How Trump's budget cuts will affect class size- here in NYC and nationwide

Trump’s proposed budget would slash overall education funding for the Department of Education by $9 billion, and roll back education funding (excluding Pell Grants) to pre-2002 levels, despite 8.6 million more students in our classrooms according to the NEA.

The Trump budget has a huge number of damaging cuts, but the biggest one in K12 education is the total elimination of Title IIA funds at about $2.4 billion. 

This funding goes to states for teacher training -- or to pay for teachers to reduce class size.  More commonly these days, the funding is being used to avoid sharp class size increases. All states and districts receive these funds currently, though districts with more disadvantaged kids get a larger share.

These cuts would be especially devastating considering class sizes are already very high in NYC and elsewhere around the country, as school budgets have still not recovered from the huge cuts made during the great recession.  

Nationwide, while the number of public K-12 teachers and other school staff fell by 221,000 since 2008, the number of students increased by 1,120,000.  In NY state, the total number of teachers in New York state public schools fell by about 26,000 between 2008-2015, according to NYSED statistics. 

In NYC, where we already had the largest classes in the state, we have lost about 10,000 K12 general education teaching positions since the recession.   The result is that general ed and inclusion class sizes are even larger than before – in K-3, bigger than in 1999; in 4-8^th grades,  than in 2004.

The Title IIA program has existed at least since Eisenhower administration, and until the year 2000 was used mostly for teacher training.  Then President Clinton created a separate funding stream to help districts lower class size, that was folded into Title IIA teacher training funds by George W. Bush when he became President. In 2014, about 30% of Title IIA funds were being used to hire teachers or keep them on staff.

You can see how much your state currently receives in Title IIA funds here; or if you live in NY state, how much your district was allocated , for a total of $178 million. 

In NYC, contrary to several news reports, the entire Title IIA amount of $101 million was distributed to schools this year for the specific purpose of avoiding further class size increases, according to this DOE allocation memo.

In addition, Trump wants to cut spending on afterschool programs by $1.2 billion as well as many worthwhile higher ed programs.  He also wants to increase funding to private schools and charter schools by $1.4 billion: $1 billion for Title I portability – so poor kids can take their funding directly to charter schools; $250 million for a new private school voucher program; and a direct increase of $168 million for charter schools.  

Of course, the ultimate goal of Trump and Betsy DeVos is by increasing class size, they will manage to drive more children into charter and private schools.  Already parents cite smaller classes as one of their top reasons for choosing charters. Soon I will post an Action Alert regarding how to fight these egregious cuts.

Meanwhile, check out the below for the proven benefits of small classes – which not only increase achievement, and improve non-cognitive skills, parental involvement and school climate but also to significantly reduce disciplinary problems and teacher attrition rates.

Summary of US Class Size Reduction Research by Leonie Haimson on Scribd

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It’s teacher appreciation week; and in a  letter in EdWeek , Arne Duncan attempts to convince teachers  that his policies actually reflect respect towards their profession.   The comments from teachers show they're not buying it.  Sabrina Shupe Stevens provides the perfect rejoinder:

Actions speak louder than words. Though you often have nice words to say about teachers, what you do is more important, and your actions thus far do not indicate that you respect, value, or support teachers and our profession as much as you claim.

Please read the rest of her post for all the evidence of how his policies have undermined the profession.

I would only add that if Duncan really respected teachers, he would honor their word that the best way to improve their effectiveness is to reduce class size, which is their response in numerous surveys, instead of supporting “selective increases” in class size, as he recently proclaimed in a speech before the American Enterprise Institute.

Indeed, rather than giving teachers the esteem they deserve, Duncan, Bill Gates and others are pushing for their performance and their job security to be to be judged primarily on the basis of unreliable  reductionist measures like value-added test scores.

See the excellent critique of value-added models, written by John Ewing, former executive director of the American Mathematical Society  and now president of Math for America, who points out that “making policy decisions on the basis of value added models has the potential to do even more harm than browbeating teachers” and  calls a recent Brookings report “fatuous”:

Why must we use value-added even with its imperfections? Aside from making the unsupported claim (in the very last sentence) that “it predicts more about what students will learn…than any other source of information”, the only apparent reason for its superiority is that value-added is based on data. Here is mathematical intimidation in its purest form—in this case, in the hands of economists, sociologists, and education policy experts.

And if we drive away the best teachers by using a flawed process, are we really putting our students first?

Whether naïfs or experts, mathematicians need to confront people who misuse their subject to intimidate others into accepting conclusions simply because they are based on some mathematics. Unlike many policy makers, mathematicians are not bamboozled by the theory behind VAM, and they need to speak out forcefully. Mathematical models have limitations. They do not by themselves convey authority for their conclusions. They are tools, not magic. And using the mathematics to intimidate— to preempt debate about the goals of education and measures of success—is harmful not only to education but to mathematics itself.

Especially this week but every week, parents should let their children’s teachers know how much they value their hard work, their caring, and their sacrifice, especially at a time that they have been treated so harshly by the oligarchy that has been engaged in a non-stop campaign to demean them, and then adds insult to injury by trying to convince them that they are really elevating the profession.

