Please help us get smaller classes for NYC kids! Please sign our petition and testify on Tuesday!

Class Size Matters and NYC Kids PAC are advocating for one billion dollars of the approximately $2.5 billion in extra federal funds that NYC schools are due to get next year and the year after to be invested in smaller classes, for NYC students who will need them more than every before. This is a chance in a lifetime opportunity to ensure that enough funding is spent the right way to make a huge opportunity for NYC kids.   For more information, take a look at the fact sheet below.

If you agree, please sign our petition here; and sign up to speak at the Council's Committee on Education preliminary budget hearings next Tuesday March 23; public testimony via video starts at noon. You can sign up here at least 24 hours beforehand and/or send your testimony to testimony@council.nyc.gov up to 72 hours after the end of the hearing. Please copy the email to your own City Council member; you can find their names and emails by filling in your address here. Feel free to copy us at info@classsizematters.org 

 Here is sample text you can use, but please add any language you like: Hello, my name is ____ and I have a child in the ___ grade in [name of public school.] Please allocate one billion dollars of the federal funds for next year to class size reduction so that students can have the benefit of both social distancing and stronger academic and social support, which they will need next year more than ever before. Please make sure that happens, for the sake of my child and the other children in the NYC public schools. Yours sincerely, Name, address, email 

 

 

Disappointing budget as far as our public schools and class size are concerned

Some  news links: NY Times, NY Post, NY Daily News, Chalkbeat and Brooklyn Eagle. 

The new NYC budget deal was announced between the Mayor and the City Council on Friday.

In terms of our public schools, it included $41M more to hire about 200 new social workers for schools, especially those with lots of homeless kids and $857,000 for seven additional Title IX Coordinators to handle complaints of gender discrimination and sexual harassment.  The budget will also put $250M into an overall city budget reserve to be used during economic downturns that now totals $6 billion. 

The education budget will  include  another $25 million  for the Mayor’s top education priority: 3K expansion into 14 new districts, bringing the cost to around $100M.  If the pattern of previous years holds, the DOE will continue to draw kids out of existing preK centers run by Community Based Organizations  and pushing them into already overcrowded public schools, which in turn will contribute to higher class sizes for kids in grades K-5.

What the education budget doesn't include: any increase in Fair student funding (with many schools are currently at only 90%), no dedicated funding for class size reduction, and no amount to achieve CBO pay parity for preK teachers -- though the Council says they got a commitment from the Mayor to address this disparity though negotiations by the end of the summer.

The only elementary school initiative that I know of is the 2nd grade literacy coach program in high needs schools, which is  now in its third year, funding 242 coaches in 305 elementary schools, according to the DOE website.  The program is supposed to produce two-thirds of students reading on grade level by the end of second grade by 2022, and 100 percent of all second graders reading at grade level by 2026 (long after de Blasio has left office.)

Yet the first year of the program showed no positive impact and the administration has not yet released data from either its second or third year - which suggests it may have had disappointing results as I predicted. Though the news of the budget deal didn't mention this, it is likely that the initiative will continue to be funded next year at the level in the Mayor's executive budget of about $90 million per year.  (There are job listings for this position here.)

In any case we aren't giving up on our campaign to reduce class sizes.  More counselors are great but there this will do little to improve achievement in grades K-5 where class sizes in many schools are still sky high.