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Class Size Limited By Law?


Concerns over the number of students per class took on a new magnitude and urgency last month – and will come even more to the fore next month, when the issue of class size will be on the November ballot.

When the new school year started in September, parents, teachers, and advocates who thought that the public schools were already about to burst found classrooms more overcrowded than ever.

Many elementary school teachers, who last year struggled to meet the needs of 28 or 29 students, are now responsible for 33 or 34. And dozens of overcrowded middle and high schools also find themselves with five or more extra students per classroom. The United Federation of Teachers, the teachers union, claims to have counted over 10,000 classes that violate the union contract's class-size limits, which range from 25 in kindergarten to 34 in high school. The union has filed a formal grievance against Chancellor Klein and the Department of Education for these contract violations.

Reasons for the extreme overcrowding this year include growing enrollments and the effects of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which allows students from schools that score poorly on state tests and are labeled "in need of improvement" to seek transfers to better schools throughout the city. Last year, 331 of the city's approximately 1200 schools were so labeled; this year, the list includes 497 city schools--and students at 374 of them are now eligible for transfers.

New York City classes have long been by far the largest in the state, with class sizes averaging 20 to 35 percent over other school districts. This fact contributed to the recent New York Court of Appeals ruling in CFE v. the State of New York (In PDF format) that the students of New York City were being denied their constitutional right to a sound basic education. In that decision, Chief Judge Judith Kaye acknowledged that "New York City schools have excessive class sizes, and that class size affects learning."

Class-size-reduction advocates believe that large classes are the New York City schools' most serious problem. They point to studies that show that smaller classes lead to more individualized attention and improved student achievement, especially for poor and minority students. They contend that smaller classes also foster greater parent involvement, fewer disciplinary problems, and lower drop-out rates.

Soon New Yorkers will get a chance to vote on one potential solution to the city's class-size problem: amending the New York City charter to make smaller classes mandatory by law.

In August, a group called New Yorkers for Smaller Classes, which includes the teachers union and a number of parent and advocacy organizations, submitted a petition calling for a referendum on class size to be placed on the ballot in November. The referendum would ask voters to approve the creation of a city charter revision commission to study the class-size issue and to decide whether a proposition to limit class size should go before New York City voters in the 2004 election.

While few deny the disadvantages of large classes, not everyone supports this type of solution to the problem. Critics of the idea argue that reasonable class size is just one of a number of ingredients necessary for a quality education; they worry that legislating small classes does not ensure and may even jeopardize having enough qualified teachers, adequate school buildings, and the full range of programs that students also need to succeed.

Opponents of the class-size ballot initiative point to Florida's controversial class-size amendment, which was approved by voters last fall. The amendment requires school districts to begin reducing class sizes this year. By 2010, classes can be no larger than 18 in grades pre-K through 3, 22 in grades 4 through 8, and 25 in high school. In a year with limited state funds, however, some believe that teachers' raises, school construction, as well as school programs in art and music have been jeopardized by the class-size mandate. A movement is now underway to scale back the law, though there is doubt whether the still-popular law is vulnerable to repeal.

New Yorkers, however, will vote in November on whether to start the city on the path toward its own class-size ballot initiative. Although last month the city clerk bumped the class-size referendum from the ballot on the grounds that only one charter proposal is permitted per election, and the mayor's charter question on nonpartisan elections had priority under local election law, New Yorkers for Smaller Classes filed suit and prevailed. On October 2, State Supreme Court Justice Louise Gurner Gans put the issue back on the ballot. City officials say they will appeal her decision. In the meantime, though, New Yorkers for Smaller Classes is now preparing for an all-out campaign to win the vote.

Jessica Wolff is a public school parent and director of policy development at the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a coalition advocating for a sound basic education for students in New York City. The views expressed are her own.

A National Theater at Ground Zero


More than 70 arts groups responded to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s invitation to move to Ground Zero, but the one making headlines came from an organization that does not yet exist—the American National Theater.

