By Michael Boyajian

The proposed Obama Administration education reforms make for a good start but do not go far enough at least in New York State.  The simplest way to level the education playing field and equalize the system is to revamp the school financing formula. 

And that begins with the abolition of local school taxes and the implementation of schools financed through a portion of the state income tax.  This is the only way to avoid poor minority districts like Long Island’s Roosevelt not having the same opportunities found on North Shore Long Island’s Gold Coast districts.

Why should some students have less of an education just because of where they live?  We are after all Americans one and all and entitled to equal opportunity under the Constitution.  Recently friends and family of one student launched a Facebook campaign in order to provide the child with a tuba so he could perform in the school band.  It is ridiculous to think that some school music programs around the state cannot afford to provide a student with a tuba so the kid can play in the school band.  This is especially chilling when one considers that those with musical abilities do well in science.

One education proponent has stated that the problem is this, hundreds of dads will shout if you threaten midnight basketball but only one will fuss over the closing of a school music program.  So not only do you have to change financing formulas but also the mindset of today’s parents who are oriented more towards extra extra curricula activities as opposed to mainstream education.

Turning towards teachers it is shameful that politicians holding their hat out for votes would make these professionals the scapegoat for the education debacle in this country.  Teachers statewide must maintain their individual union representation yet bargain collectively as one so as to ensure equal pay, benefits and accountability in every region of New York.

Education reform cannot rely on mere band aid reforms but must dig deep into the source of the affliction which today is the formula for school financing, local school taxes.  Equality lies with an income tax source of financing.

Meanwhile, I read that the state has been intensively auditing S.U.N.Y., finding the usual examples of services that could be consolidated and bookkeeping errors that need to be corrected. While I have no problem with holding S.U.N.Y. and C.U.N.Y. strictly to account, however, the reality is that staffing and pay are low in New York State in state government higher education (colleges and universities)  and in New York City in local government higher education (community colleges) relative to the national average, according to governments division data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Particularly when the higher cost of living downstate is accounted for in payroll. Meanwhile, elementary and secondary school spending, staffing and pay in the portion of New York State outside New York City is off the charts. It appears that the whole focus in a fiscal crisis in on the places where the money isn’t. Somehow, I don’t think that’s an accident.

Let me comment first on the taxi situation, in which I have some sympathy for the taxi drivers. The reason taxis require far more people to transport far fewer people is that they are inherently less efficient than mass transit. You have one taxi driver moving one or two people from place to place, rather than one bus driver moving ten to 45 or one train operator moving up to 1,500. It is difficult, therefore, to make taxi rides affordable – I seem them as a luxury for the rich, or at least richer than me.

In general, as I have noted repeatedly here, politics in New York State comes down to a contest between producers of public services (public employee unions and private sector contractors), who want to provide less in exchange for more, and rich people and business interests who do not require public services and benefits and do not want to pay for them, and thus want less provided for less. Certain regulated industries, such as taxi rides, are an exception. Like the cost of a subway ride, the cost of a taxi ride has not kept up with inflation long term. For the New York City Transit lower fares along with lower subsidies has been covered up by borrowning and contributed to an onrushing financial collapse. For taxi drivers, the result has been a lower standard of living.

Back in the era of the T.V. show Taxi, taxi drivers tended to be working class native born Americans working as employees of taxi companies, with non-wage benefits. Now they are immigrants struggling to get by as independent contractors, with no benefits. When I wrote the “Industry Trends” report for NYC Planning’s Citywide Industry Study, I found that on the books, wage and salary employment in the Taxi industry had plunged in the years leading up to 1987, falling 76.4% from 1977 to 1987 alone, to just over 2,500 in the whole city. With 2,500 “employees,” including not only yellow cabs but also outer borough car services, and 48,000 drivers for the yellow cab industry alone, one gets the picture.

