Closing failing schools and replacing them with new–hopefully better–schools is at the heart of the Portfolio Plan strategy in place in the Rochester City School District. It sure sounds appealing, especially to those who have long felt that education is a world shielded from the consequences of failure. But does it work?

The answer is critically important, not only for the obvious reason that we all want effective schools for children, but also because closing a school necessarily means dismantling a school community. Perhaps that community was dysfunctional, unhealthy, even dangerous, but it was still the daytime home for the students and staff members in it.

Hence, when districts propose to close low-performing schools, there is often an outcry among students, parents, teachers and other staff members. We have certainly seen this in Rochester, as school communities at the School of Applied Technology at Edison and others rallied together to speak out against closure. While outsiders may be puzzled at these protests, to those directly affected, closing a school means uncertainty, upheaval and pain. Relationships are broken, the negative stigma associated with a school often becomes worse, and there is no guarantee for students and staff members that something better lies ahead.

Research on the effectiveness of this approach, what little that has been conducted, is mixed. While there are studies finding that small schools formed in the wake of school closures achieved some higher outcomes and created stronger relationships among students and teachers, other research on school closures suggests they might not benefit students. Studies of Chicago, a city with extensive experience in closing failing schools, found performance among students who moved to other schools did not significantly improve, in part because students often transferred to other poor schools.

The authors of a study summing up existing research on school closure also point to the potentially harmful effects simply of moving students around (see report). Even controlling for related factors such as previously low achievement and socioeconomic status, research has established that mobility has its own, separate negative effect on students’ likelihood of graduating.

Yet under the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, school districts are required to do something drastic about the lowest performing schools. Closure is one option; others include replacing all or most of the staff, reopening as a charter school or yielding to a state takeover.

So we’re left in a quandary. We know that some schools have failed generation after generation of students. And we know that turning around a failing school is brutally difficult. Yet we’re told that the evidence in favor of closure as a general strategy is weak. The secret to a successful “portfolio” strategy depends on whether the new schools are a significant improvement over the schools that have been closed.

The Rochester City School District is phasing out 8 low-performing schools, restructuring two more and this year opened two new schools in addition to the five begun last school year.

The cautionary tales from Chicago and elsewhere suggest that good implementation is critical to making the strategy successful here. We at CGR have been a part of the effort to make sure that happens; CGR conducted a first-year implementation evaluation of the five schools opened in 2010-11. We found the schools, whose students were generally quite similar to the overall district population, had some higher outcomes than the district (including attendance, GPAs, and high school credits) and had established positive climates. But state test results were mixed, with the new schools exceeding district performance in 6 of 12 comparisons, and the schools all have work to do to increase academic rigor and student engagement in learning.

Our study didn’t focus on the population most at-risk under this strategy: the students in the phasing out schools. Although some of these students transferred to other schools, including the new schools, for those in higher grades there were few realistic options. We did interview a number of those students and found a range of experiences, with some students reporting that their phasing out schools were still generally pretty good and others saying they had greatly declined since the announcement that they were being closed. Generally speaking, performance at the phasing out schools continues to be low, though two of the schools improved enough last year to come off the state’s watch list.

But if the lesson to draw from Chicago is that there must be more high-performing schools created for the school-closure strategy to work, then Rochester is taking some of the right steps toward giving more students quality educational options.

But to be considered truly successful, Cuomo should embrace the challenge of putting the state, local governments and schools on a path toward a long-term stable financial future.

Next year’s projected budget gap is $9 billion (on a base budget of about $134 billion), rising to $15.6 billion by 2013-14. Federal stimulus funding largely goes away next year, and most of the revenue from a temporary tax increase on high earners disappears the following year. Most local governments and schools face problems on a similar scale and will look to the state for help.

Solutions won’t be easy to come by. Consider:

• Benefit costs to public employees are helping drive costs up and are difficult to reduce. Mandated school district contributions to employee pensions are expected to quadruple over the next five years, while state and local governments face costs that will triple, according to the Empire Center for New York State Policy.

