[Editor's note: Versions of this piece appeared in community newspapers throughout the five boroughs. This is the Manhattan version.]
Tens of thousands of children across the city are crammed into overcrowded classrooms. Yet the city has received from the state more than three-quarters of a billion dollars in the past three years to lower class size. Despite this influx of funds — and the city’s promise in writing to use it to lower class size — class sizes have actually increased in New York City.
That is why the United Federation of Teachers, the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation and a coalition of other groups and individuals sued the city Department of Education earlier this month. Our lawsuit charges that despite a decline in overall student enrollment and the injection of more than $760 million in state funds from school years 2007-08 through 2009-10, class sizes have gone up by the largest amount in 11 years.
This $760 million was part of the state’s solution to an earlier case called the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which challenged how state education funding had shortchanged urban districts, including New York City. The new funds, under the guidelines known as Contracts for Excellence, came with the proviso that the city deliberately target funds to smaller classes.
New York City took that money, and then ignored its promise, permitting principals to spend the money on other things, including replacing funds lost to city budget cuts, a clear violation of the agreement with the state. More »
UFT President Michael Mulgrew appeared on NY1’s “Inside City Hall” on Jan. 7. He spoke about charter schools, the Race to the Top application, this week’s class size lawsuit, and other issues.
Today, a coalition of civil rights organizations, educational advocacy groups and the UFT filed a law suit against the NYC Department of Education and Joel Klein for failure to comply with New York State law under the Contract for Excellence and lower class size in New York City public schools. The lawsuit charges that despite a decline in overall student enrollment and the injection of more than $760 million in dedicated state funds from school years 2007-08 through 2009-10, class sizes have actually increased in city schools.
Joining with the UFT in the lawsuit are the New York State Conference of the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation, Class Size Matters, the Alliance for Quality Education and parents of NYC public school students. Appearing in support of the law suit today were New York City Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, New York NAACP President Hazel Dukes and Hispanic Federation President Lillian Rodríguez López.
UFT President Michael Mulgrew said, “New York City promised in writing that it would use specific funds to reduce class size. It then turned around and ignored its promise, saying that school principals who supposedly work for the DOE simply decided to spend the money on other things — among them, to replace funds lost to city budget cuts. The result has been that class sizes have actually increased over 2007 in every grade.”
“Three-quarters of a billion dollars later, tens of thousands of New York City students are packed into classes that are higher than anywhere else in the state. Who is managing — or should I say mismanaging — this process?” More »
Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend is an odd time for the Dept. of Education to publish the new class size numbers.
But a quick look at them suggests why: class sizes rose virtually across the board, for the second year in a row. This occurred despite $150 million in targeted state funding to reduce class sizes in New York City in each of these two years.
DOE obviously knew since September that class sizes were up. They told the Daily News Sunday that the just couldn’t help it because of budget cuts. That may be true, but then why stay mum and then publish your report over a holiday?
A UFT survey in October found that 70 percent of high schools and 63 percent of elementary and middle schools had larger classes this year. It was no surprise. But DOE has sort of slinked around on this issue, saying principals are in charge of their individual school budgets so Central is not accountable for how this state class size funding is spent. This doesn’t sound like the kind of accountability Central imposes on everyone else. More »
Caroline Hoxby’s updated report on New York City’s charter schools uses a provocative construct: she finds that Harlem’s charter students are making standardized test score gains that put them on track to substantially close their achievement gap with Scarsdale.
Hoxby, a Hoover Institution fellow and Stanford professor who has published extensively on charter schools (favorably) and teacher unions (unfavorably), looked at students who won admittance by lottery to certain New York City charters and compared their performance to students who applied but were not admitted.
Today, the nation’s preeminent charter school organization, Green Dot Public Schools, and its largest teacher union local, the United Federation of Teachers, signed an innovative and pioneering collective bargaining agreement for Green Dot’s New York City charter school. The contract was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Green Dot school on Monday, and was ratified by the UFT Chapter today.
The 29 page agreement breaks vital new ground, and not simply because it brings together leading forces in the ranks of the charter school movement and teacher unionism. Just as importantly, the contract embodies a new model of labor relations in education, based on a disarmingly simple proposition: that a school which respects, nurtures and supports teacher professionalism in all of its work will provide the best education for students. More »
PS 194, the Countee Cullen School, is nestled in the heart of Harlem in Community School District Five, one of the poorer districts in New York City. On a Tuesday evening a few weeks ago, it was the scene of a tense hearing. The full school auditorium was fiercely divided into two camps — on the one side, parents of PS 194 students fighting to keep their neighborhood school open, and on the other side, Eva Moskowitz and her supporters demanding that the entire building be turned over to her Harlem Success Academies.
Behind that conflict was the New York City Department of Education — and not just because it was the DOE which was planning to replace PS 194 entirely with one of Moskowitz’s schools. More »
This celebration of vigilantism from the film “The Treasure of Sierra Madre” comes unavoidably to mind in thinking about this whole business of increasing class sizes. In the film, Mexican bandits posing as “federales” surprise a group of American gold prospectors. One of the Americans (Humphrey Bogart) demands to see their badges. “Badges?” replies Mexican actor Alfonso Bedoya, with a fabulous sneer. “We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.”
Class sizes rose in almost every grade this year, despite an infusion of almost $150 million from State Ed specifically to lower class sizes. Was there an explanation? Really not. More »
Charged up parents, politicians and UFT officials attended a rally on August 6 to demand that the Department of Education take over a state-owned building at 75 Morton Street in Manhattan for a much needed middle school. The building is up for sale.
The rally was held a day after Deputy Mayor Dennis Walcott wrote to the Empire State Development Corporation, which owns the building, asking that the sale be halted and that the site be used for a school. More »
Immediately before the holiday break, the New York City Department of Education published for the first time class size data for all NYC public schools. The data is far from complete: on the high school level, for example, it includes only classes in the four major subject areas [Social Studies, English Language Arts, Mathematics and Science]. There are also indications that it is not entirely accurate; some schools, it appears, took inclusion team teaching classes and reported them as two separate classes, one of general education students and one of special education students — even though they were instructed explicitly that they should not do that.
Yet even within these limitations, the data tells some very interesting stories. More »
. . . we are talking about kids being in high school classes of 23 instead of 35. We are talking about fifth grade classes of 20 instead of 30.
Based on the class size data that the Department of Education released last week, they’ve been thinking a tad more incrementally. Like, this year average K-3 classes were reduced by about two-tenths of a child. Grades 4-5 are down six-tenths of a child; middle schools are down seven-tenths of one kid. (High schools are not comparable with last year’s methodology.) More »
The DOE today issued its new and revamped class size report, and for the first time–or the second if you count last year’s somewhat controversial report–it is possible to get fairly accurate data on class sizes at the city level, the borough level, the district and the school levels. This is a huge advance, the product of a ridiculous amount of work and struggle.
It’s also a huge amount of data. What to make of it? The best thing to do to start is check out your own school and grade or subject, if you are a teacher, and see if it matches reality. Parents should of course look at their children’s schools and grades. If it doesn’t, let the UFT know. But going forward it should be much harder for DOE to fudge the class sizes. This is a tool that anyone can use to monitor class size. What it shows is that while classes overall are getting a bit smaller, this is not happening fast enough, especially in the high schools.
[Editor’s note: The Independent Budget Office released a report (pdf) that found a relatively small drop in class sizes despite declining enrollment and nearly $200 million in state and federal funds dedicated to reducing class size.]
It is disturbing to learn that the Independent Budget Office’s analysis shows that fully 61% of New York City’s public school kindergarten to third-grade classrooms exceeded the state’s early grade class size standard of 20 students per class last year. That target is part and parcel of the early grade class size reduction initiatives approved by the state 10 years ago and was based on what many researchers and educational experts consider best for effectively teaching children. There is universal agreement on class size reduction in the early grades; the question is why is it not happening for all the city’s students in kindergarten through third grade and how do we make it happen? More »
This past Thursday, the DoE released the class size plan required of it as part of New York State’s Contracts for Excellence. About $228 million is subject to the Contracts, which means that $228 million must be spent on class size reduction, time on task, professional development, secondary school restructuring, and pre-K.
Of those five categories, the state singles out class size for special focus, which is why the city had to create its plan. Had to is the optimal phrase here, since heaven knows the DoE has never shown much zeal for putting kids smaller classes. In fact given its longstanding antipathy, I imagine the DoE went about the task of writing this plan with all the enthusiasm of a high school Senior writing a research paper in early June. And the final written product – a lot of sound and suppressed fury signifying next to nothing – reminds me of some high school essays, too. More »
Principals, and, hopefully School Leadership Teams (SLTs), should be in the process of struggling to create a school budget for the 07-08 school year. The tool to create the budget is Galaxy, the transparent web-based program that drives the process.
After the seemingly never-ending battle over funding, the victory in the CFE lawsuit and the struggle in Albany is over: the dollars are finally flowing to the schools. School allocations reflect the additional funding as well as the “weights” that are part of what the Department calls Fair Student Funding. ELL, Special Education and low achieving students each have a “weight” assigned to the student, an additional amount of funding for each “weighted” student. More »
Today, the nation’s preeminent charter school organization, Green Dot Public Schools, and its largest teacher union local, the United Federation of Teachers, signed an innovative and pioneering collective bargaining agreement for Green Dot’s New York City charter school. The contract was approved by the Board of Trustees of the Green Dot school on Monday, and was ratified by the UFT Chapter today.
This celebration of vigilantism from the film “
