Possible legislative breakthrough on class size: please help us get this done!

We have heard via our friends in the legislature that there is a real push by the Assembly and the Senate to include requirements on reducing class size in the extension of Mayoral Control.  In he NY Post, NY State Sen. John Liu, the powerful chair of the NYC Education Committee, was quoted as saying he supports reducing class size as part of amending Mayoral control.  

Please call your legislators!  Tell your Assembly member and Senator that you need them to push for smaller class caps as part of any Mayoral control package , along the lines of S. 6296/A. 7447 ,  with strong accountability measures attached. 

The legislative session ends next week on June 2; we only have a few days to get this done! 

Thanks! 

Sign up NOW for our annual Parent Action Conference on June 4!

Please sign up for our Annual Parent Action Conference on Saturday June 4 from 4 to 6 PM, sponsored by Class Size Matters and NYC Kids PAC.  

Invited keynote speakers include Congressman Jamaal Bowman, NY State Senator Robert Jackson and NYC Council Education Chair Rita Joseph.

Following that, we'll have a brief presentation on the proposed budget cuts to NYC schools and the capital plan, and what parents can do to prevent them from being imposed.

This will be followed by your choice of workshops on a host of important issues:

• Reforming Fair Student Funding

• Resources for parents navigating the special education system
  

• How DOE puts your child’s privacy at risk

• Literacy in NYC: How parents forced a change

• The problems with charter schools

• Parent organizing and advocacy

Please register now at Eventbrite here or at 

https://tinyurl.com/PACconference22  

A flyer you can download is here.

Our testimony to the NYC Council urging them to prevent the Mayor's proposed cuts to school budgets and the capital plan!

 May 25, 2022

Check out our  submitted budget testimony before the NYC Council Finance Committee for today. We urged the Chair Justin Brannan and other Council Members to prevent the Mayor's proposed cuts to school budgets of $375 million, that are projected to lead to a loss of about 3200 teaching positions, which in turn may cause the sharpest increase in class sizes since the Great Recession, the last thing NYC kids need to recover from the Covid crisis.  We also ask them to oppose the proposed $1.5 billion in cuts to new capacity in the capital plan, which is unsupported by evidence and apparently relies on an unrealistic change to the school capacity formula that assumes every middle school and high school classroom can be scheduled for every period of the day.

Our testimony also follows.  If you'd like to submit your own comments on these cuts,  you can send an email to testimony@council.nyc.gov by Friday.

Please check out our panel on The Fight for Smaller Classes: Activism in the Wake of the Pandemic

The panelists included Leonie Haimson, founder of Class Size Matters, Lisa Haver, co-founder and coordinator of the grass-roots Alliance for Philadelphia Public Schools, and Leah VanDassor, the president of the Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) in Minnesota, which just achieved smaller class size caps in their contract after a threatened strike. Teacher union members and activists from Philadelphia, Colorado, and Los Angeles asked questions and added comments from the audience.

New and Emerging Threats to Student & Teacher Data Privacy

On May 6, the NY Post revealed that about two million students in NY State alone may have had their privacy violated by the massive Illuminate data breach; students in CT and CO were also affected.

This is an update from reporting in The Journal, based on FOILed records from NYSED that found at least one million students affected, across 24 school districts and 18 charter schools in New York, plus one Board of Cooperative Educational Service.

The NY State Education Dept. and the NYC DOE needs to do a far better job protecting personal student data and complying with the NY State Student privacy law 2D, which was passed in 2014, and to minimize the sharing of student data, ensuring strict security standards including encryption, and requiring that vendors delete it as soon as possible and at the very least when students graduate, none of which happened here.

Illuminate has reported that the hackers accessed a "database storing some information in the unencrypted format", according to The Record news site, and that the data may have included student and parent names, email addresses, grades, attendance, birth dates, ID numbers, genders, race and ethnicity, languages spoken at home, Title I and disability status and more.  Data from the records of students in Colorado and Connecticut may also have been breached.

Two weekends ago, Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, and Doug Levin, Co-Founder and National Director of K12 Security Information Exchange and a national expert on student data breaches, gave presentations at the Network for Public Education national conference in Philadelphia, in which we discussed the Illuminate Breach and the how districts and schools can better protect the privacy of their students and teachers.

Please follow the following links for videos of this session, separated into Part I and Part II, along with questions and comments from the audience.