• The 2% cap on property taxes that Cuomo promoted during his campaign will be unworkable without other reforms. A strict 2% cap would leave cities unable to fund anything but employee benefits out of property tax revenue by 2015, according to the NYS Conference of Mayors.

Cuomo will he confront countless obstacles in this effort. Those on the right will reject tax increases. Those on the left will oppose spending cuts and reform of public employee compensation schemes. Cuomo must require each interest group to give on something and force them through a public airing of the issues to consider what is reasonable. For example:

Is it reasonable that the top 1% of households in New York pays a smaller share of income as state and local taxes, at 8.4%, than the rest of the income spectrum (which generally pays 10% to 12%)?  After all, this group is now receiving a much larger share of total income, growing from 17% in 1990 to almost 35% in 2007, according to the Fiscal Policy Institute.

Is it reasonable that many public employees pay little or nothing toward their health insurance and are guaranteed pensions and health coverage in retirement, while most in the private sector pay an increasing share of the health-care premium (not to mention some of the highest state and local taxes in the nation) and take their chances in the stock market for retirement?

Although he has vowed not to increase taxes, building a solid financial foundation will probably require that Cuomo consider tax increases (especially on wealthier individuals) as part of an overall package of spending cuts, public employee wage freezes and benefit reforms, and repeal of state laws favoring public employee unions (Taylor Law and Triborough amendment). Only the complete package will allow the state to right its ship and give local leaders the ability to do the same.

Erika Rosenberg, Senior Associate
Published in the Times Union January 3, 2011

A recent poll found 74% of New Yorkers think it’s a good idea. A commission appointed by our previous governor recommended it after several months of study and more than a dozen public meetings around the state.

And yet, the state Legislature is poised to adjourn for the year without seriously considering the idea. There were no legislative hearings on the commission’s report, and Gov. David Paterson couldn’t even get his bill to cap property taxes introduced in the Legislature.

Whether or not you think capping school property taxes is a good idea (full disclosure: I do), what does it say about our legislative process that an idea with such broad appeal addressing a problem that is clearly impacting on millions of New York residents isn’t taken seriously by our lawmakers?

Granted, the commission didn’t make public its preliminary report until June 3. That didn’t leave much time for the Legislature to act before its scheduled adjournment on June 23. And it’s obviously a complicated issue. We don’t want a seat-of-the-pants reaction.

However, that’s not an excuse for the Legislature to duck the issue entirely. There is no reason why in the coming months leaders can’t call lawmakers back into session for public hearings, committee meetings and eventually debates on the floors of both the Assembly and Senate on one or more bills written to address this pressing concern.

In fact, there’s an excellent reason for legislative leaders to do so: November elections. Every member of both houses is up for election.

The commission – the New York State Commission on Property Tax Relief (learn more at http://www.cptr.state.ny.us) — has given lawmakers plenty to think and talk about. Its 124-page preliminary report dissects the issue in a thoughtful way, looks at the experience of other states struggling with same issue, and makes more than a dozen suggestions in addition to calling for a property tax cap as its central recommendation.

As the commission reports, New York property taxes (excluding New York City) are 54 percent higher than the national average, viewed as a percentage of personal income. Even more striking, viewing property taxes as a percentage of home value, counties in Upstate New York claim 9 of the top 10 spots nationwide. In Erie, Monroe, Schenectady and other counties, we’re paying 2 to 3 percent of our home value every year in property taxes.

School taxes are driving this reality. They claim 62 cents of every property tax dollar collected outside of New York City. The next biggest chunk goes to counties: 17 cents.

We at the Center for Governmental Research examined this issue and other problems with the property tax by organizing a conference for policymakers in Albany in January 2007. We invited a representative from Americans for Tax Reform to present the case for a tax cap. She discussed her research showing that a tax cap in Massachusetts enacted in 1980 brought the state down from having the highest property taxes in the nation to the middle of the pack.

School groups are against this idea, as one would expect. And it’s no secret that they carry a lot of political weight in Albany, especially the 600,000-member New York State United Teachers union. NYSUT spent more than $2 million on lobbying (the second highest of any group) and more than $700,000 on campaign contributions in 2007, according to the New York Public Interest Research Group. 2007 was not a remarkable year – the union achieves this rank or something close to it every year. Among special interests in Albany, the teachers union is the holiest of holies.

