Testimony from Hazel Dukes of the NAACP , on Sept. 29, 2004 before the Commission on CFE, about how NYC schools need smaller classes to achieve the promise of Board Vs. Education.
For this testimony with full citations as a Word document, click here:
Hello, my name is Hazel N. Dukes, and I’m the President of the New York State Conference of NAACP branches. Today, I’m here to speak on behalf of New Yorkers for Smaller Classes, a coalition of 23 parent groups, unions, advocacy organizations, and faith-based associations, representing thousands of members from all walks of life, dedicated to improving the educational opportunities of New York City public school students (see attached list of organizational members).
Our coalition formed in the spring of 2003 to address the continuing crisis of large class sizes in our schools, with a long-term commitment towards helping to ensure that New York City children are finally provided with the smaller classes they need and deserve.
To that end, in the fall of 2003, we presented petitions with over 40,000 signatures of registered New York City voters, so that a question would be placed on the ballot asking the citizens of this city whether a Charter Commission should be established to consider proposals to limit class size. Though our proposition was subsequently kept off the ballot, we have continued to work in this area, and we led the campaign, joined by thousands of parents, advocates, teachers and other concerned citizens last spring, that resulted in the formation of the Commission on which you now sit.
More recently, our coalition submitted an amicus brief in the CFE case, pointing out some of the glaring deficiencies in the city’s current plan for these funds, particularly in the area of class size. Though in its plan, the city counts on receiving $5.3 billion per year more in annual aid from the state, and more than $6 billion for facilities, the administration still doesn’t plan to reduce average class size in any grade higher than third. We think that this is a tremendous injustice to so many of our children in grades 4-12, who are struggling in classes or 34 or more, often in classes that are fifteen or even eighteen students larger than the average in the rest of the state.
Our brief also contains two five year plans that would significantly reduce class sizes in all grades, which we hope you will take a serious look at when you are considering your recommendations as to how these funds would best be spent. Both of them are realistic and affordable, in terms of staffing costs and providing the necessary facilities, given the estimated amounts that the city is supposed to receive from the state. Though we’d like to have this happen overnight, we realize this is a process that will take time; but not too much time, we hope. Five years, I hope you agree, should be sufficient for the city to finally give our children – all of our children –their right to an adequate education.
The CFE case is so very important to me because it’s our Brown vs. Board of Education, and it is very appropriate that we should be discussing the resolution of CFE case on the fiftieth anniversary of Brown. Indeed, as the evidence in the case and Justice DeGrasse’s decision pointed out, our students, so many of them black and brown, have for at least twenty years been educated in separate and unequal conditions, deprived of an adequate chance to learn because of their excessive class sizes.
Here in NYC, we have the greatest number of children who are living in poverty or who have English as a second language, and are thus in dire need of small classes and the close instructional support of their teachers. Yet instead, they are severely disadvantaged by being crammed into the largest classes in the state by far and some of the largest in the nation.
Now the evidence in the case outlined much of the research on class size, and pointed out how poor and immigrant students need much smaller classes than average students to learn and succeed. Researchers have also shown that class size reduction is one of only two reforms, along with increased access to preK, that have actually been effective in states across the country in narrowing the all-important achievement gap between racial and ethnic groups.
I won’t go over all those details here; they are all contained in our brief. But the Court did more in this case. The Court of Appeals held that there was “a meaningful correlation between the large classes in City schools” and our students’ low achievement and high dropout rates.
As the Court concluded: “[T]ens of thousands of students are placed in overcrowded classrooms, taught by unqualified teachers, and provided with inadequate facilities and equipment. The number of children in these straits is large enough to represent a systemic failure.” In fact, the Court identified class size as one of the key constitutional areas in which our children were being deprived of an adequate chance to learn.
Right now, our middle schools and high schools are in crisis. This fall, middle school children at the Booker T. Washington School on the upper West side are sitting in classes of forty or more. A. Philip Randolph HS in Harlem, one of our community’s finest schools, which had long prided itself on classes of no more than twenty with a college acceptance rate of 90 percent, is so overcrowded this year that the principal quit over the summer and class sizes have risen to 30 or 35. ''It's just unbearable,'' said one English teacher, quoted in the Amsterdam News. ''The students really lose out because there are just too many of them to get the kind of education that they deserve.''
This fall, we already have more than 11,000 classes that violate the union limits, most of them in high school, which means that they have 35 students or more. Yes, eventually the city deals with this problem, in many cases by waiting until November for the register to settle down, which means waiting for students to drop out of school or be discharged into GED programs. Last year, we had a jump in over 6,000 students who went into GED programs, according to the Mayor’s Management Report.
Considering our huge class sizes, is it any surprise that we have a dropout rate in this city of over 50%, and some of the lowest graduation rates for black and Hispanic students in the country?
Yet the city’s plan for the CFE funds doesn’t address the needs of any of these students, since it neglects to lower average class size in any grade higher than third. It invests less than $117 million out of a total $19 billion in projected spending, or less than 1% on reducing class size. What does it do instead? It spends billions of dollars on laptops, “restructuring” and hiring thousands of additional staff, specialists, and administrators, who will be housed outside of school buildings in office space leased for that purpose, without improving classroom conditions at all.
We believe that it is now up to you, the members of this Commission, to recommend that a significant share of the CFE funds should and must be spent on reducing class size, so that our students can finally receive a better chance to learn. Our proposals show that by spending less than 10% of our annual budget on our schools, we could create much smaller classes in all grades, which would give our students the additional instructional attention and support that they need to graduate from high school and succeed in life. Investing in smaller classes will promote success instead of failure, and also lead to millions or billions of dollars saved, in terms of remediation costs, grades having to be repeated, referrals to special ed, lower rates of violence, and teacher attrition.
It is our moral duty as citizens of this city to make sure that all our children have an adequate chance to succeed. In addition, so that your recommendations do not sit on a shelf somewhere gathering dust, we also urge you to come up with suggested legal and accountability mechanisms, to make sure that your recommendations are actually followed with real action. Only if your deliberations end in smaller classes, for all children in all grades, will they be provided with their constitutional rights to a sound basic education. Only then will the promise of Brown vs. Board of Education be achieved.
Thank you so much for this opportunity.
