2025: A watershed year for Class Size Matters. Will you support our work to ensure more progress in 2026?

Dec. 29, 2025

This has been a watershed year for class size in NYC public schools. Nearly 750 schools lowered class size this fall to far smaller levels, and about 60% of classes achieved the benchmarks required by the law which we helped pass in 2022. In these classrooms, teachers are ecstatic about the changes they’ve seen, and hundreds of thousands of students are benefiting as a result. Whether your child was among them or not, please consider giving to Class Size Matters.

Class sizes still vary widely across the city’s districts and neighborhoods, causing far too many students to struggle. About 78,500 students in grades K through 5^th are still jammed into classes of twenty five or more, and in middle and high schools, there are more than 24,000 classes of thirty or more, with about 760,000 students.

Regrettably, DOE has done little to create space for the hundreds of overcrowded schools that do not have the capacity for smaller classes, either by building enough new schools or annexes, or aligning their enrollment to the class size goals in the law. Please donate to our work, so we can keep fighting for every NYC student to receive the smaller classes they need and deserve .

Some other highlights of 2025:

·       After we blew the whistle that the School Construction Authority board lacked its legally required three members for over two years, another member was finally appointed. The same thing happened when we pointed out their lack of a mandated whistleblower policy – they created one.

·       Along with other advocates, we alerted the NYC Department of Health that Talkspace, which has a $27 million contract to provide online mental health services to NYC teens, was collecting their personal data, sharing it with social media companies, and using it for marketing purposes. After months of continued pressure, we finally convinced the DOH to rewrite their contract with the company, require that Talkspace remove social media trackers from their webpages, and rewrite the Teenspace Privacy Policy.

·       We were the first to reveal publicly that the data of more than 3,000 current and former NYC students in the PowerSchool student information system had been breached, after the DOE had denied this to reporters. This announcement helped lead to affected families being alerted to the breach, even if belatedly.

·       We persuaded DOE to strengthen their Chancellor’s regulations to include a provision that any individual or company provided access to personal student information must have a written contract establishing how that information will be protected from further disclosure or misuse.

·       Just a few weeks ago, along with other concerned advocates, teachers and students, we helped persuade the Panel for Educational Policy to reject four proposed DOE contracts with companies selling AI products.

·       We now have a petition calling on our new Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, to enact a moratorium on AI use in schools until rigorous guardrails to prevent harm to students and the environment are established. Please sign our petition, if you haven’t already.

There is a theme running through all of our work: to ensure that positive, human relationships are centered in the learning experience of NYC students. To help us achieve this goal, please make a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters in 2025.

Happy New Year,  Leonie