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Friday, May 10, 2013

NYC Public School Parents: Expert on school finance and equity Bruce Baker concludes: class sizes in NYC schools are freakin’ huge!

NYC Public School Parents: Expert on school finance and equity Bruce Baker concludes: class sizes in NYC schools are freakin’ huge!:


Expert on school finance and equity Bruce Baker concludes: class sizes in NYC schools are freakin’ huge!

Yesterday, Bruce Baker of Rutgers presented one of his brilliant statistical exposes on his School Finance 101 blog, revealing the inequities in funding and class size between NYC and the rest of the state.  Here are some of his findings, though I suggest you read the whole blog.

This chart shows how the higher poverty level students at a school in NYS, the larger the class sizes, and the disparity has worsened over time.  You can see that now, 90% of high poverty elementary school classes in New York state are above the recommended level of 20 students per class.  64% are above 23 students per class in high poverty schools:

Here are New York state middle school class sizes, based  on the poverty level of the school, showing a similar