feature stories
The city’s resistance to cutting class
Apr 27, 2006 5:11 PM
EDITORS NOTE: As the New York Teacher went to press, the Delegate Assembly was set to consider a resolution to launch a major campaign for class size reduction in the coming months. This campaign would build to the November elections, when the UFT and its partners in the New Yorkers for Smaller Classes coalition hope the courts stop the Bloomberg administration from blocking the voters from considering a city charter class-size-reduction amendment. The UFT Executive Board approved an outline of the campaign plan by unanimous voice vote on April 24. On April 26, UFT President Randi Weingarten and other plaintiffs were due to attend a State Supreme Court hearing on the coalition’s case that a class-size reduction ballot measure should be allowed, overriding the mayor’s opposition. “We are asking the voters to choose as we believe the mayor’s priorities are wrong on this; he should support, not oppose, lower class size. Let the voters choose,” Weingarten said. Look for stories on these developments in the next issue.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his Schools Chancellor Joel Klein have made sweeping changes in the city’s schools, but the administration has ignored the No. 1 concern of many parents, teachers and advocates: class size.
A Newsday poll taken before the election found that class size remained the top education concern of voters. More recently, a Fordham online survey of more than 500 parents and education advocates found that only 4 percent supported the mayor’s education initiatives, while the overwhelming majority replied that his highest priority should be reducing class size.
This should come as no surprise. Smaller classes have repeatedly been shown to improve student achievement, cut down on teacher attrition, reduce disciplinary problems and increase parent involvement. While much of the focus on cutting class size has been on elementary grades, the overcrowded classrooms in many of our high schools have contributed to a state of perpetual crisis, with unacceptably high dropout rates and low attendance.
Last week, the Manhattan Institute released a report revealing that the city’s graduation rate is only 43 percent and ranks third lowest of the 100 largest school districts in the nation — having plunged 12 percent over the last five years. In a recent national survey of students who had dropped out of high school, 75 percent responded that having smaller classes would have helped keep them in school longer.
Today New York City’s classes remain the largest in the state by far. Though the Court of Appeals in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case found that class sizes in New York City public schools were too large to provide children with their constitutional right to an adequate education, the mayor plans to spend only 2 percent of any money received as a result of the CFE suit to reduce class size. Instead, he intends to spend 10 times as much on more administrators and specialists.
On April 26, our coalition, New Yorkers for Smaller Classes, which includes the UFT as a key member, was in State Supreme Court, fighting for the right of all New Yorkers to ensure that these funds are spent as the court intended.
Meanwhile, the administration is thwarting the drive for smaller class size in six major ways.
1. Flouting state law
On March 16, State Comptroller Alan Hevesi released an audit of the city’s use of more than $500 million it has received from the state to reduce class size since 1999. It found that last year, with $90 million in annual funds, there were only 20 extra classes in kindergarten through 3rd grade — not the 1,586 additional classes that education department officials claimed to have formed. The comptroller also found that the city had sharply cut back the number of classes provided in grades K to 3 by almost 900 over the last four years.
If the Department of Education had actually formed the classes for which they had received state funding, the average class in the early grades would have 19.1 students. Instead, despite declining enrollment, 65 percent of children in these grades remain in classes with 21 students or more, and 26 percent are in classes of 25 students or more.
The comptroller concluded that the city was illegally charging the state for teachers who should have been paid for by the city.
Though the audit was completed in July, its release was delayed for many months until the city provided a formal response. In a reply, dated Nov. 7, 2005, the day before the mayoral election, Kathleen Grimm, deputy chancellor of finance and administration disputed the audit’s methodology and conclusions, calling them overly “quantitative” and refused to alter any of the department’s practices.
While the state comptroller found there were schools with little room to form additional classes, he also found many that had the capacity but had not received funds to add new classes or were not using the money appropriately. Moreover, there were elementary schools sitting only a few blocks away from each other, one overcrowded and with large class sizes, the other with plenty of room. But Grimm said there was no reason to change school boundary lines.
