Advocates are asking the state Education Department to step in and head off what they fear is the city’s intent to dodge a recent state law to shrink class sizes, the Daily News has learned.
Two major advocacy organizations, Class Size Matters and Alliance for Quality Education, sent a 7-page letter to Commissioner Betty Rosa on Thursday with data showing the average classroom in NYC actually expanded this year by 2 percentage points.
“It will be impossible for the city to reach full compliance by year five unless the State Education Department requires them to initiate a corrective plan to do so,” read the memo.
The new law limits kindergarten through third-grade classes to 20 students per class, fourth-through-eighth-grade classes to 23 students, and high school to 25 students. An initial 20% of classrooms had to comply with the law this fall, with an additional 20% a year until the caps are fully phased in by 2028.
Advocates predicted it is “extremely unlikely” the city will be in compliance next fall, when 40% of classrooms must fall below the caps, “without significant changes to DOE policies implemented as soon as possible.”
The letter said the corrective plan should include concrete next steps, including teacher recruitment, enrollment planning, and a capital plan that complies with the law.
Instead, modified budget plans, driven by the end of federal panedmic aid and city budget cuts, project the loss of thousands of teachers over the next couple of years, despite increasing number of students, advocates warned. Plans to create new school building capacity would also be scaled back by $2 billion under a draft capital plan released last month, they said.
City schools spokesman Nathaniel Styer defended the city’s efforts, saying the system is “well over compliance” with the law this year, with close to double the number of classrooms below the caps than required in 2023-24.
But he cited a litany of studies that demonstrate implementation will be costly and may pull money away from schools with higher proportions of children in poverty. A report from the Urban Institute, released this week and cited by the department, found that the law with no further investments would lessen a boost that a schools serving lower income families are currently receiving.
“To fully implement this law, we need the funding necessary to hire additional teachers and build additional classrooms — there is no magical pot of money available,” said Styer.
“The funding does not currently exist,” he added. “Pretending otherwise does everyone a disservice.”
Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters and one of the co-authors of the letter, pointed to the state making its largest investment yet in city public schools ahead of this year. That funding stemmed from a lawsuit that found that excessive class sizes among other shortcomings were getting in the way of city school kids’ education.
“At this point, the DOE is doing absolutely nothing to comply with the law and in fact they’re moving in the wrong direction,” she said.
“They seem to be unconcerned and unserious about their responsibilities under the law and to their students.”
A spokesman for the State Education Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
But Commissioner Rosa suggested over the summer that she may have hesitations over the law due to equity concerns.
“The resources don’t expand,” she said in August. “So you’re gonna have to take it from Peter to give it to Paul.”
