Talking points for class size hearings starting tomorrow Wed. May 22 in the Bronx; make your voices heard!

 The just-released DOE class size plan for next year fails on every account. Class size borough hearings begin this Wednesday May 22^nd.   Make your voices heard!

• Bronx – Wednesday, May 22, 2024 (6:00pm)
• Manhattan – Thursday, May 23, 2024 (6:00pm)
• Staten Island – Tuesday, May 28, 2024 (6:00pm)
• Queens – Wednesday, May 29, 2024 (6:00pm)
• Brooklyn – Thursday, May 30, 2024 (6:00pm)

To register and receive the Zoom link, go to https://learndoe.org/contractforexcellence/ The links will be available by 5 PM the day of the hearing.

Our talking points are available as a pdf here, and below.  But feel free to draw from your own experiences or that of your child, and your perspective.  Thanks!

Talking points for class size hearings

The state passed the class size law nearly two years ago, yet the DOE has still taken no steps to ensure compliance with the law. Instead, their policies have caused class sizes to increase due to repeated cuts of school budgets, while also slashing their spending on more space. Their draft class size “plan”, posted May  7, makes insufficient investments in new teachers and space, and is bound to fail without significant improvements.

Lack of funding to hire enough teachers:

• DOE fails to invest sufficient funding to hire additional teachers to lower class size. The DOE says they will spend $137 million in “targeted” schools for this purpose, though they do not report which schools will receive this funding and how many more classes will meet the legal class size limits as a result.
• We estimate that this amount would allow for the hiring of only about 1,350 additional teachers, out of the 10,000 to 12,000 teachers the DOE itself says will be needed to comply with the law over the next four years. The longer the DOE waits to hire additional teachers, the more difficult it will become to ensure their quality and certification.
• Yet DOE plans to cut the budgets of as many as 760 schools due to projected enrollment decline and to impose a hiring freeze and vacancy reductions systemwide that could easily undo any positive impact from that $137 million. In fact, the city’s Financial plan projects a decrease of nearly 1,000 teachers next year, which would increase rather than decrease class size.
• At the same time, they fail to allocate any of the more than $800 million of Contracts for Excellence funds specifically for the purpose of reducing class size, or the $1.8 billion dollars the city has received in additional Foundation funding that they will have received since 2021-2022 school year. In addition, the Independent Budget Office projects a city surplus of more than $5 billion.

What the DOE should do instead to hire more teachers: 

• The DOE should provide funding to add at least 3,000 more teachers next year — one fourth of the additional number needed over over the next four years, at a cost of about $300 million. They should also promise to refrain from cutting any school’s budget, and not to impose a hiring freeze or vacancy reductions.

Lack of spending to create enough space

• The DOE refuses to create sufficient space for smaller classes. Principals at 650 schools reported to DOE in their survey that they currently cannot comply with the class size limits due to inadequate classroom space. Yet the new proposed five-year capital plan cuts more than $2 billion for new capacity compared to the current plan and would create only about 22,000 additional seats – one tenth of the number that the School Construction Authority itself claims will be necessary.
• A provision in the state budget passed in April requires the DOE to “increase planned spending on classroom construction by $2.0 billion” in order to be able to achieve the class size limits. Yet Instead of building more schools, the Mayor is planning to spend at least $6.8 billion for new jails –$2.7 billion more than the $4.1 billion currently dedicated for new school construction.
• The Queens jail will cost at least $3.9 billion, which is far more than the plan has for new schools in Queens; the Bronx jail to cost at least $2.9 billion. Yet there is not a single dollar specified in the capital plan for new schools to be built in the Bronx.
• The plan only Identifies new seats in six districts (2, 25, 27, 30, 31) plus one new high school in Brooklyn & one in Staten Island. 77% of the new seats remain unidentified as to borough, district, or grade level.
• Without an expanded and accelerated plan to build more schools, the DOE will never meet the timelines to achieve the class size limits in the law.

What the DOE should do instead to create more space:

• Immediately add at least $2 billion to the five-year capital plan, specifying where the new seats will be built by district, sub-district, and grade level, and explain how these additional seats will allow all schools over four years to reach the class size limits in the law.

Other problems with the DOE’s plan

• DOE proposes that every superintendent increase the percentage of classes in their district schools at or below the class size caps by 3%. Yet forcing superintendents and principals to lower class size without providing any more funding or space could create problems in many schools. Instead, it is DOE’s responsibility to ensure that every school has the resources needed to lower class size without negative tradeoffs to the overall quality of education students receive.
• The DOE also cites as an option to achieve the class size limits by expanding online learning. Forcing more students into remote classes, given the dismal results of this strategy during the pandemic, seems especially unwise and would likely undercut any of the benefits to student learning and social connection provided by smaller classes.

