New York passed a law to put fewer kids in every classroom. Four years in, the city is meeting it less by hiring teachers than by carving out exemptions, leaning on the state to move the goalposts, and budgeting for a fraction of the staff the law actually requires.
The 2022 law sets hard caps, no more than 20 students in grades K-3, 23 in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school, phased in 20 percent of classes a year until every classroom complies by the 2027-28 school year. The trouble is the price tag. Full compliance would cost the city an estimated $602 million a year to hire 6,000 extra teachers, plus up to $18 billion in construction to build the rooms to put them in.
So the city has been managing the number instead of the classrooms. For this school year it reported 64 percent of classes in compliance only after declaring about 10,500 of its 150,000-plus classes exempt. Strip the exemptions out and the real rate was 59.5 percent, just under the 60 percent target. State Education Commissioner Betty Rosa said flatly that the city would have major difficulty hitting the 80 percent the law demanded for next year.
This June, Albany did the obvious thing and moved the line. A deal cut with the teachers’ union pushed full compliance back two years, to 2029-30, requiring 70 percent this year and 10 percent more annually after that. Mayor Mamdani is counting on the delay for breathing room, projecting savings of $508 million next school year and $733 million the year after if the caps slip.
The tell is in his own budget. Even with two extra years, the executive budget set aside just $122 million to hire 1,000 teachers, against the roughly 6,000 the city itself estimates it needs, plus $1.5 billion for classroom space. UFT President Michael Mulgrew defended the delay as the fastest realistic path. However you frame it, the law that promised smaller classes is being satisfied with exemptions, a later deadline, and a sixth of the teachers.
For parents, the gap between the promise and the classroom is checkable. The city reports class sizes school by school, so you can see how big your child’s classes actually are and whether your school counts as compliant or exempt. And because the hiring is funded through the city budget, the Council’s education budget hearings this June are where the difference between 1,000 teachers and 6,000 gets decided.
Featured image: Clyde Charles Brown / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
