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The cumulative effect of four consecutive years of lagging revenues has led to budget-cutting of historic proportions. An analysis of newly enacted state budgets shows that budget cuts will hit education, health care, and other state-funded services harder in the 2012 fiscal year - which started July 1, 2011 - than in any year since the recession began.

New York City's Education Department will spend $51 million to open more than two dozen new charter schools next year, according to a report released on Thursday by the Independent Budget Office.

In one of his most dramatic moves since taking office, Gov. Cuomo will use the budget he makes public tomorrow to impose union-hated teacher evaluation systems on 700 school districts throughout the state, The Post has learned. The popular governor will do so by including language in the budget that ties receipt of 4 percent state aid increases promised to the districts in last year's budget - some $800 million - to adoption of the teacher-evaluation system developed by the state Education Department, which has been blocked from city schools by a teachers-union lawsuit, a source close to the situation said. All the systems, including the New York City schools, will have until Dec. 31 of this year to adopt the teacher-evaluation systems or lose the money, the source said.

Faced with a $30 million shortfall in its $295 million budget for the 2011-12 school year, the Adams 12 school district in north Denver laid off custodians, furloughed teachers, trimmed programs, reduced benefits-and then took its budget scalpel to student activities. The district dropped middle-school sports, cut back on travel for its high-school teams, and pared $500,000 from the $2 million budget that supports afterschool activities like the Math Olympiad and spelling bee at Centennial Elementary, the technology and drama clubs at Rocky Top Middle School, and the anime (Japanese animation) and Knowledge Bowl clubs at Mountain Range High.

The February 23 release of proposed school aid for 2012-13, backed by Acting Commissioner of Education Chris Cerf's "Education Funding Report," has now made it clear: Governor Chris Christie is attempting to do an end run around the Legislature in order to impose reductions in school funding for the third year in a row. As outlined in the Cerf Report, the Governor's proposed FY13 Budget, if adopted by the Legislature, would implement major changes in NJ's school funding formula - the School Funding Reform Act (SFRA) - that will trigger substantial cuts in funding for districts across the state in 2012-13. The Governor has made clear that he intends to impose these changes to the SFRA formula not just next year, but for the following four years. Put simply, the Governor intends to use the annual budget bill to make these changes permanent, bypassing the legislative process of amending the SFRA formula law.

"Though New York City schools are being slammed with heavy budget cuts, a close look at the education budget reveals that close to $900 million will be spent on technology next fiscal year. NY1's Lindsey Christ filed the following report."

When Shania started third grade at P.S. 148 last fall, she was thrilled to be back at the Queens public school. An outgoing eight-year-old, she said she was happy to be among her friends again, and she had loved her class the previous year. Her second-grade teacher would take the time to explain tricky topics like addition and subtraction one-on-one. She had even been named "student of the month." But since 2007, as the economy has tanked and expenses for public schools have risen, New York City has made principals cut budgets by 13.7 percent. When budgets are cut, teachers are fired and others aren't replaced -- including at P.S. 148, which has lost at least $600,000 and eight teachers since 2010. When teachers are lost, class sizes balloon. Shania had 31 classmates this past school year, compared to 20 the year before.

Communities of color throughout New York State are at risk of receiving short shrift when it comes to education funding if Gov. Andrew Cuomo's proposed budget goes through as planned.

Governor Christie removed full funding of the state aide formula for the 2011-2012 school year.  A report released yesterday by the Education Law Center states that Egg Harbor Township schools are now underfunded by over $17,000,000 as a result of Christie's budget vetoes.

Five months after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg outlined a plan to give principals more autonomy to run their schools, the city imposed what would be the first of five consecutive cuts to the schools' budgets. To make ends meet, principals have trimmed after-school programs, shrunk their support staffs and tightened their schools' use of things like printing paper, markers and Post-it notes. They have dismissed coaches who used to help teachers prepare for their lessons, and teachers whose salaries they could no longer pay.

The DCPS school year is under way and many students are adjusting to an unfamiliar environment. They're not alone. A surprising number of both teachers and principals are also completing their first month at their new digs. What impact DCPS's high teacher and principal turnover has on students is less than clear, like most things with the school system. Mary Levy is a DCPS budget expert. Her work sheds light on some very dark places. In an extended interview, directly following her Sept. 7 testimony at a D.C. Council hearing on middle schools, Levy discussed DCPS's increasing de facto segregation, Teach for America, charter schools and more. She began by talking about the lack of transparency in the budget, which she says has gotten worse over the years, despite the internet.

After three years of budget cuts, the city's schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.

