'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain'

October 17, 10:20 AMNY Education ExaminerLorri Giovinco-Harte

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Only in the Land of Oz will we find arbitrators scurrilously combing through student rosters trying to determine if classes are overcrowded. A simple process of adjusting sections that topple over the mandated number of students becomes ridiculously overcomplicated in the world of the New York City Department of Education.

Newly elected chapter leader, Arthur Goldstein describes his introduction to the bizarre practice in his community column at Gotham Schools. There may not be any flying monkeys or dancing scarecrows, but the process is nonetheless outlandish. Goldstein writes:

"Oversized classes are arbitrated in reverse order, so the schools with 200 oversized classes had already been and gone. James went into a room and represented a school with 75 oversized classes. While he negotiated each and every one of them, I kept highlighting.

There are things you see when you highlight that you’d never notice otherwise. For example, many classes are actually multiple classes meeting with the same teacher in one classroom. I noticed we have a Hebrew class that includes two levels, one with 23 and another with 14. I’m grieving that as a class of 37, but if you do a straight average, there are only 18.5 kids in each class.

The gym classes are even more interesting. Many kids go to gym four days a week and attend lab the fifth, so you get several sections. Though they all meet together, one meets M,T,W,Th, another meets M,T,W,F, and another meets four other days. In fact, I’m looking at one now with five sections. The first has 38, the second 9, the third 0, the fourth 5, and the fifth 0 again. Gym classes max at 50, and on Friday the class has 52, so I’m grieving it. Still, if you average it out, there are a mere 10.4 kids in each class. It seems like a very efficient way to reduce class sizes on paper."

Smoke, mirrors, and illusion - tactics favored by filmmakers, magicians, and apparently, the Department of Education.

Read more at Gotham Schools.