It doesn’t get much dumber than this: Though enrollment remains 100,000 below pre-pandemic levels in New York City’s largest-in-the-nation K-12 public school system, the Department of Education is being forced to hire new teachers by the thousands to comply with rigid class-size mandates imposed by the state Legislature in 2022, which write in stone that classes must be capped at 20 to 25 students depending on the grade level, down from 30 to 34 under current rules.
Class-size mandates effectively compete with other investments, like hiring more mental health professionals or investing in intensive teacher training for the existing workforce. Indeed, class-size mandates actively drive up spending in some areas, like classroom construction that wouldn’t otherwise be necessary. Most importantly, requirements to increase teacher quantity can seriously threaten teacher quality, which is a far more powerful determinant of whether students are learning.
If mandating fewer students in each class effectively requires the hiring of an unknown number of dud instructors, how do students benefit? Answer: They don’t. Which is why a mandate from Albany is such a bad idea, removing any ability of the schools to manage effectively and promote learning instead of following legislatively-imposed rules.
There’s another huge problem with the law on the books. By giving schools no flexibility, it may well wind up effectively capping enrollment at some of the best and most popular schools — even as it redistributes resources from low-income and predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods, where enrollment tends to be lower, to higher-income districts, where there’s more overcrowding in in-demand schools.
Speaking of education, you’d think New York City would’ve learned from the tough example of California, which implemented a similar law nearly two decades ago. That statute wound up getting scrapped in 2015 after an analysis showed that it “led to a dramatic increase in the percentage of teachers who lacked full certification, who had no postgraduate education, and who were in their first or second year of teaching. These teachers were concentrated in schools with high percentages of nonwhite students enrolled in subsidized lunch programs.”
In other words, reducing class size “for all” actually means harming teacher quality for the already less-fortunate.
Yet today, even as federal pandemic funding dries up, the city’s Department of Education is digging deep to hire 3,700 teachers — and 100 assistant principals — to comply with the new law. That’s only a fraction of the total that will ultimately be required. The city’s Independent Budget Office estimates that we’ll have to hire 17,700 teachers to meet the mandate, costing between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually just for their salaries and benefits.
Yep, New York City is committing to hiring more teachers, and maybe more police while it’s at it, despite budget storm clouds that are coming closer every day. That would be simply silly if it weren’t fiscally dangerous.
We aren’t advising the city to defy the state law. It has to comply. But if the Assembly and state Senate had a few more sensible bones in their bodies, they’d revisit this unfunded mandate and cancel it, giving our school district and our principals the flexibility they desperately deserve to create the best learning environment for our kids — all of them.
