Class Size Trade-Offs

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
Brian Lehrer on WNYC. So now that it's squarely summer vacation, let's talk about school.
No, I mean it. For decades, New York City parents and teachers have fought for smaller class sizes, right? And you know this law in 2022, Albany finally gave them a law requiring it. No more than 20 to 25 kids per class, depending on the grade, phased in over several years. Public hearings are coming this summer, and compliance deadlines for the 20 to 25 are approaching this fall. But the law is landing at the exact moment that the city school system is shrinking down roughly 160,000 students since 2020, according to our colleagues reporting at Gothamist. There's still about 900,000 students in the system. But the city now faces a puzzle.
How do you make classes smaller in a system that's losing kids? And what do you sacrifice when you have to create more classrooms, hire more teachers? Is there anything that actually gets lost in that equation? Mayor Zerad Mamdani's answer laid out in a plan released last month is to spend big. He would spend $244 million this year to hire thousands of teachers and $1.5 billion in capital funds to build new classroom space at hundreds of schools.
But that has touched off a real fight. And you can see it playing out in one school, in particular in Washington Heights, as a microcosm that our education reporter Jessica Gould did a story on. It's PS. IS. 187, where the city wants to build an addition on top of the schoolyard. Now, parents who spent years asking for smaller classes are now divided, Jessica reports, because the price is their kids' outdoor play space and years of construction going on while they're in their classes. Meanwhile, some advocates and budget watchdogs are asking a different pointed question, why build it all when there are half empty schools just down the hill? So here to walk us through this complicated set of issues is Jessica Gould, Education Reporter for WNYC and Gothamist. Hey Jess, welcome back to the show.

**Jessica Gould** (2:28)
Hi, Brian.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:29)
So you've been following New York's class size law closely. I know for listeners just catching up, what does this 2022 law actually require and why is it suddenly forcing hard choices in the schools right now?

**Jessica Gould** (2:44)
Yeah, we keep calling it the new class size law and it's becoming increasingly far away that it was passed in 2022 But the truth is that they're still phasing it in.
So part of the law was to reduce classes by to make them 20 to 25 students depending on grade. And that's in comparison to the reality now at many schools, which is that there can be as many as in the low 30s in terms of numbers of students in classes. And it was phased in so that you would have to, the city would have to meet that target, to have more and more schools at 20 to 25 depending on grade over five years. And it actually was just extended because now we're at the rubber hits the road moment. The easy shifts have been made, the art rooms that could be turned into classrooms and force art teacher to deliver art programming classroom to classroom. They call it art on a cart.
You know, schools have found the space largely that they can to make this work. And now it's the tougher question.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:59)
And you recently reported, as I said, in the intro on PSIS 187 in Washington Heights in particular. Paint that picture for us.

**Jessica Gould** (4:09)
Sure. So this is a popular school.
That draws mostly from the neighborhood zone, though there are some families who enroll their kids from outside the zone. And it's an elementary and middle school together. It's increasingly popular to have these schools linked so that there's more continuity.
And, you know, it's in a more gentrified part of the neighborhood. And it's a popular school. Parents want to send their kids there. And they have been bursting at the seams for years. They're 25% over capacity. They did get rid of the art room. And the art teacher is now doing art on a cart. And they've made some, you know, steps toward achieving the goal of the class size law, particularly in, I think it was the first grade that was really overpopulated and overcrowded. But they still have a long way to go. And so, you know, it's been years now of discussions between members of the community and the school system trying to figure out how to make this work. They looked at everything from staggering schedules, so starting school later for some grades, to outdoor classrooms, which didn't end up happening, to now building a new building on part of the large blacktop that they have there for school recess.