New Classrooms, crony contracts at DOE, and David Ross' new job

In the Daily News this week, Ben Chapman reported on a proposed contract for Joel Rose’s New Classrooms (formerly School of One) program which uses algorithms and computers to deliver so-called “personalized learning”.  This contract for as much as $670,000 is to be voted on at the August 23 PEP meeting. The DOE’s RA (Request for Authorization) says the company won a competitive bid, though the cost was higher than the other bidders – whose identities are not revealed: 

“While New Classrooms is a higher priced outlier for their license fees, they provided documentation demonstrating that this license fee encompasses a more extensive package of services than what other vendors have offered. On this basis, pricing can be determined to be fair and reasonable."

I have been tracking this program ever since Joel Rose was working at DOE and started School of One in a few NYC public schools in the summer of 2009.  In 2010-2011 School of One was implemented as a full-time mathematics program in three NYC middle schools, costing at least $3.3 million, with about a million dollars from the NYC Department of Education, and the rest provided by venture philanthropists, including the Robin Hood Foundation, the Dell Foundation, and the Gates Foundation.  Rose’s company was named “New Classrooms” and the program renamed “Teach to One” when the venture spun off as a separate non-profit company and introduced in other districts around the country.

I previously wrote about the numerous conflict of interest issues pertaining to this school, as well as some negative evaluations of its quality here, here and here, including a visit I took myself to a School of One classroom in Chinatown in 2012, which featured students listlessly answering multiple questions randomly until they got them right.  

Yet before it was even tried out as actual school-year program, Time magazine touted “the School of One” as one of the 50 top innovations of 2009.  It quickly garnered positive media in The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Education Next.  Bill Gates repeatedly has praised the value of this program, most recently in a April 2016 speech in which he said that New Classrooms “represents the future not only of math, but a number of subjects.”  

The ability of Rose to take his program private and form a new company that would then contract with DOE was controversial, to say the least, given the conflict of interest laws.  When the first NYC contract was awarded in Jan. 2012, it was at no cost to the city, as the company promised that the DOE would be granted “joint ownership or a royalty-free perpetual non-exclusive license to the platform … for use in NYC schools."   (See p. 37 for this language in the  2012 RA document.) 

Even so, the awarding of the contract in 2012 generated negative comment, as noted by Rachael Monahan in the Daily News:

Under the agreement, the city will share with Rose’s groups the licenses for the School of One program, which uses computer-based learning to individually tailor math classes for students at three middle schools…“This is exactly the type of thing that raises eyebrows and causes people to question” the Education Department, said Michael Loughran, a spokesman for city Controller John Liu, whose office will review the contract....

 “We believe this zero-cost contract is a smart move for the city, potentially saving millions of dollars,” said spokesman Matt Mittenthal, defending the deal that aims to expand School of One to 50 schools.” 

Yet in 2014, as previously reported, DOE proposed a new, one year contract for $420,750 for New Classrooms – ignoring the fact that they had previously been promised a perpetual free license.  Nor did the DOE ever claim joint ownership. 

Since then, a new study has been released of the New Classrooms program in NYC  schools.  Jonah Rockoff and a team of researchers at Columbia Business School conducted an experimental randomized study – the gold standard --of the program in NYC schools.  The study concluded that “School of One had no statistically significant effects on student achievement—positive or negative–relative to traditional math instruction.” This evaluation is not mentioned by New Classrooms anywhere on its website, nor on the US Department of Education i3 website, which helped fund it.    

Instead, another study is trumpeted on the New Classrooms website – a non-randomized study by Doug Ready that found modest test score gains but included this caveat:

 

 “It is important to stress again that these findings cannot be attributed to TTO [Teach to One] without the use of experimental or quasi-experimental designs. In other words, we cannot state definitively that TTO caused the above-average achievement gains noted above.”     

Meanwhile, EdWeek reports that more than a quarter of the 53 schools that tried New Classrooms program are no longer using it. I would guess that the number is higher. Two out of the three NYC schools that were the first to try it in 2011-2012 school year, MS 131 in Manhattan and IS 339 in the Bronx, dropped it.   In Oct. 2014, the Daily News reported that six city school were using  the program,  by the 2016-2017 school year, only two schools were still involved: I.S. 228 and J.H.S. 88 in Brooklyn,  according to the New Classrooms website – the latter in one of its three academies.  This suggests that at least two-thirds of NYC schools that have tried the program have ditched it. 

