GothamSchools — daily independent reporting on NYC public schools

Chancellor Dennis Walcott and P.S. 130 Principal Lily Woo look on as one kindergarten teacher and her student read from a class assignment.

Even at an elementary school with high scores, experienced teachers, and years of A’s on the city’s progress reports, budget cuts are taking a toll.

At Chinatown’s P.S. 130, average class size has ballooned from between 25 and 28 students per classroom last year to 32, the maximum allowed.

Because the school lost about $1 million from its budget in the last two years, it had to cut teaching positions and reading teachers, according to longtime Principal Lily Woo.

As Chancellor Dennis Walcott looked on today, second-grade teacher Danielle Cannistraci gathered her 31 students on the rug around the front of the classroom in a circle two rows deep for a lesson about shapes.

When she asked the students to name a three-dimensional shape with no round edges, half a dozen hands shot in the air with the answer (in this case, a pyramid).

Cannistraci, who has worked at P.S. 130 for 11 years, said the lesson exemplified her efforts to make her teaching more engaging. But with 31 students this year, up from 27, she said she is struggling to give each student individual attention and manage the time students spend doing group work.

“I’ve always put them in groups, but now I have a whole extra group — it’s become much harder,” she said. “Normally I have five groups for reading, writing, and math. But if I have six guided-reading groups I can’t focus on one in each day anymore because that means one group isn’t going to be seen at all.” (more…)

If Mayor Bloomberg had his druthers, he would fire half the city’s teachers and pay the remaining half more to supervise twice-as-large classes.

That’s what he said during a wide-ranging speech at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Tuesday in which he argued that weak training, social change, and the teachers union have conspired to fill New York City’s schools with less-than-ideal teachers.

“If I had the ability, which nobody does really, to just design the system and say, ex cathedra, this is what we’re going to do, you would cut the number of teachers in half, but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers, and double class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students,” Bloomberg said.

Listen to the portion of the speech where Bloomberg talks schools (starting at about 5:00): 

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

The comments have drawn fire from UFT President Michael Mulgrew, elected officials, and many others. But while they were provocative and unusually specific, the speech tread familiar territory for the mayor. (more…)

Chart showing trends in K-3 class size. From Class Size Matters PowerPoint presentation. (Click to enlarge.)

Preliminary class size data that the city released today confirms what the teachers union has tallied: Class sizes are on the rise.

Classes grew most this year in kindergarten through third grade, where the average size increased by just under one student since last year to 23.1. On average, classes in those grades are now three students larger than they were in the 2006-2007 school year. They are largest in Queens and Staten Island and smallest in Manhattan.

Classes in those grades are now the largest they have been since 1998, according to a PowerPoint presentation prepared by parent activist Leonie Haimson for Class Size Matters, a group that she runs to advocate for smaller classes.

Class sizes have also inched up in upper elementary, middle, and high school grades, but not by as much, according to the city’s new numbers.

In all grades, average class sizes exceed the goals set forth in the 2007 Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit settlement, which required the state to earmark extra funds for New York City schools to use for six different purposes, including reducing class size. (more…)

John Elfrank-Dana, UFT chapter leader at Murry Bergtraum High School, says his history classes have as many as 37 students.

After three years of budget cuts, the city’s schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.

Union members reported that on the sixth day of the school year, nearly 7,000 classes had more students than the teachers contract allows, mostly in high schools and a large number in Queens. That was almost a thousand more oversize classes than they reported at the same time last year.

The union will soon file a grievance against the contract violations, and many of the classes will shrink as schools shuffle students around in the coming weeks, as typically happens at the beginning of the school year. But union officials said it appears that for the fifth year in a row, average class sizes have inched up again.

“Our worst fears have now been confirmed,” said UFT President Michael Mulgrew at a press conference announcing the numbers today. He urged Mayor Bloomberg to protect the city schools from additional budget cuts in the coming year.

Now, nearly a quarter of all city students are spending all or part of the day in overcrowded classes, according to the UFT. The contract limits classes to 25 students in kindergarten; 32 students in elementary school; 33 students in middle schools and 30 students in middle schools with many poor students; and 34 students in high schools. (more…)

The United Federation of Teachers is gearing up for its annual struggle to wrangle classes down to their contractual size limits.

As schools work to pinch every cent out of their compressed budgets, there are few safeguards in place to ward off swelling class sizes, and the UFT is asking members to be especially vigilant this year.

In the Sept. 1 Chapter Leader Weekly Update, the union urged its school representatives to monitor class size closely from the first day of classes so that after an “informal resolution” period ends on Sept. 21, the union can begin filing grievances.

One element of the UFT’s bid to challenge the city’s class-size efforts is in legal limbo. In 2010, the union sued the city over its spending of class size reduction funds, charging that the Department of Education had used the funds for other purposes. But this summer, an appeals court threw out the suit, ruling that the issue should be handled by the State Education Department.

Dick Riley, a UFT spokesman, said the union was still weighing how to proceed. But he said that putting pressure on the DOE early has traditionally paid off for the union, with schools rectifying many class size violations as the chaos of the first days of class wears away.

“In practice the DOE, particularly in high schools, often exceeds these limits at the beginning of the school year, but under pressure from the UFT, generally brings them down to the contractual limit, though it can take weeks for some schools to do so,” Riley said. (more…)

The city teachers union will have to go to the State Education Department to protest rising class sizes in New York City, rather than skip straight to the courts, after an appeals court today dismissed a 2010 suit by the union.

The suit aimed at forcing New York City to dedicate a certain pot of state funds toward making class sizes smaller. The union charged that the city misused the funds, sending them to offset budget cuts rather than using them as they were intended — as a means of reducing class sizes. The NAACP also signed onto the suit.

But in a decision handed down today, an appeals court unanimously dismissed the union’s suit, saying that the union must take its complaints to the State Education Department before going to court. (Read the full decision below.)

The union president, Michael Mulgrew, vowed to continue protesting rising class sizes. “Lowering class size is a key issue for the parents and teachers of New York City and we intend to pursue it vigorously,” Mulgrew said in a statement this afternoon.

The appeals court did not address the heart of the disagreement: whether the city actually did, as the union charges, improperly fail to lower class sizes — and use Contracts for Excellence funds instead to stave off budget cuts. At issue is the state Contracts for Excellence funding stream, and in particular, a specific clause forcing New York City to write a plan to reduce class sizes.

What’s not disputed is that class sizes have creeped up for the last two years even as funds aimed at bringing them down have flooded into schools. Class sizes for the coming school year aren’t yet available, but all signs point to likely increases, which principals are preparing for. It’s not clear, however, that the Department of Education deliberately sought to prevent schools from lowering class sizes by sending funds elsewhere. (more…)

As they wait to hear the results of their principal’s budget appeal, parents and teachers at Manhattan’s PS 3 are sounding the alarm over rising class sizes.

Tomorrow is the deadline for principals to tell the city how they plan to spend their budgets. With schools experiencing average cuts of 2.43 percent, they are likely to see class sizes grow as teaching vacancies go unfilled.

In April, Schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said that 4,000 planned layoffs would cause average class sizes to rise by about 1.5 students. But the School Leadership Team at PS 3 says the elementary school has been warned that, even now that layoffs have been averted, classes could grow to as large as 30 students in the fall.

Last week, we reported that PS 3′s principal, Lisa Siegman, has filed an official appeal of her budget, saying, “I couldn’t staff the school for the classrooms” with the $5.4 million allocated to the school. Yesterday, the SLT sent a letter to Walcott — and a host of other public officials — imploring him not to let class sizes skyrocket.

“Even excellent teachers have limits to their energy, time, patience, and ability to solve the infinite array of problems that facilitating learning involves,” the letter reads. “At PS 3, we have seen firsthand how increase in class size can negatively impact teachers’ energy and students’ ability to learn.”

The full letter is below. (more…)

Class sizes across the city could increase by an average of 13 percent next year if the city decides to cut more than 6,000 teaching positions, according to a report the teachers union released today.

The United Federation of Teachers’ report doesn’t consider whether the city will lay off teachers by seniority — as is currently mandated by law. Nor does it factor in Mayor Bloomberg’s desire to lay off teachers based on how their principals have rated them, or how many unexcused absences they’ve accumulated, among other factors. Instead, it takes a blunt measurement of what the loss of over 6,000 bodies in classrooms could do to class sizes across the city and in certain districts.

The calculations don’t appear to take into account many of the complicated details behind how schools distribute their teachers. Often, schools will keep class sizes low for younger students, then increase them for older ones. Schools that separate their advanced students from those who are struggling are also likely to keep class sizes high for the former and low for the latter. (more…)

When a judge ruled in favor of keeping open 19 schools that the city had targeted for closure, it appeared that the teachers union had won its case. But for at least one of the schools, under-enrollment could spell closure anyway.

Jamaica High School in Queens is currently looking at an incoming class of 23 ninth grade students, according to minutes taken during a meeting between the school’s principal and union chapter leader. If more students don’t enroll, the high school will not be able to offer a ninth grade next year, which is what would have happened under the city’s original plan to phase out the school.

A portion of the minutes reads:

Mr. Acham said that our expected number of students for the fall would be between 850 and 900 pupils and not close to 1400 that we currently are enrolling.  He added that the number of incoming grade nine students who have made a full commitment to Jamaica High School for this fall was only 23 and this number was down from a potential incoming class of merely 60. Therefore, the Principal concluded that we do not have a sufficient number of freshmen to run our programs.

A spokesman for the Department of Education, Danny Kanner, said Jamaica’s enrollment numbers would likely go up, but would not offer an explanation of how this would happen or how many students had been matched with the school’s ninth grade next year. (more…)

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…)