The union and other opponents are making reasonable arguments against the tax cap, saying the results in Massachusetts wouldn’t necessarily hold true in New York and pointing out that the state does not fund schools as the same level as other states. New York pays about 43% of the overall school bill, less than the national average of 47%.

These issues aren’t getting a full hearing in Albany. Senate Majority Joseph Bruno is instead pushing an unrealistic proposal to eliminate school property taxes altogether, and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver is refusing to consider a cap unless it comes with guarantees that schools won’t suffer and that tax relief is targeted to low- and middle-income taxpayers.

A cynic might conclude that the power of special interests has shut down the conversation. But I’m not feeling cynical. I’m going to watch for those special sessions to be convened and for lawmakers to step up this summer and fall and take our problems seriously.

Erika Rosenberg, Senior Research Associate for CGR
Published in the Albany Times-Union June 20, 2008

The state provides information collected from the school districts on everything from attendance to suspensions to dropouts to graduation to test scores. You can find out the demographic breakdown of the student body and how many students come from families poor enough to qualify for free or reduced school lunches. Now, with the federal No Child Left Behind requirements, the state goes beyond reporting aggregate test scores to give the pass rates for subgroups, including low-income and minority students.

In 2005-06, the state produced a 36-page report card and an 8-page information report for each of 700 districts in the state. That’s not to mention all the other data available on school districts, including financial data and information about the special education program. In the 12 years since I started working with this information, it’s become increasingly detailed and complex. I can’t think of any other field (health, human services, juvenile justice) where so much data is publicly available.

Yet all the numbers often don’t tell us what we want. Or they don’t give the full picture.

Take graduation rates as an example. They’re obviously a key statistic. If you could only ask for one statistic about a school district, you might choose the graduation rate, considering it shows how well the district is doing in moving students across that all-important finish line.

Several years ago, New York began reporting what are called “cohort” graduation rates. Cohort rates are something that some other states are just starting to get their arms around. They measure success from the baseline of the 9th grade year, instead of just counting how many 12th graders graduate in a given year. This is important because school systems tend to lose many students in their 9th and 10th grade years. If you wait until 12th grade to count, you might paint an overly rosy picture.

North Carolina is one state that recently began reporting the cohort rate. For 2005-06, it was 68.1%. That was quite a contrast to the high 90s people had gotten used to seeing for the graduation rate, but it made more sense next to related statistics showing North Carolina was among the states with the most 16- to 19-year-olds lacking diplomas and not in school. The cohort rate was undoubtedly a more accurate portrayal of what’s happening.

New York’s cohort rate in 2005-06 was 66.7%. Our problem is that we can’t go back more than one year in the past to look at our trend. That’s because the state changed the way it defines the cohort between 2003-04 and 2004-05. It turns out that while the state was reporting graduation rates as cohort rates, it was taking out of the calculation students who left school during the first three years of high school. Only those who were still around in the fall of their fourth year were included. It kind of defeated the whole purpose of using a cohort rate, if you ask me.

So now we have a data series that looks like the chart below. Every school district in the chart experienced a marked decline in graduation rates between 2003-04 and 2004-05, but we know that’s an artifact of how the rate was calculated. It looks like graduation rates fell, but they really didn’t. We know that because in 2004-05 the state reported the numbers both ways. Each of these five districts had an essentially flat or, in one case, increasing graduation rate if you use the old way of counting.

Our story’s moral is that you have to be very clear what you’re looking at when you’re looking at educational data. All is not what it seems. States are getting more sophisticated and I think for the most part more honest in how they report the numbers. This may take another leap forward if more states move toward reporting progress using a “growth model.” This tracks students’ progress from grade to grade, rather than simply comparing this year’s fourth-graders to last year’s fourth-graders. That’s the simplest of explanations – it will undoubtedly get much more complicated when New York actually puts it to use. And then all us consumers of educational data will have to sharpen our pencils and wipe clean our glasses to look carefully at what we’re given.

It wasn’t that much different from legislative sessions past, except that in some years lawmakers are able to cobble together more in the way of 11th hour agreements. The bitterness is generally part of the package for whatever matters weren’t resolved.

Except, of course, that Spitzer as a first-term governor had promised to change everything about how Albany operates. That might have produced visions in some people’s minds of a well-oiled legislative machine proceeding in a productive and orderly fashion toward the end of its work.

That’s not quite how it went down. The press reports paint a picture of a more typical frenzy of down-to-the-wire negotiating, mostly among the three top state leaders, on a wide-ranging array of topics, from state rules on public construction projects to nutrition in schools to a New York City plan to charge commuters to alleviate congestion in Manhattan.

In the end, the leaders – Spitzer, Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver – made agreements on none of the issues that any of them had made a priority. Even some agreements that had already been worked out, such reform of those construction rules, came apart.

Bruno pointed the finger at Spitzer, saying the governor was “obsessed” with reforming state rules in financing political campaigns – in a way that Bruno refuses to go along with — and that held everything up.

Spitzer denied the charge but continued to push hard for campaign-finance reform. He’s now traveling the state with a “Where’s Waldo”-style presentation, asking voters to think about where their senators are (not in Albany) and press them to come back to the Capitol to work. Bruno says the Senate will return in mid-July.

And what about Silver? He stood rather quietly on the sidelines of this fight and seemed OK with letting the NYC traffic plan twist in the wind, since he wasn’t completely on board with that anyway. He might have enjoyed the break from years past when he was the one duking it out with Republican Gov. George Pataki as the session wound to a close.

New Yorkers will probably never know the exact sequence of the breakdown and who said what in the back room that blew everything up, so we’ll never be able to accurately pin blame. But does it matter? The general storyline seems clear enough: Spitzer and Bruno clashed bitterly enough over enough issues to bring progress to a standstill.

It might not be such a bad thing. Those sessions when a bundle of big bills were linked together and passed in a rush were always a little scary. It was just like the frenzy around the passing the state budget, where rank-and-file legislators were scrambling to figure out what it was they were voting on, and errors in the legislation would sometimes come back to haunt everyone.

At least this year the leaders parted ways over genuinely important issues and each was forced to publicly state his position. In the past, Bruno has been able to sidestep the campaign-finance issue. This year, because of the high profile Spitzer put on the issue, Bruno had to confront it. Yes, he tried to brush it aside by saying voters don’t care how campaigns are financed, but he also had to employ the “campaign giving is free speech” argument to defend the high limits and loopholes in the law.

It can’t go on this way forever, of course. The leaders have to learn to disagree passionately over some things, and work to forge compromise on the rest, or all progress will continue to grind to a halt. It would help if they didn’t poison the atmosphere with personal attacks about such things as Spitzer’s money or Bruno’s summer schedule.

Spitzer may be a steamroller, but Bruno has made it clear he’s not about to lie down for him. It doesn’t seem that Spitzer has figured out what to do about that. One minute he’s strongly confronting Bruno over budget issues, then he gives in on most of them as the April 1 deadline nears. Perhaps regretting that choice, he stuck to his guns as the session ended. Spitzer has to find a middle way – voters don’t want to wait for Democrats to take over the Senate (they’re two seats away, but it could still take years) for anything to get done in Albany.

What?! Isn’t this a huge deal? School property taxes are the bane of many a homeowner, and the Senate wants to get rid of them. Shouldn’t that be front-page news from Buffalo to Long Island?

It seems many in the Capitol press corps chose to let this story go by because the legislation is what’s known in Albany parlance as a “one-house bill.” That is, it doesn’t have a sponsor in the other house (the Assembly, in this case), and it’s not going anywhere, practically speaking.

The bill would allow voters in individual school districts to vote to eliminate the portion of their property taxes that pays for schools. If a majority of voters agreed (if?!), the school district would be required to reduce the property taxes it collects from homeowners (not businesses, an important exception) by 20% a year over five years, so that eventually homeowners would pay no school property tax.

But school districts would continue to collect the money – from the state. The Senate bill estimates the total cost to the state if every district participated in the optional program (again, if?!) at $9 billion.