Ninety-million dollars a year to create a mere 20 extra classes means that each class cost $4.5 million, reflecting either misappropriation of funds or mismanagement of the highest order. Teachers who care about this issue ought to contact New York State Education Commission Richard Mills at richard.mills@mail.nysed.gov, Speaker Sheldon Silver at speaker@assembly.state.ny.us, and Assembly Education Chair Cathy Nolan at nolanc@assembly.state.ny.us, and urge them to require that the Department of Education comply with the law.
2. Trying to keep voters from deciding
Last year more than 100,000 New Yorkers signed petitions to put an amendment on the ballot that would require a minimum of 25 percent of the funds owed our schools as a result of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case be spent on reducing class size to the levels elsewhere in the state, where classes are 10 to 60 percent smaller. This would allow voters to decide whether smaller classes should be required by law. But the administration has decided that this proposal is “improper” and should never appear on the ballot.
Why? The city makes the curious argument that the Department of Education is officially a state entity, and thus New York City voters can have no say when it comes to our public schools.
Taking this argument even further, the administration claims that Chancellor Joel Klein derives his authority over schools directly from the state, and thus no city law has any power over his actions. So the Department of Education refuses to comply with the anti-gay bullying law passed by the City Council or any other local legislation, including regulations that apply to all city agencies to use recycled paper. Indeed, for all their talk about accountability, the Department of Education officials appear to regard their power as infinite and their responsibility nil.
In a recent case in which a parent sued the city for a slashing her child received at Evander Childs HS, the corporation counsel contended the city was not legally responsible since the Department of Education was still under state control. The judge rejected the argument, writing: “The Department of Education is a mayoral agency, just as are all the other city departments.” The city has appealed this decision.
Our coalition, New Yorkers for Smaller Classes, which includes the UFT as a key member, is contesting the administration’s attempt to keep the charter amendment for smaller classes off the ballot and that the chancellor and the Department of Education cannot be exempt from city law. On April 26, oral arguments were to be heard by Judge Lewis Stone of the New York State Supreme Court, with a decision expected later this spring.
Among the organizations submitting amicus briefs in support of the right of city voters to have a voice on class size are the Citizen’s Union, the NAACP, the Alliance for Quality Education, the Chancellor’s Parent Advisory Council and many other parent groups. Councilmember Robert Jackson and the Hispanic Federation have also intervened in support of our position and were represented in court by Randy Mastro, former deputy mayor and head of a Charter Revision Commission under Giuliani.
3. Creating fewer new classroom seats
The following is the School Construction Authority’s record of new seats created over the past four fiscal years, according to the Mayor’s Management Report:
2003 — 22,267
2004 — 12,921
2005 —8,631
2006 — 4,287
There are fewer each year.
How many new seats were formed in the first four months of this fiscal year? Only 204. We are in danger of creating more seats in new stadiums than in schools during this administration.
And yet neighborhoods in all five boroughs are experiencing a development boom and it is now predicted that the city’s population will expand to more than nine million people by 2020.
In communities from Staten Island to the Bronx, large-scale housing and mixed-use projects are springing up — with no provision for all the additional students who will live in them.
In his State of the City speech, the mayor bragged about the massive new developments and boasted of a “sweeping inter-agency, five-borough Strategic Land Use plan that examines all of our city’s neighborhoods and their needs for the 21st century, focusing particularly on housing, transportation, energy, and infrastructure — including parks.” He made no mention of schools, the most chronically under-funded aspect of our infrastructure.
Many of these projects would never be built without large tax breaks to developers. We are about to give the Mets nearly $300 million in subsidies and tax exemptions, according to the Independent Budget Office, without asking that a single school be included in the project — and this in a neighborhood with some of the most overcrowded schools in the city.
But in other cities and districts across the nation developers are obligated to either build schools as part of their projects or pay impact fees to ensure that sufficient school space is provided to accommodate any increase in school enrollment.