What the DOE should do instead:

• The DOE must create and implement an actual multi-year plan, showing which schools will receive additional funding to hire additional teachers to lower class size each year, and detailing where additional space will be created to allow the approximately 650 schools that do not currently have sufficient space to achieve the class size limits within the within the mandated time frame. If the DOE refuses to create this plan, the State Education Department should require them to do so.

 

Sad fate of landmarked PS 31 in the Bronx to be turned into high rise with a charter school instead

PS 31 when it was still standing

Today it was announced there will be a mixed use development at 425 Grand Concourse in the  Mott  Haven section of the Bronx.  A large apartment complex will be built on city owned land where until recently, a landmark public school building PS 31 once sat.    

The city awarded the project to Trinity Financial and MBD Community Housing Corporation, and will be financing it with funds from its ten year capital plan. The city also upzoned the site, to double its development rights and density.  The city will finance the construction through funds in the mayor's 10-year housing plan, which has as its goal to create or preserve 200,000 affordable units. 

Yet instead of a public school going into this building, a charter school will be built instead:

The development will include 241 apartments that will be rented to tenants earning between 60 and 100 percent of the area median income — $46,613 to $63,700 for families of three.

The 24-story tower is also being billed as the city's largest passive-house development, meaning that it will adhere to stringent energy efficiency measures. The administration said it would consume 30 percent of the energy of a traditional housing development.

The site will house a charter school, a medical facility, space for cultural programs and social services and a supermarket.

The community and preservationist advocates had tried for years to the save the original building, a beautiful school built at the turn of the century:

P.S. 31 was built in 1899 in the "Collegiate Gothic" style by the innovative municipal architect C. B. J. Snyder, who also designed a huge number of other schools during his tenure as the city's Superintendent of School Buildings. Long referred to as "The Castle on the Concourse."

Its commanding presence in the Mott Haven neighborhood, the school was granted landmark status in 1986, before its closure in 1997. Since then, it's fallen into extreme disrepair and is consistently threatened with destruction, with little to no effort made on the part of the city to restore the building to its former dignity. The building has long been seen as a battleground site for Bronx residents and preservation advocates across the city.

  

In June 2013, the city argued that P.S. 31 was a "public hazard" and couldn't withstand any more storms, but two years later, the building remains standing and in virtually the same condition. Engineers hired by nonprofit SoBRO argued that "although structurally unsound, the building is salvageable," to such a degree that even Goldman Sachs has expressed interest in investing in the restoration process. 

See the petition  to save the building that received nearly 1500 signatures from members of the community.

Despite the fact that the city had let the building deteriorate badly, even the Landmarks Preservation Commission voted not to strip the landmark status of the building and urged the city to preserve it.  Yet their vote had no impact on the city's decision.  As the NY Times reported in 2014 .

The Landmarks Preservation Commission had strong words for the owner of an abandoned landmark in the South Bronx — the elegant and imposing “Castle on the Concourse” — which is so dangerously deteriorated that emergency demolition may be the only resort.

“It’s been a disgraceful stewardship,” Elizabeth Ryan, a commission member, said at a public hearing on Dec. 17.

A fellow commissioner, Michael Devonshire, seconded the sentiment. “I find it completely despicable,” he said.

As remarkable as their anger was the identity of the landlord: New York City.... As a landlord, the city is treated differently by the landmarks law than a private owner, who must obtain approval from the commission before altering or demolishing an individual landmark, or a building within a historic district.

By contrast, a city agency receives only a nonbinding advisory report from the commission, which it may embrace, consider or disregard as it chooses....

Roberta Brandes Gratz, an author on urban affairs and a former member of the landmarks commission, took a longer — but no happier — view.

“What a sour note to end the Bloomberg administration landmarks legacy,” she wrote on Facebook. 

“The city is a terrible steward of its landmarks and frequently lets them deteriorate ’til they can make this excuse, even though alternative engineers show rescue and reuse possible. Watch a developer scoop this up.”

Which is what happened, in what is now a hot real estate area in the South Bronx.  Even though the Borough President Ruben Diaz had attended PS 31, and had  opposed its demolition,  he applauded the new plan:

“As a proud graduate of P.S. 31, I was sorry to see my beloved school building fall into such disrepair, and even sorrier to see it demolished. However, the Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) and the Housing Development Corporation (HDC) recognized the need for new life and new development at this historic site, and has moved to bring welcome new affordable housing units, commercial activity and a reinvigorated Garrison Playground to the Lower Concourse neighborhood."

The city did apparently save  some of the elements of the 1899 school building before demolition —including terra cotta gargoyles, heads and the engraved P.S. 31 sign—and will require that the future developer incorporate those salvaged pieces into the new building. More fragments are in the RFP here.

Sadly, these artifacts, including the PS 31 sign, will now apparently decorate a building housing a privately run charter school instead.

Common Core forums last night in the Bronx and Brooklyn: what a difference!