Let’s give the senators credit: They got this one in just under the wire. The legislative session concludes June 21, but they were able to complete this important piece of work about a week before that and send it on over to the Assembly, where I’m sure it will be given careful study and a thorough analysis over the next, oh, 5 or 6 days.

In fact, who knows? Perhaps the Republicans who sponsored this bill will put in the extra hours to convince their Democratic colleagues in the Assembly that the 11th hour is the right time to pass such a sweeping change in taxing practice and school funding.

After all, every single Republican in the Senate – that’s 33 of them – is listed as a co-sponsor on the bill. Not one Democrat has his or her name on the bill. They must not care about property taxes, huh?

But wait, all but one Democrat voted for the bill. All but that darn Liz Krueger from Manhattan, who has some kind of hang-up about where the state is going to get the money to fund a takeover of local school costs.

I guess it’s not just the Republicans, clinging to the majority in their house by a mere two seats, who care about our property-tax woes. The Democrats give a hoot, too (no thanks to you, Liz).

The bill would also set up a commission to study property tax reform in New York, freeze property assessments for seniors (with the state once again making up the difference to schools and local governments), and provide financial incentives to local governments encouraging them to reassess property in their jurisdiction every three years to improve accuracy and fair sharing of the burden. In addition, it would require the state to pay for any “mandate” it imposes on schools or local governments that costs them more than $10,000.

I’m sure you know how troublesome those mandates are and how they cause schools and local governments to do all sorts of things they wouldn’t normally do that increase the tax burden (like negotiating generous contracts with unions, testing schoolchildren, and following health and safety guidelines).

The rest of the Senate bill sounds OK, but I’m not sure why you’d bother with it if the Senate succeeds in eliminating our school property taxes. Heck, that’s the lion’s share of my tax bill! If the Senate has figured out how to get somebody else to pay for that (those STATE taxpayers), my problems with the property tax are solved.

Most of the stories repeated the language from the Ed Department’s news release. The schools were designated, they said, “for meeting all applicable state standards and showing adequate yearly progress in English and math for two years.”

OK, but what are the state standards, and what constitutes “adequate yearly progress”? I decided to find out. Now I understand why the reporters didn’t bother trying to explain the answers in the space allotted by their newspapers.

It took me most of a day to make any sense at all of the state’s educational accountability system, and I have some background in this area as a former education reporter. I discovered a maze of bureaucratic jargon, complete with a few mathematical formulas adding to the confusion. Here’s what I learned:

The state standards have to do with the percent of students passing tests in math and English, but it’s not nearly that simple. Students fall into one of four levels based on their performance on the state tests, from “not meeting standards” (level 1) to “meeting standards with distinction” (level 4). The top two levels, 3 and 4, are considered to be meeting standards.

But years ago, the state decided to give schools some credit for students scoring at level 2 (“partially meeting standards”). So to calculate its “performance index,” the state adds the percentage of students scoring at levels 3 and 4 to the percentage scoring at levels 2, 3 and 4, then multiplies by a 100. That’s our first formula – did you follow it?

The top possible index is 200 for a school with 100% of students scoring at levels 3 and 4. This year, the standard the state wants elementary schools to meet is 150 – what a school would have if 75% of students were scoring at levels 3 and 4 (and none at level 2). A more likely scenario would include some students at level 2. At the bottom end of the possibilities, a school could meet the standard if 50% of students scored at levels 3 and 4 and 50% achieved a level 2 score.

What that means is that a school can meet the state standards and qualify for the high-performing designation if as little as 50% of students are meeting standards as defined by their performance on the state test. Remember, level 2 performance is not considered to be meeting state standards.

Is this wrong? I’m not sure. Schools have been under tremendous pressure to improve since the mid-1990s, when state Education Commissioner Richard Mills took office and began a campaign to introduce tougher tests, require students to pass them to graduate and publicize tests results and other measures of school performance (attendance and suspension rates, for example). It was big news for several years, and the schools that felt the most heat were almost always schools with high proportions of poor students that already had a legacy of failure.

Then came the federal No Child Left Behind law, based on President Bush’s experience in Texas with educational accountability. The picture became significantly more complex, as No Child Left Behind requires states to hold schools accountable not only for overall test performance but also for the performance of subgroups of students, including ethnic groups and poor and disabled students. The intent of the law is to ensure that schools can’t hide poor results for poor or minority children behind overall high performance.

I can’t argue with any of these intentions. Even though some educators say schools have been driven to obsess about tests above all else and shortchange real learning, it seems to me you have to measure achievement across the state in a way that can be standardized and reported to the public.

After all, New York taxpayers spend more on their schools than any other state in the country. That was another recent bit of news, that New York’s per-student spending in 2004-05 was $14,119, 62 percent higher than the national average. And that’s before this year’s infusion of $1.8 billion in additional state aid to schools, negotiated by Gov. Eliot Spitzer and legislators to settle a lawsuit over school funding. The business-backed Public Policy Institute estimates per-student spending will rise to more than $18,000 this year.

State leaders promise even more educational accountability will follow this year’s big increase. But it can’t be effective if the public can’t understand it. The above description is just a taste of what’s involved in the current system – I didn’t even get a chance to tell you about “Adequate Yearly Progress,” “Annual Measurable Objectives,” and “Safe Harbor Targets.” These are all the ways the state treats schools that aren’t meeting the standards, probably the most important aspect of the accountability system.

I have no doubt that the folks at the Education Department who designed this system were trying to do the right thing: design objectives and targets that are fair to schools and motivate all to reach the highest possible performance. But the results are nearly inscrutable to the public. We shouldn’t have to trust that schools are doing well if the state says so; we should understand the basis upon which the state is judging schools. That’s going to require some redesign of the current system or a whole lot more newsprint and education reporters to explain what the state’s doing.

For years, we New Yorkers have been complaining about Albany’s “three men in a room” custom, which brings together the governor, Assembly speaker and Senate leader into a back room to negotiate deals out of the public eye. The sense has been that these three make all the decisions in secret, and legislators and the public have nothing to say about it.

Even before Gov. Eliot Spitzer took office, leaders began making small changes in this practice, occasionally gathering for public leaders’ meetings covered by the press. Spitzer has taken the changes a step further, inviting the leaders of the minority parties in each house and a few other legislators to take part.

The result was a session on May 16 described by reporters present as full of sniping, fingerpointing, grandstanding, taunting and giggling. At one point, Spitzer felt it necessary to assert his authority by saying, “This is my room and we’re going to play by my rules.”

Not what the public might have hoped for when it denounced the “three men in a room” way of getting things done.

So what happened? I think this is an important question, because the issue of leaders’ meetings seems to be going the way of other recent reforms in Albany. That is, state government moves away from the old way of doing things, but the new way doesn’t seem to be much of an improvement.

We complained about “empty-seat voting” – which recorded votes in the Legislature as affirmative if the legislator wasn’t present to vote – and we got rules requiring members to be in their seats to vote. But that didn’t change the fundamental process for passing bills – all bills that make it to the floor of either house are approved, suggesting that the real deals are still cut behind the scenes.

We railed about the 20-year string of late state budgets, and we got three years of nominally on-time budgets. But they were rushed into law and continued to raise spending well beyond the level of inflation, adding to the financial burden of government in the state that already has the highest state and local tax burden in the nation.

The power structure in Albany has responded at a superficial level to critics but has been unwilling or unable to really change how business is done. That’s not a surprise. Meaningful change is going to take a long, hard fight.

The prospects for real reform were the subject of a May 17 panel discussion that I participated in for an Issues Summit held by Buffalo’s business lobby group, the Buffalo-Niagara Partnership. Former Assembly Majority Leader Paul Tokasz, now working as a lobbyist, and Deputy Budget Director Kim Fine also took part, along with Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center.

Norden discussed the differences between lawmaking in Albany and Washington and pointed out that in Washington lawmakers hold public hearings on specific bills. You may be surprised to hear this, but that rarely happens in Albany. Public hearings do occur, but they are generally more broadly focused on an issue or the operations of a state agency. Interested parties have a chance to opine, but it’s difficult to get into the nitty-gritty details of what should be done without a bill on the table to debate.

Tokasz addressed the “three men in a room” issue and argued that the public’s perception has been wrong. While it may be the three leaders gathered to hash out deals, the legislative leaders represent the collective opinion of their caucuses. In other words, Assembly Democrats tell Speaker Sheldon Silver what they want, and not vice versa.

I still believe the public is left out of deal-making to an unacceptable degree. That’s the case because of how secretive and rushed the negotiating process is, especially around the budget. One case in point: I wonder if it would have been possible for state leaders to cut the political deal on school funding necessary to pass a budget — sending an additional $420 million to wealthier schools, mostly on Long Island — if the whole state had understood what was happening.

This argues for more time and more public debate on the budget and other issues facing the state. We may need to change how we talk about these goals in order to get state leaders to go deeper in making change. Rather than denouncing specific practices such as empty-seat voting and secret leaders’ meetings, reform advocates need to clearly communicate what New York needs: a genuine public airing of issues and options that gets down to specifics.

The reason is obvious. These two powers – to raise buckets of campaign cash and to draw the borders of legislative districts (including those you want and excluding those you don’t) – form the heart of incumbent power in the Legislature. Getting them voted into law by those very same incumbents will be a neat trick.

Yet Gov. Eliot Spitzer promised during last year’s campaign to work to fundamentally change how state government works, and in the past week he has made a slew of proposals following through on that pledge. Not only did he propose to lower various types of campaign contribution limits, he also proposed legislation to overhaul the court system and to revamp election law, including, yes, establishing a redistricting process independent of (though influenced by) the Legislature. (He also introduced a bill to allow marriage between gay people – it was a busy week.)

Campaign finance landed with the loudest thud. Spitzer had hoped to negotiate a deal and announce it April 23, the day that civic groups across the state had chosen to gather at the Capitol and make their annual push for several reforms of government. Instead, he blamed the Republicans who control the state Senate for the lack of an agreement.

The main point of contention was a Spitzer proposal to ban contributions from corporate subsidiaries and limited liability corporations, which the governor says are just ways for businesses to get around the $5,000 annual contribution limit imposed by current state law. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno wouldn’t go along with it, saying it was an unfair restriction.

Spitzer also wants to lower the contribution limit for individuals to a statewide campaign to $15,000 from $55,900 and place a $50,000 cap on individuals, corporations, unions and political action committees giving to political party housekeeping accounts (which are supposed to be used for general party-building efforts and not campaigns). New York has some of the highest contribution limits in the nation, and currently there is no limit on donations to housekeeping accounts.

It’s not hard to see why the proposals rattled Bruno. Republicans outnumber Democrats by just four in the Senate. Bruno’s majority has shrunk in recent years and been directly threatened by Spitzer, who has vowed to help elect Democrats to take over the house. By one measure, Bruno depends more heavily on contributions from partnerships (including LLCs) than either Spitzer or Assembly Democrats.

Between July and November 2006, Bruno’s personal campaign committee took in $57,300 from partnerships, 15% of the total during that time period. Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s committee received just $4,000 from partnerships, 11% of the total. And Spitzer’s committee raked in $147,850, but that was just 5% of his total.

This is just a small piece of the picture, as it doesn’t include contributions to the party and house committees controlled by Bruno, Silver and Spitzer that take in some of the largest donations. That points to another problem with the campaign-finance system — despite the fact that contributions must be reported to the state Elections Board and the board makes those lists public, it requires hours and not a small measure of expertise to make any sense of it.

In addition, important information is often left out of the records, including the dates of contributions and the type of contributor making the donation (individual, corporation, partnership, etc.). Unlike the federal government, the state does not require contributors to disclose the names of their employers or the names of people who actually delivered the contributions (“bundlers” play a key role in collecting and delivering groups of donations).

All this makes it more difficult, if not impossible, to track patterns and understand the stories behind the numbers about who is giving what to whom. Also, since the first campaign filing for the year is not due until July 15, there is no reporting of campaign contributions made during the legislative session.

Civic groups concerned about the influence of money in state politics are pushing not only for lower limits and better disclosure but also for public financing of campaigns. That seems to me a tough sell to a cynical electorate. We have some of the highest taxes in the nation, and we should spend taxpayer money on political campaigns?

Lower limits and better disclosure would be welcome changes for those concerned that special interests hold too much sway over the Legislature. But committed contributors have historically found ways around whatever limits are imposed – that’s one reason the system has become so messy. And disclosure has its limits too – getting their names in the newspaper doesn’t seem to have shamed anyone into not giving or receiving yet. This may be an area where, for all our desire for radical change, we may have to settle for incremental progress.

It also gives us a woefully outdated structure of government that has proven incredibly resilient despite many criticisms and calls for change.

The latest evidence comes from a Center for Governmental Research project — prepared for the Long Island Index — comparing the structure and cost of government on Long Island to that of another densely populated suburban area: Northern Virginia.

The CGR project, headed by Charlie Zettek, found that Long Island had 26 times as many governments (including towns, villages, cities, school districts and special districts) as Northern Virginia: 439 vs. 17. This correlated with higher costs for government. Long Islanders pay $5,562 per capita for government, compared to $3,840 in Northern Virginia, a difference of 45%. Higher spending, of course, means higher taxes. Long Islanders pay 55% more in property taxes than their counterparts in Northern Virginia.

You might not be surprised at any of those figures. But consider this: the Long Island Index survey of residents in both areas found Northern Virginia residents were generally more satisfied with the level of service they received from local governments than Long Islanders.

More Northern Virginia residents rated police, parks, roads and schools as “excellent” or “good” than Long Islanders. (More Long Islanders gave high marks to garbage services, and the two areas were about equal in rating libraries.) Twice as many Northern Virginians said they could trust their county government to do what is right all or most of the time (51% vs. 26% on Long Island).

Back in the non-surprising category, nearly twice as many Northern Virginians as Long Islanders said the value in quality local services that they receive from property taxes was excellent or good (62% vs. 33%).

The new information in the report is that more local governments don’t produce more satisfied residents. When New York’s mind-boggling system of local governments has been defended, it has often been on those grounds. These findings strongly undercut that argument.

There were several other interesting findings. CGR’s analysis found that most of the difference in the cost of government in the two areas could be attributed to higher salaries and benefits for government workers here in New York: $873 of the $1,722 difference between per-capita costs on Long Island and in Northern Virginia (51%). New York is a state with strong protections for public workers and powerful unions, while Virginia is a right-to-work state where employers call most of the shots.

Another significant part of the difference can be attributed to different state requirements to fund programs ($477, or 28%, of the $1,722). In New York, local governments pay more toward public assistance programs and highways than in Northern Virginia.

But the remainder — $372, or 22% of the difference – can mostly be traced to the structure of governments.

The analysis of spending on fire services illustrates this point nicely. On a per capita basis, Long Island had 3 times the number of fire stations and fire trucks than Northern Virginia. Why? In Northern Virginia, fire fighting resources are managed at a regional county-wide level. Contrast that with Long Island’s 179 separate fire departments, which manage resources for their own little corner of the world. The result is, on a regional basis, there is massive — and costly — duplication of stations and equipment.

New York’s system of local government dates to the 18th century. Many efforts to change it and encourage consolidation have accomplished little. It’s not unlike the court system, which was the subject of a recent talk to the area League of Women Voters. Supreme Court Justice Evelyn Frazee, a member of the Special Commission on the Future of the New York State Courts, explained our similarly outdated judicial system.

New York has 9 trial courts and the most complex structure in the nation. Although it’s a dry topic, there are real consequences for people in the court system who lose time (not to mention their sanity) appearing in multiple courts on the same case. But several commissions have come and gone over the past several decades and the Legislature hasn’t budged on any of their suggested reforms (most recommend the same things: consolidate and make two trial courts, add a Fifth Department to the Appellate Division).

We have a new commission on local government too, Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Commission on Local Government Efficiency. It’s long past time for the voters and – more importantly – the Legislature to take seriously and act upon the work that comes of these commissions. It’s just not true anymore, if it ever was, that the status quo upsets no one and change will be difficult. Change will be difficult, but it becomes more urgent every day.