Testimony of Amina Rachman before NYC Council Education Committee

Aug 23, 2005 2:25 PM

Good morning. I am Amina Rachman, special assistant to the United Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today about one of the most urgent problems in our school system: overcrowding, and its effects on class size, building use, and ultimately, on teaching and learning.

First of all, what do we know about class size and building use? Unfortunately, we know far too little, considering how important it is to assure reasonable class sizes for all students, and to assure that class sizes are equitable across the system. The Mayor and Chancellor tell us that average class size is going down. It may be, but an “average” for a system of 1.1 million students is not very useful data. Averages conceal as much as they reveal, especially when the numbers are so huge. The Mayor’s Management Report shows the average class size in grade 6 now is 26.7 students, down from 28.0 students in the 2003-04 school year. But that means nothing to the 32 students packed into Ms. Chan’s 6^th grade science class. Nor did the systemwide average help the parents of Ms. Chan’s students when they were picking a middle school for their children.

As for high schools, neither the MMR nor the Department of Education even report average class sizes for the high schools The information is available from the State Education Department, but its data lag by about two years, so it is of no use for planning, or for students looking for a school for next year. In fact, the city DOE failed to report even this older data last year. Now there is a blank line across the page for New York City class sizes in 2002-03. This year the DOE also failed to report complete data for the 2003-04 year (to be published this spring) due to a glitch in its new online system so the State Ed Department had to accept partial data as the basis for its report.

In addition, the high school buildings are now frequently shared by a number of new small schools. This often increases class sizes in most classrooms in the building, even as the small school classes are capped at 25. So it may depend not just on what high school a student goes to but what program in that building he or she attends as to what his or her class size is likely to be.

Similarly, it is very difficult, even for school system insiders, to know exactly what the capacity of a school building is and whether enrollment is exceeding that capacity—in other words, just how crowded the school is. We have founds that the DOE’s estimate of school building capacity often increased without any actual addition to the facility. The capacity rating sometimes goes up because the school is on double session—or triple or quadruple in some instance—so the increase merely reflects the fact that the same room is now used for 12 periods a day instead of six. There isn’t any real new classroom space. Or it may reflect the fact that the library is now two classrooms. Of course, they now have no library. So the rated capacity of a building can, like average class sizes, conceal as much as it reveals. Some of the most overcrowded schools and districts in the city now look on paper like they have no problem, or their problem isn’t so bad. For example, Richmond Hill High School in District 27 in Queens runs at 140 percent of capacity according to the latest DOE reporting, but is actually at 260 percent of capacity using its capacity rating of 1993.

There are scores of high schools on multiple sessions, or back-to-back sessions where half of the school attends in the morning and half in the afternoon. In many schools, halls are so crowded that it’s a real challenge for teachers and students to make it to class before the late bell. Students often have “lunch” at 9:30 am At the January forum organized by the UFT and the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, participants heard in great numbers about damage done to students and schools from overcrowding, and from students who felt they had been cheated of their education. Small schools have tended to suck up space in the existing large high schools that house them, creating even worse and often patently unfair conditions in the host schools. And this is not a problem confined to a few schools in the system. According to the Mayor’s own MMR, 31.9 percent of elementary and middle school students attend overcrowded schools and 71.4 percent of high school students do

What does this degree of overcrowding do to teaching and learning? You have probably heard that teachers come back to school before students every summer in order to “set up their rooms.” What they are doing is creating classroom space to support learning. They are carefully planning the flow of students throughout the day, creating dedicated spaces in their rooms for certain activities, deciding how to display information, and creating an environment that will set the stage for learning. None of this occurs if a teacher has to shoehorn 34 children into a former boiler room. None of this occurs if she has to move her classroom around on a cart, or is assigned to a basement room without windows, or is teaching Spanish in the same former library room where the French teacher is also instructing his 34 students on the other side of a half-height, moveable partition wall.

It is disgraceful that such working conditions count as acceptable classroom space when the Department of Education reports to the public. Where is the transparency here? Where is the truth in advertising? How are such conditions going to retain the high-quality teachers we need? How will this play out with parents who thought they were sending their children to a school with adequate facilities? And does pulling a veil across the school system help the public decide what the schools really need?

In a recent speech, UFT President Randi Weingarten called for an independent evaluation board in order to create a more transparent system of accountability. Such a board would allow educators, parents and the public to get a clearer picture of school conditions and assess the results of educational initiatives. It would also allow outside experts to have more input into the system. In the speech, she said, “We have to get around data that is massaged and selectively released by the same people who have a stake in proving that their plans and ideas worked…. Without full disclosure, without a watchdog, without venues for parent and community input, without consultations with front-line educators, Tweed has taken the public out of public education, and we, all of us, need to fight to put the public part back in.”

That is why the UFT wholeheartedly endorses these two bills, which will help us get a clear and accurate picture of both the school system and the individual schools within it, and put the public back in public education.

Thank you.