Class sizes at 5-year highs

To no one’s surprise, preliminary class size figures, released by the city Department of Education on Nov. 15, show class sizes increased in all grades and core subjects again this year as budget cuts continued to slam the city’s schools.

The increases — an average of almost one student per class in every elementary school, and a 4/10th-student increase in each middle and high school classroom — mark the fourth straight year of class-size increases, beginning in 2008. The increases pretty much wipe out all the reductions in kindergarten through 3rd grade since the state and the city first launched an Early Grades Class Size Reduction program in 1998.

UFT chapter leaders had already warned the city of large class-size increases in a union budget survey released in October. In mid-September, the union found approximately 7,000 classes over the contractual limit — the highest in a decade.

The DOE, in issuing the new figures, warned that class sizes next year are likely to be as bad or worse. 

“Continued concern regarding federal and state revenues and the need to close a fiscal year 2013 city budget gap will continue to negatively impact schools’ abilities to maintain or improve class sizes in the future,” it wrote.

The increases are also, in part, the result of the DOE’s refusal to mandate class-size reduction in school budgets. State funds targeted to lower class sizes under the settlement of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit have not been spent as directed in the past three years, according to the State Education Department, and were the subject of a UFT lawsuit against the DOE.

Once again, Queens and Staten Island had the highest class sizes. Average elementary school classes were 24.4 students, up from 23.7 last year, according to the DOE report. Middle schools averaged 27.1 students per class, up from 26.8. And high schools averaged 26.8, up from 26.4.

Early grades (K-3), middle grades (4-8) and high school core classes were all supposed to decline under the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement.