DOE still has not posted last year's class size data -- after repeated promises to do so.

DOE still has not posted last year's class size data, including the class sizes of remote and blended learning classes.  Last year, many NYC parents and teachers spoke out in protest about how these classes were excessively large, with as many as 40 or 60 students.  See articles in NY Post, WSJ and Gothamist.

Nearly a year ago, in response to a letter sent to the Chancellor by Council Education Chair Mark Treyger, Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark promised to provide class size data for the 2020-2021 school year by February, with separate categories for in-person vs. hybrid vs. remote learning.  That never happened.  

Instead, the only class size data posted in February, months after the Nov. 15 legal deadline, were for the socially distanced, in-person classes that were much smaller, averaging 18-20 students per class.

In May, at City Council budget hearings, after Finance Chair Danny Dromm pointed out that DOE had still not posted the promised class size data, Chancellor Porter again promised to make it available. See the hearing transcript on pp. 30-31.

MEISHA PORTER: …as you know that that data that you are asking about that we did post reflects our in-person classes. We also had to make investments to class size obviously as a result of COVID and look forward to providing that data as soon as possible.
CHAIRPERSON DROMM: So, Chancellor, thank you. We look forward to getting that data and former
Chancellor Carranza did say that that data was being collected. So, it should be easily available for us
to see. Would you agree with that, that that data was collected?
MEISHA PORTER: That data is being collected and we will work to make sure that we make it available to you.

Yet they never followed through. On Friday, I sent the following FOIL request for this data.  See below.  I will update this post if and when I receive the data.

Sept. 17, 2021

Records Access Officer
NYC Department of Education
52 Chambers Street, Room 308
New York, NY 10007

By email: FOIL@schools.nyc.gov

Dear Records Access Officer:

Under the provisions of the New York Freedom of Information Law, Article 6 of the Public Officers Law, I hereby request the class size data for the last school year 2020-2021, preferably on Nov. 15, 2020, disaggregated by type of class: remote only, hybrid (remote and in person) and full-time in person learning.  As usual, please supply this data, with class size distributions and averages by grade and type of class, at the citywide, district and school levels.

On Oct. 15, 2020, CM Mark Treyger sent a letter to then- Chancellor Carranza urging him to report on school-specific and citywide class size averages as the law requires on Nov. 15, and to disaggregate the data by type of instruction used: either in-person learning, remote classes for blended learning students, and remote classes for full-time remote students.   His letter is here .

On Nov. 14, one day before the class size data was legally due to be reported, Deputy Chancellor Karen Goldmark responded,  saying that they would delay the release of any class size data until Dec. 31, 2020, and would report the disaggregated data by Feb. 15, 2021.

No class size data was released on Dec. 31, and on Feb. 15, 2021, the DOE posted class size data, not on the DOE or Infohub website as usual, but on the city’s Open Data website. 

The data, which was said to reflect class sizes as of Nov. 13, 2020, was not disaggregated, and one can only assume it only reflected in-person class sizes,  since they were far smaller than ever before, 18-20 on average depending on the grade. See charts here.

Meanwhile, some parents and teachers had reported very large remote and online blended learning classes of 40 students, 60 or more.  See articles in NY Post, WSJ and Gothamist about this issue. 

There is no doubt that the DOE has had access to disaggregated class size data since at least Oct. 2020. 

At the Mayor's press conference on Oct. 26, 2020,  Chancellor Carranza said that schools have been reporting attendance data in "literally three buckets of attendance every single day": in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes.  Thus, the disaggregated class sizes must have been available since that time, as attendance rates cannot be calculated without the data on the number of students enrolled in a class compared to the number who are attending.  

In Oct. 2020, the DOE began to release attendance rates by school, and since Feb. 2021, the city reported citywide and district-wide attendance data disaggregated by remote, blended in-person, blended-remote, and in-person learning.

In April 2021, the DOE released remote-only attendance data by grade.

This requested class size data is not exempt from disclosure under FOIL. In the event that all or part of this request is denied, please cite each specific applicable FOIL exemption and notify us of appeal procedures available under the law. 

To the extent that this data is readily available in an electronic format, we request that it be provided in that format. The Freedom of Information Law requires agencies to respond within five (5) business days of a records request.  

