Education

A Drop in the Bucket

By Stacey Decker — July 06, 2007 1 min read
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NYC Educator, an ESL Teacher from the Big Apple, responds a New York Times article that says the schools chancellor will spend $106 million to reduce class size, a growing crisis in the city. According to the article, the funds, if distributed evenly, would reduce class size by an average of only 0.3 to 0.8 students per class.

This clearly means, for the overwhelming majority of kids, it will have no effect whatsoever. Furthermore, it appears you'll have to be extremely needy for this money to reach your classroom. The fact is, many schools are so overcrowded they couldn't reduce class sizes if they wanted to—there’s simply no place else to put kids.
With schools hovering over 250% capacity, it's a disgrace that this mayor gets away with labeling what now amounts to a drop in the bucket as a major improvement.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Blogboard blog.