Showdown on School Tax Credits in Albany

I hope this tax credit legislation passes.

 

In mid-December, I spent a morning with Peter Flanigan visiting two Catholic schools, St. Ann's grammer school (on E. 110th St. in Manhattan) and Cardinal Hayes high school, which is only a few blocks away from KIPP in the Bronx.  I was REALLY impressed with both schools.  On extremely limited budgets -- FAR less than what taxpayers are spending on public school students -- these schools are providing safety, discipline and of course learning to nearly entirely low-income minority students -- precisely the students that are being failed so badly by the existing public school system.

Of course I'm aware of the many advantages these schools have -- much less regulation, ability to select (and deselect) students, etc. -- and no doubt not all Catholic schools are as high quality as the ones I saw, but at the end of the day, here's the only thing I care about: most of these schools are achieving some degree of success (in some cases, a very high degree of success) with students who, if these schools didn't exist, would mostly be going absolutely nowhere were they in the nearby public schools.  So can someone explain to me why it's in our city's, state's and country's best interests to let these schools fail for lack of $3,000-$5,000 per student per year when we're utterly wasting $10,000-$12,000 per student per year miseducating comparable students at nearby schools?  This strikes me as the definition of madness!

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know the reasons -- separation of church and state, skimming the best students from the public schools, etc. -- but I keep coming back to this question: What do I tell the mother who's trying to get a decent education for her son and keep him away from gangs, yet can only afford to live in a neighborhood in which the local public school has for decades failed to provide such an education and is rife with gangs?  What does one say to her if she says, "You're spending $10,000 each year on my child at school, yet here he is in 8th grade and he can barely read.  He hates school and is skipping classes and spending time with bad kids.  If I don't get him out of this environment soon, I'm going to lose him forever, but I can't afford to move or send him to a private school.  But if you could merely give me HALF of what you're currently spending on him, that would cover the entire tuition at Cardinal Hayes, which has been saving boys like my son for decades."

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Showdown on School Tax Credits in Albany

BY JACOB GERSHMAN - Staff Reporter of the Sun
February 15, 2006
URL: http://www.nysun.com/article/27619

 

ALBANY - The battle over school choice in New York escalated yesterday, as Cardinal Egan and thousands of schoolchildren, parents, and teachers rallied here to pressure lawmakers to back a plan by Governor Pataki that would give tuition tax credits to parents with children in failing schools.

 

Efforts are also under way by critics of the governor's plan to condition support for the tax credits on Albany's compliance with a public school-financing lawsuit. A powerful opponent of the tax credit plan, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, is signaling to Catholic leaders that she might be flexible on the issue of tax credits, but is urging them to support her demands that Albany spend billions of more dollars on New York City public schools.