On Monday, September 24, 2007, the members of the NYC Student Union unanimously voted in favor of a resolution stating: “While the NYC Student Union acknowledges the good intentions and possible benefits of Opportunity NYC, the plan, as it stands now, is too problematic.” Many students expressed their dissatisfaction with the plan, which pays low-income students for high standardized test scores, prior to the vote. “It insults hard- working, low- income students by conveying the message that they could not possibly value education in itself and must need some sort of incentive in order to perform better in school.” Said Laura Johnson, 17. Some students feared that the program could have the potential to distance students from their schools and create tensions between students who are getting paid and students who aren’t. On the NYC Students Blog, Hasanur Rahman, 16 wrote: “a student that tries to earn the money but barely misses the cut off score to earn the money will only become frustrated and give up.” Furthermore, Shauna Fitzgerald, 15, added, “[Opportunity NYC] propagates the test prep culture and detracts from other important aspects of education.” This culture is a large factor in student apathy in our high schools. Still, the NYC Student Union refrained from condemning the spirit of the program outright. “It’s nice to know that the City is coming up with new and creative ways to help New York City public school students,” said Ashu Kapoor, 17. However, the members of the NYC Student Union felt that this program had too much baggage. “The cash being used in this program could better be used to solve citywide problems affecting all students like class size and school resources” concluded Ben Shanahan, 15.

On Wednesday, July 11th NYCSU Member Seth Pearce spoke at the DOE’s public hearings on the 228 million dollars that has been given to New York City Schools as part of the State’s Contract for Excellence. In his testimony below, Seth speaks out in favor of using the money to reduce class size.

Good evening and thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak tonight. My name is Seth Pearce and I am going into my senior year at LaGuardia High School. I am also a representative of the New York City Student Union. As a student, I firmly believe that more money from the Contracts For Excellence should be dedicated to reducing class size. This sentiment is echoed by many of my peers at the NYC Student Union. They each have their own stories about how they have been academically shortchanged by the City’s incredibly large classes.

At one NYC Student Union meeting, a student noted that certain teachers did not even know their name. Sadly, this has become a cliche. It has been said that two of the most important factors in improving our schools are improving teacher quality and reducing class size. These factors go hand in hand. I believe that that student’s teachers, who ignored them, would not have, had there been several fewer students in their class. Reducing class size is instrumental to improving teacher quality.

At many of the New York City Student Union’s meetings this year, the issue of student apathy as a cause for many of our schools’ problems was brought up. For a variety of reasons, many students do not care enough to actively pursue academic success or involve themselves in their school communities. This lack of engagement in our schools must be first remedied in the classroom. We need new and better teaching and learning methods. We need engaging curricula. We need more time on task. However, to explore these necessities, it is imperative that there be smaller classes city-wide. There is not way that a teacher can reasonably keep a class “on task” in a classroom of 34.

According to the DOE web site the citywide average class size is around 28 students. Unfortunately, I cannot recall having that few students in any of my classes. This is a problem and with the Contracts for Excellence money we can come closer to fixing it. Thank You.

Students from the New York City Student Union, a citywide student-run organization of City public high school students, reacted today with disappointment to yesterday’s Supreme Court decision in Meredith v. Jefferson County Board of Education and Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1. “Affirmative action, in its purest form, is the establishment of more holistic admissions criteria. An ideal affirmative action program measures students not only by the academic heights that they have reached but also by the length of their climb,” said Seth Pearce, 17, a member of the NYCSU. Other students pointed out that admissions to New York City’s specialized high schools—determined solely on the basis of a score from a single standardized test— disproportionately exclude minority students relative to their numbers in the public high schools as a whole. According to Insideschools.org, only 6% of the enrollment at the City’s flagship elite high school—Stuyvesant—is African American or Hispanic. Even several of the students from the NYCSU who agreed with the court’s ruling acknowledged that the problem highlighted in the cases and in the Supreme Court’s decision is the failure to achieve educational equity across America’s classrooms. Lorenzo Mendez, 16, said, “Schools need more flexibility to create programs that promote widespread educational equality than this ruling allows.”