2025: A watershed year for Class Size Matters. Will you support our work to ensure more progress in 2026?

Dear all: 

This has been a watershed year for class size in NYC public schools.  Nearly 750 schools lowered class size this fall to far smaller levels, and about 60% of classes achieved the benchmarks required by the law which we helped pass in 2022.   In these classrooms, many teachers are  ecstatic about the changes they’ve seen, and hundreds of thousands of students are benefiting as a result.  Whether or not your child was among them,  please consider giving to Class Size Matters.

Yet class sizes still vary widely across  the city’s districts and neighborhoods, causing far too many students to struggle.  About 78,500 students in grades K through 5^th are still jammed into classes of twenty five or more, and in middle and high schools, there are more than 24,000 classes of thirty or more with about 760,000  students.

Regrettably, DOE has done little to create space for the hundreds of overcrowded schools that do not have the capacity for smaller classes, either by building enough new schools or annexes, or aligning  their enrollment  to class size goals.  Please donate to our work,  so we can keep fighting for every NYC student  to receive the smaller classes they need and deserve .

Some other highlights of our work in 2025: 

• ·  After we blew the whistle that the School Construction Authority board had lacked its legally required three members for over two years, another member was  finally appointed.  The same thing happened when we pointed out their lack of a mandated whistleblower policy – they created one.

• ·       Along with other advocates, we alerted the NYC Department of Health that Talkspace, which has a $27 million contract with the City to provide online mental health services to teens, was collecting their personal data, sharing it with social media companies, and using it for marketing purposes.  After  months of continued pressure, we finally convinced the DOH  to rewrite their contract with the company, require that Talkspace remove social media trackers from their webpages, and rewrite the Teenspace Privacy Policy. 

• ·       We were the first to reveal publicly that the data of more than 3,000 current and former NYC students in the PowerSchool student information system had been breached, after the DOE had denied this to reporters.  This announcement helped lead to affected families being alerted to the breach, even if belatedly. 

• ·       We persuaded DOE to strengthen their Chancellor’s regulations to include a provision that any individual or company provided with access to personal student information must have a written contract establishing how that information will be protected from further disclosure or misuse. 

• ·       Just a few weeks ago, along with other concerned advocates, teachers and students, we helped persuade the Panel for Educational Policy to reject four proposed DOE contracts with companies selling AI programs.  

• ·       We now have a petition calling on our new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to enact a moratorium on AI  use in schools so that rigorous protections against harm to students and the environment can be established.  Please sign our petition, if you haven’t already.

There is a theme that runs through all of our work:  to ensure that human relationships are centered in the learning experience of NYC schools.  If you want to help us achieve this goal, please make a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters.

Happy New Year,   Leonie