Our testimony about why NYC kids will need smaller classes next year than ever before -- & the federal funding is available to achieve this

City Council education budget hearings were held today.  The DOE offered no plans or thoughts on how to spend the additional $6B or more they will get from the federal government over the next two years. When Education Chair Treyger asked Chancellor Meisha Porter about the potential of reducing class size to strengthen academic and emotional support and creating stronger bonds between teachers and students, she said there were other ways to achieve this and that class size was "a contractual matter."  Disappointing. You can watch today's hearings here, in Virtual Room 2.  

See our testimony below, advocating for a big chunk of the federal funds be used for smaller classes below for the sake of health, safety and to address the damage done by more than a year of remote learning.

Testimony on Attendance Reporting Bills

The NYC Council Education and Health Committees held oversight hearings on October 16 on the reopening of schools, as well as two proposed bills to require detailed attendance reporting: Int. 2058 and Int. 2104. Below is my testimony on the issue of class size and how to sharpen these bills to require more precise and disaggregated reporting on the three kinds of instruction students are receiving: in-person face-to-face learning, blended online learning, and full-time remote learning.

The most depressing statistic revealed at the hearings: 77,000 students still don’t have access to devices for remote learning.

The DOE also failed to provide any data on how many students are attending school in-person only to receive instruction on their computers, how many more teachers are needed to staff all three types of programs sufficiently, and/or how many houseless students have logged into any sort of online classes.

The most hopeful finding: Only 0.2% of students and staff randomly tested randomly so far in the public schools have been shown to be positive for COVID-19; more on this here. Dr. Jay Varma, the Senior Advisor for Public Health to the Mayor, also revealed at the hearings that their estimates of the actual current COVID-19 infection rate in NYC is between 0.1-0.7% --rather than the much higher positivity rate which according to the state is 1.3%, and according to the city is 2.17%, which instead reflects how many New Yorkers have tested positive at any one time.

Despite worsening overcrowding, de Blasio's ten-year capital plan allocates less for schools than Bloomberg's

See  the testimony below that I gave today to the NYC Council on the deficiencies of the proposed Mayor's proposed executive and capital budgets for schools, which if adopted as is would lead to larger class sizes and even more overcrowded schools.

The school capital plan was released more than three months late, supposedly  to align with de Blasio's new ten-year city overall capital plan, which cuts back on education compared to the previous ten-year plan, developed under Bloomberg.

The new ten year plan has schools at only 28% of overall capital spending, compared to 34% in the Bloomberg plan, and cuts back the spending by almost $5 billion.  See the above charts to compare.

CSM Testimony Executive and Capital Budget 5.18.15