Craig Garrett on the need for human-centered schools rather than learning based upon AI.

 Craig Garrett is a parent leader in District 14 whose group, District 14 Families for Human Learning, has just created a new website here.  You can sign up for more info at the website.  Below are the comments that he delivered at the D14 CEC meeting last month.  If you agree, please sign our petition for a moratorium on the use of AI in schools here.

    Last night I delivered the following remarks at the end of District 14's CEC meeting, a few minutes after Superintendent Cintron glowingly described his forthcoming "AI vision statement". The first half of the meeting was spent prioritizing urgent funding requests from individual schools (a process one CEC member referred to as "the hunger games"). Mostly of those requests were about fixing problems like inoperable bathrooms and broken PA systems. It really underlined the absurdity of signing multimillion-dollar contracts for unproven ed-tech while our schools can't afford functioning bathrooms. 

    Let's all cast our minds back one year, to early January 2025. At Coney Island, long-shot mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was doing the Polar Bear Plunge in a suit and tie. At movie theaters across the country, kids were flocking to see Moana 2. And from every direction, we were hearing about a revolutionary new technology that was about to transform our lives.

 Back then, the tech industry's story about artificial intelligence was thrilling, provocative, and told entirely in the future tense. Business leaders and elected officials rushed to incorporate AI into their operations. There was a sense of urgency, an eagerness to get on board this magic technology that would solve our most stubborn problems and transport us to a brilliant future.

    Well, I'm here with a message from the present. The  flourishing we were promised has not arrived. We're waking up to the fact that this technology is NOT being developed to extend human capacity or expand human knowledge — because those are not the tech industry's priorities. In 2025 we saw the leading AI companies drop their commitments to democracy and equality,  dismantle their safeguards and moderation, and aggressively fight off any form of regulation, no matter how sensible.

    And unlike in January 2025, we now have real-world data on how their products are performing. In “AI-enabled” classrooms, students are experiencing isolation, cognitive atrophy, and loss of focus. Outside classrooms, LLMs are endorsing suicide, inducing psychosis, and empowering bullies. This is happening because tech companies have decided to prioritize user engagement over safety, dependence over efficacy. And it turns out those decisions are antithetical to human flourishing.

    Just three weeks ago, the Eric Adams administration tried to push four AI ed-tech contracts through the PEP. And they failed, to our great relief, saving NYCPS millions of dollars. Let's hope 2026 is the year our school leaders wake up to the fact that ed tech in its current form is a not just a waste of money, it's a direct threat to our values, our humanity, and our children. 

How I was quoted about Zohran's reversal on Mayoral control -- and my full remarks

Just a quick  update to let you know that yesterday, Zohran Mamdani announced that he was appointing District 3 Superintendent Kamar Samuels as his Chancellor. 

He also said he was renouncing his previous position that Mayoral control needs reform, expressed frequently during his campaign, and that he would ask the Legislature to renew it in June.  He did mention some potential tweaks, to  “improve the parent coordinator position to be a meaningful organizer of parents” and to “restructure meetings so that working parents can actually attend them.”  You can see his entire announcement here.

Both these suggestions, while potentially promising, are a far cry from the fundamental reforms that many parents, teachers and advocates believe should be made to ensure significant checks and balances in the school governance system. 

DOE is unlike any other city agency, in that there is no significant local input into educational decision-making, either from the City Council nor an independent school board, the latter which 98% of districts across the  country already enjoy.  School boards were created to try to take the politics out of education, and though this is essentially impossible, one-man rule in NYC has too often led to wasteful and corrupt contracts, backroom deals, irrational policies and faulty implementation.

I was sitting with my family at lunch when I was alerted to Mamdani’s statements through various chat groups.  I listened to his remarks and began to tweet.  I thought it was important for someone to speak out quickly to counter his claim – that is too often the conventional wisdom --- that Mayoral control leads to more accountability, when the reverse is true, as I explained in my briefing  to the NYC Bar Association.

Surprisingly, both the NY Daily News and the NY Times quoted my remarks in their stories about the Mamdani reversal – but only part of them, so  I’d like to share the whole thread with you, which began in response to a tweet from reporter Ross Barkan: 

@Ross Barkan

Mamdani announces he will support the system of mayoral control after his past disavowal of the system. He promises more input from parents.

