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Friday, March 5, 2021

NYC DOE releases Class Size Data three months late & it appears highly inaccurate | Class Size Matters

NYC DOE releases Class Size Data three months late & it appears highly inaccurate | Class Size Matters | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes
NYC DOE releases Class Size Data three months late & it appears highly inaccurate




By law, the DOE is supposed to report on class sizes twice a year, the first time on Nov. 15 and then again on Feb. 15.  We had heard from parents of egregiously large classes sizes this fall for many students engaged in remote learning of sixty students or even more, either full-time or part-time. See articles in NY PostWSJ and Gothamist about this issue.

So we realized it would be important for the DOE to report on disaggregated class sizes, i.e. in-person, vs. full-time remote, vs. part-time remote for blended learning students.  On Oct. 28, Council Member  Mark Treyger, chair of the Education Committee sent a letter to DOE, urging them to make the legal deadline of Nov. 15 and provide the disaggregated data. His letter is here  which a Chalkbeat article reported on.

At a press conference on Oct. 26, Chancellor Carranza said that schools had been reporting attendance to DOE in “literally three buckets of attendance every single day“: in-person classes, remote blended learning classes, and full-time remote classes.  So reporting the class size data in these three separate categories should not have been difficult for them to do.

Yet on November 16, Karin Goldmark of the DOE  responded to CM Treyger’s letter, to say they would CONTINUE READING: NYC DOE releases Class Size Data three months late & it appears highly inaccurate | Class Size Matters | A clearinghouse for information on class size & the proven benefits of smaller classes