September 8, 2022 On June 2, 2022 the Legislature overwhelming passed S9460/ A10498 by a vote of 59-4 in the Senate and 147-2 in the Assembly. The bill requires that NYC implement a five-year class size reduction plan, to be phased in over five years, beginning in the fall of 2022. On Sept. 8, 2022, […]
August 22, 2022 Check out Class Size Matters testimony at hearings of the Council Education Department today on their resolution, demanding the Mayor restore the budget cuts to schools. We included a critique of the entire design of the Fair Student Funding system, showing how it was structured to maximize class sizes and incentivize principals […]
August 20, 2022 A few weeks ago, the NY Post ran an oped by a plaintiff in the NYSER case, which was an educational lawsuit filed in 2014 and settled last fall, after the Governor agreed to fully fund the amount to NYC schools owed them from the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case. This NY […]
This is a fast moving story. The fact sheet below has been updated since the Appellate Court gave the City an automatic stay late in the day on August 9. Here is the attorney’s statement on the Appellate Court’s action. August 9, 2022 On Friday, August 5, in Tucker vs the City of New York, […]
On July 18, 2022, four parents and teachers filed a lawsuit in the Manhattan Supreme Court on July 18, 2022 to block the Mayor’s budget cuts to schools in the case Tucker et. al. vs the City of NY. Subsequently, the New York City Civil Liberties Union filed an amicus brief in the case. The […]
July 15, 2022 Yesterday, July 14, we again analyzed the total Galaxy school budgets via an automated mechanism, scraping the data posted on the DOE Galaxy look-up tool here . Our new spreadsheet is here. According to our analysis, the overall school cuts for FY 23 now total about $1.42 billion compared to FY 22; […]
Below is our testimony from the July 24, 2022 joint hearings of the City Council Education and Oversight/Investigation Committees. If you’d like to hear our account of the hearings, and the absurd claims made by the Deputy Chancellor, it’s posted here.
Total Galaxy cuts to schools as of June 13, 2022, sorted by Council district, added up to more than $1.7 billion – far more than the $215 million in Fair Student Funding that is widely reported. Though more funding will be added to schools after that date, it generally is limited and supposed to be […]
Our 2022 Parent Action conference was great; about 80 people participated. Here is the presentation I gave on the new class size bill and yet how proposed budget cuts to schools will likely cause class sizes to rise sharply rather than decrease. Sure enough, last night school budgets were released, and they were brutal. Some […]
May 25, 2022 Check out our submitted budget testimony before the NYC Council Finance Committee for today. We urged the Chair Justin Brannan and other Council Members to prevent the Mayor’s proposed cuts to school budgets of $375 million, that are projected to lead to a loss of about 3200 teaching positions, which in turn […]
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 .
