Meddling lawmakers in Albany passed a law in 2022 that forcing the city to chase the incredibly expensive goal of reducing public school class sizes — a “nice to have” that, as designed, will pay limited dividend in instructional quality and disproportionately benefit kids who are already lucky to attend the city’s most well-attended schools.
Such interference in New York City is always a bad idea, but especially in the wake of COVID learning loss, our schools need to prioritize implementing the best possible curriculum to help kids learn to read, do math and learn social studies and science. They need to surge targeted, high-impact tutoring to help kids who are struggling.
They need to hire, train and retain the highest-quality teachers possible. They need to pay close attention to school culture, and strengthen extracurriculars so that kids can find at least a little joy in every school day.
But instead the system is trying to follow the new law and as Daily News education writer Cayla Bamberger reported this week, new data reveal that, as the schools rush to comply with a mandate to have 60% of classrooms being newly capped at between 20 and 25 students, depending on grade level, educrats plan to spend more than $400 million to fill 3,700 new teaching positions by the coming fall.
And that hiring spree is above and beyond the 4,000 to 5,000 teachers the system already needs to hire in an average year to replace educators who leave.
Who will all those new teachers be? We’ll see. But we know that teacher quality is the single most important school-related factor driving student learning, and we know that when California tried to implement sweeping class-size reduction, the teachers it wound up hiring to meet its mandates were subpar. The program “led to a dramatic increase in the percentages of inexperienced and uncertified teachers,” reported the Public Policy Institute of California in 2002, and “large gaps in teacher qualifications had emerged between schools attended by nonwhite and low-income students and other schools.”
To be sure, some schools and students that saw major reductions in class sizes saw modest gains in student learning — but overall, the results of the massive investment were middling at best, leading California to all but abandon the incredibly pricey program in 2009.
Evidence like that from the nation’s largest state should’ve given New York lawmakers pause before they imposed this rigid, costly mandate on the nation’s largest school system — but they whistled right past the graveyard.
Spending hundreds of millions on new instructors who may be of dubious quality to get a given class down from 27 or 31 to 20 or 24 kids makes little sense given the school system’s many other pressing priorities. It’s especially nonsensical because it’s likely to force the system to build more classroom space despite generally declining enrollment.
Mayor Adams and his schools chancellor early on warned against the unfunded mandate. But who will speak up now, in election season? We don’t hear anything. Everyone’s just going along, getting along with the notion of spending hundreds of millions of dollars to hire thousands of teachers, even as they wring their hands about federal funding falling away and outyear deficits looming.
The politicians are going to have to get a lot smarter, and soon, if they want our kids to do the same.