Stop Slamming Kids
Class-size law’s insane impact
IT’S that anxious, fateful time of year again, when New York City families receive admissions offers for elementary, middle and high schools. And if the process isn’t stressful enough, once this year’s offers are finalized, it could mark the beginning of a vastly different enrollment process for 2025-26 admissions that could have ramifications for years.
A new state mandate starting to phase in could have devastating consequences for unsuspecting families who will apply to schools next year.
To comply with the state’s costly, unfunded Class Size Reduction Law — rammed through in 2022 by teachers-union-backed state Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) — Chancellor David Banks needs to start making hard decisions fast or risk losing funding.
On the surface, the law sounds like a win for students, as it mandates a more favorable studentteacher ratio. Yet if implemented as written, the results could be a nightmare.
The mandate could hurt students who attend popular and highly competitive schools and redistribute funding from low-income to high-income neighborhoods. It’ll also provide the teachers union with a windfall in membership dues by doubling, from 4,000 to 8,000, the number of new teachers hired.
One of its biggest problems is that it fails to take into account a simple math problem: Some districts are so overcrowded there aren’t enough seats within the district. Last year, a NYC Public Schools working group recommended cutting enrollment at oversubscribed schools but didn’t resolve the lack of seats within districts.
And though the idea of “more evenly allocating enrollment across all schools” sounds simple, it implies rezoning schools and sending students to emptier, further-away schools, with longer commutes for children and degraded quality of life for families.
Even this “solution” is doomed because many of the adjacent districts are also overcrowded, and so kids might have to commute even further distances.
A perfect storm is brewing in central and northeastern Queens, where public school overcrowding has been neglected for years by developers, local community boards and politicians, who OK’d muchneeded residential projects without adding the necessary hundreds of classroom seats.
California had a similar “class size” law in 1996 — until it didn’t. The law was quietly revoked when funding was eliminated in 2015 because it led to a “dramatic increase” in lower quality teachers in low-income, nonwhite schools.
One would think this would raise equity concerns for the United Federation of Teachers, but it hasn’t. Not that anyone has asked, but New York City families don’t want second-rate teachers, either.
This is a manufactured crisis, but solutions do exist. If Liu and his UFT pals care about students and want them to benefit from smaller classes, they should immediately and aggressively push to lift the charter-school cap in districts where demand for seats exceeds the number available.
Then, the market can correct the problem. A lifting of the caps would be a win-win. Charters, exempt from the Class Size law, would alleviate the construction component of the law and more quickly open up seats. Teachers, too, would benefit from smaller, more manageable classes.
It is inarguable that there is demand for more charters: Nearly two-thirds of the city’s Democrats — and an overwhelming majority of blacks and Latinos — support lifting the state-imposed cap that prevents opening more charters.
Gov. Hochul proposed lifting the cap last year as part of her $227 billion executive budget plan. Guess who opposed it? Liu and the UFT.
The other obvious solution is to amend the law to give the city more time to build new schools.
Does anyone really expect hundreds of classroom spaces to materialize in the three years left to comply, when construction sites haven’t yet even been presented to and approved by community boards?
Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton HS alone will need an almost staggering 80 new classrooms. Same for Francis Lewis HS in Queens.
Meanwhile, the law allows only the unions the right to approve class-size exemptions. Leaving out the voice of families is a surefire way to further fuel their flight from the schools, and it’ll become a stampede once the most painful aspects of the plan kicks in.
If the city can’t comply, it’ll lose school funding under the law. Yet schools must meet the needs of the students and families they serve.
Our children should benefit from this law, not be penalized by it. Hochul and Mayor Adams aren’t standing in the way; it’s Liu who needs to find a solution, and the UFT that needs to get on board with what is best for students, not just their union dues. Clock’s ticking.