OPINION: Adjusting our education system in a post-coronavirus world demands more funding
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District 26 City Council candidate Heajin Hailie Kim is a professor at Hunter College. Photo courtesy of Kim
By Heajin Hailie Kim
During his March 13 press conference, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the “schools are the second biggest expense for the state after health care, and that’s where we have zero dollars.”
Cuomo’s statement preceded Mayor Bill de Blasio’s slashing $264 million from the Department of Education, particularly from those programs that benefit students from working and working class families. For example, nearly half of the cuts have been to the Fair Student Funding, which lost $100 million.
An article on silive.com describes this program as providing “additional funding per student based on need ... This funding is typically higher at schools with large numbers of students with disabilities, English language learners, low income students and students performing below grade level.” In other words, the New York City schools — and students — that need the most support will be the ones most affected by these cuts when our schools eventually reopen.
This is incredibly short sighted. We should be investing in education as a way to help close the economic and racial disparities exacerbated by the coronavirus.
In an article in The Harvard Gazette Croydon Ireland writes that in impoverished areas of New York City, “only 8 percent of black males graduating high school in 2014 were prepared for college-level work … The preparedness rates for Asians and whites ... were unimpressive too, but nonetheless were firmly on the other side of the achievement gap.”
The connection between college preparedness and economic disparity is a personal one for me. During my years as an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College, I have seen many students from New York City public schools who came unprepared for college-level work and who were convinced they weren’t intelligent enough for college when, in fact, their high schools had simply woefully underprepared them.
In an article in The Atlantic, Nick Hanauer argues that positing education as the answer to solving economic disparity is myopic and requires economic reforms. Hanauer, a skeptic, acknowledges this link between education and economic disparity, and proposes that Americans should focus on bridging the economic gap and that our public schools need improving, even if improving our public school system doesn’t solve every economic problem in the United States.
Lack of state support for city education has been an issue before the pandemic. While New York City spends $28,808 per student, “the state’s share of the city’s school budget has dropped by more than 11 percentage points over the past three decades … The state spent $11.2 billion on city schools last year, $3 billion more than in 1990, while the city spent $20 billion last year, or $11.6 billion more than in 1990.”
Cuomo says that without federal funding, the state’s budget for education will be cut in half. It is imperative that New York receive federal funding, but it is also important to acknowledge that New York State has not properly funded New York City’s education before COVD-19 ravaged the State Treasury rather than simply write it off as an economic side effect.
Had New York City schools been properly funded, and had those resources been properly allocated, we would not have struggled to deliver tablets and laptops to students who need them for distance learning after schools closed, the schools would have already provided them to students who needed them before the pandemic began.
Dr. Horace Webster, the first president of the City College of New York stated that, “This experiment is to be tried, whether … the whole people, can be educated.” Webster here encapsulates the essence of not just public university education, but of public education as a whole: to allow the education of the whole people. Until the 1970s, CUNY schools were free and had obtained a reputation for excellence. Currently, the retention rate for City College is 83 percent with a 43 percent graduation rate, this means that 17 percent of students transfer out of City College while 40 percent do not graduate within 6 years, although the graduation rate within 8 years is only marginally better at 48 percent. Afterwards, the graduation rate falls to 20 percent. For comparison, the retention rate for Columbia University is 97 percent with a 95.7 percent graduation rate. Furthermore, Latino or Hispanic students make up largest proportion of the student population at City College at 36.3 percent, while White students make up the largest proportion of the student population at Columbia University at 31.9 percent. The line between race and the educational opportunities afforded to our students is glaringly obvious, and supports much of what the CUNY studies report. These discrepancies are inexcusable, and underfunding New York City public schools will only serve to widen this gap further.
Education in a post-coronavirus world will be different, but these changes can be positive ones: smaller class sizes, innovative teaching methods, an increased awareness of and empathy for the needs and struggles of our students can be the outcome of this pandemic. Implementing these changes requires more funding, not less of it.
Hailie Kim is an adjunct professor in the English department at Hunter College. She is running for City Council in District 26 to represent Sunnyside, Woodside, Long Island City and parts of Astoria.
