Council members and DOE at odds over class size data release

Days after the deadline for the city’s Department of Education to send class size data to the City Council, the department is giving itself a new deadline for the numbers’ release.

A spokesman for the DOE, Will Havemann, said department officials met with staff members of the City Council’s Education Committee this morning and showed them preliminary class size numbers. When the meeting ended, department officials took the data back with them.

“The numbers were shown to the Council this morning but not given to them,” Havemann said, adding that the department plans to release final numbers to the Council on November 23.

City Council spokesman Anthony Hogrebe said giving council members a brief look at a small amount of data did not qualify as meeting the department’s legal obligation to release class size information.

“They very briefly showed it to them, which is not the same and certainly not what the law requires,” Hogrebe said. “As far as we’re concerned we’re still waiting on the data.”

In a statement sent to reporters, executive director of the group Class Size Matters, Leonie Haimson, said that this is the third year in a row that the DOE has missed its November 15 deadline for releasing class size data to the City Council.

The city’s deadline for giving class size numbers to the State Education Department was yesterday and Havemann said the preliminary numbers were sent over this morning. A spokesman for SED did not return requests for comment.

“We are 3 weeks earlier than we were last year and hope to work with the Council to change the deadline that I think is broadly recognized to be unreasonable given the quantity of data involved,” Havemann said.

The DOE has also yet to publish data on the number of teachers in its Absent Teacher Reserve — a pool of teachers who lost their jobs when their schools closed or when they were laid off during budget cuts and have not found new work. The deadline for hiring these teachers was October 30.