New York City is scrambling — again — to comply with the state’s class-size mandate. Cue the predictable outrage: City Hall can’t manage. The Department of Education dropped the ball. Kids are being shortchanged.
But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: This was always going to fail. Not because of incompetence. Because the law itself is fundamentally disconnected from reality. The mandate requires the city to dramatically shrink class sizes across the system. Sounds great: who wouldn’t want smaller classes? There’s just one problem: you need classrooms to do that. And New York City doesn’t have them.
You don’t magically “find” space in a system that’s already bursting at the seams. The only real way to comply is to build new schools, something that takes at least four years, assuming you can even find land in the first place. In many neighborhoods, you can’t.
So what’s the fallback plan? The one advocates keep quietly floating? Cap enrollment at popular schools. That might look like a solution on paper. In reality, it’s a disaster.
Take District 26 in Queens, one of the most sought-after, high-performing districts in the city. Its schools aren’t just crowded; they’re universally oversubscribed. There is no nearby school with extra seats waiting to absorb displaced students.
So when you cap enrollment, those kids don’t “go elsewhere” locally. They get pushed out — often out of their neighborhood, sometimes out of their district — bused to wherever the city can patch together an open seat. That’s not class-size reform. That’s musical chairs.
And here’s the part policymakers and advocates are especially careful not to mention: the schools that do have space aren’t just lower enrollment, they’re overwhelmingly high-poverty schools with weaker academic outcomes.
Let’s be honest about what this policy means in practice. Families who fought to get their kids into higher-performing schools are now being told: Sorry, no room. Try a school with smaller classes — but worse results. That’s not equity. That’s redistribution by lottery. And it exposes an uncomfortable fact: shrinking class size is not a silver bullet for academic achievement. It may help with classroom experience and teacher workload, but it doesn’t magically turn struggling schools into high-performing ones.
So we’re upending the system to chase a goal that doesn’t even guarantee the outcome being promised. None of this should be surprising.
Three years ago, a minority of members on the city’s own Class Size Working Group warned exactly what would happen. They pointed out the obvious: without time to build new schools, the mandate would force bad choices: displacement, enrollment caps, and logistical chaos.
They urged common sense amendments: A longer phase-in. Starting with the younger kids who benefit the most from smaller class sizes. Exempting high-performing schools where parents don’t seem to mind larger class sizes. They were ignored.
Now, the same political class that cheered the law’s passage is acting shocked that it can’t be implemented on schedule and pointing politically expedient fingers left, right, and center. And here’s the kicker: giving the city two more years won’t fix it.
In three years, we’ll be right back here, still short on space, still unable to build fast enough, still pretending that a law can override basic physical and geographical constraints. Because you can’t legislate square footage into existence.
New Yorkers deserve smaller class sizes. But they also deserve honesty. Right now, they’re getting neither.
Alexander is a public school parent, the co-president of the Citywide Council on High Schools, and was a co-author of the Class Size Working Group Minority Report.