Cuomo’s education plan: Where do other lawmakers stand?

ALBANY – After seven weeks of shaping strategies and closed-door talks, Gov. Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers have entered the final stage of budget negotiations.

One of the major sticking points remains since Gov. Andrew Cuomo first proposed his $142 billion budget in January: What to do with the state education system?

The Assembly’s Democratic majority and the Republican-controlled Senate approved their own budget plans on Thursday, though the vote was largely symbolic.

The proposals, though, more clearly show where lawmakers agree and differ with Cuomo’s controversial education agenda, which has spurred big rallies and protests across the state. And they come ahead of a March 31 deadline to have a budget in place, with a string of four consecutive on-time budgets on the line.

Cuomo wants to make it easier to take over failing schools and fire poor-performing teachers, revamp the state’s system for evaluating educators and granting tenure and increase the state’s cap on charter schools while boosting their funding.

To better his chances of getting it done, Cuomo is using the state budget to his advantage.

The state Constitution limits how the Legislature can alter Cuomo’s budget proposal, and the Democratic governor has inserted a wide array of much-debated policy matters -- including his education plan and ethics proposals — into the spending plan.

Cuomo takes it a step further: His budget includes a provision that would wipe out a proposed $1.1 billion increase for schools unless lawmakers agree to his education proposals.

In the current fiscal year, the state put up $22 billion for education, by far the most in the nation and 82 percent above the per capita average.

“We have a lot of education reform proposals in this budget that change the ways in which we do education services and emphasize performance,” Cuomo said Wednesday in Rochester. “Why? Because the government way is to just throw money at a problem. That is what government does. If it is not working well, let’s throw more money at the problem. But sometimes money is not the answer.”

Agree and disagree

When it comes to education policy, the Senate Republicans’ budget proposal backs Cuomo’s effort to change the state’s teacher evaluation system to make 50 percent of it based on students’ test scores. They also support Cuomo’s proposal to create a $100 million tax break for donors to public and private schools.

The Assembly Democrats’ plan, meanwhile, rejects both of those proposals. It backs Cuomo’s call to grant state college tuition breaks to immigrants in the country illegally — which is opposed by the Senate GOP.

But when it comes to education funding, the Senate and Assembly agree: Cuomo’s proposal is too low by hundreds of millions of dollars and shouldn’t be linked to other issues.

Both the Assembly and Senate budgets removed Cuomo’s linkage between funding and passing his policy reforms. They both proposed total education funding around $24 billion.

Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, D-Bronx, said lawmakers “should not have to negotiate a budget under threats.”

“This is America. This is New York state,” Heastie said Thursday in an interview with public radio and television. “The public and the media should be concerned when language and policy is tied up in negotiations and the legislature is limited to making changes.”

Speaking to reporters in Rochester on Thursday, Cuomo said he’s well within his constitutional rights, which lawmakers have been hesitant to challenge after a 2006 Court of Appeals ruling limited their budgetary powers.

“If the speaker doesn’t like the constitution of the state of New York, he can try to change the constitution,” Cuomo said.

Room for compromise?

The Senate GOP’s also backed Cuomo’s plan to suspend teacher-certification programs that perform poorly for three consecutive years. It also backs Cuomo’s push to increase the state’s cap on charter schools from 460 to 560, while removing a separate cap on New York City.

The Senate, though, wants to provide $225 per pupil in supplemental funding for charter schools, while Cuomo has proposed $75 per pupil. Assembly Democrats have resisted changes to the charter school cap and didn’t raise the cap in their own budget.

Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, R-Nassau County, said he's hopeful that the teacher evaluation reforms proposed by Cuomo could be included in the budget. But Skelos warned that any of the policy issues Cuomo has tied to the budget shouldn't jeopardize an on-time deal.

The legislative session runs until late June.

"I would like to see us get teacher evaluations, that issue, that reform, as early as possible, in the budget, but again if that’s going to hold up the budget, the answer is we’ll accomplish it before the end of the year," Skelos told reporters Thursday.

The Senate and Assembly’s budget proposals are crafted by the majority parties in each house, with Senate Democrats and Assembly Republicans largely left out of the process.

The budget resolutions were passed largely along party lines Thursday.

Senate Minority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins, D-Yonkers, has led a push to be included in budget negotiations, arguing that a woman’s viewpoint is needed.

At a meeting Thursday of the joint budget committee meeting — known in Albany parlance as the “mothership” — Stewart-Cousins chided Albany’s “three men in a room” culture, which allows most major deals to be negotiated in private between the governor and heads of the Senate and Assembly.

“We can’t pretend the overall budget process is not greatly flawed,” she said in her opening remarks. “Apparently, the mothership is the only place this mother will appear in negotiating the budget.”

JCAMPBELL1@gannett.com

Twitter.com/JonCampbellGAN