Proposals also came from El Museo de Barrio, for a Hispanic cultural center; from Hunter College, to create a downtown arts campus; and from UrbanGlass, a contemporary art glass center now housed in a small space in Fort Greene. The Lower Manhattan Development Corporation will work with the Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts to evaluate the proposals, though how and when are not clear. For arts groups, there is a great deal at stake, including as much as $200 million in public funding and the chance to set up shop on the world’s most famous stage.

The proposal for an American National Theater is in some ways as optimistic -- some might say naĂŻve -- as the creation of a World Trade Center three decades ago. The project is headed by a little-known actor named Sean Cullen and has been endorsed by Arthur Miller, Blair Brown, Emily Mann, Harold Prince, and others. Cullen envisions it as a showcase for the best of what the regional theaters have to offer, selected from the 72 members of the League of Resident Theatres and some 80 other major theaters throughout the country by theater professionals hired as jurors. An artistic director would then choose 15 plays to form the season on the national theater’s three stages, with 800, 700, and 400 seats.

The idea taps into the theater person’s perennial frustration. Most live in New York but, because they can’t make a living Off Broadway, spend their career on the road in Minnesota, Texas, and Oregon. Very few productions make it to New York, and even fewer arrive with their casts intact. While Europe sends its national theaters—many with resident acting companies—on tour, American theater people work largely in artistic isolation.

Perhaps the earliest attempt to found a national theater came in the 1920s, when the critic John Corbin founded the New Theatre in New York. In search of a homegrown “American” aesthetic, he read thousands of scripts from would-be playwrights across the country. The project never made it off the ground.

There were several more attempts in the mid-1980s, when Peter Sellars took the reins at Lincoln Center’s Vivian Beaumont; Joe Papp proposed to fund such a theater through the sale of air rights over Broadway houses; and Actor’s Equity hoped to seed the country with “mini” national theaters.

Given this history, it’s not surprising that many theater professionals have voiced reservations about Cullen’s proposal. At a time when even long-established nonprofits are struggling, there are obvious concerns about how a national theater would be funded. Virginia Louloudes, executive director of the Alliance of Resident Theatres/New York, points out that there is only a finite amount of money to go around, and yet many deserving New York theaters. Cullen estimates that the national theater would cost about $170 million and have an annual budget of $17 to $20 million, financed by private, corporate, and foundation support. In addition, he would create an apartment tower to raise rental revenue for the theater.

Ben Cameron, director of Theatre Communications Group, has expressed concerns about the fairness of the selection process. Even if jurors saw 150 plays a year, that would be only a fraction of the work mounted at the country’s 1,800 nonprofits. The regional theaters—which arose in the 1960s to challenge the dominance of New York theater and the commercial prerogatives of Broadway—have themselves been challenged by smaller, less institutional theaters in cities like Austin and Seattle that reject the demands of a subscription audience and institutional model. And, while many regional theaters consistently produce original, quality work, others copycat each other and produce whatever new play has been hot and crowd-pleasing that season.

Because theater occupies only a marginal place in our society, theater people would want to enshrine it in some way. But it will take some extraordinary resources and a leap of faith to create one. As Newsday critic Linda Winer wrote recently, “There is nothing inevitable about the notion of a national theater. We are not automatically less of a civilization without one.”

Catch the FEVA

To judge by this summer’s HOWL! Festival, high rents and Starbucks have not diminished the East Village’s role as a crucible for counterculture. In all, more than 100,000 attended the festival’s 262 music, performance, film, and poetry events.

For the younger crowd, the festival served as a primer to East Village history—a 3-D slide show of the neighborhood in the 1980s, a video of the Tompkins Square Park riots, a panel on art moderated by Karen Finley, and the publication party of a book about the history of film and video on the Lower East Side.

The festival was produced by the Federation of East Village Artists, a new group that aims to honor and promote the neighborhood’s cultural legacy. Executive director Phil Hartman says that FEVA plans to leverage its new visibility to push for broader social goals, which include advocating for better health insurance and housing for artists, improving arts education in local schools, and bringing more public art into neighborhood streets.

