A report by the nonpartisan Independent Budget Office in New York City has found that the New York City public schools are experiencing extensive overcrowding, even as federal and state funding has diminished.
Nearly 450,000 students were enrolled in overcrowded buildings, defined as those at greater than 102.5 percent capacity, in the 2012-13 school year, the most recent covered by the report from the agency, the Independent Budget Office. The average class size is rising, too, particularly in the lower grades: The average elementary and middle school class had 25.5 children, up from 24.6 just two years before. This was true even as the total number of students in traditional and charter schools has hovered around 1.1 million for more than a decade, and as the city has created tens of thousands of new seats. Advocates have fought for years to get the city to use more state aid, known as Contracts for Excellence money, to reduce class sizes. Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group, said the problem of overcrowding persisted for several reasons. First, she said, the city has been in the habit of placing more than one school into the same building — known as co-location — which leads to classrooms’ being converted into administrative offices or specialty spaces. Also, she said, the number of teachers has dropped — a topic the Independent Budget Office report also touched upon. The report said the ranks of general education teachers declined by about 2,300 between 2010 and 2013, but it noted that the number of special education teachers rose by about 1,400 in the same period. Ms. Haimson said more than 330,000 students were in classes of 30 or more last year. “That really shows how extreme the situation has become,” she said.
The number of homeless children increased from 66,000 to 77,000. The number of principals soared as former Mayor Michael Bloomberg closed 102 schools and replaced them with 432 small schools, each of which has its own principal and administrative staff.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
In some communities with more than their fair share of homeless shelters and charter schools, the public schools don’t stand a chance. The co-located charter schools are not taking the homeless and they are squeezing the district school for space. When they can’t handle the high needs students, they kick them out to the district school.
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Many of the charters aren’t full k-8, and each has its own staff of administrators, principals, and specialty coordinators. Top have administration $alaries. Weren’t the charters supposed to do more with less?
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Donna: just my POV, but I am amazed at how often those arguing against bloated big government with its obscenely overpaid bureaucrats who sit in offices and smother their organizations with their top-down mandates and management by fear—
Love the charterization and privatization of public schools supposedly because now “they” can do “more” with “less”—
That is, do more for the “suits” than for the students, school staff, parents, community members, and taxpayers combined.
Ah, the smell of $tudent $ucce$$ in the morning…
Just my dos centavitos worth…
😎
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CX: top heavy, not top have. I am incensed. Can’t even type anymore.
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Our town in RI sold a town-owned playground to Civic Broad St. Inc., which has the same address as Civic Builders in NY and they are building a new charter elementary school. See link. http://www.civicbuilders.org/assets/press-releases/Civic-Builders-Release-FINAL.pdf
Even though this debt is “leveraged” and tax credits are involved, is there a way to find out how much of this debt (per pupil or per year) will come out of the local school department budget and the budgets of the other districts who send students?
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We have a class size amendment to our state constitution, passed twice by the voters after Jeb!, who opposed it, tried to do some fancy number work in able to ignore it. The state Supreme Court slapped him down (one of the many reasons he hates teachers and their unions).
My own district simply ignores it. The law says as a primary teacher I can have no more than 18 children in my class. Last year I had between 21 – 23. Next year I’ve got 25 on my class list so far.
Rather than spend the money to hire enough teachers, our non-educator Broady Superintendent (who loves to tell the press that he follows ALL laws scrupulously. WHOOPS!) chooses to pay the state-levied fines for being out of compliance instead of abiding by the law.
He prefers keeping the payroll money to hire 6-figure salary business people who never interact with or teach a child anything. They, you see, are important and we, who teach the children, are insignificant and replaceable. We hardly register on the radar with this guy.
Seems that in every district the NCLB and RTTT laws have exponentially increased the number of out-of-classroom, highly-paid personnel and created teacher shortage crises. It takes so many of them to watch out every move and make checkmarks on the Danielson and Marzano rubrics to show us how bad we are so we can be gotten rid of that there is not enough money to pay actual teachers anymore.
Apparently a loophole in the law makes paying the fines much cheaper than hiring a new teacher, even though Florida ranks 48 or 49 out of 50 states in teacher pay.
I pity my colleagues in NYC. When I began teaching there, many years ago, I had 36 kids in my 5th grade class. Not enough desks, books, or anything. We made it through, somehow.
Why do we continue to let
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our children, the children of the USA suffer so? Do we really care so little for other people’s children? Happy 4th of July and 238th B-day, America. You’re showing your age a bit when it comes to education.
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Chris – I do not want to say where I teach but there are other districts like mine as this scenario is repeated in many places. We are underpaid, short teachers, increased class size, more asked of us pertaining to tests/rigor…and yet the district office has grown with more admin and with many gettng 3 figures and lots of spending on consulting.
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caligirl, I understand. I post these things here to let other teachers know they are not alone. Good luck to you.
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in 2013, there were 1.6 million HOMELESS CHILDREN in the United States. But even that ghastly number vastly under-represents the horrors faced by our children, a quarter of whom live in families below the poverty threshold.
One out of every four U.S. children.
One out of every four.
The Cost of War Project at Brown University estimates that to date we’ve had 4.4 trillion dollars in committed expenditures for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And for what? To completely destabilize the area and fuel fundamentalist fury in order to pave the way for the establishment of an extremist Caliphate? For that’s been the actual effect of all that wasted national treasure. This is what an INSANE foreign policy looks like–one that wastes vast resources and, entirely predictably, achieves exactly the opposite of its intended effect.
So, how much money is 4.4 trillion dollars? Well, it’s enough to have set up each of those 1.6 million homeless children with a trust fund with an opening value of two million seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
How can a nation with millions of children LIVING IN THE STREETS be so wasteful?
Where. Are. Our. Priorities?
A country where these things are true has entirely lost its moral compass.
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This should give the charters something to crow about. With overcrowding et al int public schools and moneys for charters test scores should drop in public schools which will PROVE that public schools are not doing their job.
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I don’t understand why Haimson lists co-location as the number 1 reason why NYC’s schools are overcrowded, given that the IBO report says that co-located schools are less crowded than non co-located schools. Co-locations may be more an *effect* of overcrowding than a cause, because the biggest obstacle to reducing class sizes in so much of the system is the lack of physical space. My daughter’s middle school is co-located, and it’s absolutely bursting at the seams. (Not to mention sweltering in June and September.) I’d sure like it if the school had its own space, and I’m sure its roommate-school would love it, too. But that takes a lot of money that the city either does not have or refuses to spend.
In theory, hiring more teachers reduces class sizes, but not in schools that don’t have any additional space.
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FLERP, I don’t think that Haimson said co-locations are the #1 cause of overcrowding. Your own child is in a co-located school that is overcrowded. Reducing class size should have a high priority. Overcrowding is parents’ number 1 complaint.
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I’ll just point out for at least the 100th time that while there are a handful of districts where the lack of physical space is the primary cause of overcrowding, in many others human resource issues (primarily “fair student funding”) are to blame.
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Well, it’s the first reason she lists out a grand total of 2.
“Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, an advocacy group, said the problem of overcrowding persisted for several reasons. First, she said, the city has been in the habit of placing more than one school into the same building — known as co-location . . .”
I’m aware my daughter is in a co-located school that’s overcrowded, her being my daughter and all. There is just no room in my district. That, not co-location, is the main reason why her school is overcrowded. If you eliminated the co-location, it might free up space for one of the two schools, but without another building, the other one would cease to exist.
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Meant to reply to Diane, not Tim.
Tim, I will confess that Fair Student Funding is a bit of math I’ve never gotten around to doing.
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Simply put, before it was enacted, principals were given X number of teachers per Y kids. Now they are given a budget (they are mini CEOs), and if they have a relatively senior staff, it means they can’t hire as many teachers.
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Less money?
Total Funds Committed to DOE (in 2013 dollars):
2003: 19.9 billion
2008: 23.2 billion
2009: 23.8 billion
2010: 24.5 billion
2011: 24.6 billion
2012: 24.5 billion
2013: 23.8 billion
2014: 24.1 billion
That is a pretty healthy 21% adjusted-for-inflation increase from 2003 to the present, a period during which total charter + district school enrollment actually decreased by a smidge. And of course the bumps in 2010 and 2011 were due entirely to filthy lucre gained from RTTP.
As for class sizes, the contract that the United Federation of Teachers collectively bargained in the best interests of its members allows for class sizes of up to 32 kids in grades K-8 and 34 in high school. True, most parents find those sizes unacceptably large, but apparently they are fine in the eyes of UFT. Hopefully they’ll change their minds on the next contract?
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Those numbers tell the story, though, don’t they? Six years of essentially flat overall funding. Over those six years, transportation costs kept growing, pension costs kept growing healthcare costs kept growing, debt service cost kept growing, average salaries kept growing — all mandated by contract or statute. So the DOE manages expenses through headcount reductions, and individual school do whatever they can.
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So what? Americans have had to more with less for decades- especially lately during the Obama/Bush years of skyrocketing debt. Why shouldn’t government have to do the same thing?
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Wow Tim! So the AFT wrote the contract with NO input from management, eh? They were not asked for ANY concessions, those foolish, greedy, evil teachers.
You conveniently leave out the in those 11 years of the “healthy 21% increase” NCLB and then RTTT (Were you referring to Race to the Pot?) increased exponentially the amount of money schools must spend on specialists and coaches, testing materials, constantly changing curricula and textbooks and the mandatory professional development, mandatory after-school tutoring, mandatory teacher evaluation programs and the accompanying professional development, mandatory special education services and the costly service providers that accompany them, huge increases in insurance, copying, and benefit (insurance, mandated by law) costs, and none of these things are free or low cost.
Then we have the newly minted federal, state, and city policies that require schools to give large chunks of their budgets to charter schools, pay to transport those students in many cases, and provide free real estate to those charters.
Lying in the service of a political ideology is OK though, in today’s America. The ends always justify the means and if you have to prevaricate and engage in mendacity to demonize teachers and their unions to prove the crackpot theories of Friedman and justify the greed of the obscenely rich, well then, that’s what you do, right?
It’s so easy to portray school districts as profligate spenders when you conveniently leave out many of the government mandated expenses and unfunded mandates.
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And I forgot to add technology, which is mandated for testing now. That can hardly be had on the cheap, can it, especially since many of the school buildings in NYC are nearly a century old and not exactly wired for 21st century technology. Software, hardware, Internet access, maintenance, and replacement expenses have ballooned on the last 11 years as well.
But yeah, talk about how schools get more and more money and waste it and do nothing good.
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Of course the city was pressuring the union for concessions, although higher class sizes wasn’t one of them. The city pressed for concessions like merit pay, test-based evaluations, LIFO, the infamous absent teacher reserve, etc. And the union pressed for higher wages and pension benefits. The last time time the union made class size a top priority in contract negotiations was more than 40 years ago. It’s a big working conditions issue, but it’s also an expensive one: it takes dollars that could otherwise go to salary or benefits increases. The union’s view for decades had been that class sizes aren’t so high that it’s worth trading salary or benefits to lower them. It is what it is.
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Forepaw,
Your union may have learned a lesson from what happened to UTLA. 8 years ago we passed by a raise in exchange for class size reductions. Within weeks, the district declared a fiscal emergency and cancelled those reductions. We actually lost when we took this to the labor board. So now we’re sitting at 36-40 in secondary, with 7 years without a raise. But there’s always money for new coaches.
It’s ok, though. Deasey writes us a thank-you note for increasing test scores every year despite the hardships. It makes me feel all warm and fuzzy.
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Diane, don’t forget the public and semi-private networks that help with the day-to-day operations of each school. For example, there are nine clusters in network two. Each one has their own staff development personnel, compliance monitors, budget person, personnel person,etc. The list goes on-and-on. Once upon a time there used to be something called districts. There were originally 32 K-8 districts and five high school districts. Instead of having hundreds of personnel directions, there were once only 37. Think of all the money saved if the original district structures were re-established. By the way, I know for a fact that in some of the private networks, some of the directors are being paid about $400,000 a year. Somehow, I do not feel these directors deserve a salary twice that of the President of the United States. .
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Homeless students? How could something like that happen, this is horrible
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And, Diane, overcrowding is also a teacher’s number one complaint. I guess I retired at the right time.
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Why are the problems of homelessness and child abuse in schools overlooked and increasing? Most of the adults in the US now are “adult children”. ACoA!
Adult Children of America (ACoA) use Avoidance & Denial ( dissociation) for coping with problems.
These are adults who grew up in families of alcoholics, workaholics, & dysfunctional families ( everyone)! The coping mechanisms of Avoidance and Denial ( dissociation) that they learned early in childhood allowed them to survive in an environment of chronic stress with insecurity from unpredictable, detached, or scary authority figures ( parents & teachers). The reality is that these coping strategies were learned behaviors that became ” hard wired” into their personality, so they will continue to use the same coping of Avoidance & Denial in adulthood. It is learned helplessness. Instead of recognizing their dysfunctional coping or taking responsibility, they will find “escapes” and ” protection “.
ACoA is the reason for the deficit of leadership that would address problems of homelessness and increasing abuse of children in the schools, as well as in our society overall. The only hope to change this is to educate the public on how to recognize their own dysfunctional coping, and teach everyone the skills to validate children, as well as each other . Skills of conflict resolution and empathic listening have been lost in this current society of barbarianism from Narcissism!
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