Chris Phillips’ son was struggling to stand out in his crowded New York City classroom.
But this fall, his diverse campus, Public School 9 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, hired almost a dozen new elementary teachers. Classroom rosters fell from 32 students to 20.
Quickly, the fifth grader began to have more face time with his teacher and richer conversations with his classmates. He even seems more excited about school.
“When I saw it in action, I was thrilled,” his father said. “I’m worried about the city and state’s ability to keep it going.”
There’s good reason for his concern. While Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to replicate the experience at PS 9 in schools across New York City, making that happen in the nation’s largest education system will be a formidable task.
To pull it off, his administration will need to hire more than 10,000 new educators. And the price tag is steep — Mamdani needs up to $700 million in additional funding.
Other big-ticket items that anchor the mayor’s ambitious agenda are well-known — free bus service and universal childcare, for example. But the quest to reduce class size, and the state law that mandates it, has largely played out beyond the spotlight.
A state law requires New York City to decrease the size of public school classes to 25 students or fewer, depending on the grade. The deadline to comply is two years away.
Mamdani made it a top priority of his education agenda, promising that children would no longer be “fighting for the attention of a teacher”.
The implementation of the class size law has highlighted long-running tensions in the school system. Some elite schools are overcrowded because middle-class families have clamoured for seats while other schools have empty classrooms. Will Mamdani cap enrolment at the most in-demand schools, a move that would make it even tougher to gain admission?
Even before he took office, Mamdani received a crash course in the complicated politics of running a school system. On the campaign trail, he issued frequent calls to end mayoral control of schools. But the day before he was inaugurated, he backed down on that pledge, which had been the biggest pillar of his blueprint for schools.
A shift in his stance on class size could threaten his alliances with labour unions, teachers and public school families.
But his other priorities, such as making the city the first in the US to offer free universal childcare for all children younger than five, will also come at a significant cost. And Mamdani needs to close a $12 billion municipal budget gap.
“The class size law runs right into that,” said Andrew Rein, the president of the Citizens Budget Commission, a budget watchdog group. “He’s got to make some hard choices,” Rein said of the mayor.
Research shows that smaller classes can help students, though the extent — and whether there are more cost-effective ways to improve education — remains hotly debated. Children from poorer families stand to benefit most.
But New York will run into a tough hiring landscape. Enrolment in university education programmes in the state, the incubator of new teachers, has declined more than 50 per cent during the last 15 years.
And then there are concerns over retention. Could a hiring spree at well-off schools draw top talent away from struggling ones — and reduce the benefits of small classes in less-advantaged schools?
Chris Caruso, the managing director for school-age children at Robin Hood, an anti-poverty organisation, said that the pursuit of smaller classes was laudable. But as Mamdani confronts tight budgets and “competing, expensive priorities”, he said that the state should rethink the law.
The Mamdani administration insists that it is committed to shrinking class sizes. The schools chancellor Kamar Samuels said that class size would be an “incredibly important” issue even without a mandate — “For me, it’s not about a law.”
The mayor wants to provide $12,000 a year in tuition benefits for 1,000 college students who commit to teaching in the city’s schools for three years.
But the clock is ticking.
By September, 80 per cent of classrooms across New York City must comply with the law. This fall, just under 65 per cent met the requirement. But to do that, the city had to grant a significant number of exemptions.
NYTNS