Our comments on how the city's proposed Contract for Excellence plan violates the language and the spirit of the law
Please send your comments to ContractsForExcellence@schools.nyc.gov by the deadline of July 19; Mine are below. thanks!
Comments on the proposed Contract for Excellence plan from the NYC Department of Education
July 16, 2014
From: Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters
The Contract for Excellence law (C4E) was passed in 2007 as a direct result of the Court of Appeals decision in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) case, in which the state’s highest court found that New York City schoolchildren were deprived of their constitutional right to receive a “sound basic education,” in large part because of excessive class sizes. For example, the court found that “over half of New York City schoolchildren are in classes of 26 or more, and tens of thousands are in classes of over 30.”
The Court ordered the state to reform its school funding system, and for the state to “ensure[s] a system of accountability to measure whether the reforms actually provide the opportunity for a sound basic education.”
The Contracts for Excellence law promised additional state funding to struggling districts in return for a pledge that they would spend them on five evidence-based reforms, later expanded to six. For NYC, they added one crucial requirement: that the city would submit a plan with annual targets to reduce class size in all grades to be achieved over five years. Here are the regulations:
- In the city school district of the City of New York, include a plan that meets the requirements of clause (c)(2)(i)(a) of this section, to reduce average class sizes within five years for the following grade ranges:
- prekindergarten through grade three;
- grades four through eight; and
- grades nine through twelve.
Such plan shall be aligned with the capital plan of the city school district of the City of New York and include continuous class size reduction for low performing and overcrowded schools beginning in the 2007-2008 school year and thereafter.
Though the city’s original C4E plan, approved in Nov. 2007, called for the city to lower class size in all grades, instead class sizes have increased each year, and are now the largest in 15 years in grades K-3 and the largest since 2002 in grades 4-8. As news account attest,more than 330,000 students attended classes of 30 or larger last year.
Recent reports by Class Size Matters, the Independent Budget Office and the City Comptroller’s office show that school overcrowding has also worsened since 2007, in part because the school capital plan was never aligned with the city’s class size reduction plan.
How do we know this? The class size standards in school utilization formula in the annual school capacity report known as the Blue Book, which are supposed to drive the capital plan, are larger in every grade (28 in grades 4-8 and 30 in high school) than current class size averages except in K-3, and thus will tend to force class sizes even higher. There are no class size standards at all in the Instructional Footprint that the DOE devised to decide where to put school co-locations, as these standards were eliminated in 2010. Thus, wherever there is “excess” space in a school building, DOE inserts another school rather than lower class size.
The DOE has made many other policy decisions that have undermined the efforts of school principals to reduce class size, including cutting NYC Public School Parents: Our comments on how the city's proposed Contract for Excellence plan violates the language and the spirit of the law: