For this testimony complete with references and links, click on the file below:
Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters
Testimony to the New York City Council Education Committee
On Int. No. 619 and the need to require more accurate, timely and school-based class size reporting
June 15, 2005
My name is Leonie Haimson and I’m the Executive Director of a parent advocacy group called Class Size Matters. I’d like to thank you for asking me to testify here today, and more importantly, for introducing this very important legislation which will require more accurate and timely class size reporting on the school and district level.
As I found out several years ago, New York City is the only school district in the entire state that doesn’t include school-level class size information on its school report cards or anywhere else. When choosing a school, parents can find out the minutest details of test scores, and the experience and certification level of the teachers, but not the most basic information about what size classes are, which as research proves is a critical determinant of academic success.
Moreover, the system-wide class size data DOE does release, whether to the State Education Department, in the Mayor’s Management Report, or elsewhere, is notoriously unreliable. The state education department was unable to provide any statistics on average class size in New York City or the state as a whole for 2002-3 because the city’s data was thrown out as unacceptable. Reportedly, the data submitted to the state by DOE in 2003-4 was also considered highly problematic, but the state used its own estimation methods to come up with what they believe to be reasonable approximations of reality. Even so, the figures in the SED reports and the MMR rarely match up. To add insult to injury, when the public finally receives this information, it is at least a year out of date.
In this era of computerization, the internet, and Comp stat, this lack of accuracy, transparency and timely information is simply unacceptable. The city completes its audited classroom or “C” registers each year by October 31; we as parents and advocates deserve the data soon thereafter.
Why it is called the “audited” register I have no idea, since DOE obviously puts very little effort into ensuring that its accuracy. Indeed, after investigations initiated by Class Size Matters, with the help of the Independent Budget Office, and then pursued over a course of many months by Councilmember Jackson and State Senator Schneiderman, DOE admitted this winter that they had reported inaccurate class size data for many years, by including in their calculations very small classes of 1-4 students, which were not classes at all but imaginary holding categories of long-term absent students.
The extended saga began in the fall of 2003, when I started hearing from parents that class sizes had gone up in their children’s schools, sometimes dramatically. I had no idea why this should be, since the funding for class size reduction in particular and the education budget was stable, and enrollment was declining. DOE officials continued to insist in memos to the Panel for Educational Policy, to the press, and in the MMR that average class sizes were declining in all grades. So I asked the IBO to take a look at what was happening, and to calculate not only class size averages, but how many classrooms in grades K-3 were being provided, because there are specific provisions in the regulations in the state class size reduction law pertaining to this.
A little background: in 1999, NY State began to fund the hiring of additional teachers for grades K-3 to reduce class size. Since 2000, NYC has been granted $88 million dollars annually under this program, and DOE claims to have created more than 1500 additional classrooms per year with the use of these funds.
Yet as the NYC Independent Budget Office informed me in July of 2004, when they finally received the “C” register information and completed their calculations, the city had formed only about one third of the additional classes in grades K-3 in 2003-4 that they had claimed. As the IBO letter says, “… the city reported a higher number of new classes formed than IBO found in its analysis of the data.” Indeed, according to the IBO data, during the 2003-4 school year, NYC public schools had only 540 more classes in these grades than before the state program began, rather than the 1,586 that DOE claims to have formed with these funds, with more than 1,000 missing classes last year alone. The IBO also calculated that over the past three years, the total number of classes in these grades had declined by over 600, which in my reading of the regulations and that of others more expert, violates the maintenance of effort provisions in the state law.
After the IBO threw out all the classes that were smaller than five or more than 50 students, assuming they were errors in the data, they found that the sharp cut in the total number of classes caused average class sizes to rise for grades K-3 in 15 districts last year, while declining in only 14 districts. The average size of Kindergarten class sizes also rose citywide last year, for the first time in five years, contrary to official figures reported in the Mayor’s Management Report and elsewhere. I calculated that if the city had actually created 1586 additional classes in these grades, as they claimed in their reports to the state, the average class size in grades K-3 would be near 18 rather than almost 22.
According to the IBO’s calculations, because of the lack of progress in reducing class size, only 38% of Kindergarten students in NYC were in classes last year that met the state goal of 20 or less; only 33% of first and second graders, and only 28% of third graders were in classes of 20, despite declining enrollment and stable state funding.
After I went to Councilmember Jackson and State Senator Schneiderman with this information, and they pursued the matter with DOE, Kathleen Grimm, Deputy Chancellor, conceded in a letter that the department had released inaccurate class size data by including in the data the aforementioned phantom classes made up entirely of long term absent (LTA) students. Yet in the same letter, she continued to claim that they actually formed every one of the additional 1,586 classes they had reported to the state.
