In September 2022, Governor Kathy Hochul signed S960, a bill limiting the size of classes in New York City public schools. The law phases in class-size limits—20 students for grades K–3; 23 students for grades 4–8; and 25 students for high school—over six years.
Fast forward to today: the implementation of the class-size law is causing predictable disruptions in Gotham. Parents and experts warned from the beginning that the law would be expensive, hard to implement, and generate, rather than reduce, inequality. Three years in, their fears remain valid.
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Smaller class sizes mean more classes—and more teachers. New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO) estimated that the new law would cost the city between $1.6 billion and $1.9 billion annually to hire the number of additional instructors required to comply with the law. This would make the city’s public schools, already projected to spend more than $42,000 per pupil, even more inefficient.
And that’s before construction costs. Most public schools lack space to accommodate new classrooms and will have to expand their existing buildings, or erect new ones, to comply with the law. The Class Size Working Group’s minority report estimates that fully implementing the law will require $17 billion to $22 billion in school-construction costs. Even if the city could afford these expenses, it’s unclear where schools would find qualified instructors, given Gotham’s teacher shortage.
The law’s most troubling effect will be to worsen inequality. Schools with the largest class sizes are typically high-performing and in the highest demand. Reducing these schools’ seats gives students fewer opportunities to attend high-performing schools. The law does nothing for low-performing schools, which typically serve low-income students and are already under-enrolled.
Last month, Mayor Eric Adams did what any reasonable leader would do given the difficulty of implementing the law. He exempted a number of schools and declared the city in compliance, with 60 percent of classrooms operating under the new limits.
But where it has been implemented, the law is causing disruptions. At Brooklyn Technical High School, the city’s largest high school, administrators have proposed several compliance strategies. Among them: creating a separate annex in a different building for freshmen, or expanding the school day from 7:20 a.m. to 4:19 p.m. One student in a “leftovers” class—an additional class created to comply with the law—reportedly “found the experience uncomfortably different from the Tech standard.”
At School District 2 in Manhattan, parents of M.S. 255 Salk School of Science students resisted a proposed merger inspired by the class-size law. The district had considered merging Salk with 75 Morton Middle School, an under-enrolled middle school. While parents claim that they have scuttled the plan, they worry that “uncertainty about Salk’s future location continues to threaten its stability and location.”
In School District 25 in Queens, the Community Education Council passed a resolution to remove all pre-K and 3K classes from the district’s elementary schools to comply with the law. The resolution suggests that their only other option would have been to repurpose rooms currently used for arts, science, or libraries.
The city has already implemented the law in schools that are under-enrolled or that have unutilized classrooms. In its next phase, implementation will result in fewer incoming students at the highest-demand schools and schools repurposing their art and other elective rooms as smaller, regular classrooms.
As then-chancellor David Banks warned in a 2023 interview with the Daily News: “If you’re going to prioritize the budget for class size, that means you’re going to have to deprioritize the budget for other things, which could be after-school programming or arts programming or mental health services or a whole range of things that aren’t about opening new classrooms and hiring new teachers.”
Mayor Adams initially opposed the class-size law, but Albany and the United Federation of Teachers eventually forced his hand. Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has spoken in the law’s favor and voted for it as a state assemblyman in 2022. If he pushes forward with full implementation and disrupts the city’s most popular public schools, he will inevitably face backlash from parents and educators.
Photo by Michael Loccisano/Getty Images