York State Charter Schools Act of 1998 gave SUNY and the Board of Regents authority to approve charter applications. Some 60% of 358 charter schools across the state have been authorized by SUNY, including most belonging to high-performing Success Academy and KIPP. With trustees appointed by the Governor, SUNY is freer from teachers union influence than the Regents, whose members are appointed by the state Legislature and oversee the state Education Department.
The Board of Regents can oppose charter applications approved by SUNY, but Mr. Liu gripes that a “loophole” allows SUNY to let these charters open anyway. Thank heaven for that. Consider a recent case: SUNY approved two charters for struggling school districts in Long Island, but the Regents sought to block them under pressure from the Education Department and teachers union. Last month SUNY authorized them anyway. Mr. Liu’s bill would give the Regents final say to nix the charters.
“What does SUNY know about primary and secondary education? They have their hands full running their colleges and universities,” Mr. Liu said, according to the New York Post.
The evidence shows otherwise. SUNY reports that 88% of its charters outperform their district’s schools in reading and writing, and 91% in math. Once authorized, charters are held to strict financial and academic standards by the city and state and must apply to renew their authorization every five years.
SUNY says it approves only 38% of new applications. The National Association of Charter School Authorizers calls SUNY “one of the top charter school authorizers in the country,” noting it has “some of the best-developed charter oversight architecture.”
New York City’s cap on the number of charter schools was reached in 2019. The city’s charters have expanded during the pandemic while district schools lose students. The student waiting list for charters is nearly 50,000.
Mayor Eric Adams should call out the Legislature’s ruse to limit the charters that have been so effective in his city. If the Liu legislation—currently making its way through both the Assembly and Senate—crosses Gov. Kathy Hochul’s desk, it is ripe for a veto.
Jamestown Post-Journal. February 22, 2022.
Editorial: More Signatures To Force Public Hearings Is Bad Policy By State
Legislation passed last year allowing citizens to force a public hearing needed no changes.
Citizens were empowered to force a public hearing from agencies, such as the state Education Department and the state Health Department, if they presented a petition with 125 signatures and be submitted by the 30th day after after comments on a policy had stopped being accepted.
Amendments to the bill were absolutely uncalled for by anyone but the powers that be, so sure enough last week the state Legislature approved a chapter amendment that increases the number of signatures on the petition from 125 to 450 in most circumstances, and from 125 to 750 for the Education and Health departments. Agencies will now be allowed to create the petition signature form. The amended proposal also amends the circumstances when an agency is not required to hold a public hearing to include when a rule is adopted on an emergency basis until a formal Notice of Proposed Rulemaking is issued.
In other words, it will take 400% to 700% more signatures to hold a public hearing. Citizens have to go to the agencies to get the petitions and public hearings don’t have to be held on rules adopted as emergencies — which applies to pretty much every COVID-19 rule and policy implemented over the past three years.
As Assemblyman Andrew Goodell, R-Jamestown, said during his comments on the Assembly floor, this is a step in the wrong direction. Rather than empowering citizens to petition their government, the Legislature has neutered the public instead.
Auburn Public Citizen. February 23, 2022.
Editorial: Evolution of SUNY a win for students and employers
Additional opportunities to learn skills for career advancement or to become quickly certified to jump into in-demand jobs could reap great benefits for students and employers in Cayuga County and across New York state.
State University of New York officials said the groundwork began years ago to develop additional offerings to traditional two- and four-year degree programs that just don’t fit the needs of many students, and disruptions to the job market and the educational system brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic underlined the need for even more alternatives.
Gov. Kathy Hochul recently announced an expansion of short-term certification courses by which students can earn microcredentials, including some that require just three classes to complete and offer the skills needed to qualify for jobs that currently have big worker shortages, such as phlebotomy, HVAC and positions in the hospitality industry.
Cayuga Community College is one of the colleges taking part and is currently offering several credit and non-credit options for people looking to advance or begin their careers or get back into the job market after an absence.
Educational opportunities through the SUNY system have come a long way over the decades, with traditional classroom lectures and labs being supplemented with a wide array of online options and coursework pinpointed toward the specific needs of employers in local areas.
We’re glad to see the SUNY system remain open to continually changing the way in which it operates in response to changing times, and we hope that students and professionals alike in Cayuga County will take the time to explore the new offerings at CCC to see if there might be a microcredential that’s the perfect fit for them.
Advance Media New York. February 20, 2022.
Editorial: Celebrate Syracuse’s record graduation rate — and keep expecting more
Congratulations to the students and staff of the Syracuse City School District for achieving a 77.2% graduation rate in 2021 — a record high on top of the previous year’s’ record high of 71%.
