All the recent sound and fury over the state class-size law signifies nothing because all the players refuse to say the most important part out loud: This mandate only serves the interests of the United Federation Teachers — and is actively bad for the city’s schoolchildren.
Declining enrollment had the UFT’s ranks steadily shrinking as of 2022; the class-size mandate is purely a gimmick to turn that around.
State Sen. John Liu (D-Queens) and the other Democrats who pushed the law through plainly don’t even believe the mandate is pro-education, or they wouldn’t have imposed it only on New York City.
Why not on Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, Hempstead, and, heck, Scarsdale?
Note, too, that the city’s lower-performing schools already mostly meet the law’s class-size targets: It’s the schools that largely work that have more kids in every classroom.
So the law’s actual impact is to force those schools to break up classes — and, indeed, if they don’t have enough available classrooms, to admit fewer students.
That is, fewer children being taught by the best, veteran teachers, and fewer kids in the better schools.
This may well mean fewer students getting the chance to learn at the city’s elite high schools: The buildings that house Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and Bronx Science have fixed numbers of classrooms, after all.
More perversity: Rapidly increasing the size of the teaching corps can’t help but dilute its quality.
Newbie teachers just have a lot to learn, since most schools of education don’t teach fundamental skills like classroom management, nor indeed much about the practice of teaching at all.
Worse, complying with the law requires the city Department of Education to triple its rate of hiring new teachers — which pretty much forces it to hire every warm body that comes along with the right paper qualifications.
Another wrinkle: Under the UFT contract, senior teachers have considerable rights to choose which school to teach at; human nature ensures that many (maybe most) will transfer to any new slots that open up at “nice” schools, and away from schools where harder-to-educate kids predominate.
Yes, some dedicated veteran teachers will always stick it out at the “tough” schools; a few gifted new teachers will be great from their first days on the job.
But the fact is that this mandate mainly harms the education of the city’s needier kids — and everyone who understands how the system works knows it.
That includes Liu, UFT boss Mike Mulgrew, and the City Council members griping about the city’s slow implementation of the mandate: That they posture to the contrary just makes every one of them even more despicable.
Schools Chancellor David Banks knows it, too, though it’s beyond impolitic for him to call out the vile powerbrokers for playing this game.
But, since he cares about the kids, Banks has a moral duty to drag his feet as much as possible.
As for Liu: How does he sleep at night? The only possible answer: Wherever, whenever, and however the UFT tells him.