 

@leoniehaimson

Very troubling. Every mayor has promised more parent input and then when push comes to shove, they just do what they want. Any system with no locally based checks & balances is inherently dysfunctional & anti- democratic @ZohranKMamdani

 

It has also led to poor policy decisions under every mayor since Bloomberg, and too many backroom deals in which kids needs have been sacrificed for political ends. 

 

One man rule has not worked for our federal government as we’ve seen clearly in 2025. No matter how much @ZohranKMamdani has progressive positions or values, it will not work well for @nycschools either

 

This apparent reversal is indeed an inauspicious beginning to Mamdani’s mayoralty.  I want to assure you that in 2026, we will continue to advocate for real accountability, transparency, and spending focused on what research and experience shows actually works  – including smaller classes – rather than unproven and often risky fads, like AI.

I hope you will help us in achieving these goals as well, by supporting our work in 2026.

 Happy New Year, Leonie

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

Update on problems with the School Construction Authority: My comments at their Nov. 22 board meeting & their response

As I reported previously,  at a SCA board meeting on  March 20, 2025, during the public comment period, I pointed out that the board had lacked the necessary three members required by law for nearly two years.  Three members are required at all times by the state law that established the SCA in 1998, but after Lorraine Grillo resigned from the board in August 2023, no replacement was made.  I also pointed out to the board on that occasion that the SCA lacked a whistleblower policy, along with many other legally required policies, according to the 2025 report of the NY State Authorities Budget Office.

Though Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg, the Chancellor’s representative on the board, dismissed  my concerns, a third member to the board was appointed two weeks later, Liz Bergin.  Then, less than two months after that,  the SCA board approved a Whistleblower policy at their May 15 meeting,.  Though the SCA General Counsel Nadine Rivellese called this an “update”, the previous policy was never posted or provided to the NY State Authorities Budget Office, or to me when I requested a copy.  

Last month, on Nov. 20, 2025, I again spoke an SCA board meeting, and explained there were still serious deficiencies in the transparency and accountability required of the SCA board and the agency as a whole, including the following:

Failure to comply with the state and city laws requiring transparency and full funding:  According to their board minutes, the SCA board had never discussed the class size law or the challenges it presented in terms of creating space for smaller classes. Nor did they discuss the reporting required. 

The class size law requires an “annual capital plan for school construction and leasing to show how many classrooms will be added in each year and in which schools and districts to achieve the class size targets.”

In addition, Local Law 167, passed in 2018, requires the SCA to explain where school seats are needed by district, subdistrict and grade level, as well as the demographic data and methodology used to make these projections.  

Yet fewer than half of the seats are funded compared that the number that the SCA testified last year are needed to reach the  goals in the class size law.  Of those seats funded, fewer than two thirds are identified as to district, subdistrict or grade level.

Failure to comply with their own capital plans:  I also explained how the SCA has never fully spent the funding allocated for new capacity in the last three five-year capital plans—plans that were approved by the City Council.  Instead, the  cumulative shortfall is about $4.6 billion over 15 years.

No policies on time, attendance and salaries:  As the NY Public Authorities Office reported, the SCA lacks required policies on time and attendance, as well as salaries. Acting Deputy Chancellor Kevin Moran who has replaced Dan Weisberg as the Chancellor's representative on the board, seemed to listen intently to my critique, especially compared to Weisberg who was dismissive when I spoke at their March board meeting.  

I  sent my comments as a letter to the SCA board the next day.  A month later, SCA Vice President and General Counsel Nadine Rivellese replied in a letter which is posted here, along with my response to some of her more questionable assertions.    

Two of her claims are indeed true: the ultimate responsibility for the SCA’s underfunding, lack of transparency and failure to comply with the law lies with Mayor Adams, who appoints all three board members and controls their budget. 

 Moreover, as she also pointed out, there are other ways to create more space in overcrowded schools than just capital construction.   But none of those other methods have been sufficiently employed by the DOE and the one that has the most potential and would likely save more than a billion dollars for staffing and construction costs has been rejected: balancing enrollment between nearby schools. . 

We are about to have a new Mayor who appears far more focused on the benefits of reducing class size in the public schools.  Let’s hope Zohran Mamdani, along with his Chancellor and appointees to the SCA board, are focused on addressing these fundamental flaws in the agencies' transparency, planning and funding.