Compromise on Ethics and Education Reforms in Budget Deal

New York legislative leaders Sunday night agreed to a budget that includes a compromise on the aggressive ethics and education reforms that Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been pushing for this year.

The ethic reforms that Cuomo and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie originally agreed to remained largely unchanged in the final agreement. However, the Senate was granted one major modification: Any legislator who is also a practicing attorney will be able to request that a client’s name be redacted from public records if that client is found not to be directly involved with legislation or other state affairs. The Office of Court Administration or JCOPE will ultimately make that determination.

As Heastie and Cuomo previously agreed to, the ethics deal will require legislators who receive outside income to disclose the source of any compensation in excess of $1,000 and disclose the name of the client for compensation in excess of $5,000. Legislators who are employed by law firms and who, for example, are serving as counsel and have no specific clients are also required to disclose their income. A lawmaker who is paid to bring in clients, but does not represent them, must also reveal those clients.

The final ethics agreement also included pension forfeiture, per diem reform, prohibition of personal use of campaign funds and campaign finance disclosure reforms that were outlined in the Cuomo-Assembly deal.

On education, Cuomo had originally pushed for 50 percent of teacher evaluations to be tied to state tests and for the time it takes to gain tenure to be extended to five years. Instead, the Assembly negotiated a new teacher evaluation system to be operated by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) and compromised on a four-year evaluation period before a teacher is eligible for tenure.

A top administration official explained that the teacher evaluation system will no longer work by percentages. Instead it will be broken into two seperate categories: state test results and classroom observation. In the testing category, localities can choose to administer only the state assessment to students, or they can request a second test to be given as well. If they choose the latter, the state will then design a second set of assessments for the locality to use.

If a teacher, tenured or not, is evaluated on students' performance on the official state test and is then rated “ineffective” by that metric, he or she cannot be graded “effective” on their overall evaluation score. The highest rating that teacher could receive is “developing.”

If a locality decides to use the two tests for the teacher evaluation, then a teacher who receives an “ineffective” composite score on those tests will have to be graded “ineffective” overall.

The observation component will be carried out by a principal and a second, "independent" source. The locality then has the option of including a peer review by a teacher that is rated “highly effective.”

The long-controversial 3020a process, used to remove tenured teachers whose performance is deemed unnacceptable, has also been reformed. Now, if a tenured teacher receives an “ineffective” score two years in a row, the district can begin proceedings to remove them and have them out of the school within 90 days. If a teacher receives an “ineffective” score three years in a row, the district must bring charges against them and that teacher can be out within 30 days.

Receivership for failing schools was also included in the reforms. If a school is newly failing, the locality can submit a plan to NYSED detailing how it intends to turn the school around. The district will then have one year to show “demonstrable improvement” or it will be taken over by a a state-appointed receiver. If NYSED rejects the locality's plan, the school immediately goes into receivership.

Any school that has been failing for ten years will have to show “demonstrable improvement” within a year in order to keep its independence. If a school has been failing for three years, it has two years to show “demonstrable improvement” or it will go to a receiver.

NYSED is charged with developing the previously mentioned second test and codifyng the new regulations by June. School districts have to accept and adopt the new reforms by November. If they fail to do so they will not receive a 5 percent increase in school aid and will only get a 1.7 percent increase instead.

The 2015-16 budget includes $1.4 billion in aid for schools. The breakdown of aid by district, known in Albany as school runs, will not be available until Monday.

Also included in the budget is a commission to determine whether legislators should receive a pay raise and $1.5 billion for Cuomo’s Upstate Revitalization initiative.

The budget's total growth is 2 percent with $94.25 billion in total state operating funds. It also allots $17.741 billion for Medicaid and $100 million for the New York City Housing Authority, which will be distributed through the Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR).

Several key issues that advocates had hoped would be part of the budget were left out of the final deal. They include raising the minimum wage, the DREAM Act, the Education Investment Tax Credit, criminal justice reforms and mayoral control, which will all be taken up post-budget.