Please donate to help us continue our work in 2019!

Please donate to Class Size Matters today; we rely on your support to continue our fight for smaller classes, an end to school overcrowding and better privacy protections for students in NYC, NY state and the nation as a whole.

We can only survive because of the generosity of individuals like you, parents, teachers and concerned citizens, who want to protect our public schools from privatization but also to make them stronger by giving all kids an opportunity to learn. This depends on their being able to receive enough individual attention from their teachers that only smaller classes can provide.

Please click here to give a tax-deductible donation; if you’d like it to be spent on our privacy work, you can indicate that on the line which says “designate your donation to a specific program or fund.”

Today, I have a piece in the Washington Post about the data-mining Summit Learning program, used in more than 300 schools across the country, including several NYC schools. The program caused a student walkout from the Secondary School of Journalism last month, in protest against this online program, that made national news. In my column, I describe how Summit collects a huge amount of personal student data and shares it with as many as 19 corporate “partners” including Mark Zuckerberg’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative –though Zuckerberg is the last person in the world who should be trusted with kids’ personal data, considering all the scandals and breaches at Facebook.

On Tuesday, we released a new report, detailing how the Mayor’s expansion of preK in NYC  has meant even more overcrowding  in 352 NYC elementary schools, leading to worse conditions for more than 236,000 students. Take a look and see how your district was affected. The Daily News covered the story here.

Though DOE contested our figures to the Daily News, including the fact that only 50,000 seats of the 57,000 new seats in the new five-year capital plan won’t be built until 2024 or later, these figures were confirmed by the Independent Budget Office and City Council staff. Moreover they weren’t disputed by the DOE officials either when confronted with the figures at Council hearings on Tuesday, as I describe here.

There are many problems with the proposed capital plan, including its lack of transparency and unacceptably slow pace, discussed in more detail in my testimony. One example: the only section of the plan dedicated to class size reduction has been slashed from $490 million to $150 million; with only the unspent portion from the current plan remaining – providing yet more evidence that the DOE never plans to lower class size unless there is yet stronger pressure from parents and teachers.

Which is to say, our work is more critical than ever. Please show your support, so we can continue our work to improve students’ opportunity to learn next year and in the years to come.

Happy Holidays, Leonie