Don’t believe the UFT’s fake school funding cut hype

Colleges Chancellor David Banks defended the cuts he and Mayor Eric Adams made to the DOE price range.
Michael Brochstein/SOPA Pictures/S

Mayor Eric Adams and Colleges Chancellor David Banks are being solely rational within the battle over faculty funding. The thunderous complains are absurdly dishonest and largely self-interested.

United Federation of Academics puppets on the Metropolis Council have joined in demanding Adams “instantly restore” some $215 million that the council voted to slash when it handed town price range final month.

The modest lower — 0.69% of the Division of Schooling’s $31 billion-plus price range — is the results of 1) the winding down of $7 billion in momentary federal COVID reduction, 2) falling scholar enrollment and three) the necessity to rein in years of off-the-charts spending (with no enchancment in citywide scholar achievement).

So Adams is solely proper to remain the course, and to slam the protesters who disrupted a latest, unrelated city corridor as “clowns.”

Eric Adams known as protestors who disrupted a mayoral city corridor “clowns.”

AP

As Banks advised NY1, the faculties dealing with cuts have misplaced enrollment and “it’s not possible to proceed funding colleges as in the event that they haven’t misplaced college students.” For instance, “I used to be simply speaking to a college in the present day [that] went from having 300 youngsters to having now about 45 college students which might be really coming on this 12 months. It’s a dramatic lack of college students, so I can’t give them the identical price range they'd have had in any other case,” he stated.

Lefty metropolis Comptroller Brad Lander claims about 1,200 of the DOE’s 1,850 or so public colleges are seeing cuts to the primary supply of their funds by the Honest Scholar Funding components. But, for all his noise about unspent stimulus money, he nonetheless to confess that the faculties dealing with cuts are shedding enrollment and that the DOE is selecting to use “the remaining one-time federal funding to different makes use of.”

The UFT agenda right here has nothing to do with instructing youngsters; it’s all about maintaining the ranks of its members whilst households flee the common public colleges. (Similar goes for the UFT drive for a state NYC-only legislation mandating class-size reductions.)

Sure, the union’s acquired some dad and mom irate over shedding studying lecturers. However Banks should look out for the system as a complete. Notably, Politico stories that the favored 3K preschool growth is heading towards a fiscal cliff, even because the Legislature refused to incorporate state funding for the UFT’s class-size measure.

File inflation, a looming recession and a metropolis financial system nonetheless in restoration mode oblige Adams and Banks to seek out prudent spending trims — not burn billions on the brand new hires the UFT desires.

Don’t fall for this newest UFT marketing campaign of lies.