Schools where New Classrooms operated 2016-2017

Nevertheless, with the backing of Bill Gates and an aggressive PR campaign, New Classrooms has aggressively expanded to nine other states – though the expansion has not been incident-free. In January 2017, two of the middle schools from the Mountain View Whisman School District in Silicon Valley abandoned the program, after having spent four months and more than half a million dollars on it – due to “avalanche” of parent opposition and poor interim test scores, according to the local paper.

A letter signed by 180 parents of Mountain View fifth and sixth graders observed that “topics are taught in an incoherent and seemingly random order, are riddled with mistakes and outright wrong answers, and students are frequently given math problems that are better-suited for ninth-graders and beyond.”   A survey revealed that 61% of the parents "said they do not believe the program matches the needs of their children," and the number of students who said they “hate math” sharply increased, from 7% to 29%. For more on what happened in Mountain View, see these articles in EdSurge, the Wall Street Journal and a parent blog here.  

 At the same time, it was revealed that the Mountain View district’s contract with New Classrooms had a “non-disparagement” clause, forbidding teachers or district officials from publicly criticizing it – something that was apparently banned from contracts in California in 2014 and by the federal government in 2017.

It would be very interesting to see if DOE’s contract or the contract that NYC schools signs with New Classrooms has a similar clause. In the past, New York City reporters who have tried to get comment from principals at the schools that have ceased using the program have been unable to do.  

All in all, it appears that DOE has continued paying for this program despite its disappointing results and conflicts of interest for no particular reason.  In the Daily News, I called these continued “crony contracts…inexplicable.”

Another dysfunctional company that spun off from DOE during the Bloomberg/Klein years is the highly problematic Leadership Academy , which still has a contract to provide coaching to principals through 2019, and which recently received a scathing audit by the NY State Comptroller, who found that the Academy had been paid without any evidence that the services had been rendered.

And all these problems with shady and wasteful contracts are symptomatic of an even larger problem at DOE – lax oversight.  For twelve years as chief procurement officer at DOE, David Ross has overseen hundreds of millions of education dollars that have been wasted on vendors who have engaged in fraud and corruption, including some of those described in my 2011 testimony before the City Council.

Ross’s career at DOE was capped off by the incredibly inflated five-year contract for $1.1 billion proposed for Computer Consultant Specialists in 2015 for internet wiring, extendable four more years at $2 billion—hurriedly reduced to $637 million overnight after news broke that this huge amount was to be awarded a company that had engaged in a fraudulent kickback scheme just a few years before. 

Friedlander and Ross at PEP meeting

See the video and the account on my blog where David Ross and Hal Friedlander, Chief Information Officer for DOE reassured the PEP members that this was the best possible contract at the best possible price, only to have it later kicked back by City Hall because of the resulting scandal, and rebid to other vendors for savings of between $163 million and $727 million – depending on what baseline is used.

As a result of the controversy provoked by this contract, DOE promised to the City Council to post full details of contracts within their Requests for Authorization (RAs) at least 30 days before every PEP vote, as Juan Gonzalez reported in the Daily News: “Tweed will even post information on all bids on its website 30 days before the scheduled vote by the panel, and has committed to do the same with other contracts.”

Yet in a May 2017 letter to the City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, Ursulina Ramirez of DOE and Laura Anglin of the Mayor’s office said they would post this information online at least four weeks prior to the vote, “except where the DOE determines it is in the best interests of the DOE and the City to provide less notice…”  This is a significant backtrack from the DOE’s earlier promise. 

After 12 years, David Ross is finally leaving – but sadly, now going to head contracts at MTA, where he will likely waste many more millions, while Hal Friedlander, the other DOE official who pushed so relentlessly for the outrageous CCS contract and claimed they had gotten the best possible price for the contract, has started a new organization called Technology for Education Consortium.  This Gates-funded organization is focused on- get this – how to save school districts money on technology.  You just can’t make this stuff up.

Fair student funding & the ATR system - two bad policies undermining NYC schools

Today Chalkbeat covers the budgetary ramifactions of the new agreement between the UFT and the NYC Department of Education in which the DOE will place ATR teachers (on Absent Teacher Reserve) in schools with vacancies, whether the principal chooses these particular teachers or not.  In addition, unlike earlier years, the principal will have to pay the full amount of their salaries – which are often much higher than the average teacher salary, even though the school only receives funding for the average salary under the Fair Student Funding system, implemented by Joel Klein in 2007, after much controversy and protest.

As an earlier Chalkbeat article explained, the cost of the ATR pool has risen to more than $150 million per year, according to an IBO estimate, and included 822 teachers at the end of the last school year -- teachers who had no permanent assignments but had been “excessed” because of school closings, enrollment decline, disciplinary offenses or low ratings from their principals.  The existence of a  wasteful system like this is the confluence of large number of factors and policies adopted by the DOE during the Bloomberg administration: mass school closings and their replacement with charter schools, NYC’s  version of a student-weighted funding system called Fair Student Funding, and the agreement made in 2005 not to place tenured teachers who had lost their positions into schools with openings, but leave the choice of who would fill these positions completely up to the principal’s discretion.

Earlier this summer, the DOE announced plans to place hundreds of these teachers into school vacancies by Oct. 15, even if principals objected. And yet one of the reasons that the ATR pool has grown so large and principals remain reluctant to hire them, no matter  their qualifications, is that one of the peculiarities of the Fair student funding system, at least in NYC, is that it requires principals to cover the whole cost of their staff, by allocating per student funding to a school based on the average teacher salary -- which has decreased in recent years due to teacher attrition.  

According to Chalkbeat, based on IBO estimates, “on average each ATR teacher received a total of $116,258 in salary and fringe benefits for the past school year. (By comparison, the base salary for a city teacher as of May 2017 was $54,000). “ Thus for every average teacher hired from the Absent Teacher Reserve, a principal could hire more than two new teachers for his or her school.

At the time, Robert Gordon who devised the Fair Student Funding system for Joel Klein in 2007 was quoted in the NY Times as saying that the system would allow principals “to retain their most experienced teachers if that is what they want to do.''   This shows that the idea was devised to provide an incentive to schools to get rid of their experienced teachers, through the ATR, the rubber room or otherwise. At the time Randi Weingarten, then head of the UFT warned in the above article that “it will destabilize good schools and give principals a disincentive to hire experienced teachers simply because they cost more.''

Advocates like Noreen Connell of the Educational Priorities Panel was quoted in the same NY Times article that “the funding proposals have the potential to do lasting damage for decades to come.'' More specifically, she warned that by not covering the costs of a particular staffing ratio, the system would lead to sharp class sizes when budgets were cut—and principals would have no choice but to increase class size, get rid of their experienced teachers, or both.

Class sizes have indeed risen sharply since 2007, and nearly ten years after the recession many schools still only receive 87% of the funds that they are owed via the FSF formula. I would argue that the system is inherently misconceived and undermines the quality of schools, since there are only two observable, quantifiable school-based factors that have been shown to lead to more learning – small class size and experienced teachers.

I don't know any other school district in the country that has adopted this version of Fair Student Funding and that demands principals cover the full cost of their staff no matter what their salaries. If you do know of another district that does this, please let me know below. 

Bill de Blasio promised when he was running for office he would re-evaluate the FSF system, but has not done so.  Certainly, no NYC Mayor would impose this sort of rigid funding system on local police precincts or firehouses, and demand that NYPD or fire company captains cover the cost of their staff -- – even if could mean shortages if they had particularly experienced officers.  If any Mayor did try to impose such a system, no doubt he would face mighty resistance from his own Commissioners as well as the police/fire fighter unions.

Just as I am not aware of any other district that has adopted NYC’s version of the FSF system, I don’t know of any district that has given principals the right to hire outside the reserve of teachers already on staff.   When Cami Anderson ran the Newark school system from NYC she adopted the system, but it was later deep-sixed by Chris Cerf when he was appointed as Newark Superintendent – because it was recognized as too expensive and too wasteful.

If teachers are incompetent or have engaged in misconduct, they should be dismissed in the usual way, via a 3020-a disciplinary hearing, rather than put into the Absent Teacher Reserve. I know of several former principals and administrators who say this is time-consuming but eminently doable.  If teachers have not been found to exhibit any of these deficiencies, they should be offered to principals to reduce class size or provide other services at no expense to the school. If there are any teachers left over in the reserve, their contracts should be bought out.   The current system is an absurd waste of money. And NYC’s Fair Student Funding system needs to be re-evaluated in light of its detrimental impact on teacher experience and class size.