Please contact me by phone at 917-435-9329 or by email to leoniehaimson@gmail.com  with any questions. Thank you in advance for your timely consideration of this request.

Sincerely, Leonie Haimson

NYC DOE releases unreliable class size data three months late; please take our survey today!!

NYC parents, teachers and administrators please take our five-minute class size survey here. I'll explain why:

By law, the DOE is supposed to report on class sizes twice a year, the first time on Nov. 15 and then again on Feb. 15. We had heard from parents of egregiously large classes sizes this fall for many students engaged in remote learning of sixty students or even more, either full-time or part-time. See articles in NY Post, WSJ and Gothamist about this issue. 

So we realized it would be important for the DOE to report on disaggregated class sizes, i.e. in-person, vs. full-time remote, vs. part-time remote for blended learning students. On Oct. 28, Council Member Mark Treyger, chair of the Education Committee sent a letter to DOE, urging them to make the legal deadline of Nov. 15 and provide the disaggregated data. His letter is here which a Chalkbeat article reported on. 

At a press conference on Oct. 26, Chancellor Carranza said that schools had been reporting attendance to DOE in "literally three buckets of attendance every single day": in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes. So reporting the class size data in these three separate categories should not have been difficult for them to do. 

Yet on November 16, Karin Goldmark of the DOE responded to CM Treyger's letter, to say they would delay the release of ANY of the class size data until Dec. 31, and any disaggregated data until Feb. 15. Subsequently, they told the Council they would further delay the release of any class size data till the beginning or middle of January. 

In late February, more than three months after the legal deadline, the DOE finally posted on the Infohub site links to another Open Data site that alleges to report on class size data as of Nov. 13, 2020, with aggregate average data that appears to be inaccurate. Based on our analysis of the initial data, we calculated the following averages for each grade level, which if true would show DOE achieved the far smaller class sizes called for in their 2007 Contracts for Excellence plan:

Grades	Average
K–3	18.74
4–8	20.18
K–8 Special Classes	6.46
K–8	17.44
High School	20.00

Charts of the reported trend of average class sizes over time are here: Even factoring in the reported drops in enrollment, based on analysis of past data as well as speaking with teachers, parents, and students, we believe these figures are likely far lower than the reality. The DOE now says they will further delay any disaggregated data until sometime in March, which may be further delayed, given their past record, and may not be more accurate . 

So that's why in the meantime, we are asking NYC parents, teachers and administrators to respond to our five-minute class size survey here.

DOE and SCA going backwards not forwards in terms of rational school planning

Yesterday's City Council hearings on the capital plan reveals how the NYC remains stubbornly resistant when it comes to expeditious, transparent school planning. 

As explained in my testimony and the report we released yesterday on preK and school overcrowding, 50,000 seats of the 57,000 seats  in the new proposed five-year plan won’t be finished until 2024 or after, long after the Mayor has left office.

from the City Council briefing paper

The DOE disputed this finding to the Daily News: "City Education Department Doug Cohen said the new seats would be done sooner than Haimson projected, although he did not give a concerete time line for their completion."

Yet these figures were confirmed by the Independent Budget Office and the City Council - see the chart above - and neither Lorraine Grillo, President of the School Construction Authority nor Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark disputed them when they were asked about this undue delay by Education Chair Mark Treyger at the hearings.

Only 11,000 seats will have been built over the lifetime of the current five-year plan, with 23,000  folded over into the next plan.  Meanwhile our schools are becoming
more overcrowded due to pre-K expansion and rampant development. Already more than 575,000 students suffer in overcrowded schools.

When Council Members Dromm and Treyger asked School Construction Authority President Lorraine Grillo why thousands of seats are going to be unfunded in severely overcrowded districts like District 10 (-1,172), District 13 (-1,636),  District 15 (-3.023), District 20 (-2630) and District 24 (-3961), especially as compared to the last identified DOE needs assessment released in Nov. 2017, she couldn’t explain why. 

First she claimed she had been so successful siting schools in those districts that they didn’t really need many more seats, then she said it’s too hard to find good sites for schools in these areas, and then she said we just have to focus on creating seats in the rest of the city.

