It’s welcome relief that the state Legislature has delayed for two years the onset of its unnecessary and unreasonable (and pricey) class size mandate on New York City. The next step is to scrap it all together. Of all the fixes to the myriad issues plaguing our public schools, a mandatory reduction in class sizes from 25 to 20 is one of the more expensive and least-supported ones.
Enacted with the strong backing of the teachers union, the law imposes the costs added of hiring new teachers without funding it.
Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani backed the concept and voted for it and promised during his mayoral campaign last year to implement it. Well, now he’s mayor and he’s agreeing with the prior mayor, Eric Adams, that it interferes with running the city’s public schools.
In an ideal world without financial or practical constraints, yes, smaller class sizes now would be fine. In this circumstance, where the public school system is bleeding enrollment — which doesn’t mean that class size targets are easier to hit as the education funding formula is tied to number of students, plus we have a teacher attrition problem — and spending gobs of money for middling results, then yes, more individualized attention would be nice.
As it stands, there are more pressing needs for our classrooms that could utilize some of the billion-plus dollars that would otherwise be spent hitting this one specific milestone.
The delay is just that, a delay, which means the law continues to require that New York City public schools move in the direction of compliance. That was a compromise reached in these waning days of the Albany session, which has seen various frenzied negotiations after lawmakers burned almost all of their session time on protracted budget negotiations that went even later than they usually do.
That said, we’ll take a delay, but this is a conversation that should be continued next session. Even if the full implementation is in 2030 as opposed to 2028, that still is a requirement that will impose substantial annual costs in perpetuity.
Next year, city leaders and lawmakers should push for a full repeal. This was a piece of legislation that municipal leaders did not want, but was forced by state legislators encouraged by the teachers’ union.
Mamdani himself has now seen the issue from both sides, having voted for and campaigned partly on the implementation of the class size bill as an assemblyman. Now in City Hall, the mayor can see that attempting to implement in full right now would be logistically fraught, costly and not be the best intervention to serve students. He has maintained that he wants to see the caps enacted eventually, but perhaps we will see some additional evolution from this mayor.
Instead, the city should focus on getting up to compliance with other laws, for example those ensuring equal access to education for students with disabilities, which the city has consistently failed to do. It can also turn more resources to the perennial issue of the large volume of unhoused students in the system — which last year hit a whopping 154,000 — who need additional support.
And, of course, it needs to invest in and find recurring revenue for the rollout of the mayor’s ambitious childcare proposals, building on the work of his predecessors to make NYC a global leader in universal access to childcare for children 2 and up.
If and when the city has addressed some of these more fundamental problems, the conversation around class size caps can be revisited, especially given that the status quo of 25 is not in itself unreasonable. For now, it’s a burden.