The city’s Department of Education (DOE) released a draft proposal of its 2027 Class Size Reduction Plan (CSRP) on Wednesday night in which Mayor Zohran Mamdani pledged to allocate an additional $1.5 billion in the city’s capital plan to help build school expansions and create additional space to accommodate the mandated smaller classes.
In March, advocates criticized Mamdani and the DOE over an update to the School Construction Authority’s capital plan, which they said did not adequately address the school system’s capital needs to reach the class size mandate’s goals.
Yet Mamdani and School Chancellor Kamar Samuels took a victory lap Thursday in announcing the proposed plan’s completion. Samuels went as far as to state the plan represented, in his view, “a major milestone for my administration and is a testament to our partnerships with City Hall, the State, and our Unions.”
“Delivering smaller class sizes this fall — something every student and teacher deserves — will require real investment, real partnership and real planning,” Mamdani said in a June 11 statement. “That means building the classrooms we need, hiring the teachers our schools deserve, engaging families and educators every step of the way, and pursuing every available path to compliance.”
When caps on class size were passed in 2022, the state also required the New York City school district to develop a five-year plan detailing how it would reduce the number of students per class. Since then, the DOE has updated the plan each year, reevaluating its progress and what is still needed to happen to fully comply with the law.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Schools Chancellor Kamar Samuels opened a new early childhood education center in Downtown Brooklyn on Tuesday, April 21.Photo by Lloyd Mitchell
Since then, under the Mamdani administration, the state legislature approved a two-year extension of the deadline for meeting the class-size requirements, namely to help close a $5.7 billion budget gap by deferring expenses.
“For too long, City Hall treated class size as a problem to postpone rather than a promise to keep. That ends now,” Mamdani said in the statement.
Space limitations in some NYC public schools have been a long-standing hurdle to achieving the city’s goal of reducing class sizes to no more than 25 students. Previous iterations of the CSRP have focused on finding space in classes through reorganizing student distribution among classes, converting spaces that were not originally used for classroom instruction and looking for innovative ways to manage enrollment numbers within the schools of a community.
As it reads, the 2027 CSRP proposes pursuing more capital projects and construction to create additional room for schools that cannot meet the current reduction mandates due to space constraints. It identified more than 600 schools throughout the public school system with additional space needs to accommodate smaller class sizes.
But advocates like Leonie Haimson — executive director of Class Size Matters, which seeks to educate the public on the benefits of smaller class sizes — called the proposed plan “hugely disappointing,” saying it’s “not a real plan at all.”
The criticisms stemmed largely from a lack of specificity. Part of the 2022 law requires the city to issue annual reports that, among other things, include details such as “[t]he annual capital plan for school construction and leasing to show how many classrooms will be added in each year and in which schools and districts to achieve the class size targets,” as the law reads.
The CSRP did not include information on specific schools or construction projects. Instead, it used broader strokes to describe the administration’s plan.
However, as the language of the 2022 law distinguished a “report” from a “plan,” it is not immediately clear if the CSRP is required to include more detailed information.
Haimson said a plan should provide more concrete information about steps that will be taken to achieve class size mandates.
“All in all, it provides no assurances to parents that Mayor Mamdani was serious about his repeated pledge when running for office that he would lower class size to provide their children with the smaller classes that they need and deserve.