Growing Financial Burden of Unfunded State Testing Mandates.
Under the federally promoted Race to the Top (RTTT) program, the State’s new teacher evaluation and testing and reporting requirements represent additional unfunded State mandates that further constrain the Scarsdale school budget, especially under New York’s property tax levy (“tax cap”) law. The District estimates that the direct and indirect costs now total $2,520,000. Direct costs include teacher salaries, test development and administration, software and support, and teacher training. Indirect costs include teacher time devoted to testing, data collection and reporting.
By agreeing to implement federal reforms, New York won $700 million in federal Race to the Top funds; however, local districts have to pay to put in place the federally initiated state mandates. For example, they must use their limited RTTT fund allocations toward required changes to their evaluation systems and must cover in their local school budgets the remaining majority of their costs, which are reportedly proving to be considerably higher than anticipated. As one New York Times reporter puts it, “By adding just one-third of one percent to state coffers, the feds get to implement their version of education reform.”
In a 2012 report, Ken Mitchell of the Lower Hudson Council of School Superintendents writes, “Much is being sacrificed to meet both this expensive mandate and the newly enacted tax cap, all while serious challenges to the program’s validity and the research upon which it is based remain.”
The report further notes that no cost-benefit analysis, including an analysis of districts’ ability to afford the new unfunded mandates, was conducted at the state level prior to the decision to enact the new laws and regulations and finds:
In a sample of eighteen Lower Hudson school districts, the aggregate cost just to get ready for the first year of RTTT in September 2012 was $6,472,166, while the aggregate funding was $520,415. These districts had to make up a cost differential of $5,951,751 with local taxpayer dollars.