“That would take 20 years,” Leonie Haimson said when asked to outline her involvement with New York City public school advocacy. She isn’t exaggerating. Haimson is the founder and director of Class Size Matters, a non-profit she formed in 2000 that is devoted to lowering the number of students per class in the city’s public schools.
So, in September 2022, when New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a bill into law that would significantly lower the number of students permitted per class in NYC, Haimson was ecstatic. Her life’s mission was one step closer to becoming a reality.
New York lawmakers passed the class size measure in May 2022, and after negotiations, Hochul signed it on September 8. The law marks a significant shift in policy, with the structure of the state’s public education set to change dramatically. Kindergarten and first through third grades were previously capped at 25 and 32 students, respectively. Those grades are now required to have a maximum of 20 students per class. For fourth through eighth grades, the previous limits mandated class sizes between 30-32 students. That number is now 23. And high schools, formerly permitted up to 34 students in each classroom, are now restricted to 25. The law mandates that each year, beginning in 2023, an additional 20% of schools must be in compliance, with 100% of classrooms achieving the new caps by 2028.
Haimson argues that lowering class size numbers is unequivocally good for education. She recalls a memory from two decades ago when she dropped off her 1st-grade daughter in a classroom filled with 29 students. “Her teacher confided to me one day that it made all the difference in the world when one or two kids were absent,” Haimson said. Thus began her crusade to shrink classes.
Haimson’s experience is a relatable one for many New York City parents and teachers. Improving public schools is a universal desire, and as class size reduction is a tangible policy change, it garners strong parent support. A poll from 2007 found that 77% of the American public preferred dedicating education funding to reducing class size rather than increasing teacher salaries. And a survey of parents from the 2020-2021 school year found that smaller class sizes was the most popular reform, after stronger enrichment programs and more hands-on learning. Teachers express similar sentiments: one study found that 90% of teachers believed small classes would have a very strong or strong impact on learning.
“A lot of high school class sizes are above 30,” Josh Torpey, a humanities teacher for 7th and 12th grade students at a public school in Manhattan, told The Politic. “I think it’s terrible that we have so many classes in the city with such big class sizes.”
United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the New York City teachers’ union, played a large role in the law’s passage. Christina Collins, director of education policy for the union, said that union members were overwhelmingly supportive of the measure. “Our members really consistently have said this is the time to do it,” Collins said. “The sooner, the better.”
If the new limits are enforced, the union does stand to benefit from a substantial boost in membership, as the city will be required to hire more teachers to accommodate the new classes. But Collins emphasized that this is an issue teachers are passionate about. “We do have higher class sizes than many other districts. And that’s been a point of concern for our members for a long time.”
The bill was also politically popular. In Albany, the measure passed 59-4 in the NYS Senate and 147-2 in the NYS Assembly, garnering bipartisan support. New York State Senator John Liu was a sponsor of the new law, and believes that it was a long overdue reform.
“The class size bill should not have been necessary,” Liu, who represents Queens, said. “The city of New York should have known that it needs to comply with the state constitution to provide a sound basic education for every school kid.”
But the benefits of class size reduction for learning are more complicated than this widespread political support seems to reflect. Most of the evidence that points to the educational effectiveness of lowering class sizes originates from a study conducted by the Tennessee Department of Education between 1985 and 1989, commonly referred to as STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio). STAR shows strong results for small classes in lower grades, although the study concluded that the benefit of small classes grows smaller as students get older. Other research disagrees. One 2007 study by researchers at Duke found that the quality of the teacher is nearly 24 times more impactful on student learning than reducing the number of students in a classroom. When confronted with these challenges to the data, Haimson responded, “it’s clear. I don’t want to argue about it.”
No matter the district, reducing class capacities is extremely expensive. The New York state bill, which is not directly funded, is estimated to cost almost $2 billion. New York City’s Independent Budget Office found that the district would have to hire a total of 17,700 new teachers to accommodate the necessary restructuring and addition of classes. The budget office clarified that this price tag does not even include the resources that may be required to build additional space for shrinking classes. Proponents of the bill are not blind to these challenges. The working group tasked with examining the law’s implementation released initial recommendations to the city to “aggressively pursue new opportunities for potential funding.”
“In this case, equal is less equitable.”
For the past 15 years, Josh Solomon has been a principal at the Business of Sports School (BOSS) in New York City. BOSS is a public high school of under 500 students in midtown Manhattan where the vast majority of students are Black or Hispanic. 90% of his students are below the poverty line. Solomon understands the class size predicament from a head of school’s perspective – both its benefits and detriments.
If one is asked whether they’re in favor of smaller class sizes, “everyone will say yes,” claimed Solomon. But he emphasized that this consensus becomes messier because of the difficulties of implementation. “Well, are we reducing everyone’s raises so that we can pay for more teachers to give smaller classes? Now, does everyone say yes? Are we going to cut all services…let’s cut down on music and sports funding and art so that we can have smaller class sizes?”
Solomon’s questions underscore a central dilemma that critics often point out about the bill: education policies come at the cost of other initiatives. Funding is not unlimited – far from it, particularly in New York City. If this new law is to be fully implemented, the city will inevitably have to reduce other forms of spending, as they are forced to spend more of their allocated budget on hiring thousands of teachers and finding schools more physical space.
