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 […]
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 […]
The following PowerPoint is a summary of concerns and ideas offered by parents, teachers and others who contributed to our online survey and our June 20 conference on the reopening of schools.
The need to reduce class size next fall to improve health and safety and strengthen academic and emotional support and how this could be achieved through budget savings Download the PDF version here. Shorter version in the Gotham Gazette, “To Reopen Schools, The Mayor Needs Smaller Classes — Here’s $570 Million in Potential Department of […]
Update: 10/26/2023: The SCA has posted a spreadsheet that shows how many seats were lost in the 2021-2022 school year that includes the seats lost in 2019-2020, but has added no other information required by law. The spreadsheet lists “0” for the number of seats lost in a D75 school on Staten Island, at 669 […]
The Board of Regents and the New York State Education Department are re-examining the use of Regents “exit exams” as a requirement for high school graduation, and are holding a series of regional public sessions to gather input from parents, teachers and other stakeholders before making any changes to the current policy. These meetings will […]
You can download a PDF version here. What are we proposing? Class Size Matters is urging that the Mayor and NYC Council allocate $100 million to be allocated towards hiring teachers to lower class size, starting first in the early grades and in struggling schools. That amount could pay for the salaries of about 1,000 new […]
Jan. 6, 2020 The School Siting Task Force, created by Local Law 168, met only twice with no input from parent members appointed by the DOE or City Council members. It produced only a 1 1/2 page report, along with two spreadsheets, one a list of empty city-owned sites from the Department of Citywide Administrative […]
For immediate release: October 21, 2019 Contact: Leonie Haimson, 917-435-9329, [email protected] New report reveals over $100 million spent last year by NYC on charter facilities Includes payments to help charter schools rent space in buildings owned by their CMOs or related parties Also: 175 public schools co-located with charters lack $22M in matching funds […]
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 .
