EDITORIAL: Group wise to seek solutions in Long Island education

Who died and left you boss?

That, in essence, was the initial reaction of local education professionals when they learned this past spring that a new player on the scene was sniffing around their turf.

Actually, that player, the Long Island Regional Planning Council, had good reason to be exploring education. The council - supported by both counties, with representatives from towns and villages - is on the verge of releasing "Long Island 2035," its plan to keep our region sustainable for the next 25 years. But it's not sustainable unless we can rein in the cost of our high-quality education system.

Educational excellence is a major reason why people decide to move here. But its ever-rising costs are a key reason why people decide not to come or to move away. On top of the steady rise in school property taxes, every so often, headlines remind us of the huge compensation packages of our school superintendents. On Friday, a Newsday story said nine of the 10 highest paid K-12 educators in the state work here.

The other half of the dilemma is the continuing struggle of underperforming districts such as Roosevelt, Hempstead and Wyandanch - small islands of pain in a sea of educational excellence.

That's the challenge: Maintain the strength of our high-quality districts, reduce the achievement gap in the struggling ones and lower the overall cost burden.

That question is not only vexing, but existential. Unless we answer it, our very existence as a regional economy is threatened. So far, the education community hasn't solved it. So the planning council, the closest thing we have to a force for regional action, was quite correct to try.

Paying too much for quality

Its first step was to gather statistics, and they showed that, high quality or not, we're paying way too much for what we're getting.

This was just before school-budget voting time, and some educators feared that the release of that data at that moment could cause a wide swath of budget rejections.

So the council chose not to release the numbers then. Instead, it began conversations with educators, edgy and adversarial at first. They started with vetting the data, then moved on to broad discussions of issues.

Eventually, this Education Working Group drew in superintendents, school boards, the New York State United Teachers union, and the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services (BOCES), which provide a variety of services to school districts. It met at the offices of the Jericho School District, one of the Island's best, but talked a lot about how to help its poorest.

The conversation alone was fruitful because of the working relationships and trust it built. But it also has produced a plan: actions that the group considers worth pursuing, and a pledge to keep monitoring the progress of those proposals.

The plan's language is highly negotiated, after compromises on all sides. The council, for example, backed away from calling for a 2 percent property-tax cap, when members of the group persuaded them it would increase inequity between districts. But it does include items not congenial to all members of the group, such as its call for affordable housing, which school districts often fight, and further talks on regional collective bargaining, which unions distrust.

Wisely, the plan's first point is action to reduce inequity among districts. For too long, our underperforming schools have been left to cope by themselves. But this plan puts the emphasis where it ought to be: Underachieving schools are a problem for the whole region.

It proposes an idea this page supports: For new major commercial projects, the school portion of the property tax revenue would be regionalized, so that one district does not profit solely from the new revenue while nearby districts get none.

The plan also calls for broader use of BOCES to meet the needs of poorer districts. More wide-ranging BOCES, in fact, would play a bigger regional role in other aspects of the plan, too.

Try something new

And, if more muscular solutions for failing districts are needed, it recommends using a new "distinguished educator" provision in state law. For districts having major problems, the state could send in a respected educator from outside, with experience in turning around low-performing districts. That's invasive, but not as tough as chopping the failing districts up and sending their students to surrounding districts.

Beyond the equity issue, the plan argues for a variety of ideas, such as state legislation to create "transition and reorganization incentive aid," to encourage functional consolidation of districts, and to repeal or provide state funding for currently unfunded mandates, among others.

Yes, Nassau and Suffolk have great schools: the state's highest percentage of high school graduates intending to go to college; top scores in many subjects, above the state average in others. But we do have gaps, such as average SAT reading and writing scores in 2006-07 below some other U.S. regions, and just below the national average.

Then there's the cost: From 1999 to 2008, school district spending here increased at more than double the rise in the local Consumer Price Index. So the size of the problem is staggering.

This action plan represents a hopeful new collaborative approach to solving it. Now the council has to put out its "LI 2035," with all the telltale data. And it has to keep pushing hard, using its new allies, to make progress toward cutting costs, retaining quality and reducing inequity. The region's future depends on it. hN