Survey Suggests Class Sizes Exceed the Official Averages
By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: April 14, 1997
At Public School 32 in Flushing, Queens, a sprawling building crammed with children of Asian and Latin American immigrants, it takes Janice Gellman three days to read with each of the 27 students in her first-grade class.
And it would take even longer, if the school didn't bus half of its kindergarten pupils to another elementary school a mile away, to free additional space and keep classes from getting even larger.
With the school system growing by 20,000 students a year, the situation at P.S. 32, where the average first-grade class has 28 students, is far from unusual. In fact, a survey of city elementary schools by The New York Times last month suggests that classes are larger on average than city and school officials acknowledge.
Officials say their goal is to hold class sizes in kindergarten through third grade to an average of 25, and a report released in February by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani concluded that the system had met that target this year.
But when asked about The Times's findings, the school officials who supplied that data to City Hall acknowledged that their numbers were simply guesses -- and that they made sure to keep the guesses under the target of 25 pupils.
The officials said they had since used actual enrollments to calculate the average class size for all elementary grades through fifth grade, and the number was 25.5.
But The Times's telephone survey of 45 elementary schools -- selected at random and representing 7 percent of the 660 citywide -- found that the average class size overall was 28.4.
And of the 38 schools that responded to a question asking them to list average class sizes in the first grade, more than three-quarters said their classes exceeded the average of 25 reported by the Mayor. And nearly half reported having an average of at least 28 students: no small difference, given the intensive one-on-one attention required in a class of early learners.
The survey of elementary schools was part of a broad effort by The Times to examine services throughout the city in the fourth year of the Giuliani administration.
In an update of a similar effort in the fall of 1995, reporters visited schools, parks, municipal hospitals and subway stations to measure a dozen city and state services. They rated the cleanliness of city streets, and they timed how long it took to get prescriptions filled at a city hospital and to pay parking tickets at the Parking Violations Bureau. They also analyzed the city's own statistics to evaluate changes in social services and to measure the length of lines at the Buildings Department. What emerged was a mixed picture, with some aspects of city life -- most notably crime statistics -- significantly improved, while some services are still feeling the cumulative effects of budget cuts.
Asked about The Times's findings on class size, a spokeswoman for the Board of Education, Karen Crowe, said that the board's most recent calculations were based on dividing the total citywide enrollment of each grade, as of Oct. 31, by the total number of classes.
''In computing an average class size,'' she said, ''there are bound to be classes above average and some below average.''
The Deputy Mayor for Operations, Randy M. Mastro, also questioned the survey, saying the number of schools canvassed was small.
In fact, the survey's margin of sampling error was small, because the average class size in each of the 45 schools, which had more than 1,000 classrooms altogether, did not vary much from school to school. According to statistical standards, 19 times out of 20 that sample would yield a result within 0.7 students of the true citywide average.
At P.S. 32, one of the schools selected at random, Ms. Gellman spends most of her time helping her pupils in individual programs of study that she has tailored to each student's abilities. And those abilities are varied, given that her students speak eight foreign languages, including Pashto, Korean, Urdu and Punjabi. At any given moment, 27 students may be doing 27 different things, with a large percentage tugging at her sleeve for help.
On a recent afternoon, Sabreet Kang, 6, labored alone to make sentences out of the words ''make'' and ''mother,'' coming up with ''My mother makes a book.'' Renee Han worked to turn a plastic cup into a rabbit. And Ms. Gellman read aloud at her desk with Stephanie Chow -- or at least tried to, for the interruptions were continuous, with one girl announcing she had a headache and needed to see the nurse, and two others insisting that Ms. Gellman drop what she was doing and help them turn on the classroom computer.
Ms. Gellman said that having no more than 25 students -- or ideally no more than 22 -- would let her serve her students better.
''Let's pretend you have 45 minutes to wrap gifts,'' she said. ''At the end of the 45 minutes, whether you have 22 gifts or 27, all will be wrapped. But if you had 22, you'd have time to do something special: put a bow on or tie a frilly ribbon.''
After imposing substantial budget cuts on the city school system during his first two years in office, Mayor Giuliani chose this election year to hold overall school spending relatively constant. But those who occupy the schools each day said that they had noticed little improvement despite the fiscal reprieve. Services that were pared in recent years -- like guidance counselors and art teachers -- have not been restored, they said, and many buildings remain in desperate need of expansion and renovation.