Dear Fellow New Yorker,

There is a crisis of failing schools in New York State. In fact, more than 109,000 students are currently enrolled in New York’s 178 failing schools.  

• On Long Island, more than 5,700 students are currently enrolled in 6 failing schools. 
• 77 of New York’s schools have been failing for a decade, with more than 250,000 students passing through these schools while state government has done nothing. 
• Statewide, more than 9 out of 10 students in failing schools are minority or poor.

This is the real scandal in Albany—the alarming fact that state government has stood by and done nothing as generation after generation of students have passed through failing schools. While the education bureaucracy demands more and more money, the reality is school districts with failing schools have statewide seen an average 13.8% increase in funding over the past three years, and New York today spends more per pupil than any other state in the nation—$19,552—nearly double the national average of $10,608 per pupil.

Read the full report on The State of New York’s Failing Schools, wh...

A school is designated as “failing” if it’s in the bottom 5% of schools across the state based on combined English Language Arts and math scores, if it’s not showing progress in test performance, or if the school has a graduation rate below 60% for the last three years.

To address this problem, we’re proposing a model that worked in Massachusetts, where when a school fails for 3 years, a nonprofit, another school district, or a turnaround expert must take over the school. When this model was used in a large school district in Massachusetts, the following results were seen:  

• Graduation rates increased from 52% to 67% 
• Math proficiency improved from 28% to 41% 
• The dropout rate decreased by nearly 50%

The time is now for the State Legislature to act and do something about this problem so we no longer are condemning our children to failing schools.

Find out more about our proposal to transform failing schools on go...

Sincerely,

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Governor Andrew M. Cuomo