The DOE also basically eliminated the class size reduction section of the current plan that was funded at $490M but over five years went mostly unspent, revealing they never intend to lower class size in the first place. According to the Council briefing paper, “The Council was informed that as of Spring 2018 SCA hoped to identify additional projects but none were.  In addition there is no explanation as to how the projects identified will reduce class size.”

There is no identified needs assessment for new seats in the capital plan by the DOE/SCA for the first time since at least 2011.  While the Council has been begging for a more transparent and accurate needs assessment, the DOE decided to take that figure out of the plan altogether.  When asked why, Lorraine Grillo couldn’t explain why, and then said it was all up on the SCA website, [which is untrue.]

CM Dromm said he was very disturbed about the lack of identified needs assessment and the severe cuts to District 24.  CM Treyger said that he saw no reason that the timeline to build schools has to be so painfully slow and that the Amazon deal showed that the city could act faster to encourage economic development; also when it comes to creating new housing  in the various re-zonings happening throughout the city.

CM Brad Lander pointed out that the planning process is dysfunctional.  When a large-scale development is proposed and then approved, too often more schools may be promised on paper, but  aren’t really incorporated  into the overall plan and if and when they are built, this happens years later.  Often, this occurs long after the rest of the development is complete and when  school overcrowding is already at a crisis level and sites are hard to find.  Instead, schools should be included as part of the development’s planning, design and construction at the outset.  He said he hopes this will happen with the Gowanus rezoning happening in his district.

When he asked about the promised installation of air conditioning, and the fact that the DOE’s last progress report to the Council on this had contained inaccuracies, Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark insisted that teachers can teach and students can learn no matter how warm the room. (Lots of research shows this is just untrue.)

My testimony is here. When I spoke extemporaneously I said that all this new development could and should be used by the city officials as a way to help them get schools built quickly, yet they fail to take advantage of it. I despair that in the year 2025 when a new five-year plan is introduced, the same problems will be in evidence yet even more severe. There will be yet another Mayor who makes campaign promises to solve the problems of school overcrowding but when he is elected sells his soul to developers.

Will the Mayor and Chancellor halt the practice of allowing charter schools to access student personal information to market their schools, now that the feds and the state have launched investigations of how this violates student privacy?

If you’d like to add your voice, please send a letter to the Mayor and the Chancellor to stop allowing charters to market their schools by giving them access to personal student information.

 Yesterday, Sue Edelman of the NY Post reported that the DOE is under investigation by both the US Department of Education and the NY State Education Department for violating student privacy law by making student information, including their names and addresses, available to charter schools for recruiting purposes.  The letter in which Dale King, Director of the Family Privacy Compliance Office of the US Department of Education, announced the investigation into this DOE practice is posted below.

This investigation follows from Johanna Garcia's FERPA complaint filed a year ago, which pointed

Johanna Garcia

out that the DOE allows charters access to student personal information to send families promotional materials via  the DOE mailing house, Vanguard Direct, without providing parents with the right to opt out, which would be required under the directory information exception to FERPA.

Instead, DOE wrongly claims the right to share this information with charter schools under the "school official" exception, which is reserved for vendors that are performing services on behalf of the district and need the information to carry out their contracted duties. Yet charter schools are not carrying out services for DOE.   In addition, the use of data for marketing purposes is specifically barred by the NY State student privacy law §2-d: "Personally identifiable information maintained by educational agencies, including data provided to third-party contractors and their assignees, shall not be sold or used for marketing purposes."

Here is the NY Post summary of the DOE claim, and our responses:


In response to Garcia’s complaint, the New York state and US education departments said they are probing whether the marketing deal violates FERPA — a federal law which requires schools to get parent permission before releasing student information, except in limited cases.

The DOE claims an exemption lets it give student information to outside entities to perform functions that its own employees would otherwise do. State law “permits outreach to make families aware of their educational options, including both district and charter schools,” Cohen said. 

But Leonie Haimson, co-chair of the national Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, said the reasoning makes no sense: “School districts lose funding and space when students enroll in charters. Why would the DOE use its own employees for that purpose?”

Garcia agreed. “Vanguard makes money. Charter schools make money. All on the backs of regular public-school students.”

The DOE long-standing policy of making student information available to charter schools started under charter-friendly Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein, in response to a plea from Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz that she needed to "mail 10-12 times to elementary and preK families so she could grow the "market share, " according to emails she sent to Klein and acquired through FOIL by reporter Juan Gonzalez in 2010. Five days after she sent her initial request,  Michael Duffy, then-head of the NYC DOE charter office, wrote back he was trying to "overcome the obstacles" of privacy laws and would do his best to make the mailing addresses of public school families available for this purpose.

The US Department of Education letter from Dale King that is posted below is dated Sept. 25, 2018 and demands a response from DOE within four weeks.  This deadline was October 25 – nearly two weeks ago, yet according to sources, the DOE has not yet responded. Dale King's questions include clarifying how DOE informs parents of their rights under FERPA, and to "provide this Office with information on the relationship between the District and the charter schools to which the District discloses information, particularly Success Academy."

Below the US DOE letter is another letter sent by Council Members, Danny Dromm, Mark Treyger, Brad Lander and Stephen Levin on August 8, 2018, urging Mayor de Blasio and Chancellor Carranza to halt this practice and pointing out how it not only appears to violate student privacy but also the administration's stated priority of supporting public schools rather than encouraging charter schools to expand and drain more funds from the system:

Next fiscal year, the charter sector in New York City is projected to cost the DOE $2.1 billion in annual operating funds and is taking up more space every year in our overcrowded school buildings. It is time to put our public-school students first and focus on improving their education and protecting their privacy.

Only after Sue Edelman began asking DOE about whether they had responded to this letter did the DOE respond to these elected members of the City Council, more than two months later.

On October 12,   Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark sent a letter to CM Dromm, in which she repeated the dubious claim that since the state law requires charter schools to enroll high-needs students, including students with disabilities and/or English Language Learners, this somehow exempts DOE from the countervailing restrictions of state and federal privacy law. Though the state charter school law does require charter schools to make efforts to recruit high needs students, this does not mean that DOE is authorized to help them do so by violating student privacy.  
 
Moreover, as Johanna has pointed out, despite multiple mailings, her family has never received a letter from Success Academy in Spanish, even though there are large numbers of Latino families in District 6 where she lives.  And as mentioned in her complaint, the only one of her children to receive Success marketing materials is the one child without an IEP.

A recent Bronx Ink article reports that only ten percent of NYC charter schools enroll  as many English Language Learners as the school districts in which they're situated, including few if any Success Academy charter schools.  The article focuses specifically on Success Bronx I in District 7, where the number of ELLs has fallen in half -- from 8% to 4% -- since being reauthorized by SUNY two years ago.  This percent is tiny compared to the overall numbers of ELLs in District 7 public schools, in which ELLs vary between 16% and 22% depending on the grade level.  So despite millions spent on marketing and mailings, the DOE claim that making personal student information available to Success and other charter schools somehow helps them enroll their fair share of high-needs students doesn't hold water.  

At a Harlem Town Hall meeting last week with Chancellor Carranza, District 5 Community Education Council members and PTA leaders vehemently objected to the supersaturation of charter schools in their community, that drains their public schools of students and funds.  In response,  Carranza insisted that their public schools needed to engage in improved marketing, and that parents should consider "what is the need that charter schools are answering."  (See the video from News 11 here.)

Yet few if any public schools have the resources to put into advertising and recruitment as Success Academy, which spent about  $1,300 for every newly enrolled student in 2011 on marketing.  More recently, Moskowitz had created what is described as a "full service, brand strategy, marketing, and creative division within Success Academy” called the "The Success Academy Creative Agency" according to the LinkedIn profile of its Managing Director, Meredith Levin.  In the previous version of her profile accessed last month, Levin described leading a  "group of over 30 creative directors, designers, copywriters, strategists, e-learning architects & project managers to develop, execute and optimize campaigns to recruit 1,000+ teachers, enroll families, donors, influencers, and cultivate community engagement."

What public school has the resources to compete with that?  And why should the DOE be helping Success Academy, which has repeatedly been sued for violating student civil rights and last year kicked out one quarter of their special needs students in self-contained classes, expand their "market share," especially when it involves violating the privacy rights of public school families?

Let's hope that the Chancellor and the Mayor reconsider this practice and reverse course before the charter schools send out marketing materials to DOE families this fall, via their access to personal student information provided by DOE.