It is a remarkable and hard-won turnaround from a decade ago, when just over half of Syracuse students graduated from high school.
This accomplishment is even more notable because it came amid the disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic. Schools were closed for many months, forcing a pivot to remote classes that severely tested teachers, students and their parents.
The state Education Department cautioned that graduation rates may have been affected by its decision to suspend Regents exams due to the pandemic. Perhaps. But as SCSD Superintendent Jaime Alicea pointed out, students still needed to earn the same number of credits to graduate.
While we tend to focus on the negative effects of the pandemic on education, it’s clear from these numbers that many students did better during remote or hybrid schooling.
Some of that can be attributed to individual student preferences. Some of it undoubtedly had to do with changes made by the district to make up for what was being lost: more academic and emotional supports for kids and families; scheduling changes that allowed students to focus on fewer classes at one time; using Regents exam week as a time to catch up on schoolwork; and offering more summer learning opportunities for students to earn the credits they needed to graduate. The end of the pandemic need not be the end of these strategies, if they are indeed helping students to succeed.
Let’s reserve our loudest applause for the students and their families who persevered through this difficult time.
Also, hat tips to the revolving cast of teachers, staff, administrators and school board leaders whose hard work over the past decade led to this dramatic rise in graduation rates.
Let’s not forget those were also years of big changes (and big fights) in public education over the Common Core curriculum, standardized testing, teacher evaluations and school funding. In Syracuse, many failing schools underwent big transformations in curriculum and wholesale changes in leadership. We’d like to think these interventions also contributed to the steady upward trajectory of graduation rates.
Former Superintendent Sharon Contreras initiated many of these controversial changes — and was not universally beloved for having done so. Whatever you think of her tenure, she was painfully right about one thing: For many years, Syracuse schools were damned by our low expectations of them.
In April 2013, Contreras scolded this editorial board and the community at large for accepting the schools’ poor performance for so long. “When the adults are not saying the low performance is unacceptable, what we are saying without speaking is we don’t have high expectations for our students,” she said.
We all raised our expectations. Syracuse students responded.
Going forward, our expectations are higher still. We expect graduation rates to keep marching upward, closing the gap with the state average (currently 86%) and the district’s suburban counterparts (which graduate 90% or more of their students).
More important is what those numbers represent: our city’s young people prepared for college and careers, capable of citizenship and service, and inspired to change Syracuse and the world for the better.
Albany Times Union. February 22, 2022.
Editorial: What about ‘Do no harm’?
Gov. Kathy Hochul and state Health Commissioner Mary T. Bassett were caught between what you might call a shot and a hard place: Risk a staffing crisis in the health care industry by sidelining workers who haven’t gotten a COVID-19 booster vaccine, or risk those workers infecting patients and colleagues.
Their solution — not to enforce a mandate to get a booster shot by Monday — may be the most realistic solution anyone could have come up with. As of early February almost 240,000 health care workers had not reported getting a booster shot. That was simply too many people to suspend or fire all at once in a health care system that’s already stressed from the pandemic.
But in saying they will reassess the situation in the spring, they’ve effectively launched the state on a three-month experiment in which hundreds of thousands of workers and patients will be the guinea pigs.
Stepping back from all the political noise surrounding the issue of vaccines, it’s extraordinary that New York came to be in this crisis-within-a-crisis at all.
It’s baffling that workers in a health care system that was overwhelmed early in the pandemic because there was no vaccine against COVID-19 have either refused to be vaccinated at all, or for one reason or another won’t get a booster shot.
It’s similarly puzzling to see this level of reluctance in a state that went through such high-profile turmoil over the COVID-19 death rate among nursing home residents. While there were valid questions and criticisms about the Cuomo administration’s handling of the situation and fudging of the data, it’s also been well established that transmission of the virus from staff to patients was a substantial reason for the infections.
The state Health Department says the booster rate as of late last week was 75 percent of the state’s health care workforce, and 88 percent of the direct-care staff in hospitals. Those would be pretty good numbers in the general population, but in a health care system that deals with already-sick, immunocompromised and otherwise vulnerable people, it’s clearly not enough.
We’re well aware that even vaccinated and boosted people can be carriers. But people are simply better protected with them than without them. In health care settings, every precaution matters.
People are free, of course, to gamble with their own health — but not when it could harm those around them. To those health care workers who could get a shot but won’t out of some misplaced sense of personal choice, or freedom, or what have you, we suggest they consider the first principle of medicine: Do no harm. It’s an oath that doctors and many nurses take explicitly when they enter their professions. And for everyone else in the field of caring for the health of other people, it’s surely an implicit promise. Being fully vaccinated is a promise kept.
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