Did your school receive class size funding for next year, or was it rejected? Please let us know!

 

The DOE has still not released the list of the 746 schools receiving funding next year for class size reduction, nor the total amount directed towards that purpose. So we have posted a VERY BRIEF survey for parents, teachers, and school administrators to fill out, asking if your school applied for these funds and whether they will be getting them, along with a few other relevant questions. The survey is here: https://forms.gle/SiQBQZtKETb5iNpR9 All responses will remain fully confidential unless you say otherwise.

Please fill it out if you know the answers, and if not, forward it to someone on your School Leadership Team who would likely know –your PTA president, chapter leader, or Principal.

I found the photo above on Instagram. The SLT at Brooklyn Arbor celebrated the fact that they will be getting four additional classroom teachers and a music teacher next year by ordering a special pizza. Feel free to share with me any reactions or celebrations your school may have had in learning the news, or your disappointment if not.

Thanks so much, Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
leonie@classsizematters.org
www.classsizematters.org
Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson

Please take our five- minute class size survey!

Welcome to a new school year, and the first year of the phase-in of smaller classes, according to the new state law. Unfortunately, we have already heard of schools where class sizes have increased substantially compared to last year. We anticipated this would occur, given cuts to Fair Student Funding and the fact that DOE eliminated the only promise in their initial class size plan: that those schools which had achieved the class size caps in the law last year would be given support to retain them this year.

Our letter to DOE, criticizing the lack of any real class size plan, and signed onto by more than two hundred NYC advocates, parents and educators, was reported in the Daily News, including the DOE’s omission of any pledge to ensure that class sizes would not increase this year.

Please fill out our brief five-minute survey for parents, teachers and other school staff, to report on the size of your school’s classes this year. All your info and your school will remain anonymous unless you indicate otherwise. 

Parents: if you don’t know how large your children’s classes are, ask them or their teachers. If you find out that they are excessively large, you can reach out to your principal and/or School Leadership Team to ask if anything can be done about it. If you don’t get a response, a petition signed by  you and other parents to urge the hiring of another teacher can be effective. If your child's class sizes violate the UFT contractual limits, set over fifty years ago, you can also reach out to your child’s teacher or chapter leader to ask whether they intend to file an expedited grievance.  

But please, do fill out our survey as soon as you can. This information is critical in our fight for smaller classes and to persuade the state to ensure that DOE makes progress on this issue.

Thanks for your support, Leonie

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.

Welcome to a new school year, and please take our 5-minute survey!

Welcome back to a new school year! The good news in NYC is that we finally have a Chancellor, Richard Carranza, who is progressive and believes in the importance of class size.

The bad news is that neither he nor the mayor have put in place any specific programs or incentives to encourage smaller classes – even in struggling schools with large numbers of disadvantaged students.

Outside NYC, school budgets in many states are still lower than they were in 2008 before the recession hit. In NYC, though our budget has grown, class sizes are still significantly larger than in 2008.

While the overall DOE budget increased this year by nearly $1 billion, not a single dime will be spent specifically to lower class size, and $200 million more will go to charter schools as their enrollment continues to grow. Nearly $31 million more will be spent on central administration, with more than $1.7 million to pay for the salaries of nine new Executive Superintendents.

Please let us know what the class sizes are this year in your child’s schools, by filling out our five-minute survey here. If you don’t know, ask your child’s teacher -- or ask your middle school or high school child to count heads. The UFT class size limits are posted here. (Subscribers outside NYC are also welcome to take the survey.)

Since projected student enrollment has declined slightly and the City Council successfully pushed for an extra $125 million so that all schools will receive at least 90% of their Fair Student Funding, we hope that this may help lead to slight decreases in average class size this year.

The DOE also announced that 21 new schools were opening this year, but 15 are charter schools. Only one new public elementary school opened in Queens – the most overcrowded borough – and in every borough there are neighborhoods still is suffering from school overcrowding.

This fall the DOE will propose a new five-year capital plan, and we are going to try to keep the Mayor at his word to fully fund this plan and provide all the new school seats that are needed to alleviate overcrowding and accommodate enrollment growth.

We are also going to push for dedicated funding for class size reduction. Let me know if you’re interested in helping with our campaign by replying to this message and/or by filling out our survey.

Please take our 5-minute class size survey!

Welcome back to a new school year! 

Please take our five-minute class size survey to let us know how large your child’s class size is this year; teachers, your input is welcome too!   In NYC, the administration has until Sept. 20 to get below the union class size limits – which are already far too high. I’ve already heard of one NYC high school with 260 classes that violate these limits -- meaning more than 34 students per class.

In case you missed it, this summer we filed a legal complaint with the NY State Education Department to enforce the law requiring NYC schools to reduce class size. We hope to hear back from the Commissioner soon.   Meanwhile, after submitting a Freedom of Information Law request a year and a half ago, we finally got back a heavily redacted memo from the Mayor’s office, which blacked out their reasons for rejecting a proposal to align the school capacity formula with smaller classes. Check it out here.