Bridge International, for-profit chain of schools in Africa may violate student privacy rights among other abuses

A little less than a year ago, I blogged about how the journalist Tina Rosenberg, who regularly writes for the NY Times Fixes column, had repeatedly praised the for-profit education company, Bridge International Academy, while glossing over or omitted negative information, including the arrest of a doctoral student falsely arrested for investigating conditions at the school. Bridge International, or BIA as it is commonly called, currently runs over 500 private schools in India, Kenya, Nigeria, and Uganda, with the professed goal of reaching 10 million students by 2025. The company hires high school graduates and provide them with just a few weeks of training, and then send them off to teach to read scripts off computer tablets.

Rosenberg wrote glowingly about  this company in her column while failing to disclose how she and the organization she co-founded, Solutions Journalism, have a conflict of interest:  Bill Gates has invested in BIA, along with Pearson, Mark Zuckerberg and others, while the Gates Foundation has granted Solutions Journalism more than $2.5 million in funds since 2014.

Last year, Liberian government outsourced fifty primary schools to be operated by Bridge, and  recently decided to allow them to expand the number even more, without waiting for the results of a randomized trial as originally promised.  The decision of the Liberian government to expand the company's operations without actual evidence of their schools' quality led to a public statement of protest from the academic community.  Bridge's operations in Liberia has also been criticized by Kishore Singh, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, who sent a letter to the Liberian president, stating that by outsourcing its educational system to a for-profit company, the country was committing a “gross violation” of its education obligations under the Sustainable Development Goal number four, which states that by 2030, the nation would “ensure that all girls and boys complete free, equitable and quality primary and secondary education leading to relevant and effective learning outcomes.”


On July 27,  the NY Times magazine ran a comprehensive on-the-ground description by Peg Tyre of these schools in Kenya, along with some of their problems.  Tyre described how many families can't afford the tuition, students were sent home immediately if their parents fell behind on payments, teachers deliver rigid scripted lessons with no time to answer questions, and in buildings that often feature inadequate unsanitary conditions.

A couple of weeks later, Tyre's account was challenged by a breezy NY Times column by Nick Kristof whose argument could be summarized this way: the Liberian education system is a disaster, so Bridge's schools must serve as an improvement.  (The same argument, by the way, is often used by charter school supporters to privatize public schools, rather than invest in improving their conditions.) This column sparked a Twitter debate between Prof. Daniel Katz and Kristof, into which I occasionally interjected.

Among the other troubling concerns with Bridge is the company's plans to achieve profits by using the personal student data of students for marketing purposes, as described here by the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

This concept is troubling, to say the least, and it can be easily imagined how Bridge International Academy might share data on families that lapsed on tuition payments with banks and used to deny them credit and/or loans.

More recently Liberia's teachers have come out publicly against the expansion of Bridge, and yesterday 174 organizations from 50 nations, including Network for Public Education, on whose board I sit, came out with a letter urging investors to cease their support and divest in Bridge given the company's lack of transparency, inadequate research evidence, poor conditions, and violation of student and teacher rights.  As well as divestment, the letter from the organizations , whose logos are below,  goes on to make the following demands of investors:

● Immediately and independently verify BIA’s compliance with national laws and standards,

including human rights, educational, disability, and labor standards;
● Ensure that issues of equity, systemic discrimination, and exclusion are addressed;
● Demand that BIA immediately uphold standards of transparency and publicly disclose information about its operations, including accurate information on actual levels of fees and real costs for parents, teacher salaries and qualifications, enrollment data of children with disabilities, student attrition and completion rates, legal status and policy compliance in different countries, etc.
● Demand that BIA immediately stop intimidating civil society organizations and researchers, including teachers’ unions, and collaborate with any interested researcher in order to provide reasonable access to its schools and all information required to make independent assessments of its claims;
● Engage in dialogue with civil society organizations to review the concerns about BIA and to explore alternative ways to make a valuable contribution to education;
● Demand immediate action to remedy the above violations, within a reasonable timeframe and with adequate monitoring, or alternatively withdraw existing investments;
● Transparently share information about existing or future evaluations of BIA, and engage in dialogue about these evaluations with all stakeholders, including civil society organizations;
● Cease future investments of public or private resources in BIA and other fee-charging, commercial private schools that are failing to reach the most disadvantaged and contributing to socio-economic segregation, undermining the public education system, or undermining the rule of law;
● Invest in programs that fight poverty and inequality by promoting high-quality, equitable, free public education, including programs that help local and national governments improve public schools and expand to under-served areas;
● Constructively engage with civil society organizations to promote the realization of the right to education.

Surely, that would be a good start!

NYC Parents file legal complaint to force Mayor to reduce class sizes

Update (7/20/17 : Lindsey Christ of  NY1 just ran a segment on the complaint here: Here's how parents aim to reduce class sizes of city public schools.

Yesterday, nine NYC parents from every borough of the city plus the Public Advocate, Class Size Matters and the Alliance for Quality Education filed a complaint with the NYS Education Department to require them to force NYC to reduce class size and comply with the Contracts for Excellence (C4E) law.  Articles about our complaint were published in the Daily News: Growing class sizes at city schools break state law and provide 'second-rate education,' advocates charge; and WNYC Schoolbook: Parents Push NY to Enforce Smaller Class Size Law,   
Queens Chronicle: Obey the Law, School Parents Tell City DOE. 

The reality is that since the C4E law was approved by the NY Legislature in 2007, class sizes have substantially increased with the sharpest increases in grades K-3, where the research is crystal clear that small classes makes a dramatic difference in children's ability to learn, especially for low-income students of color, English Language Learners and kids with special needs, which make up the majority of students in NYC public schools.

In fact, the number of children in grades 1st through 3rd in classes of 30 or more has risen by an incredible 4000% since 2007.  It is both unethical and illegal that Mayor de Blasio and his Chancellor Carmen Farina have refused to reduce class size -- even though de Blasio promised to do so when he ran for Mayor in 2013.

The press release is here and below.  The legal complaint is posted  here .  A timeline documenting the DOE’s failure to reduce class sizes since the CFE lawsuit is available here; and more data showing class size trends is available here.   

Much thanks to the nine parent plaintiffs, Public Advocate Tish James and AQE, for joining the legal complaint,  Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. for his support, and attorneys Wendy Lecker and David Sciarra of  the Education Law Center, who are handling the case pro bono.

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For Immediate Release:  July 6, 2017

Contact: Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters, 917-435-9329; leoniehaimson@gmail.com
Wendy Lecker, Education Law Center, 203-536-7567, wlecker@edlawcenter.org

NYC PARENTS FILE COMPLAINT TO ENFORCE LAW TO REDUCE CLASS SIZE

Demand Department of Education Reduce Class Size as Mandated in State Law

Today, nine parents from every New York City borough filed a petition with State Commissioner of Education MaryEllen Elia, charging the City Department of Education (DOE) with failing to reduce class sizes as mandated by the Contract for Excellence Law (C4E). The City’s Public Advocate, Letitia James, and two advocacy groups, Class Size Matters and the Alliance for Quality Education, also joined the parents in the petition.

Education Law Center (ELC) is representing the Petitioners.

Please see Parent Petitioners’ quotes below.

In 2007, as required by the C4E law, the DOE developed a class size reduction plan for the City’s public schools, pledging to lower average class sizes in Kindergarten through third grade over five years to no more than 20 students; in fourth through eighth grade to no more than 23 students; and to no more than 25 students per class in high school core classes. The State Education Commissioner approved the plan.

The DOE never delivered on its plan. Instead, class sizes have increased sharply since 2007, particularly in the early grades, and are now substantially larger than when the C4E law was enacted. As of fall 2016, DOE data show classes in Kindergarten through third grade were more than 18 percent larger, classes in grades four through eight were six percent larger, and high school classes were 1.5 percent larger than in 2007.

“The growth in class size from 2007 to the present is breathtaking,” said David Sciarra, ELC Executive Director. “For example, in 2007, a little over 1,100 students in grades one through three were in classes of 30 students or more. As of November 2016, a staggering 43,219 first through third graders were in classes this large, an increase of almost 4000 percent.”

“New York City students have waited too long for a better opportunity to learn, and it is unacceptable that the City has reneged on its legal obligations,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters. “The research is crystal clear that smaller classes benefit all children, but especially those who predominate in our public schools: students who are low-income,  have special needs, or are English Language Learners.”

“A decade ago, the City committed to reducing class sizes to appropriate levels, a resource identified by New York’s highest court in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case as essential for a constitutional sound basic education,” said Billy Easton, Executive Director of the Alliance for Quality Education. “But now class sizes are even larger than when the court issued its decision. It is past time for the DOE to live up to this legal obligation.”

“The research is clear: smaller classes are better for our children. This indisputable fact can no longer be ignored. I am proud to stand with a diverse coalition of education advocates to demand the city provide our students with the smaller class sizes they are owed. There can be no equity or excellence when students in The Bronx and throughout New York City must sit in classes this large,”  said Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr.

The Petitioners are requesting that Commissioner Elia order the DOE to immediately begin reducing class sizes to the averages set forth in the 2007 class-size reduction plan and to reach those averages in no more than five years. Petitioners are also asking the Commissioner to order the City to promptly align its capital plan for school construction to the class size averages in the 2007 Plan, another requirement of the C4E regulations.
_____________________
Parent Petitioners Speak:

“My daughter has been in extremely large classes since Kindergarten,” said Naila Rosario, a parent in District 15 in Brooklyn. “This year, in fourth grade, she is in a class of 32 students. She cannot possibly receive the kind of personal attention and feedback every child deserves and needs to be successful in school. In fact, often her teacher does not even have enough time to answer all the students’ questions. There is no way my daughter or any of her classmates can get a quality education in a class this large.”

Deborah Alexander has two children at P.S. 150 in Queens, one in 1^st grade and the other in 4^th grade. Both are in classes of 3O students: “My fourth grader told me he doesn’t bother to raise his hand anymore, because as he said to me, there are too many kids, so I’m never picked. My daughter’s class is full of restless children, waiting their turn to be able to speak. Some of the children have social-emotional issues and clearly feel deprived, no matter how hard their teacher tries. It is time to aggressively address class size reduction once and for all so that all children know they are seen and heard.”

“My son, who has an IEP, has been held back twice and is at risk of being held back again,” said Rubnelia Agostini, who has a second grade child at P.S. 277 in the Bronx. “His class size is now 25, and he was in a class of 27 in Kindergarten at P.S. 205. After two months in Kindergarten he was bused to another school to address class size violations, since Kindergarten classes are supposed to be capped at 25. Now his independent evaluation says he needs a small class, but his school doesn’t have any small classes, and some are as large as 27. Why can’t my son receive the quality education he needs to succeed?”

Litza Stark’s son is in an inclusion, or ICT, Kindergarten class with 28 students at P.S. 85 in Queens. The ICT class contains 10-12 students with special needs: “Especially since this is an ICT class where students present an array of extra challenges, his class size causes excessive stress on the teachers and the students alike. PreK is important, but so is the quality of education for children in Kindergarten and up.”

“My son’s class has 24 children, many of them requiring close support, and his teacher is not able to individualize instruction as she could in a smaller class,” said Reeshemah Brightley, the mother of a Kindergarten child at P.S./I.S. 76 in Manhattan. “Classroom management is difficult, and students are more disruptive in a large class than they otherwise would be, making it hard for the rest of the class to focus.”

JoAnn Schneider’s son is a fourth grader in an ICT class of 31 students at P.S./I.S. 113 in Queens: “My son receives special education services and has been in an inclusion class since Kindergarten. He’s making only minimal progress because he needs a more focused environment that only a small class can provide. It is not right that my child should be denied the kind of education given to children elsewhere in the state where classes average only 20-22 students per class – especially when the law requires it.”

Johanna Garcia, a mother of two children at P.S./I.S. 187 in Manhattan, explained: “My son is in third grade in a class of 28. He receives special services, but his class is far too big and he has trouble keeping up. When he was in Kindergarten, his class size exceeded the cap, and that’s when it became clear to me that it was impossible for him to receive the attention he needed with so many other children in the class. My daughter is in a class of 29 students in fifth grade, and many in her class have been unable to stay engaged and afloat. The city owes it to my children and all other students in the public school system to remedy this egregious violation of their rights.”

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