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.

       

 

Our forum on the risks of using AI in schools, and sign our petition calling for a moratorium!

 

Above is a video of the forum held on Dec. 6, with panelists including Sen. Kristen Gonzalez, students, teachers, parents, and professionals from a variety of fields.  They explained the risks of AI, to student privacy, cognitive development, critical thinking, creativity, collaboration and emotional wellbeing, as well as to the local and global environment. 

Now we have posted a petition, urging Mayor-elect Mamdani, a to support a two-year moratorium on AI use in NYC public schools.  This moratorium would allow the DOE to establish rigorous processes for responsibly assessing the risks and impacts of AI, before introducing these programs in classrooms and schools.   If you agree, please sign our petition now!  Also see this AI Toolkit, with links to resolutions for CECs, posted by Parents for AI Caution. 

 

·       AI undermines children’s ability to learn. AI use in schools has a negative impact on students’ cognitive skills, critical thinking, and creativity. It undermines the relationship between teachers and students, which is at the center of how students learn. The RAND Corporation’s report on AI in K-12 contexts finds no teaching and learning gains from AI use. In fact, there is increasing evidence that AI use in educational contexts rewires your brain. An MIT team found a significant decrease in brain activity among students asked to write an essay using AI. Research suggests that students do worse when "taught" by AI instead of human teachers. There is also racial, ethnic, and gender bias built into AI models, which influences the feedback students are given and the material they are exposed to. Finally, there is increasing evidence of the mental health toll of AI: children have formed “romantic relationships” with chatbots, and several tech companies are being sued because their platforms coached children into dying by suicide.

 

·       AI invades our students’ privacy and puts them at risk of surveillance. AI use in schools undermines student privacy, as most AI-enabled programs data-mine, meaning they collect and process personal information for commercial purposes and product improvement, which violates the New York student privacy law Ed Law 2D. Currently, parents have no means of knowing how their children’s sensitive biometric data is being used by AI companies like Amira, which collects student voices.  The State Education Department has issued guidance  that schools should not allow the collection of  biometric data  without parent input, but Amira is  widely used  without any such input. 

  

·       AI undermines a “Green and Healthy Schools” agenda and our city’s climate goals. AI is driving fossil fuel expansion and thus fueling climate collapse; MIT researchers estimate that “by 2026, the electricity consumption of data centers will rival that of whole countries like Japan or Russia.” AI data centers are also consuming our drinking water at a moment when climate change is leading to more frequent droughts. NYC children, particularly students of color, unhoused students, and low-income students, already face harms from fossil fuels, including air pollution, flooding, and extreme heat. All of these negatively impact their ability to thrive and learn. If large consumers like NYC public schools continue to fuel AI data center growth, our children will face more catastrophic disasters, famine and mass displacement. 

 

·       AI use in schools undermines an affordability and worker-first agenda. Data center expansion is driving up electricity prices for working New Yorkers. Meanwhile, the funds used for expensive contracts for ed-tech could instead be used to expand universal childcare, reduce class sizes, upgrade aging school buildings, or otherwise benefit students, educators and families.  

An AI moratorium should be a top priority for the Mamdani administration in the first 100 days. The largest school system in the country should use its purchasing power and moral authority to protect children, not leave them subject to a surveillance experiment that will undermine learning and leave them a world on fire. There is overwhelming support for a moratorium from across the political spectrum: CECs are already passing resolutions supporting an AI moratorium, and parents and teachers have repeatedly made their voices heard against AI contracts at PEP meetings. The ban on cellphones in schools has been an overwhelming success—but it came ten years too late. Let’s not make the same mistake with AI.

 

Signed by:

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Alliance for Quality Education 

Parent Coalition for Student Privacy

Class Size Matters

The Circle Keepers

NYC Kids PAC

Zephyr Teachout, Law Professor, Fordham Law School

Kaliris Salas-Ramirez, PhD, Assoc.Professor Robert Wood Johnson Medical School; Pres. CEC4

Liat Olenick MSEd, Climate Families NYC

Martina Meijer, MORE-UFT

Kelly Clancy, PhD, CEC-20, Parents for AI Caution

Oscar Romero, Educator 

Kyle DeAngelis, 3rd Grade Teacher, UFT Chapter Leader, MORE-UFT

Alina Lewis, PhD, CEC-20, President of the Brooklyn School of Inquiry PTO

Mustafa Sullivan, Coalition for Educational Justice

Lauren Monaco, Early Childhood Educator, UFT Chapter Leader, MORE-UFT