This unsatisfying response eventually led Speaker Miller, State Senator Schneiderman, and Councilmember Jackson to ask for the State Comptroller to perform an audit of NYC’s use of the class size reduction funds, which he agreed to do.
When a DOE spokesperson subsequently claimed to the press that the request for an audit was political, and that the department had been completely cleared by an earlier audit of the city’s use of these funds, the State Comptroller’s office then released a previous audit from 2003, showing that from 1999-2002, NYC had only created 2,613 classes of the 4,034 classes it had claimed and received funding for under state law.
Yet for reasons unknown, no one except for the State Education Department seems to have known about this earlier audit, and no one followed up on it. Because of the lack of oversight and attention given this issue, by elected officials, advocates, and the media, DOE’s 55% compliance as of 2002 slipped to less than 33% compliance last year. Indeed, the evidence suggests strongly that since 1999, hundreds of millions of state dollars supposed to go towards reducing class size have been misappropriated, and millions of NYC children have been deprived of their chance to benefit from smaller classes as a result.
Now, if the city was required to release class size data by school and system-wide more promptly, parents at the various schools could help assure the accuracy of the information, and check on whether the data was indeed on target, at least in regard to their own schools. I don’t imagine DOE could get away with including phantom classes in their calculations, and we might also discover whether all the other classes that the IBO included in their calculations of 5-15 students per class were really special education classes miscoded or also imaginary classes of long-term absent students. We would have a far better handle on not just what the class size averages are but also the variations in size – which schools have very large classes of more than 30 students per class, for example.
We might finally be able to figure out just what is happening with class size in our high schools. The IBO has never received high school data in any form that would allow them to check the class size averages reported in the MMR, which claims that in our high schools, class sizes now average between 27 and 28 students. This is difficult to believe, and either reflects widely uneven class sizes across the system or inaccurate data, since we also know that in most of our large high schools, classes are usually 34 students or above. When our high school drop-out rates are over 50%, it is critical that we have as much information to see if those schools with smaller classes do a better job engaging and graduating their students.
I do have some suggestions on how thus legislation could and should be improved. Parents whose children are in CTT inclusion or vocational programs also need and deserve to know the size of these classes, and for some reason these categories are exempted from the reporting requirements in the bill.
Parents, advocates and the Council itself also need to receive accurate and real-time data as regards overcrowding, including how many schools are overcapacity, and by how much. When the IBO finally receives this data from DOE, calculates the figures, and issues their annual report, reporters rush to whatever poor school is listed as most overcrowded, only to find out that the information is up to two years out of date.
We need more accurate and timely overcrowding data if we ever are going to be able to understand why certain schools are suffering increased crime and safety problems; a recent study of the Impact schools shows that on average, these schools went from being less overcrowded than the city average to much more overcrowded, just as they began experiencing increased rates of school violence.
In the legislation, there also should be specific reporting about how many additional teachers were hired with state, federal and city funds, at specific schools and systemwide. This might help prevent the sort of problems that triggered the need for an audit by the state comptroller, and would better ensure that in the future, funds appropriated to reduce class size are actually used this purpose.
The City Council has a vested interest in more closely monitoring this situation. Last year, the Council appropriated an additional $20 million that was supposed to be used to lower class size andto create almost 200 more classes in grades K-3. Yet no one really knows whether these classes were ever actually formed. If the Council’s proposal to fund additional class size reduction at the tune of almost $200 million next year, and $400 million the year comes to pass, it will be especially important to ensure that this money results in actual and large scale reductions in class size.
If and when our schools finally receive the funds they are due as a result of the CFE case, which will hopefully be on the order of an additional $5.6 billion per year, as Justice DeGrasse has ordered, it is of paramount importance that these funds are not wasted. We need full transparency in this area, to ensure that our children receive their constitutional rights to an adequate education, which, according to the court’s decision in this case, will require more accountability and smaller classes in all grades.
In the legislation, we also need to ensure that the data files on which these school-based and system wide averages are based is released concurrently to interested parties, so that the IBO and other monitoring independent organizations can verify it. Class size and capacity information must be sent home with every parent and included in school report cards as well as on the internet, so that all parents, even those without computers, will have access to this critical information. Parents, advocates, and other interested parties must also have the right not just to receive class size averages, but to find out the class sizes of every classroom in any particular school if they so request it.
Finally I would like to humbly recommend that DOE be given three months after the passage of this bill, rather than six months, to report this information; it shouldn’t take them that long to calculate it, and New York City parents have been waiting too long already for what should have been provided us a long time ago.
I want to thank the sponsors of this bill, and Councilmember Moskowitz in particular, for taking the time to examine this issue, and for proposing that NYC parents finally receive the basic class size information that they need and deserve, and that all other parents in New York state have received as matter of right for many years.