The group also plans a Museum of the Counterculture, part archive, part gallery, and part performance space. Among other things, it would seek to preserve the collection of filmmaker Jack Smith, (whose Flaming Creatures was shot on the roof of a Lower East Side movie house) and the beat poet Ed Sanders, whose papers are, according to Hartman, “in [Sanders’] leaky garage upstate.” They are also in the process of raising money to create an emergency relief fund for the many downtown artists and organizations fighting for survival.

But FEVA doesn’t plan simply to worship at the altar of Allen Ginsburg. “ We’re defining the East Village spiritually, not geographically,” Hartman says. “Next year we hope to include more of the Brooklyn scenes, Long Island City, da Bronx, wherever good, crazy stuff is happening.”

Martha Hostetter has written about the arts for the Village Voice, American Theater and Empire New York.

Struggling With Strollers and Schools


  Allison Woods
Allison Woods left Manhattan for upstate New York in 1997.


Leaving New York

While some New Yorkers are leaving the city, citing bad schools, high housing costs or the daily stresses of urban life, analysts debate whether the exodus is anything alarming or unusual, and what to do about it.

Why New Yorkers Are Leaving:

The City Is Too Expensive
by E.J. McMahon

City Schools and Housing Are Inadequate
by David Kallick

New Yorkers Who Left:

Rondrae Hunter
A Frustrating Apartment Search

David Bassine
Fear of Terrorism

Stefan Kochi
Bad for Business


My husband and I left New York in 1997, just before my second son was born.

There were a lot of things that made me tired of city life, like struggling to get my stroller up the subway stairs. Try to take a stroller on a bus, and see whether you feel like ever getting on a bus again. It seemed like such a battle to stay in New York. If we weren't getting to enjoy things like performances at City Center, and all the things the city is about, there wasn't much point in being there. When you have really young children you can't enjoy the cultural life of the city anymore -- at least, we couldn't. I couldn't stay awake past nine o'clock.

School was looming. We couldn't afford private school, certainly not for two children. And I felt I was having hostile interactions all the time with people in the city: Cab drivers who wouldn't take me the way I wanted to go, etc. I got tired of it, so I left.

At the time, my husband and I owned a little building in Greenpoint that we were going to move into. Then we realized that we could live a lot better if we rented the building out - it had three apartments - and used the money to live somewhere where the cost of living was lower. We could use the public schools, or private schools that cost half or 30 percent what they do in the city.

Our income at the time came from the rent from the building in the city. My husband is an artist, so he just continued his work. I was pregnant with my second child, so I wasn't working at all. Since then I've taken a class and become a real estate appraiser, which has worked out well.

Now I live in a hamlet called High Falls. It's in Ulster County, eight miles south of Kingston, the same distance northwest of New Paltz. There might be 1,000 or 1,500 people in High Falls. I live in a small house, 1,100 square feet. But it's an old house, a turn-of-the-century farmhouse-type thing, with a porch and a beautiful garden. The town has a noon whistle.

I always thought the city was a good place for children to grow up, and I still think that. I grew up in Chelsea and on the Upper West Side. It is such a rich environment in many ways. But I also like the childhood my kids are having, and in retrospect I can see a lot of things that I missed out on, such as any chance to really do sports, or know anything about the natural world. I didn't have pets, if I don't count rodents. I never had dogs, certainly never had anything like a horse. My kids don't have horses, but they have friends who do.

They like it up here. My older son, who is eight and lived in the city as a small child, will sometimes say things that really astonish me. When it's the first snow of the season and there are icicles hanging off the trees, he says, "I'm so glad I live here, because if I lived in the city I'd never get to see this." It strikes me as funny that a kid can even think that way.

But I feel the same way. I can't imagine living in New York anymore. I find it overwhelming. I find the number of strangers disconcerting. I'm no longer used to not being known in places where I go. And aesthetically the city is difficult. A lot of it is dirty, ugly and noisy. I was starting to feel that way when I lived there. But the feeling developed more strongly afterward.

I grew up in New York and for years I just didn't realize that Manhattan was not the center of the universe. I don't feel that way anymore.

Alison Woods was born in Manhattan and moved upstate in 1997.



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