UPDATE: 4/7/21 Thankfully, the completed state budget does NOT have any increase in the number of charter schools allowed under the cap; nor does it revive the “zombie” charters! April 5, 2021 I just heard from a connected source that raising the charter cap and/or reviving the “zombie” charters is still on the table in […]
The NY Daily News and WCBS-TV covered the lack of matching funds issue. We summarized our findings in Gotham Gazette on both the DOE overspending on charter rent and underspending on facility enhancements for co-located public schools. In March 2022, State Senators Liu and Jackson along with Council Education Chair Rita Joseph sent a letter […]
City Council Education budget hearings were held yesterday. See our testimony below, advocating for a billion dollars of the federal funds NYC will receive of the $2.5 billion be used for smaller classes below for the sake of health, safety and to address the damage done by more than a year of remote learning.
By law, the DOE is supposed to report on class sizes twice a year, the first time on Nov. 15 and then again on Feb. 15. We had heard from parents of egregiously large classes sizes this fall for many students engaged in remote learning of sixty students or even more, either full-time or part-time. […]
A pdf of this testimony is posted here. Class Size Matters Testimony on Impact of COVID-19 on Student Learning and Academic Achievement January 20, 2021 Thank you for holding these oversight hearings today. My name is Leonie Haimson and I am the Executive Director of Class Size Matters. Recent articles in the NY Post [1], […]
Dec. 17, 2020 The NY State Assembly Education hearings on Mayoral control that were supposed to be held today were postponed last night because of snow. Given that the hearings were to be held remotely this is hard to understand. Perhaps the Assemblymembers wanted to have a snow day, which unfortunately, the Mayor is not […]
On Dec. 9, 2020, Class Size Matter and NYC Kids PAC held an online briefing for City Council candidates and campaign staff. About 85 or so candidates participated. The presentation, which covered a range of issues from the education budget, class size and school overcrowding, to charter schools, testing and Mayoral control, is available below. […]
Oct. 28, 2020 Last week, Council Education Chair Mark Treyger wrote a letter to Chancellor Carranza urging him to report on school-specific and citywide class size averages as the law requires on Nov. 15, and also to disagreggate the data by type of instruction used: either in-person learning, remote classes for blended learning students, and […]
October 16, 2020 The NYC Council Education and Health Committees held oversight hearings on October 16 on the reopening of schools, as well as two proposed bills to require detailed attendance reporting: Int. 2058 and Int. 2104. Below is my testimony on the issue of class size and how to sharpen these bills to require more precise and disaggregated reporting […]
I sent the below memo to the members of the Panel for Educational Policy last week; questions about their busing contracts, DOE’s lack of compliance with the state student privacy law by failing to post their district data privacy policy and contracts with vendors that have access to personal student data, and problems related to […]
Sign here to urge NYC to implement a real, multi-year strategy to lower class size, as the law intends, without exempting up to half or more of all students.
Talk out of School radio show and podcast airs Sunday night at 7 PM on WBAI 99.5 FM or online at www.wbai.org when Leonie Haimson and Daniel Alicea interview guests and discuss issues affecting public schools in NYC, the state level and nationally. You can stream or subscribe to the podcast here; or at iTunes, Spotify or Google.
We held our annual Skinny award dinner Wed. June 28, 2023, honoring Rep. Jamaal Bowman, former Bronx principal and now a progressive trailblazer who is fighting in Congress to protect and improve our public schools. More photos on Facebook .
