Contracts for Excellence

As stipulated by the Contracts for Excellence legislation, the New York City Department of Education submitted a Five Year Class Size Reduction Plan to the New York State Education Department that was approved on November 19, 2007.  The plan is a comprehensive strategy to reduce class sizes across the system in alignment with the basic principles of leadership, empowerment and performance accountability that are the foundation of the Children First reforms.  Contracts for Excellence funding is only one piece of the plan.  Beyond resource allocation, the Five Year Plan includes a variety of multi-year strategies such as system-wide guidance and targeted coaching, policy adjustments, new school construction, collaborative team teaching and class size data tracking and accountability.

Results from our 2007-08 Class Size Report indicate that the approach of empowering and enabling class size reduction is achieving results.  Schools system-wide are reducing class sizes.  In grades K-3 we are seeing a reduction of 0.2 students per class from last year’s baseline, and in grades 4-8 we are seeing a reduction of 0.5 students per class. Due to changes in our high school class size methodology, we cannot make a direct year-over-year comparison; however, using last year’s high school methodology, schools are showing an average reduction of approximately 0.5 students per class between last year’s average class size and this year’s average class size.  Perhaps most importantly, the reductions are concentrated in the schools that began with highest class size.

View a complete summary of our 2007-08 Class Size Reports.

The City intends to maintain the major planks of our approved plan, executing and extending on the plan approved last year. We will consider amendments to the approved plan on the basis of public comment.  To view details of the approved plan, see links below.

An updated city-wide guide on class size reduction strategies was released in Principals’ Weekly on Wednesday, May 28, 2008 (see links below). As described in the five year plan, this year the city will add 116 schools to the targeted Class Size Reduction Coaching Program. These schools were identified based on low-performance on city and/or state accountability metrics, relatively high class size, and in some cases, availability of space.  See below for a complete listing of schools in the Class Size Reduction Coaching Program.