Taxi drivers, it would seem, are outside the charmed circle of people and groups that gets to impose higher costs on the serfs due not to earning it in a voluntary free market transaction, but due to political power. The charmed circle includes the top executives who sit on each other’s boards and vote each other higher pay packages, the retired and soon to retire public employees who control state and local government, and today’s senior citizens. Those in the charmed circle take their money out up front, often with automatic inflation adjustment, leaving investors, taxpayers and public service recipients fight over what is left. On the other hand people and take or leave the drivers’ services, so they have to satisfy the customer, and their prices are regulated on top of that. Customers fight every taxi fare increase. So to get by, the drivers cheat. No, I’m not surprised. Private sector organizations generally can’t just take their customers’ money like public agencies. They have to con people.

At New York City Transit, there are certainly productivity improvements that need to be made. Perhaps TWU workers are now more willing to do their jobs independently than they were 25 years ago, and not as many managers and administrators are required to look over their shoulder. Perhaps now that transit worker are much better off than the people they serve, and a Wall Street and real estate bubble is no longer providing an alternative source of funds, New Yorkers can no longer afford more than one station agent per station and more than one transit worker per train. Morally the TWU, whose members get to retire earlier than most riders, who generally have no retirement plan at all, and are now getting raises was others are getting wage cuts, should not stand in the way.

But NYCT workers and NYCT managers are not where the big increases in spending have been. Contractors have vastly increased what they charge the MTA Capital Plan. Debts from the past, as a result of higher costs, lower fares relative to inflation, and a cutoff of taxpayer support, are sucking up more and more of the budget. And soaring retiree costs, as a result of unlimited health insurance for employees and retirees with little or no employee contribution, and a series of unfunded pension enhancements (though not the 20/50 pension the TWU struck for), have shifted money from those doing work to those not doing work, an onrushing disaster for all public services.

If you want to see highly paid workers and high staffing, look outside New York City to the commuter railroads. Could all those conductors be replaced by fare control, with smart cards, and cameras and severe penalties for those who hop up on the platform and around the fare control? Those conductor jobs are political sinecures, I believe, possibly Republican political sinecures on the LIRR. No one is talking about them.

As for SUNY and CUNY, the numbers are stark. In March 2007, the agencies had 260 full time equivalent workers per 100,000 state residents, compared with a national average of 533. Pay per full time equivalent instructional employee was 1.8% below the national average, even though the agencies had substantial operations in high cost of living Downstate New York; in New Jersey it was 59.5% above average. S.U.NY. and C.U.N.Y workers are given a 401K, or expected to either work 30 years or retire at 62 for a full pension. For local government higher education (community colleges), New York City had 36 instructional workers by 100,000 residents in March 2007, the downstate suburbs had 69, the upstate metro counties had 74, and the rest of the state had 60; the national average was 44. The pay for instructional workers was just 0.6% above the U.S. average in NYC (compared with 32.3% above average for private sector workers in downstate New York outside of finance), about 8.0% to 9.0% below average for Upstate, and 19.7% above average for the Downstate Suburbs.

Some of disparities may be explained by a higher share of NY State students who choose private higher education, compared with the national average. But the state has been squeezing public higher education for decades, in part to keep tuition much lower than elsewhere (similar to the taxi-drivers) and in part to direct tax dollars elsewhere. The cost of private higher education has soared, with those who work in it becoming richer relative to other Americans, fewer classes per term taught by professors with tenure, and luxury-class amenities. In New York’s public universities, in contrast, classes are more often taught by those outside the charmed circle – part time adjuncts struggling to get by with multiple jobs. And classes required for graduation are often unavailable, forcing students to take additional years to graduate. Of course, one could argue that this is a pro-New York City policy, since in large part as a result of state priorities, most of the city’s public schoolchildren have not been able to go to college anyway over the past few decades.

While SUNY and CUNY are put under the microscope, meanwhile, what about the cost of elementary and secondary education in New York? Fifteen years ago, the state had good though expensive schools outside New York City, paid for in part by bad though cheap schools inside New York City. Since then the cost of NYC public schools has been brought up, but to keep that gap the cost of schools in the rest of the state has exploded. In March 2007, there were 1,463 instructional public school employees in NYC and a national average of 1,533, compared with 1,756 in the downstate suburbs, 1,827 in the upstate metro counties, and 1,979 in the rest of the state. There were 419 non-instructional public school employees in NYC and a national average of 670, compared with 808 in the downstate suburbs, 898 in the upstate metro counties, and 937 in the rest of the state. The pay for NYC’s instructional employees was 20.1% higher than the national average in March 2007, compared with below average a decade earlier. It was already high elsewhere in the state but has gotten higher, at 46.2% above average in the Downstate Suburbs, 16.3% above average in the Upstate Metro counties and 5.4% above average in the rest of the state.

