The following letter was sent on July 29, 2021 to the NY State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa and the Regents Chancellor Lester Young concerning the many problems with NYC’s Contract for Excellence proposed plan.
The DOE has proposed a Contracts for Excellence spending plan that is completely inadequate to provide an equitable or adequate education to NYC kids — contrary to the intent of the law, which was passed to fulfill the goals of the CFE lawsuit. The DOE claims that the state has allocated no more funding to […]
August 9, 2021 Below and attached are talking points in English and in Spanish on how parents and teachers directly or through your School Leadership Teams should urge your principal to use available funds to lower class size and to help ensure social distancing next year, for the sake of stronger academic support and health […]
See our letter written with the Education Law Center to the DOE Chancellor about the need to hold prompt hearings to gain input from parents and others on how the C4E funding will be spent next year. This public input is legally required and is especially critical now, given that our schools are finally getting […]
Updated June 14, 2021. Below is our summary of the positions of the leading candidates for NYC Mayor on a range of critical education issues. For maximum readability, download it and read at 100% of its size. Please share with others!
Check out the fact sheet here or below. If you support smaller classes, please urge your CEC or community group to support this resolution. Please also sign our petition here.
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. For immediate release: March 25, 2021 Media contact: Leonie Haimson, leoniehaimson@gmail.com, 917-435-9329 New report finds DOE overspent by many millions on rental subsidies for charter schools and owed millions to co-located public schools for facility upgrades Analysis by Class Size Matters reveals […]
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. […]
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 […]
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 .
