Professional anti-teacher union blogger Michael Antonucci recently took his advocacy to the pages of the New York Daily News in an Op-Ed entitled “Fewer students divided by more teachers = very costly math.”
Antonucci’s claim is that from 2001 to 2006, New York City public schools lost 52,458 students, but added 5,647 teachers. On this basis, he concludes:
Over the long term, the trend is unsustainable. Revenues for public education are appropriately tied to student enrollment. It doesn’t take an economist, however, to see that shrinking revenues and increasing expenditures are a recipe for future budget deficits and fiscal meltdown… Shuttered schools, massive layoffs, early retirement buyouts and other attrition lead to dissatisfaction for everyone involved. It’s hard to tell an angry union rep or an overwrought parent that a laid-off teacher probably should not have been hired in the first place.
There is one little problem: Antonucci’s numbers are wrong. According the New York City’s Department of Education payroll records, the number of teachers actually decreased from 79,027 in March 2001 to 77,147 in April 2006. [Since 2006, in the period after that Antonucci cites, the number of teachers have risen modestly once again, so the overall figures for the decade are flat.] Further, according to the Mayor’s Management Report, the population of students declined 49,100 over Antonucci’s time period, not 54,458. This decline is a drop of approximately 4%.
Antonucci says that he obtained his figures from the U. S. Census, and has nothing more to say on the subject. It doesn’t take more than a minute or two on the Census web site to understand that it is an extraordinary warehouse of statistical information, such that identifying it in a general way as the source of a statistic is next to meaningless: finding the actual statistic is like searching for a needle in a haystack. Consequently, it is impossible to know if the statistics Antonucci cites are for all New York City schools [which appears to be the case for virtually all of the educational data compiled by the census] or if they distinguish public district schools from private schools and charter schools. Whatever their basis, the numbers he provides do not jive with the most authoritative data available. He has failed to do his homework, and bases his argument on claims that are not supported by the data.
The real story here, which Antonucci completely misses, is why the NYC Department of Education has not taken advantage of the opportunity posed by declining student enrollments to lower class sizes. Based on his numbers, Antonucci says there is a 14:1 teacher to student ratio in the NYC public schools. Even if Antonucci were using accurate figures to calculate the ratio, it would still be a misleading figure, since an overall ratio includes special education classes with mandated class sizes that are much lower than general education, as well as programs like universal pre-K with mandated lower class sizes — a statistician would say that in this case, there is a great deal of variation from the mean, so simply citing it is misleading. The general education class sizes, especially in the upper grades, remain all too high, and as we have shown here at Edwize in the past, the larger the school, the larger the class size. The bottom line is that with an opportunity to bring New York City class sizes closer to those in suburban schools, the NYC Department of Education has failed to act. It has not even spent the C4E funds it receives for lowering class size in this area. A commentary without an ideological axe to grind would have asked why the Department of Education has been wasting this opportunity.
