Our letter to the state, urging them to reject DOE’s class size “plan”

July 23, 2024

Yesterday, Class Size Matters sent a detailed letter to State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa, criticizing the document that DOE submitted to the state, entitled their “FY 2025 Class Size Reduction Plan.” We urged her to reject it, and instead demand that DOE provide a real, multi-year plan showing how schools will be provided with the necessary resources and space to allow them to lower class size to mandated levels over the next four years. Politico and the Daily News reported on our letter, and the Education Law Center sent the Commissioner a similar letter as well.

We also forwarded Commissioner Rosa a copy of the petition that more than 550 of you signed last month, urging DOE to revise the first draft of their “plan” along the same lines, and yet unsurprisingly, none of our suggestions for improvement were adopted by DOE officials.

Schools are about to begin the second year of the mandated five-year phase-in of smaller classes. And although the city started with a big head start, with more than 40% of classes meeting the new class size caps when the bill was passed by the Legislature in June 2022, and the Governor giving DOE an extra year to comply when she signed the bill into law the following September, they have moved backwards instead.

School budgets have been repeatedly cut and the capital plan slashed since the law was passed, and class sizes have significantly increased in most schools, as reflected in the DOE’s own June 2024 class size report. At this point it is a crap shoot as to whether DOE will achieve the legal requirement that 40% of classes will meet the caps next year, and very unlikely that 60-100% classes will do so in the following three years without significant improvements in planning, budgeting, and the provision of space – which need to start now.

Instead of making a full-faith effort to comply, the DOE document uses the words “may” 35 times and the word “exemption” 22 times, and then says that they will “continue to investigate opportunities and methodologies by which to direct resources to schools to meet the newly mandated class size caps” –– which is not a plan.

Rather than adopt the proposals of the Class Size Working Group, whose December report provided an actionable and effective roadmap towards compliance, Chancellor Banks spoke at a recent event, railing against the law and claiming that “parents don’t want small classes.” I urge you to email him at [email protected] and let him know how you feel. You can copy me if you like.

Also please, contact me if your school is at risk of increasing its class sizes next year.

Thanks as always for your support,  Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329

Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson