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Smaller Class Sizes
Summer 2000 (v4#2)

May 24, 2000

Hon. Rudolph W. Giuliani
Mayor
City Hall, New York, NY 10007

Hon. Peter F. Vallone
Speaker of the City Council
City Hall, New York, NY 10007

Chancellor Harold O. Levy
NYC Board of Education
110 Livingston Street, Brooklyn, NY 11201

Dear Mayor Giuliani, Speaker Vallone and Chancellor Levy:

The Educational Priorities Panel is a coalition of civic, religious, and parent organizations that work together to monitor how budget decisions impact New York City public school children. Though your strategies for improving schools may differ on some points, we know that all three of you share the objective of raising student academic performance. During the next school year, New York City will receive $154 million in state and federal funding for smaller classes. As negotiations over the city budget for fiscal year 2000-01 proceed, the city needs to make its contribution to this important initiative by providing classroom space on a priority basis.

EPP members strongly believe that reducing class size to an average of 20 students in the early grades could be the beginning of a turnaround for city public schools. Although state testing results over the last four years show that New York City elementary school students have pulled ahead of students from the other four large cities, there still remains a 20-point "gap" on average test scores between New York City students and those in the rest of the state. This gap can be narrowed if the reduced class size initiative is supported by good planning.

The first year of implementation of smaller class size has gone well. Enclosed you will find our recently released monitoring study, Smaller is Better: First-hand Reports of Early Grade Class Size Reduction in New York City Public Schools, which documents the positive impact of reduced class size on children’s learning to date. It ends with a discussion of ways in which the program could be strengthened and the need for continuity. Finding additional classroom space is key.

We ask that the Board of Education and the city prepare a $69.5 million facilities plan for the 2000-01 and 2001-02 school years that creates additional classroom capacity through leasing so that as many young children as possible gain the maximum benefits from class size reduction. To achieve this goal, 1,727 new k-3 classes should be formed within the next two years. At a minimum, 720 new classes need to be created by next fall in schools that have already begun reducing class size so that their students can continue to be in smaller classes. Research indicates that young students need to remain in smaller classes for at least two consecutive years in order for them to improve their achievement levels.

Given the limitations on the city’s Capital Budget and the speed at which classrooms need to be made available, we urge you to consider an increase in the Expense Budget earmarked for creating additional (k-3) classroom space through leasing. Based on an annual estimated per-seat leasing cost of $1,184 provided to us by the Independent Budget Office, EPP recommends:

• $20.5 million increase in the Board of Education budget for FY 2000-01 to lease classroom space for 720 newly created classes and 144 classrooms for cluster teachers.

• $49.1 million increase in the Board of Education budget for FY 2001-02 to lease classroom space for 1,727 classrooms and 345 classrooms for cluster teachers. (This figure includes the 864 leased classrooms of the previous school year.)

These funds can be used to create small schools, Early Childhood Centers, and early-grade annexes. We understand that these new leases will involve a Capital Budget commitment of anywhere from $295.7 million to $707.1 million for renovations, depending on the extent of renovations and whether they are done by landlords or the Board of Education. Portable classrooms are another way of providing space for overcrowded schools, but EPP members suggest that they be used primarily for school staff or for cluster classrooms. This investment, along with the pay-as-you-go school construction initiative of the Speaker and the construction-for-leasing proposals of the Schoolhouse Foundation and NYC School Construction Working Group, all of which EPP supports, would begin to bring down early-grade class size to the state average. More importantly, it would help to bring New York City students up to the state average for academic performance.

Research findings on smaller class size are compelling. The STAR assessment conducted for the state of Tennessee, Dr. Harold Wenglinsky’s report for the Educational Testing Service, and the University of Wisconsin’s continuing evaluation of the SAGE program show a powerful relationship between student achievement and class size. They also find that the largest gains were among low-income students in large cities. If children enter small classes at kindergarten or first grade and then remain in smaller classes for another two to three years, their academic achievement puts them six months to a year ahead of their counterparts who remain in larger classes. Unfortunately, in some large-scale implementations of class size reduction, such as the one in California, children have bounced around from small classes to large ones, undercutting its effectiveness. Without a New York City facilities plan to ensure grade continuity for children now in smaller class sizes, we risk duplicating California’s experience.

At both the Congressional and State Legislative levels, there has been fierce opposition to providing direct funding to school districts for the salaries and benefits of newly hired teachers and, in particular, to the allocation of most of these funds to large cities. This city is receiving 7% of the Congressional allocation for smaller classes, far exceeding our proportion of the nation’s total student population, and 65% of the State Legislature’s allocation, again far exceeding our proportion of the state’s total student population. In the wake of a historic lawsuit, brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity to challenge the state’s system of funding public schools, it would be tragic to send a public message to Albany that New York City is not making a substantial effort to maximize this funding for new teachers.

Similarly, at a time when there is a bipartisan effort led by Congressmembers Rangel and Johnson to make the federal government a significant partner in the effort to repair the aging infrastructure of the nation’s school buildings, New York can show by example that facilities funding is part of the strategy to raise the academic achievement levels of students in urban cities. Absent this example, the lack of a turnaround of school performance in the Kansas City, Missouri school district after a $2 billion facilities investment will continue to remain a strong argument against federal funding for school repair and new construction.

A parallel with crime reduction comes to mind. State and federal funds to hire more police became available because there was some assurance that the city had strategies in place to use these dollars effectively, and the results have been impressive. In many city elementary schools, young children are reading books and writing essays when just a few years ago they were just filling in the blanks in workbooks. But these students need the individual attention and small group instruction that can increase this type of learning to meet high standards. Now that federal and state funds are available to hire teachers and the instructional strategies for early-grade instruction are in place, the city needs to make a commitment to find the classroom space.

Sincerely,

Marilyn Braveman, Chairperson
Noreen Connell, Executive Director

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