And then, in a horrific blow to New York City’s children, the retirement age for New York City teachers was cut to 55 rather than 62, a change described as “free.” And even now, the United Federation of Teachers is up in Albany talking with its friends in the state legislators about a pension “incentive” to allow existing teachers to retire even earlier, perhaps at age 50 or 45, perhaps after 20 years of work or 15, with no penalty. “For the children.” Perhaps that will happen, in exchange for UFT agreeing not to criticize the legislature for cutting aid to the NYC schools far more than the rest of the state. That was the deal in the mid-1990s, after all.

As we face disaster, how come the most cost efficient transit agency in the country, NYCT, and one of the lowest tuition state university systems in the country, are being picked on over nickels and dimes? Why doesn’t anyone ask if existing public employees (not just future ones) shouldn’t by paying more for their pensions, and existing retirees more for their health insurance? Why doesn’t anyone question the fact that public retirees pay nothing, and private retirees less than workers, in state and local income taxes on the same income, given the debts and unfunded benefits they have stuck those workers with? Why isn’t anyone talking about an LIRR crackdown, and the long decrease in the subway fare relative to inflation? Etc. Etc. Etc. Why isn’t anyone talking about cases where billions more than average are spent there?

With regard to S.U.N.Y. and C.U.N.Y., one way out of the public school disaster may be to eliminate the senior year of high school for those who stay in sequence, and replace it with a year of community college preparation for senior college or vocational training. But that won’t work unless S.U.N.Y. and C.U.N.Y. can offer enough classes. But it is in the interest of those who matter to simple gut the quality of education across the board, particularly in New York City, where a “we will pretend to work, you will pretend to pay us” solution is preferable to union that represents the minority of teachers who don’t do their job, and those retired and about to retire.

By Michael Boyajian

When I was younger I used to watch war movies, mostly John Wayne stuff like his cavalry trilogy, his World War II forays and finally the Green Berets.  As kids we all played with our G.I. Joes dressing them up in Marine dress up or a frogman outfit.  All the neighborhood kids would run around the block playing army with toy guns.  How did we know how to play army?  Well, they were broadcasting the Vietnam War on television every evening.

Later in our teens we would, all us under the drinking age guys, sit in the park sipping beer on Saturday nights even on the coldest day of winter wearing our green snorkel parkas.  Were we alcoholics?  No, we were on deck just waiting.  We were waiting to be eventually drafted into the Vietnam War.

That was our destiny.  My small Long Island town was a recruiting ground.  Have a minor brush with the law the judge gave you a choice, go to jail or go to Vietnam.  Older brothers of my friends went and came back different.  They were violent, cursing around the dinner table and arguing.  Not the smiling boys they once were.  One guy came back and he would be catching imaginary flies with his hand while you talked to him.  Some houses had a gold star in their front window; their son was not coming home.  Those houses remained shut tight with curtains closed tightly in grief.

We missed the draft by a couple of years, they ended the Vietnam War.  We left the parks and went to college or started a vocation.  We now watched movies like Paths of Glory, Coming Home and Deer Hunter.  We realized war was about trauma.  The trauma was to ourselves, to our enemies and to all the innocent civilians in the war zone.

And now we have new wars and new traumas and you can only hope that our soldiers will get the right treatment for their trauma knowing that there is no trauma care for our enemies and the civilians we left behind.

Nations, not just people, suffer trauma also.  North Korea after the Korean War withdrew from the world of nations making its only economic product weapons and its government secretive.  The United States suffered trauma after Pearl Harbor spending the next half century fighting wars driven by paranoia and fear.  The nation was further traumatized after 9/11 allowing some to throw out the Constitution, torture people and launch an unjust war.

So Mr. President, let’s end the trauma and finally bring the troops home.  We have been fighting wars for over 50 years and now our soldiers overseas are like dry logs on a hot fire.  Take out the logs and the fire will go out and the trauma will finally end.

End