Forty-nine million or so American children have returned to public school classrooms that are, according to many critics, ever more boring. Preparation for increasingly high-stakes tests has reduced time for social studies and science. Austerity state and federal budgets are decimating already hobbled music, art, library and physical education budgets.

" David Brennan has cast a long shadow over this year's state budget. The Akron charter-school magnate who has given more than $5 million to Republican politicians dating back to the mid-'80s as he built a 31-school empire was the force behind a series of charter school amendments slipped into the GOP-controlled House's budget bill in late April, House Speaker William G. Batchelder has said. "

There comes a time when you look at the rug on the floor, the one you've seen many times, and you see a pattern that you had never noticed before. You may have seen this squiggle or that flower, but you did not see the pattern into which the squiggles and flowers and trails of ivy combined. In American education, we can now discern the pattern on the rug. Consider the budget cuts to schools in the past four years. From the budget cuts come layoffs, rising class sizes, less time for the arts and physical education, less time for history, civics, foreign languages, and other non-tested subjects. Add on the mandates of No Child Left Behind, which demands 100 percent proficiency in math and reading and stigmatizes more than half the public schools in the nation as "failing" for not reaching an unattainable goal. Along comes the Obama administration with the Race to the Top, and the pattern on the rug gets clearer.

The foundations-idea complex has also set its sights on remaking another of the key institutions of our democracy-the public school-in its own managerial image. There's no other way to account for the distorted, counter-empirical shape of the American debate over education. The overarching trends are plain enough: As wealth inequality swells, so do the coffers of private foundations, even as the recession has caused government budgets to shrink. As long as the motives of government and foundations are aligned, that's not necessarily a problem. But the funders of education reform seek nothing less than the wholesale retooling of public schools, at a time when the nation's school budgets are stretched to the breaking point. And the writing on the chalkboard grows clearer by the minute: Their market-based educational reforms don't work.

"It has been difficult to discern what specific details are left on the table in the Chicago teachers' negotiations. Broadly, we know the union leadership resents Mayor Rahm Emanuel's enthusiasm for non-unionized charter schools and neighborhood school closings. It is also clear that professional evaluation is a big issue, as it is in states and cities across the country. To what extent should teachers be judged by their students' test scores, as opposed to by more holistic measures? Job security, especially for teachers in schools that will be shut down, has been eroding, which the CTU sees as a calamity, yet many reformers applaud. And of course, there is pay. Is it fair for teachers to demand regular raises when unemployment is so high, and budgets at every level of government are strapped? I'm not going to pronounce on these questions today, but I do want to offer a quick history of teacher unionism to keep things in perspective. The modern teachers' union movement began in Chicago in 1897, and many of the problems back then -- from low school budgets to testing to debates over classroom autonomy -- remain more than salient today."

Now, as I ponder a recent CSA member survey, I see how many of you have lost your optimism.   Whether Principals, Assistant Principals or Education Administrators, 48 percent of you were dissatisfied with your jobs in 2009 compared to 59 percent today. Among Principals the rate of dissatisfaction was 68 percent in 2009, which was when the city and state budget cuts began but we were cushioned by President Obama's American Recovery Act. Today, 73 percent of Principals are dissatisfied with their workload, their wages and their job security. As demands on Principals continue to rise and budgets shrink, we better think about how we'll recruit and retain APs, EAs and teachers to fill the Principal pipeline. Back in 2006, when The New York Times reported that a startling number of experienced Principals were fleeing the Bloomberg/Klein school system, the DOE seemed to think the attrition was a normal result of baby boomer burn-out or fear of accountability. Experienced educators were often viewed as enemies of change.

"Once again, a conservative politician has perpetuated the mis-truth about the ratio of administrators to teachers and the "huge" number of non-teachers we have hired over the last decades (see http://edtechsandyk.blogspot.com/2011/05/governor-perry-is-wrong-about-texas.html). Conservative groups have consistently perpetuated these incorrect data as a way to garner public support for cutting education-especially cutting central office positions. In fact, Republican Senators and the Governor have implied that no teachers should lose their jobs as a result of budget cuts since the "huge" increase in non-teachers-especially administrators-leaves plenty of non-teaching positions available to cut in order to solve the budget deficit perpetrated on districts by bad decision-making by the Governor and legislature back in 2006."

The debates surrounding Ohio's biennial budget and other education-related legislation during the first half of 2011 were intense, and it's no wonder. The state headed into the year facing a historic deficit, federal stimulus money was vanishing, and school districts were preparing for draconian cuts. Meanwhile, despite decades of reform efforts and increases in school funding, Ohio's academic performance has remained largely stagnant, with barely one-third of the state's students scoring proficient or better in either math or reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Achievement gaps continued to yawn between black and white students and between disadvantaged youngsters and their better-off peers.