UFT sizes up the class size struggle
New York City will easily achieve 70% compliance on class size this year, but getting the last 30% to full compliance within the law by 2030 will be the toughest, UFT President Michael Mulgrew said at the Oct. 14 Delegate Assembly.
Mulgrew said the union has made remarkable progress in its decades-long fight to bring class sizes to acceptable levels. “If 10 years ago, I stood up in this body and I said, ‘Seventy percent of all the classes that our members are in right now adhere to the class sizes the rest of the state has,’ we would have said, ‘That’s not possible.’ And it wasn’t possible,” he said. “But we bet on ourselves and we made it happen. We told them, ‘You give us the law, and we will make it happen.’”
However, to implement the legislation properly, the timeline to do so was adjusted. Part of the reason for the delay is that the city did not make a good-faith effort to modify its capital construction plan to satisfy class size requirements under the law, Mulgrew said. The lack of a comprehensive construction plan necessitated an adjustment of the legislative timeline.
The original state law required 80% of classrooms to be compliant with new class sizes by the 2027–28 school year and 100% the following year. Each year, the city Department of Education can categorize classes as exempt due to lack of space or hard-to-staff positions in order to reach the legal compliance rate. “We knew they couldn’t get to 80% this year because they didn’t start the construction they needed to,” Mulgrew said.
In connection with the new timeline, the UFT negotiated an accountability measure with the DOE to compensate through pay differentials eligible teachers whose classes remain above the new limits in schools that were granted exemptions, and whose exemptions were used to officially get to citywide compliance.
Mulgrew stressed, however, that the pay differentials are not the goal (see president’s column, page 13). The goal is for all schools to be in class size compliance. “Our goal is to get this to 100% and keep it there for our students,” he said.
In other business, Mulgrew gave an update on the work of the 750-member UFT Contract Negotiating Committee, and the importance of all-member participation in the UFT contract survey in November.
Delegates also discussed problems with the Multi-Tiered System of Supports (MTSS) for reading in schools. Mulgrew said the union will continue to speak with the DOE about the system, which is broken and causing chaos in schools. The UFT and DOE have agreed on guidance that all schools should be following, including that teachers are not required to use more than one city-approved reading intervention program at a time, and teachers must receive appropriate training and materials for the program they are using. “We will continue to fight back when the DOE refuses to support what is going on in the schools,” he said. “This is about providing what our students need.”