Local lawmakers are demanding a progress report from the city’s public schools on their efforts to reduce class sizes.
Top education officials, absent Schools Chancellor David Banks, responded Thursday to three hours of questions about their plans to meet new state caps on classrooms. The Council’s Education Committee chair also introduced legislation that would authorize the body to track the system’s compliance, which advocates have called into question as class sizes grow across the city.
“It is no secret that a smaller class leads to better academic outcomes for our students,” Chair Rita Joseph (D-Brooklyn), a former teacher, said at a rally before an oversight hearing at City Hall. “Firsthand experience — two decades in New York City public schools — I know what it means to have a small class.”
The bill introduced Thursday would require schools to report actual class sizes instead of averages and offer detailed data on students with disabilities or learning English. It has 22 co-sponsors.
While education officials have said they are in compliance with the law, which builds in time to phase in the caps, critics point to trends in the opposite direction as, for the first time in nearly a decade, systemwide enrollment increased this fall.
State law requires class sizes to stay below 20 to 25 students, depending on their grade level. By next school year, 40% of classrooms need to comply, which education officials conceded for the first time Thursday could require tweaks. All class sizes must be below the caps by 2028, when more sweeping changes will be required.
“We do expect some policy shifts will be required to maintain compliance with the law for next year,” said Chief Operating Officer Emma Vadehra.
Those shifts could include new restrictions on state education funding mandating schools prioritize hiring teachers over other positions, and directing superintendents to oversee principals’ compliance, she said.
Vadehra projected the city will need to spend up to $1.9 billion to hire thousands of teachers, not including the billions more it will need to build classrooms at an estimated 500 schools expected to need additional space.
“We fully recognize that our current capital plan is not funded at that level,” said Nina Kubota, president of the School Construction Authority, “but the current $4.1 billion in new capacity funding represents a downpayment toward this mandate.”
Despite supporting smaller class sizes, education officials have panned the law for coming with no new dollars attached, forcing difficult trade-offs that could weigh heavily on top performers and schools serving the largest shares of poor students that are already more likely to be under-enrolled.
Supporters point to record-high state funding and say the city’s school kids deserve class sizes as small as elsewhere in the state. They also suggested the reform could help pay for itself by keeping more teachers in the classroom, as the system loses 4,000 teachers each year to attrition.
