There's good news and bad news about Rochester schools from a new study comparing the variation in educational quality within urban educational systems. The good news: measured by standardized pupil proficiency scores, there's only an 8.6 percentage point gap between good and bad schools in Rochester. The bad news: even Rochester's good schools—those in the 75th percentile—have the lowest proficiency scores among the 68 largest urban school systems in the country. Read More
As a new report from the conservative Empire Center shows, the education spending gap has grown ever wider over the past 20 years. Spending in New York was 45% higher than the national average in 1997, 65% higher 10 years later and 89% higher in 2017. That’s unsustainable, as the state’s out-migration demonstrates. Read More
The data was highlighted this week by the Empire Center, a fiscally conservative think tank that has long pointed to the state’s high education costs, which is a major burden for homeowners. “The education spending gap between New York and the rest of the U.S. has grown considerably wider overall,” noted E.J. McMahon, the Empire Center’s founder and research director. Read More
E.J. McMahon, who served as a deputy tax commissioner in the administration of former Gov. George Pataki and now is the research director for the Empire Center for Public Policy, an Albany think tank, said STAR has always been about fiscal gimmickry and is going further in that direction. Read More
An Empire Center analysis of the latest Census numbers also showed that New York’s educational expenditures are primarily driven by teacher salaries and benefits that are 117 percent above the national average on a per-student basis. Read More
Schools, excluding the Big 5 districts of Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Yonkers and New York City, are proposing to increase taxes by $539 million despite an enrollment drop of 7,827 students, or a 0.5% decline, the Empire Center for State Policy, a fiscally conservative think tank said. Read More
The 2011 tax cap law, that would have expired in 2020, was made permanent this year. It limits the annual growth in property tax levies to 2% or the rate of inflation, whichever is less, and with certain exclusions for each district. The fiscally conservative Empire Center says the law has saved New Yorkers billions of dollars in municipal and school tax payments. Read More
New York's spending on elementary and secondary education reached a record $23,091 per pupil in 2017, once again topping all other states in this category, according to the latest U.S. Census data. Read More