THE PSYCHOLOGIST : NYC public school officials grilled about plan to comply with controversial class-size law

NYC public school officials grilled about plan to comply with controversial class-size law

This old, old class size fetish is ridiculous. There are plenty of instances of kids in large classes doing well.

It is teacher quality that matters and good teachers are largely born, not made. There are only so many good teachers around regardlesss of what teacher-training courses they undergo, so class size limitations can cause a lot of barely competent teachers to be hired, thus HARMING, not helping the education of the kids.

Below are links to some of my old posts on the matter that give more detail:

https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2006/11/public-school-class-size-doesnt-matter.html

https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2007/06/class-size-where-belief-trumps-reality.html

https://edwatch.blogspot.com/2008/03/great-class-size-myth-i-note-that-gos.html

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City Department of Education officials were grilled Thursday about their plan to comply with a controversial state law that requires Big Apple public schools to reduce class sizes across the board by 2028.

The City Council hearing on the issue came as the legislative body’s education committee introduced legislation that would require the DOE to report data twice a year on the actual size of classes at all schools and special programs.

“Here’s my issue, the people that are making the decisions have never taught in New York City public schools,” Committee on Education Chair Rita Joseph told the panel of DOE officials during the hearing.

“You must apply the law,” added the council member, a veteran educator, challenging the DOE’s argument that it needs more funding to hire more teachers in order to comply with the mandate.

Mayor Eric Adams and Schools Chancellor David Banks have called on lawmakers to provide $1.4 billion to $1.9 billion — the projected cost of hiring between 10,000 to 12,000 educators — to help the city comply.

According to DOE’s “Class Size Reduction Plan” update, nearly half of all classes currently fall under the size caps set by the law. But the department’s plan noted that more work will be required

DOE Deputy Chancellor Emma Vadehra said the administration supports the goal to lower class sizes but reiterated that more work needs to be done in the 2025-26 school year and beyond to meet the requirements.

“In brief, we are currently fully in compliance with the class size legislation. In the coming years, however, we do have work and we will face some difficult choices to maintain compliance,” Vadehra told the education committee.

The department’s First Deputy Chancellor Dan Weisberg, NYC School Construction Authority President and CEO Nina Kubota and District 23 Superintendent Khalek Kirkland made up the rest of the panel speaking to the committee.

“Our work is not complete without New York City planning to make these changes and enact those changes,” Jackson said.

Liu said he doesn’t “begrudge” Adams and Banks over the mandate being fiscally difficult to deal with, but maintained a plan for compliance needs to be made transparent.

“The reality is, they’re in control of the public schools, and even though they did not make this problem, this problem they inherited, it is their responsibility to fix it,” he stressed.

Gov. Kathy Hochul and the state legislature — under intense lobbying from the United Federation of Teachers union — approved the law in 2022.

It states that grades K-3 must have a maximum of 20 students, with 23 students in grades 4-8 and 25 students in grades 9-12 by the 2027–28 school year.

Earlier, Joseph held a rally with parents, educators, advocates and elected officials on the steps of City Hall in support of the law.

“The DOE has an incredible opportunity to change the educational lives of students by implementing class laws,” said Michael Sill, the UFT’s assistant secretary, who was at the rally.

“Sadly, the DOE’s engagement thus far has been typified by inflating cost estimates and inventing excuses for not doing what needs to be done,” Sill told The Post.

“While revenues are up, the reserves are overflowing, and the state has invested in New York City’s young people, the city continues to push a false austerity narrative that is designed to frighten the public.”

UFT President Michael Mulgrew claimed the DOE was “trying to sabotage the law.”

“Parents want this. Educators want this. We challenge the DOE to identify the schools that have the space right now to make this change and get started,” he told The Post.

“We ask the City Council to help us hold the DOE accountable.”

https://nypost.com/2024/02/29/us-news/nyc-public-school-officials-grilled-about-plan-to-comply-with-controversial-class-size-law/

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Background

The essence of conservatism is caution. The essence of Leftism is anger

This blog is written solely by John Ray, who has a Ph.D. degree in psychology and 200+ papers published in the academic journals of the social sciences. It does occasionally comment on issues in psychology but is mainly aimed at giving a conservative psychologist's view on a broad range of topics. There are very few conservative psychologists.

The blog originated in Australia and many (but not most) posts discuss Australian matters. Australians have an unusually good awareness of events outside their own country. Australian newspapers feature news from Britain and the USA not as an afterthought but as a major part of their coverage. So Australians do tend to have a truly Western heart, which is the reason behind the old name for this blog. So events in Australia, Britain and the USA all feature frequently here, plus occasional coverage of other places, particularly Israel.

A primer in American politics for non-Americans:

SCOTUS is the Supreme Court of the United States, the highest court in the land

The "GOP" stands for "Grand Old Party" and refers to the Republican party. The GOP is at present center/Right, while the Democrats have been undergoing a steady drift Leftwards and now have policies similar to mainstream European Leftist parties.

The ideological identity of both parties has however been very fluid -- almost reversing itself over time. In the mid 19th century, the GOP was the party of big government and concern for minorities while the Democrats advertised themselves as "The party of the white man" -- an orientation that lasted into the mid 20th century in the South. The Democrats are still obsessed with race but have now flipped into support for discrimination AGAINST whites.

Was Pope Urban VIII the first Warmist? Below we see him refusing to look through Galileo's telescope. People tend to refuse to consider evidence— if what they might discover contradicts what they believe.

Global warming

Calibrated in whole degrees. Larger graph here

Climate scientist Lennart Bengtsson said. “The warming we have had the last 100 years is so small that if we didn’t have meteorologists and climatologists to measure it we wouldn’t have noticed it at all.”

The term "Fascism" is mostly used by the Left as a brainless term of abuse. But when they do make a serious attempt to define it, they produce very complex and elaborate definitions -- e.g. here and here. In fact, Fascism is simply extreme socialism plus nationalism. But great gyrations are needed to avoid mentioning the first part of that recipe, of course.

Two examples of Leftist racism below (much more here and here):

Beatrice Webb, a founder of the London School of Economics and the Fabian Society, and married to a Labour MP, mused in 1922 on whether when English children were "dying from lack of milk", one should extend "the charitable impulse" to Russian and Chinese children who, if saved this year, might anyway die next. Besides, she continued, there was "the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants" and "obviously" one wouldn't "spend one's available income" on "a Central African negro".

Hugh Dalton, offered the Colonial Office during Attlee's 1945-51 Labour government, turned it down because "I had a horrid vision of pullulating, poverty stricken, diseased nigger communities, for whom one can do nothing in the short run and who, the more one tries to help them, are querulous and ungrateful."

Defensible and indefensible usages of the term "racism"

The book, The authoritarian personality, authored by T.W. Adorno et al. in 1950, has been massively popular among psychologists. It claims that a set of ideas that were popular in the "Progressive"-dominated America of the prewar era were "authoritarian". Leftist regimes always are authoritarian so that claim was not a big problem. What was quite amazing however is that Adorno et al. identified such ideas as "conservative". They were in fact simply popular ideas of the day but ones that had been most heavily promoted by the Left right up until the then-recent WWII. See here for details of prewar "Progressive" thinking.

R.I.P. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet deposed a law-defying Marxist President at the express and desperate invitation of the Chilean parliament. He pioneered the free-market reforms which Reagan and Thatcher later unleashed to world-changing effect. That he used far-Leftist methods to suppress far-Leftist violence is reasonable if not ideal. The Leftist view that they should have a monopoly of violence and that others should follow the law is a total absurdity which shows only that their hate overcomes their reason

Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a war criminal. Both British and American codebreakers had cracked the Japanese naval code so FDR knew what was coming at Pearl Harbor. But for his own political reasons he warned no-one there. So responsibility for the civilian and military deaths at Pearl Harbor lies with FDR as well as with the Japanese. The huge firepower available at Pearl Harbor, both aboard ship and on land, could have largely neutered the attack. Can you imagine 8 battleships and various lesser craft firing all their AA batteries as the Japanese came in? The Japanese naval airforce would have been annihilated and the war would have been over before it began.

FDR prolonged the Depression. He certainly didn't cure it.

WWII did NOT end the Great Depression. It just concealed it. It in fact made living standards worse

Joe McCarthy was eventually proved right after the fall of the Soviet Union. To accuse anyone of McCarthyism is to accuse them of accuracy!

The KKK was intimately associated with the Democratic party. They ATTACKED Republicans!

People who mention differences in black vs. white IQ are these days almost universally howled down and subjected to the most extreme abuse. I am a psychometrician, however, so I feel obliged to defend the scientific truth of the matter:

The average African adult has about the same IQ as an average white 11-year-old and African Americans (who are partly white in ancestry) average out at a mental age of 14. The American Psychological Association is generally Left-leaning but it is the world's most prestigious body of academic psychologists. And even they have had to concede that sort of gap (one SD) in black vs. white average IQ. 11-year olds can do a lot of things but they also have their limits and there are times when such limits need to be allowed for.

America's uncivil war was caused by trade protectionism. The slavery issue was just camouflage, as Abraham Lincoln himself admitted. See also here

Did William Zantzinger kill poor Hattie Carroll?

Did Bismarck predict where WWI would start or was it just a "free" translation by Churchill?

Leftist psychologists have an amusingly simplistic conception of military organizations and military men. They seem to base it on occasions they have seen troops marching together on parade rather than any real knowledge of military men and the military life. They think that military men are "rigid" -- automatons who are unable to adjust to new challenges or think for themselves. What is incomprehensible to them is that being kadaver gehorsam (to use the extreme Prussian term for following orders) actually requires great flexibility -- enough flexibility to put your own ideas and wishes aside and do something very difficult. Ask any soldier if all commands are easy to obey.

A good article on Leftist hate

The real history of social Darwinism

Some personal memoirs

Memoir highlights

THE PSYCHOLOGIST

NYC public school officials grilled about plan to comply with controversial class-size law

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