In Miami, 20,000 new school seats have been created this year, with another 20,000 planned for next, in part by placing schools in new office buildings. This has enabled Superintendent Rudy Crew, who formerly headed the New York City system, to reduce class size in all grades.
Unfortunately, in New York City, education is the forgotten stepchild of economic development.
Now that the city is expected to receive more than $9.2 billion for school facilities over the next five years, the capital plan needs to be amended so that it accomplishes what this specific figure was calculated by the court to achieve — to provide enough space to reduce class sizes in all grades through high school. In the current capital plan, the administration creates only enough room to reduce average class size through 3rd grade, spending only one-third of these funds on new capacity with more money devoted to “restructuring” schools than building new ones.
In addition, the City Council should hold hearings to explore whether the development boom can be harnessed to our advantage, or whether we will stand on the sidelines as schools become even more overcrowded and another generation of students is doomed to failure.
4. The mayor breaking his promises for Governors
Island
When Michael Bloomberg first ran for mayor in 2001 he pledged to put high schools on Governors Island.
“We should build a major high school and university complex on Governors Island in partnership with one or more of our great private universities,” he said on Oct. 17, 2001. “The room is there for athletic facilities, laboratories, workshops, classrooms, etc. This would also free up many existing buildings in all boroughs for junior high school, elementary school and special education uses.”
Almost five years later, according to the mayor’s office, the city and state are still “working on a plan to develop educational facilities on the site.” But no one in the administration is focused on public school classrooms anymore. Instead, the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, whose board is chaired by Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, has been told to maximize the island’s profit-making potential.
The existing facilities on Governors Island could have a significant impact on the city’s severely overcrowded high schools. According to the agreement with the federal government that turned the island over to local control, at least 20 acres have to be reserved for educational purposes. Large buildings that once held classrooms and would be perfect for high schools now sit vacant with adjacent sports fields just waiting to be used.
5. Opening more charter schools
The mayor and his allies in the business world propose to create up to 100 new charter schools. Though Chancellor Klein has assured members of the City Council that he would not allow any new charter school to be created before it had an appropriate home, the department’s capital plan calls for 74 percent of them to be put in existing school buildings.
These actions will likely further overcrowd current public schools and raise their class sizes. Each new school gobbles up valuable classroom space for administrative and specialty purposes, space that could be used to reduce class size instead. Already, a public school in Harlem and another on the lower East Side face the threat of larger classes as a result of the administration’s intention to put charter schools into their buildings.
Of the 22 New York City public schools that currently share space with charter schools, only two did not see a significant increase in class size in at least one grade and usually many grades after a charter school was placed in its building.
The City Council ought to take the $100 million the mayor put into next year’s budget for charter schools and, instead, use it to improve outcomes for all our students by reducing class size in our middle schools where test scores are flat or declining and where children sit in classes of 28 or more.
6. Increasing out-of-classroom positions
There has been an explosion of out-of-classroom positions in our schools since the beginning of the Bloomberg administration. The headcount of bureaucrats at Tweed has mushroomed by 64 percent since 2003, only partly offset by a decline of administrators at the district level. New categories of supervisory positions have been introduced, such as “learning instructional supervisors” and reading and math coaches in every school.
Meanwhile, in 2005, the city comptroller found that there was a net loss of more than 2,000 teachers in two years. “If dollars that are going directly to the classroom are not being invested in teachers, it begs the question: how was the money spent?” asked Comptroller William Thompson.
More recently, the Educational Priorities Panel discovered that the percentage of spending devoted to instruction steadily declined during the first four years of the Bloomberg administration.
What are all of these out-of-classroom people doing, what are they costing and are they worth it? Wouldn’t it be better to invest these funds on hiring more classroom teachers so that class size could be reduced?
All New Yorkers need to take a serious look at these issues and take action to ensure that our children receive the smaller classes they deserve.
Leonie Haimson is executive director of Class Size Matters (www.classsizematters.org). A version of this article originally appeared in the Gotham Gazette on April 24.
