New York City schools are entering the year with a range of challenges. While there are fewer overcrowded buildings, students still flock to the most cramped facilities, and class sizes continue to rise across grades.
Schools can reinforce societal inequalities or they can challenge and confront them. Many groups like Cure Violence New York and Make the Road are working to give students a voice in the curriculum by using arts and community-based organizing.
1. Overcrowding
The city’s 1.1 million students attend 1,840 schools, and more than half of them are in overcrowded buildings. Teachers in overcrowded classrooms report higher levels of stress, and students who attend overcrowded schools are less likely to graduate high school. Overcrowding also impedes students’ ability to have small classes, use the cafeteria at reasonable times, and access other essential services like art, music, and counseling.
The problem isn’t new, but it continues to grow. Mayor Bill de Blasio’s new capital plan includes nearly $8.8 billion for school expansion projects that aim to reduce crowding, but the needs are greater than those funds will allow for. The city’s overcrowded schools are unable to meet student demands for smaller class sizes, more enrichment programs, and improved facilities.
As new school year classes begin this week, overcrowded schools will be forced to try to accommodate as many students as possible with a variety of strategies. Some will opt to hold classes on a rotating schedule, so that each student will only have to attend class every other day. Other schools will hold classes one day a week, and some schools will even be able to offer full-time remote learning options for students.
School overcrowding is exacerbated by the fact that New York City has a very diverse population. The city is home to people from more than 150 countries, and many of those families speak languages other than English. The city’s Department of Education translates report cards, registration forms, system-wide alerts, and other information for parents in Spanish, French, Russian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Hindi, Telugu, Urdu, and Arabic.
Overcrowding is also caused by rapid residential development, and the city’s environmental review process does not always require developers to show how their proposals will impact local schools. In the past, the DOE has even had to build schools on top of existing ones in order to have enough space for students.
Many parents are furious with the DOE for blowing off their requests for more space. For example, a group of parents in Manhattan’s District 3 sent 207 hand-written notes to their superintendent to complain about their cramped classrooms and lost programs. Others are fighting to retain access to schools in their districts or borough that give priority to students based on their address, while others want to keep their children in “high-performing” schools with disproportionately white and affluent enrollment.
2. Unaffordable Supplies
New York City schools must make do with the materials available in their buildings. The next mayor will need to work with the city’s unions and other stakeholders to find ways to reduce costs without jeopardizing education quality. The next mayor should also recognize that the current school-budget crisis is not just a result of de Blasio’s largesse in teacher contracts, but also because of the state’s fiscal crisis and the need for serious belt-tightening. This includes addressing the excessive costs of the city’s pension system and making hard choices about what to cut in the short term in order to invest in education in the long run.
The future of NYC schools will depend on how well the next mayor understands how they relate to larger societal inequalities and how to confront and counteract them. The city’s public schools can either reproduce or counteract these inequalities; to do the latter, they must create environments that provide students with a variety of educational options and ensure their equitable access to them.
Unfortunately, the needle has not moved much toward achieving this goal. Although the share of students who are off-track (i.e., older than their grade-level peers) has been slowly decreasing, overage students still represent a significant portion of the student body. Meanwhile, the number of students attending overcrowded schools has increased despite efforts to shift some pupils into less crowded buildings.
Moreover, the city’s charter-school sector remains stalled because of the deep skepticism of many Democratic lawmakers who fear that it could siphon off money from traditional district schools. The next mayor should work with lawmakers to address this concern and find a way to expand the number of charters, as well as make it easier for parents to transfer their children into them.
In addition, the next mayor should continue to support a strong, well-financed public-school option for families who want it. In this regard, the city should seek to preserve independent private schools by implementing a state-level tax credit for contributions to nonprofits that provide scholarships for students in need of such alternatives to the district school system.
3. Lack of Support for Students with Disabilities
Amid the coronavirus pandemic, parents who have children with special needs have been struggling to get the services they are entitled under federal law. A new report from the city education department, released Wednesday for the first time since the pandemic began, shows that more than 4,000 students were either not fully receiving or not at all receiving the classroom services required by their Individualized Education Programs, or IEPs.
The city’s education department says it has made substantial improvements. In addition to distributing tens of thousands of devices for remote learning, the city has prioritized in-person access to therapy for special needs students and begun providing those in-person services on Saturdays. It is also experimenting with “integrated co-teaching” classes that combine disabled and non-disabled students in the same class led by two teachers.
These are positive changes, but the city still faces major challenges. The city’s education department’s budget for 2021-22 includes more than $8 billion for the special education system. That represents a huge investment, but the city will have to find ways to maximize its resources and make sure all the kids with disabilities are getting the services they need.
To do that, the city must create more schools and increase the number of seats in academically challenging high schools. It must also expand opportunity in lower-income communities by creating new schools and redrawing school boundaries to allow more seats at academically rigorous schools. It should also start experimenting with more innovative ways to help kids achieve their educational goals, including opening schools that focus on career paths.
The city must also continue to improve its legal system for resolving disputes over educational services. It has a long history of adversarial litigation over special education, and it can be costly for families who have to hire lawyers to fight for their rights. Mayor de Blasio has pledged to reform the system and is taking steps to limit expensive legal battles, such as by requiring parents to prove their child requires a particular service before the city will pay for it.
4. Lack of Resources
A lack of resources can limit students’ opportunities. Large class sizes, insufficient funding for counselors, a limited ability to offer music or art classes, or an overreliance on technology can all have a negative impact on students. But these are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the challenges New York City’s schools face.
Educators, parents, and students themselves need to think beyond these issues to see how they can best serve their children. The next mayor should build upon de Blasio’s successes in pre-K for all, but also take steps to address the entrenched racial and socioeconomic segregation that plagues the system.
To start, the next mayor should learn from the failures of de Blasio’s Renewal Schools program and reinstall a process for closing schools that fail to meet minimal standards. He should also resist legislative attempts to undo the requirement that admissions to the city’s selective high schools rely on a single exam, which helps promote integration in one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.
The next mayor should also reopen the process for charters to lease space in underused public schools. This will not only help them in their efforts to expand educational opportunities, but will result in future budget savings for the city by reducing the need to lease private spaces for these schools.
Finally, the next mayor should invest in the research and data necessary to understand how to support the academic, social, and emotional needs of NYC’s diverse student body. The results of this work should inform the development of policies that provide adequate resources to meet the unique needs of all families.
Despite the many challenges that confront them, New York City students are remarkably resilient. They are determined to find the schools that will best meet their individual needs, and the city’s leaders should stand with them in their quest. New York City’s future depends on it. —Raymond Domanico is the director of education policy at the Manhattan Institute. He is the author of The Changing Nature of American Schools: How Testing and Markets Are Remaking the Way We Learn.
