Please give to Class Size Matters; we rely on your support!

December 18, 2019

Please consider making a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters. It has been a busy and eventful year.

Among other victories, we won our battle last spring to keep PS 25, a small but excellent school in Brooklyn with very small classes from being closed by DOE.

This fall, we released an important new report revealing that public schools co-located with charters have been denied $22 million in missing matching funds for facility upgrades that they were supposed to receive.

We also found that that the cost to the city of subsidizing the rent of charters in private buildings  increased sharply to more than $100M last year, including millions spent to help rent space for charters owned by their charter management organization or another affiliated group. We will be advocating with legislators to eliminate this onerous obligation on the part of the city, which no other district in the state or the nation is required to provide.

Our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy joined with other education and privacy groups to urge the FTC against weakening the prohibition against schools or their vendors directly collecting digital data from children under age 13 without parental consent.  We successfully fought off an attempt by the NYS Education Department to allow corporations, including the College Board, to continue to sell student personal data.   This fall we also testified to the State Legislature and City Council on issues ranging from high-stakes testing and school funding to Mayoral control.

We launched a new radio show on WBAI on education issues, called Talk out of School. This morning, we spoke with Carol Burris about a new report showing more than $1B in federal funds wasted on charters that never opened or quickly closed. We also talked to author Eric Blanc about the teacher strikes that occurred throughout the nation this past year, and what they achieved.

Today’s show and past ones can be streamed here. You can also subscribe to them as podcasts on iTunes or Spotify.

Most exciting is that next month, our class size lawsuit against the city and state will finally be heard in the Appellate court in Albany.

But we rely on your donations to keep fighting for the smaller classes that are the right of all children, but particularly disadvantaged kids, to get the excellent education they deserve.

If you want to help us succeed, please make a tax-deductible donation to Class Size Matters.

If you would like your donation to go to our work on privacy, please indicate that on the donation form. You can also give in someone’s name and we will send them a personal thank- you note, letting them know about your generous donation.

Happy holidays, Leonie

P.S. if you are ordering last minute gifts on Amazon,  you can do it through Amazon Smile and a percentage comes to Class Size Matters.  Just click here. Thanks!