CTT and the Class Size Swindle

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.

And yet, for a plan that is long on words and short on some specifics , the section on CTT’s is surprisingly detailed. According to the DoE, a full $40 million of the total $113 million allotted to class size reduction will be used to create 430 CTT (Collaborative Team Teaching) classes. The DoE even goes through the trouble of breaking that number down by level (288 new CTT classes in K-8 with the rest in high school) and, in a separate document, by district. On CTT, we get details. From what I’ve seen so far, this is the most specific part of the plan.

But wait — since when is CTT defined as class size reduction? CTT is a program that gives special education children a chance to learn alongside their general education peers. These classes follow the same class-size maximums as general education (let’s say 33 students in grade 7) but they can be comprised of up to 40% special education (IEP) kids. Most, or even all, of these special education students are kids with intense academic or emotional needs who are coming from self-contained environments where the class size ratio is 12:1. In order to address these needs, CTT classes consist of two teachers, one from special education and one from general education.

Maybe CTT is a great program, but is it class size reduction? Of course not.
The additional teacher does not reduce the class size. Rather, she compensates for the greater needs of the IEP students, and thereby brings the class back to the starting point. Without that additional teacher, a CTT class of 33 (or even 22) would be pedagogically untenable.

Or, to put it another way, when we take a class and then add both needs and teachers, no class size gains are made.

What is more, the child coming from self-contained special education into CTT has moved from 12:1 setting to 33:2. That’s a larger class no matter how you look at it.

None of this is to criticize CTT. If it is a good program (I don’t know enough to say), then surely it should be expanded, and the DoE is right to fund it. The problem comes when the DoE claims that CTT ought to be counted as part its overall plan to reduce class sizes citywide.

But why should that be a problem? Why can’t the city include CTT so as to highlight a program it believes is good for our kids?

The problem is this: the net effect of that inclusion will be to skew the numbers and make the city seem to have done more than in fact it really has. This becomes clear when one considers how much of the class size plan is actually the CTT plan. As far as I can tell, the city claims that about $113 million will be put toward class size reduction. But of that $113 million, over a third ($40 million) is slated for CTT.

And now, look at the projected gains. The DoE says it expects a decrease class size of anywhere from .3 to .8 students per class, citywide. Not exactly stellar, is it? But what’s worse is that the true gains must be even smaller. After all, what’s left of a projected class size reduction of .3 students, once we factor out the bogus inclusion of CTT that, again, makes up a large part of the city’s plan?

The answer is, not much. In fact, depending on how the DoE calculates the so-called reductions achieved through CTT (will a class of 30 now be counted at two classes at 15:1?), it is possible that CTT will turn out to have a disproportionately greater effect on the numbers than even its large piece of the budge implies.

But, well, what about the remaining $73 million? If you are doing the math with me, you know that there still seems to be about $73 million in the class size pot in addition to what’s in there for CTT. At least that money should reduce class sizes, shouldn’t it? Not necessarily. Almost all of it ($67 million) constitutes the weighted student funding already distributed to the schools . One hopes principals will use that to reduce class size, but the DoE has made one thing clear: there will be no directives to the principals to do so. Rather the DoE will give the principals “guidance” and “targeted coaching.” Principals tend to favor smaller classes, but given the pressure on them to use teachers for additional test-prep drilling, I’m not convinced that smaller classes is what the schools will choose.

Still, with more money in the system, it stands to reason that some classes are likely to get smaller, and we have CFE to thank for that. The real question now is, will we look back at the past year and see an opportunity squandered as (once again) the DoE claimed astounding gains by adjusting numbers to suit its fancy, rather than addressing students’ needs?

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1. For example, it is hard to tell how the city is even defining class size. There’s a passing reference to what they call the “conventional” definition (the number of kids in a class), but that gets tangled into a series of “personalization metrics” that include things like “student attention” and “pupil-teacher ratio.”

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