Testimony of Randi Weingarten on Contracts for Excellence Hearing: July 9, 2007
Jul 9, 2007 1:13 PM
Everyone has a right to have his or her own priorities. But the CFE money was supposed to be for a sound, basic education, especially for our city’s neediest kids.
So we expected the lion’s share of these funds to go expressly, transparently and with an accountability mechanism to those things explicitly mentioned in the state legislation – such as pre-K and class size. Instead, the city’s spending plan seems to be simply a plan to fund its own agenda: $42 million in all for new testing (including $8 million for Senior Achievement Facilitators, a title that all the new community school district superintendents will have), $60 million for charter schools and $13 million for new small schools.
The major flaw here is that this is not a system of schools, but a school system. A warning flag should have been gone up when less than $1 million was devoted to full-day pre-K education – something that everyone agrees is critical. Giving children an earlier start on learning has wide support among educators, parents, economists, business people and child development experts, and it is extraordinarily cost-effective. Research tells us that a dollar invested in good preschool programs yields between $7 and $17 in saved educational and social costs over the lives of the children.
With the $5.5 billion in new funding for city schools coming from the CFE lawsuit, we also have a historic opportunity in New York City to reduce class size.
Everyone in education knows that teacher quality and class size are the two key factors that produce academic improvement.
Every research study shows that when you lower class size, student achievement increases, disciplinary problems decrease, students become more engaged, and more students graduate. Lowering class size would make the job more doable and more satisfying for teachers, meaning fewer teachers would quit and you’d get a better and more experienced teaching force.
Simply put, there is no other way of spending resources that gets the same kind of value.
Albany lawmakers understand this. That is why the state, for the first time, is requiring the city to use the new state education aid to reduce class size.
Yet the city has no real plan for lowering class size.
The mayor deserves credit for committing with Albany to devote $13 billion over the next five years to building new schools. But to spend that money effectively requires a really thoughtful capital plan tied to a clear and precise class- size reduction strategy.
It’s disappointing to see that although the state is trying to do the right thing here, there is nothing in the city’s spending plan for $228 million in Contract for Excellence funding that explicitly says that class size will be meaningfully reduced.
For an administration that makes a point of stressing accountability, I am troubled by the lack of a clearly defined requirement for principals to reduce class size. It’s akin to saying to them, “Pretty please with sugar on top,” with no procedures in place to back it up.
The chancellor has committed to $106 million for class size reduction next year, but $40 million of that is for CTT classes, which is great but it will not really reduce class size. The DOE, by its own admission, says the new infusion of money will result in an average reduction of only 0.3 to 0.5 students per class. If we are going to make a meaningful reduction in class size in all grades, the city needs to allocate more money.
Even if you believe in an intensive testing regime, as the mayor and chancellor do, lowering class size can only improve the results. The city plans to spend $80 million over five years on a battery of new periodic tests to monitor students’ progress and to pinpoint individual weaknesses. If we reduce class size, teachers will actually have the time to focus on those kids that the interim tests show need help.
Teachers cannot do their best work given the high class sizes in this city. Teachers are working an average of 10 or 12 hours a day. Secondary teachers routinely take home 100 or 150 papers to grade a night. Teachers know what their students’ weaknesses are, but when you have 28, 30, 32 students in a class, it’s impossible to give each student the kind of individualized attention that he or she deserves.
Parents, teachers and New York City voters all agree that reducing class size should be our top priority. We are respectfully asking the mayor and chancellor to make it theirs as well.
