Update on DOE’s testimony on class size and inadequate guidance on AI

March 25, 2026

A lot has happened in the last two days. On Monday, education budget hearings were held at City Hall. It soon became  apparent that nearly four years since the class size law was passed, the DOE still has no actual plan to comply. Chancellor Samuels admitted that it is unlikely that they will meet the 80% benchmark for classes meeting the caps next fall. DOE and School Construction Authority (SCA) officials said they were “exploring capital and non-capital strategies” but refused to say what they were, or how the 500 schools too overcrowded to meet the caps at their current enrollment will be able to lower class size to mandated levels.

The Education Chair CM Eric Dinowitz asked SCA President Nina Kubota, “does SCA believe that all seats needed are funded in this plan?” She responded, “ We are still working on that.” He pointed out that last year they testified that 70,000 seats would be needed – but less than half that number are currently funded, and only about 12,000 are due to be finished by the deadline in the law.

Dinowitz: “What is the new target now?” Kubota: “ We don’t have that number.” Dinowitz: “When do you think you’ll have that figure?” “ In a couple of months.” At one point, after the SCA reported that about 4600 school seats will be added in Sept.2026, Dinowitz asked, “how will that impact compliance with class size law?” The DOE officials seemed absolutely floored by that question and said, “we’ll have to talk to our team to get that data.”

Anyway, you get the drift. My testimony is here, with more facts and figures, including how the DOE could save years of time and literally billions of dollars in staffing and construction costs by adopting some of the proposals of the Class Size Working Group, which so far they’ve refused to do, including aligning their enrollment policies with the class size caps in the law. In fact, without doing this, it is unlikely they will ever be able to deliver smaller classes to all the students who need and deserve them..

Following the hearing, Mayor Mamdani and Chancellor Samuels went up to Albany, to ask for four more years of Mayoral control and an amendment to the law to extend the timeline for class size reduction by another two or three years. A Mamdani spokesperson claimed that without mayoral control, “meeting the class size law would be impossible.” Huh?

Under Mayoral control, we’ve had three mayors who took state funds earmarked for smaller classes and used it for their own priorities, while cutting the city’s own spending on staffing instead. Each of them in their own way also made it more difficult to lower class sizes in the future.  Perhaps if NYC Mayors didn’t have unilateral control, they’d be more likely to be more responsive to the concerns of parents and the needs of our students, and do the right thing instead.

2. Yesterday DOE released their much ballyhooed AI Playbook, now entitled “Guidance on AI” with a shorter version here and a longer version here.

As usual, the contents are displayed on a very long webpage that you have to scroll down on, making it hard to read no less assimilate, when it really should be presented in the form of a more readable document. (While I was sent an embargoed pdf version the night before, I have been told for unknown reasons not to share it but will continue to press DOE to ask why.)

In any case, as expected, the guidance is far too weak on privacy, offering nothing stronger than their existing ineffective checklist policies, despite the fact that AI holds a special threat, given how student personal data is often mined and used for purposes we don’t even understand. The guidance doesn’t even pretend to deal with many of the other concerns of parents, students and educators, including AI’s negative impact on students’ critical thinking and skill development, creativity, mental health and the environment.

DOE claims that some of these issues will be dealt with later in the year, in June. They also say that parents will have to wait till then to learn the names of the AI products currently used in our schools, even though they also claim that they demanded that their vendors “disclose AI capabilities” and “meet transparency standards” back in December 2024.

As you may recall, the AI working group appointed by Chancellor Ramos that I was a member of asked for a list of AI products used in our schools, and was denied this information, with the DOE explaining they had a non-disclosure agreement with their vendors that prevented them from disclosing the names of their AI products. It is unfortunate that while DOE officials are overly lax about protecting student privacy, at the same time they are apparently intent on guarding the privacy of their vendors!

As I mentioned earlier, some teachers are currently assigning their students to use off-the shelf AI products such as Chat GPT, whose own Terms of Service say it should never be used by kids under 13, and between 13 and 18 only with parental consent, because of the very real threat to their data privacy and safety. Yet there is nothing in this guidance that clearly warns parents or students away from these products, and instead unhelpfully says, “Students may use AI for research, exploration, and creative projects. Educator guidance, critical evaluation of outputs, and age-appropriate context are required.”

A more detailed critique of the DOE inadequate guidance will come soon, but please check our AI Moratorium Coalition’s press release here, including my comments that the co-called “guidance is confusing, contradictory in many places, and doesn’t address most of the serious concerns of parents and teachers.” There are also articles about the guidance and its critical response in the Daily News , Gothamist , and again in the Daily News here.

Anyway, the DOE says there is now a 45-day comment period for parent and community feedback, that public sessions will be held (when? we don’t know), and have offered an survey where you have to check off your top three concerns with AI, from a list pre-determined by DOE. (Why limit people to three?)

More opportunities soon on how you can make your voice heard on this issue. But you can start by signing our petition calling for a moratorium if you haven’t already, asking your CEC to pass a resolution, (five CECs have already done so), and/or ask for a briefing for your CEC, Community Board or other parent group. A sample one that we recently gave that summarizes our concerns and the reasons we’re calling for an AI moratorium is posted here.   More soon.

Leonie Haimson
Executive Director
Class Size Matters
124 Waverly Pl.
New York, NY 10011
phone: 917-435-9329
leonie@classsizematters.org
http://www.classsizematters.org/

Follow on twitter @leoniehaimson