Coalition for Equitable Education Funding

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The Coalition for Equitable Education Funding (CEEF) advocates for the resources needed to ensure every student receives a high-quality education, with a focus on those who need the most support. It includes more than 120 advocacy organizations, civil rights organizations, social service providers, and groups representing students, parents, and educators that first came together in 2023 as the Emergency Coalition to Save Education Programs to push elected leaders to sustain important education programs, services, and staff positions that were supported with temporary federal COVID-19 stimulus dollars and one-year city funding set to run dry in June 2024. While the City made significant investments in Fiscal Years 2025 and 2026 to save many of these initiatives, the work is far from done.

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State budget advocacy

For more than 15 years, the Foundation Aid formula has been used to decide how much education funding school districts get from New York State for each student. New York City currently uses its Foundation Aid dollars to support school budgets and to fund a range of crucial education programs—and with more funding from Albany, the City could do even more to support students. While Governor Hochul and the State Legislature took a positive step by fully funding the Foundation Aid formula for the first time in 2023, the formula itself includes outdated and incomplete measures of need and has not evolved to account for growing costs, particularly in large urban districts. Unfortunately, the limited changes to the formula included in the final Fiscal Year 2026 budget resulted in New York City schools getting hundreds of millions of dollars less than they would have received had the State made no changes to the formula at all.

CEEF is continuing to call for changes to the formula to help ensure New York City schools can meet the needs of all students, including students with disabilities, English Language Learners (ELLs), students from low-income families, students experiencing homelessness, and others who need additional support. Key recommendations include adding a per-pupil weight for students in temporary housing and students in the foster system and updating the Regional Cost Index (RCI) for New York City, which is supposed to account for differences in wages in different parts of the State but hasn’t changed since 2006.

City budget advocacy

Over the past two years, the Mayor and City Council baselined many of the important education programs that were at risk due to expiring federal or city funds, providing long-term funding. However, the City continued other initiatives for one year only—meaning the funding will expire at the end of the 2025–26 school year unless City leaders act to extend funding in next year’s budget.

The programs at risk of being rolled back or eliminated as soon as July 2026 include summer programming, preschool special education services, Learning to Work, restorative justice, the Mental Health Continuum, early childhood outreach, and immigrant family communications and outreach. CEEF urges City leaders to provide long-term funding for all of these programs moving forward to help ensure their stability and success.