The Mayor’s cuts to class size funding; do they make sense?

May 13, 2026

Mayor Mamdani announced yesterday that his executive budget will allocate $122 million next year to hire about 1,000 more teachers to lower class size;  $421 million less than in his preliminary budget. This will significantly slow the progress required by law, that currently requires 80% of classrooms to meet the cap next year, and 100% thereafter.

According to reports, the law will be amended by the Legislature as part of the state budget to lengthen the timeline for completion but by how much is still unclear. In this article, Senator Liu says that Mamdani has promised to achieve the legal class size goals by the end of his first term in office.

The Adams administration never actually intended to comply with the law and never proposed an actual class size plan to get there, though the law required it. Instead, Adams cut the budget for schools causing class sizes to swell, and slashed funding for new school construction by over $2 billion after the law was passed, making the timeline even more difficult to achieve.

What is true is that no matter how much Mamdani may sincerely committed be to the goals of smaller classes, aside from the budget savings he is obviously eager to achieve, it is very unlikely that he could reach the deadlines in the law the next two years no matter how he tried, because of delinquency of the Adams administration, especially when it comes to creating sufficient space.

•       The good news is that Mamdani also announced that he will add $1.5 billion to the capital plan to fund more school construction, which is desperately needed, especially in areas where nearly all schools are overcrowded. The bad news is that at the same time, the overall capital plan funding will be smaller by $1.2 billion. Which other categories within it will be slashed is still unknown.

•       Other bad news: previously the School Construction Authority testified that they would need about 70,000 more seats to comply with the law, and only about 33,000 are currently funded. An additional $1.5 billion will fund about 8,000 more seats – not nearly enough, according to the DOE’s own estimates, unless other changes are made to allow the 500 or so schools too overcrowded at their current enrollment to meet the caps.

•       There’s also the problem of the inordinate time it takes to build more schools, especially as SCA drags its feet in finding available sites.  Though the Class Size Working Group came up with many practical suggestions on how this process could be made more efficient and affordable in our report, so far neither the DOE nor the SCA have adopted a single one of our suggestions.

•       If the DOE would allow schools to cap their enrollment by reducing admissions or shift some of their 3k or PreK classes to nearby CBOs that have literally thousands of empty seats, it would save many years of time and billions of dollars. But so far neither the Chancellor nor the Mayor has publicly shown a willingness for this to occur. Though we have heard of a few schools where this is happening, we’ve heard of many others where the DOE has rejected their pleas.  In any case, is extremely unlikely that the city will ever achieve the class size goals required without doing so.

Also regrettable is the lateness of the state budget. The process for the DOE to publically present its class size plan is supposed to occur within 30 days of the adoption of the state budget. Unless the state budget is finalized soon, we may not even get a glimpse of DOE’s revised class size plan to see if it makes any sense until the summer, after the city budget and the capital plan are voted on by the City Council.

We hope that Council members will insist on being briefed on the Mayor’s actual revised plan before approving either one. More soon on how you can help us make that case.

2. Please also purchase a ticket for our May 19 Skinny dinner, to honor Diane Ravitch and support our advocacy and analysis on class size, privacy and AI.  If you cannot attend, please consider donating to our organization if you want this critical work to continue.

thanks Leonie

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
leonie@classsizematters.org
http://www.classsizematters.org/
Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson