July 20, 2017 Some important news to report. First the bad news: 1- The House Appropriations Committee voted yesterday to zero out and totally eliminate more than $2 billion in Title II funds, which are used in many schools to reduce class size, keep teachers on staff, and/or improve teacher quality. If the full House […]
News articles about our legal complaint were reported by in WNYC Schoolbook: Parents Push NY to Enforce Smaller Class Size Law, NY1: Here’s how parents aim to reduce class sizes of city public schools, and the Queens Chronicle: Obey the Law, School Parents Tell City DOE For Immediate Release: July 6, 2017 Contact: […]
The NYC Department of Education has refused to complied with the Contracts for Excellence (C4E) law requiring that they create smaller classes in all grades in our public schools. Instead class sizes are considerably larger now than when the law was passed in 2007. As of the fall 2016, classes in Kindergarten through third grade […]
This testimony along with the Opportunity to Learn index is downloadable as a pdf here. Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters June 6, 2017 Good evening, Regent Cashin, Regent Reyes, and Commissioner Elia. My name is Leonie Haimson and I’m the Executive Director of Class Size Matters, a non-profit organization dedicated to reducing class size in […]
May 18, 2017 1. This week our Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, along with the Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood, released a new Parent Toolkit for Student Privacy: A Practical Guide for Protecting Your Child’s Sensitive School Data from Snoops, Hackers and Marketers. We think this is a uniquely valuable resource because it will […]
April 19, 2017 Chronic failures with school planning and siting have resulted in overcrowding citywide. These power points listed below reveal how that latest data from the School Construction Authority’s 2015-2016 “Blue Book” indicate that more than half (56%) of NYC schools are overcrowded (at or over 100% of target utilization). Over half a million […]
Tomorrow Wed. April 5 at 4:30 PM we will rally outside Governor Cuomo’s office at 633 3rd Ave. (40th/41st), to protest his refusal to adequately fund our public schools and his insistence on expanding charters and raising their funding. Please join us; come with your kids and bring signs! The NY state budget is deadlocked […]
April 3, 2017 1. The NY state budget is stalled and will be late for the first time in years. The deadlock appears to be related to education funding for our public schools vs. charter schools, and whether the cap on charter schools will be lifted. As usual, the Assembly Democratic majority wants to fully […]
March 9, 2017 In December of 2016, President Obama signed into law the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which replaced NCLB and requires states to develop a new accountability system for their schools. ESSA mandates that schools be rated mostly on academic factors, including test scores and graduation rates. But it also allows the inclusion […]
On Tuesday, Feb. 28, the NYC Council held joint hearings of the Education and Finance Committees on the myriad problems with the city’s dysfunctional process of school planning and siting. Many parents, students and advocates pointed out how the capital plan is underfunded, the enrollment projections inaccurate, school siting too slow — all resulting in […]
You’re invited! Class Size Matters will hold our annual Skinny Awards on Wednesday, June 12th. You can sign up for the event here.
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 .
