Rift Over Class Size Widens as Pupils Return to School
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

New York City’s 1.1 million schoolchildren return to class today under the shadow of an unresolved teachers’ contract and highly charged battles over class size that picked up steam just yesterday.
The Independent Budget Office released a study showing that average public school class size for kindergarten through third grade fell again last year, to 21.3 from 21.6 the year before. Over the past seven years, the report shows, class size has shrunk 15%, from almost 25 students a class. In the same period, enrollment in those grades has dropped 12%.
The speaker of the City Council, Gifford Miller, who has made reducing student-to-teacher ratios a major campaign issue and advocates capping class size at 17 students for kindergarten through third grade, seized the opportunity to lash out against the Bloomberg administration for not doing more.
“Class size reduction has slowed to a crawl despite a drop in enrollment,” Mr. Miller said. “The mayor can’t take credit for reducing kindergarten class size, since it went up during 2003-2004 and is now back at 2002 levels. Furthermore, first-grade class-size averages haven’t moved in two years. Is that really progress?”
Besides running for mayor as a Democrat, Mr. Miller has the new Smaller Class Sizes ballot line on the November ballot.
Despite the citywide drop in class sizes, approximately 46,000 of the city’s nearly 282,000 students in kindergarten through third grade were still in classes with more than 25 students last year.
District 1, in Lower Manhattan, had the smallest average class size. District 6 in Northern Manhattan, District 10 in the Northwest Bronx, and District 17 in Central Brooklyn had the largest average class size of 22.8 students.
“This number is very disheartening,” the president of the teachers union, Randi Weingarten, said of the average class sizes. “Given that the city says it has invested millions of dollars in the classrooms and that there’s been a drop in student enrollment, the numbers should be significantly lower, not basically the same as last year.”
But the Department of Education, which has questioned the value of pouring more money into reducing class sizes, touted yesterday’s report as evidence that it is moving in the right direction.
“The IBO data again confirm that we continue to reduce average class size, create new classroom space, and provide the other classroom reforms that are helping to improve student achievement levels,” a department spokeswoman, Kelly Devers, said.
New Yorkers for Smaller Class Sizes, a coalition of teachers, parents, and unions, said reducing class sizes would help boost student achievement.
“New York City has the largest class sizes in the state, and they have failed to reduce class sizes to the levels that they were going to reduce them,” the group’s coordinator, Jan Atwell, said.
“The fewer children in a class, the more individualized attention they can receive,” she said. “It’s difficult to have one teacher in a classroom with too many students – it’s really important in the early grades.”
Mayor Bloomberg won control of the schools in 2002 and has staked his reputation, and his re-election campaign, on turning the schools around.
Fifty-two new small high schools will swing open their doors today – roughly the same number that opened last year – along with another 15 new charter schools.
Tensions are still running high, however, as the city’s 83,000 teachers are starting their third school year without a union contract.
Many education activists see this year as a final exam for Mr. Bloomberg’s sweeping education initiatives.
“I see this as a pivotal year, because the mayor has now had several years of control of the schools,” a testing expert, Robert Tobias, said. Mr. Tobias, a former city education official, is director of the Center for Research on Teaching and Learning at the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University.
“He has some majors and reforms policies that he has initiated,” Mr. Tobias said of the mayor. “… I think if it’s going to bear fruit, it’s going to bear fruit this year.”