“What would I do?” Solomon said, when asked what will happen if each school is assessed for its class sizes’ compliance. “Ask for another building?” he continued. “Yeah, that’s not gonna happen. Ask them to, like, close one of the schools in my building? Ask them to take out, you know, 100 kids from my school, but give me the same money? Like, I don’t see any of these things [happening].”
The critiques of this law are not only questions of theoretical tradeoffs. The ways in which the new policy will impact NYC is far from clear, and some data indicates it will further increase education inequality. According to the Department of Education’s data, within the 39% of NYC classes that already meet the new law’s standards, schools with a higher percentage of disadvantaged students are more likely to be in compliance, not less. In contrast, schools with larger affluent populations are more likely to be overcrowded, with class sizes that are above the new law’s caps. The quarter of city public schools with the lowest income students is already at 59% of classes meeting the new standards, compared to only 23% of classes in schools with the wealthiest quarter of students.
What does this mean for the implementation of the new law? Many of the overcrowded schools that this bill seeks to address are already relatively wealthy, academically-strong schools.
In some people’s minds, overcrowded schools are assumed to be institutions that lack adequate funding and provide students with poorer educations. But in NYC, this is largely not the case. As former NYC public school student Theo Kubovy-Weiss said, “class sizes at Stuyvesant were quite large, usually over 31, 32 students.” Stuyvesant High School, the school that Kubovy-Weiss attended, is ranked as the fourth best public high school in the city. His experience reflects the data – stronger schools often have larger classes. Given that funding is allocated per student, New York City awards large portions of funding to highly-enrolled schools like Stuyvesant.
Furthermore, well-funded schools tend to have larger populations of white and Asian students, while under-resourced schools in the city generally have larger Black and Hispanic populations. According to a 2017 study, only 15% of the students at the city’s top schools are Black or Hispanic, demographics that make up around 70% of the city’s total number of public school students.
These data points lead to perhaps the biggest critique of the 2022 law: If under-resourced schools with larger Black and Latino populations are also the under-enrolled institutions, this bill is unlikely to have any impact on them, let alone improve their educational standing. “In this case, equal is less equitable,” said Matthew Chingos, Vice President for Education Data & Policy at the Urban Institute.
“Bullshit,” Haimson said in response to this criticism, not mincing her words. “The highest-need schools tend to have a somewhat larger number of smaller classes than other schools,” she admitted. But she maintained that the recent legal measure will nevertheless help “Black, Hispanic, low income, and English language learners,” because there are large numbers of these demographics in the whole NYC public school system. As Senator Liu put it, “the vast majority of school districts in New York City are still considered needy, and many of them still have overcrowded classes.” He called the criticism of his bill a “red herring.”
Solomon disagreed. “In areas of Harlem – there are many schools that are struggling to get, like 100 or 200 students. So from a school size, those schools are really shrinking rapidly,” he said. With the new law, “most of the benefit would be [for] the wealthier schools. And most of the other schools would just lose budget, because that 2 billion dollars is going to need to come from somewhere.”
“There’s no magic bullet.”
Peter Karp is the principal at the Institute for Collaborative Education (ICE), a public school in lower Manhattan that serves sixth through ninth graders. ICE prides itself on its small classes, and Karp said that in turn, the school forgoes potential funding that is calculated per student. Karp said he is generally supportive of the legislation, and is pleased that it passed. But he knows the complicated nature of education policy and the diverse issues facing education in NYC.
“There’s too many layers, in my opinion, to say this one thing is the bullet,” he said. “There’s no magic bullet.”
Solomon echoed this sentiment, saying of the measure, “it’s kind of like looking at [education policy] as the Garden of Eden, you know?” Whether or not the 2022 law will improve education, many educators are in agreement: it is not the all-in-one fix that it is made out to be.
It is now the job of a New York City working group composed of around 50 members–teachers, parents, advocates, and government officials–to recommend a plan for implementing the law. They will advise the city on if it’s possible to make this proverbial Garden of Eden a reality. The working group’s recommendations for the implementation of the plan will be released by the end of October 2023. Haimson is also a member of the committee, though she would not comment on its inner workings.
Dia Bryant, Director of the Education Trust and former New York City principal, is a member of the working group. Bryant is concerned that the group is not focused enough on how the law might negatively impact high-need schools. “Talking about class size in a vacuum misses what we know about urban schooling,” Bryant said. She went on to describe how, in her view, some members of the working group are only concerned with implementing the new caps exactly as they are described in the bill or examining the intricacies of high-achieving schools in NYC. As a former public school principal, Bryant wants to ensure the conversation also includes questions of equity.
Solomon, who is not a member of the committee, labeled the bill as unrealistic and unachievable. He conveyed that principals like himself are focused on the day-to-day challenges of educating NYC youth, not tackling the uphill battle of reducing the city’s class sizes. “The law is not a factor in my life. It’s something in the news, I have not thought about it,” he said.
Whether the class size law will improve education in New York City — and if it will even be implemented as planned — is yet to be determined. But Haimson will not be deterred: she and her supporters are confident in the law’s potential to remedy a deeply flawed system. “It’s a tragedy,” she said, “that in the richest city, in the richest country in the world, we have kids attending school in third world conditions.”
Cover image: An empty classroom (Pexels, edited by Kyra McCreery)