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Class sizes on rise across city
Dec 17, 2009 5:47 PM
The city packed more students into its classrooms for the second year in a row, a new Department of Education report confirmed, giving students less individual attention time and making their teachers’ jobs more difficult.
The reality of growing class sizes was evident to many teachers long before the report was published. Chapter leaders in almost 70 percent of high schools and 63 percent of elementary and middle schools surveyed by the UFT in October reported larger class sizes and cuts in staff.
“Class sizes have ballooned. These students, who need that little bit extra to succeed, may never be able to catch up,” teacher Kate Kurjalovic wrote in the survey, worrying about her students at PS 11 in Queens.
“Class sizes have definitely increased,” a Brooklyn high school math teacher reported in the survey. “This means less instructional time and more time putting out fires.”
According to a UFT analysis of data from “The 2009-10 Preliminary Class Size Report,” average kindergarten-through-3rd-grade classes rose almost 6 percent from 2007 to 2009. High school classes have risen 2.7 percent in the last two years. The increases come despite some $300 million of state Contract for Excellence funding to lower class sizes over that period.
“The Department of Education is mismanaging education funding at a time when budget cuts make every dollar more precious to classrooms,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said.
The city cited across-the-board budget cuts this year as the reason for the swelling class sizes.
However, in each of the last two years the city has received about $150 million in dedicated state funding from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement to reduce class sizes.
And according to a September audit by the city comptroller’s office, the DOE used more than 25 percent of money targeted to early grades class size reduction to cover its own portion of the budgets for 245 schools, rather than to enhance their budgets, as intended.
Exceeding the targets
The DOE chose the Thanksgiving weekend to publish the numbers, probably hoping to bury them. But there was little it could do to cover up the troubling reality.
Despite a long-standing state program to make kindergarten through 3rd-grade classes no larger than 20 students, three-quarters of the city’s K-3 students in public schools are now in classes larger than 20. A more recent state target, based on the Campaign for Fiscal Equity settlement, aims for classes in the upper grades of no more than 23. Yet half of all classes in 4th through 8th grade this year are larger than 25.
Almost half of all core-subject high school classes are larger than 30, according to the report’s data. Fully one-quarter of high school social studies classes across the city are at 34 or larger.
In some overcrowded districts, average class sizes are far higher. In District 29 in Queens, the average 5th-grade general education class has 27 students. (Average means half of all classrooms would be larger than 27.)
In the Bronx’s District 11, the average 7th-grade class has more than 28 students. In District 22 in Brooklyn and District 26 in Queens, the average high school geometry and U.S. history classes each have 34 students.
To read the report, go to http://schools.nyc.gov/AboutUs/data/classsize/classsize.htm.