As anyone who has ever volunteered in a classroom knows full well, teaching is  one of the hardest jobs in the world, and they deserve better from our government and from the think thanks, the venture philanthropists, the privateers, and the hedge-fund managers who devalue their contributions every day.

Parents and teachers protest budget cuts

What Frank McCourt could teach Joel Klein or Arne Duncan

Frank McCourt died yesterday. He was a wonderful writer, and very unsentimental about the teaching profession. He taught in NYC high schools for thirty years and wrote a book about his experiences called Teacher Man. His insights would be very valuable to Joel Klein or Arne Duncan, if they would have ever listened.

Check out this interview from 2005 on WNYC radio:

Leonard Lopate: “If you were named Schools Chancellor what would you do?”

Frank McCourt: “I’d certainly go to Albany and get more money for the teachers’ salaries…and I’d cut the school day and certainly cut the size of the classes, because they’re monstrous. And I've have a parliament of teachers, no supervisors and certainly no politicians."

He also mentions, heartbreakingly, how the huge teaching loads in NYC schools meant that he had too many students and too little time to develop real relationships with any of them.

When one or two students first asked him to have coffee, at first he said yes, but he soon learned that he just wasn't able to get to know them– with 175 students each semester.

He bemoans the lack of respect for teachers -- how hard they work, how little their opinions and professionalism matter to elected officials; and how their views are never heeded about how schools could be improved.

Indeed, in national surveys, over 90% of teachers regularly respond that the best way to raise the quality of education would be to reduce class size – over every other strategy proposed, including increased salaries, merit pay, professional development, or anything else.

And yet the powers-that-be always criticize this view as somehow merely reflecting self-interest, rather than in the best interest of the children as well. They never make the same attack on merit pay or increased teacher salaries, somehow -- just the one proposal that would directly improve classroom conditions and the ability of children to learn.

If 95% of doctors year after year proposed a certain reform as the best way to improve our medical system, would they be brushed off so easily? Not likely.

I remember a great speech McCourt gave at the UFT spring conference in 2006--- telling a packed audience at the Hilton a hilarious story about how he was once so overwhelmed with all the homework he had to correct that he threw all 175 student papers into a dumpster.

He also went on at some length about how elected officials and top administrators never listen to teachers, but unfortunately by that time, all of those who had been there, including Joel Klein, had left the room.

See also this interview from 2005:

McCourt: ... Teachers here are treated like second-class, third-class, fourth-class citizens. They're told to come in the back door. ....This is all a matter of class and status, and maybe snobbery. And the figures go along with this -- the lousy pay they get and the lack of respect.

When did you last see a teacher on a talk show? Movie stars and athletes and politicians -- criminals! They all get on the talk shows. But not the teachers. They are regarded as dull people. The ones who take care of the children every day. Almost like super babysitters. That's the way they are treated.

And then when you do see something on television, a panel on education, you see someone from the board of education, you see a professor of education, or you see a bureaucrat, someone from a think tank, a politician, but never a teacher. Never. Imagine a panel on medicine without a doctor? The uproar there would be from the medical profession!

But all the politicians think they own education. Just the way the pope and the cardinals think they own the [Roman Catholic] Church. Which they do, of course. We don't get the keys. The politicians have the keys to the educational system, they control the purse strings, and they don't have a clue about what education is. I know they've been to school and all themselves, but what goes on in the classroom is another story.

Teachers on absent reserve -- the shame of our system

Recent news reports have focused on the fact that over 1,400 teachers are sitting in Absent Teacher Reserve – paid their regular salaries but assigned to no regular classroom duties. These teachers have been "excessed" through no fault of their own, but because their schools have been closed or restructured.

This represents an incredible waste of millions of dollars – not to mention manpower. See these stories: Budget Bind Turns Spotlight on Reserve Teacher Policy (NY Times) and Union, City Dig In Heels Over Fate of Reserve Teachers (NY Sun).

Meanwhile, our students continue to be crammed into the largest classes in the state and some of the largest in the country. I received the following letter from a retired teacher: why not offer these teachers to principals, free of charge, to reduce class size?

Dear Ms. Haimson,
Your group is to be commended for seeking to lower class sizes.

The Department of Education is missing a golden opportunity to do this. Why not take the 1,400 excessed teachers and use them to lower class size? This would make a lot of sense. Instead, these people are being used as day to day substitutes. These teachers, many of whom are teaching for 20+ years, did not get master's degrees and give the best years of their lives in education to be relegated to substitute status.

At first, the public was lied to by the city. The public was told that these teachers were incompetent. This is not true. These teachers received satisfactory ratings and were excessed due to the drop in student population. Next, the chancellor has the nerve to chide these people for not looking for positions. They did look. No principal would hire them since their teaching experience would allow for them to be at a higher salary.

This refusal to do anything for these affected pedagogues is a disgrace beyond belief.

I am a retired teacher. It was my pleasure to have worked with 3 such people at IS 228 in Brooklyn, the school I retired from in 2001. These teachers were excellent. They are caring individuals who were held in high esteem by their administrators, other teachers and students alike. Now, they face a completely hostile working environment. They are being treated in a totally unprofessional manner by people who either rarely or never taught.

Shame on the New York City school system and the newspapers for allowing this situation to continue.

Ed M. Greenspan, retired teacher, Brooklyn