Posts tagged "class size reduction"
class size goes to court
January 5, 2010
After years of complaints, union sues city over class size dollars
UFT President Michael Mulgrew announces the union's lawsuit. Behind Mulgrew are, from left to right, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, NAACP NY President Hazel Dukes, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and Yolanda Morales, a plaintiff in the suit.
The city teachers union, along with a coalition of parents and advocacy groups, sued the Department of Education this morning, charging it with not spending allocated state money on reducing class sizes.
Since 2007, the state has allocated nearly $761 million for class size reduction, yet class sizes in schools across the city have risen over the past two years.
The lawsuit accuses the DOE of causing the class size increase by willfully misusing those funds.
“As far as we are concerned, this is deliberate,” UFT President Michael Mulgrew said in a press conference at union headquarters this morning.
“New York City how has the highest class sizes in New York State,” Mulgrew said. “$760 million, for what?”
The lawsuit, filed this morning in the State Supreme Court in the Bronx, was brought by a coalition of parents, activist groups, the UFT, the New York chapter of the NAACP and the Hispanic Federation.
“The charges are without merit,” DOE Press Secretary David Cantor said. (more…)
Dollars and Cents
March 13, 2009
DOE: Lowering class size by 10% would cost “tens of billions”
Lowering class size by just a fraction of the degree sought by class-size reduction advocates would require a tremendous expansion of the Department of Education’s budget, Deputy Chancellor Christopher Cerf just testified at today’s Assembly hearing on mayoral control in the Bronx.
Recent DOE analysis concluded that a reduction in class of 10% — from an average of 25 to 22.5, for example — would cost $800 million a year in extra operating funds to pay for new teachers, Cerf said. Constructing the extra classrooms needed would be an additional tens of billions of dollars in capital funds, he said.
The city last year received $150 million from the state in funds earmarked to reduce average class sizes in a set of needy schools.
Feb. 10: You’re invited!
Copyright Notice
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.