New York State passed a law in 2022 requiring New York City’s public schools to reduce classes to 20 students in grades K–3, 23 students in grades 4–8, and 25 students in grades 9–12 by the 2027–28 school year. The city will need to hire thousands of new teachers to comply with this mandate. This additional need is likely to strain hiring in subjects and schools where vacancies have historically been harder to fill. These newly hired teachers will be concentrated in lower-poverty schools, but teachers who transfer into these new openings from other schools in the city will create additional vacancies that need to be filled.
Key Takeaways
Using data from the 2022–23 New York City Department of Education Demographic Snapshot and data on school-level transfers, findings show the following:
- Higher-poverty schools hire more teachers than lower-poverty schools, in part because they tend to be smaller and employ more teachers per student. They also have higher teacher attrition rates.
- Most newly hired teachers are new to teaching or come from schools outside the district, but a substantial minority are within-district transfers. The highest-poverty schools are somewhat less likely to hire teachers from within the district than other schools.
- Forty-six percent of teacher transfers came from the highest-poverty schools in 2023.
- Within-district transfers that result from the class size law may produce roughly three additional vacancies at the highest-poverty schools for every additional vacancy created at the lowest-poverty schools.
Implications
Hiring enough teachers to meet the class size caps will pose challenges both in higher-poverty schools, which have historically faced greater hiring and retention challenges, and in lower-poverty schools, which must hire the greatest number of teachers to meet the caps. But the analysis suggests that if recent teacher transfer patterns hold, within-district transfers may substantially increase the number of teachers that the highest-poverty schools need to hire because they are disproportionately likely to lose teachers to other New York City Public Schools (NYCPS).
Teacher hiring is a significant focus of the draft 2024–25 class size reduction plan that NYCPS released in May. Hiring levers NYCPS proposed include providing hiring resources to schools, expanding pathways for current NYCPS students and paraprofessionals to become teachers, strengthening recruiting efforts with schools of education, leveraging alternative certification programs such as NYC Teaching Fellows, and expanding teacher retention efforts such as bonuses. And some of these proposals prioritize schools in locations that have historically faced staffing challenges (e.g., the Bronx) or with higher poverty rates.
Although these kinds of targeted approaches are critical if the district is to mitigate the inequitable impacts of the class size mandate, most of these levers are focused on expanding the pipeline of teachers across the board. A larger applicant pool could help all schools meet the hiring needs created by class size reduction and attrition but would not address the long-standing inequities in teacher hiring challenges across schools. Mitigating those inequities might require addressing their root causes, such as school segregation by income and race or ethnicity, or substantially reforming how teachers are compensated, such as paying teachers more to work in higher-poverty schools or harder-to-staff subjects.