Me in the Bronx last night (credit: GothamSchools)

Last night in the Bronx, only about 50-75 people showed up at the Regents Forum at Evander Childs HS.  The borough president, Ruben Diaz Jr., who started off the evening, was clearly furious at the poor attendance and blamed it on the fact that NYSED officials had given only one week's notice.

It was a mixed crowd, but most of those who spoke in favor of the Common Core appeared to work at charter schools or were teachers affiliated with Educators for Excellence, an organization funded primarily by the Gates Foundation, that also funded the Common Core.  The director of E4E, Evan Stone, spoke, as well as two (!!) of their Bronx "outreach" directors, one of whom had been excessed [not laid off] when her school was closed last year.

Most of the speakers were against the Common Core and its associated testing regime.  These included Mark Naison, a professor at Fordham, who asked for the resignation of Regents head Merryl Tisch, and several parents who decried that their Kindergarten children were being subjected to inappropriate bubblesheets exams and worksheets labeled "test prep."  While Tisch said that the state did not support standardized testing for small children, the parents called her "disingenuous" and pointed out that these tests were on the NYSED's approved list of assessments. See this video of Monique Dols, a parent of a Kindergarten child at Dos Puentes, a bilingual school in Washington Heights.

Teachers lamented how the scripted and flawed Common Core curriculum hav taken all the joy out of teaching, and how students no longer had access to art, music and well-rounded education.  Parents reported that their children who once loved school now cry when doing homework, and are made to feel like they are failures.  The state had decided beforehand that 70% of the children would fail the tests, to what end? one asked.  Another parent said the quota for informational text was "diabolical" and pointed out that reading literature is what makes us "human."

Regent Betty Rosa, who was there along with Merryl Tisch and several NYSED Deputy Commissioners, said she voted against the teacher evaluation system linked to test scores, and that the Common Core focuses on evidence, but there is none for the Common Core itself.  She concluded that sadly, all the focus has been on the standards and the assessments, but everything needed between had been omitted: sufficient resources, small classes, quality curriculum, and teacher capacity.

I asked the following questions about student privacy: "We've learning that personally identifiable student data was uploaded to the inBloom cloud -- once last December to help with inBloom's "infrastructure development" and again in July for the data dashboard "roadshows."  Exactly what personal data was uploaded and couldn't dummy data be used, given how incredibly sensitive much of this information is, and could be seen by anyone attending the roadshows?"

"Also, thousands of parents signed petitions against the state sharing this data with inBloom; hundreds have written letters begging for their child to opt out and at least 40 superintendents have given back their Race to the Top funds in hope of protecting their students; but the state insists on sharing their data anyway.  Parents, school board members and Superintendents all agree that this plan is not only completely unnecessary but poses huge risks for children's privacy and safety.  Eight of the the nine original inBloom states have now pulled out .  Why is the New York State Education Department so much more resistant to listening to parents and educators and so much more careless with kids' privacy and lives?"

Regent Merryl Tisch handed over the mike to Ken Wagner of NYSED, who repeated the usual blather and didn't answer either of my questions.

credit: WNYC/InsideSchools

In Brooklyn, the scene was completely different. The speaking list was entirely dominated by charter school parents who had been bused in by Michelle Rhee's StudentsFirst NY and Families for Excellent Public Schools, two pro-corporate reform organizations financed by the Walton Foundation and other pro-privatization groups.

Officials at Medgar Evers College had been told to reserve a room inside the building for these parents early. Though on its website, NYSED announced that the doors would only open at 6 PM, by 5:30 PM all the speaking slots were already taken.  StudentsFirst was founded to provide the shock troops for corporate reform, and with the help of either NYSED or DOE insiders, they performed their role admirably in Brooklyn last night. The only person who had a chance to speak against the Common Core until the very end of the night was Katie Lapham, a teacher who happened to arrive even earlier at 4:30 PM.  Her statement is here.  An account from a parent posted on Diane Ravitch's blog is here.

One more point: there is no objective evidence that higher standards alone will narrow the achievement gap or enable children to learn what they need to succeed, as Tom Loveless and other experts point out.  And there is even LESS evidence to show that the current crop of Common Core standards and their associated modules and exams are high quality -- and much that argues against this. As Rosalina Diaz, a professor at Medgar Evers said last night,  ""I think this is very sad...The Common Core is the furthest thing from solving inequality. This is the ultimate inequality because people can't speak their mind," referring to the overwhelming dominance of of pro-Common Core speakers.

In fact, by basing all decisions on test scores and  labeling struggling students as failures, it may serve to discourage them, widen the achievement gap and lead to more dropouts.  What actually works to improve student learning and narrow the opportunity gap is small classes, experienced and caring teachers, and a well-rounded education -- all of which is being driven out of schools and actively undermined by NYSED's  narrow and damaging policies.