Letter To The Editor March 22, 1995 Letters to the Editor The Education News When I began teaching in 1961, the student population of School District 3 on the prosperous Upper West Side of Manhattan was over 20,000, and the cry was heard everywhere from the four district administrative employees (!) that schools were overcrowded. But I was fresh from western Pennsylvania and saw something different, a small but significant fraction of the school's enrollment was made up of phantom kids in several categories: kids on the school register who had never shown up but were carried as if they had; kids who were absent but who for revenue purposes were entered as present; kids who were assigned to out-of-school programs of various sorts, some term-long, but who continued as phantoms to swell the apparent school rolls. Then there were the absentees, about 10 percent a day, who were actually marked absent, and the curious fact that after lunch attendance dipped precipitously sending that fraction soaring, although there seemed to be a gentlemen's agreement not to document the fact. So it was that when the press announced horrendous class sizes of 35 and 50, in my school, at least, the real number was about 28 — still too many, of course, but manageable. Although everyone agreed there was absolutely no space available anywhere, by greasing the custodian's palm I was able to obtain a master key and a priceless document known as the "empty-room schedule." Would you believe there was never a time when multiple rooms in that building weren't empty? By training my kids in low-profile guerrilla tactics I was able to spread about half my class into different cubbyholes around the building where they worked happily and productively, in teams or alone. Beginning in the 1980s this tactic became impossible because all the empty spaces did fill up — even though the number of students District 3 was managing fell sharply from 20,000 to 10,000, and with even more lax procedures to account for them than when I was originally hired. This latter development caused phantom children to multiply like rabbits. A simple act of long division will explain in outline what had happened: by dividing the number of students enrolled in my building by the number of teachers on the class register, I was able to discover that average class sizes should have been 17 kids. And yet actual class sizes were about 28. The mystery of the now unavailable empty space vanishes in the ballooning numbers of "coordinators," "special supervisors," "community programs officers," and various other titular masks behind which deadwood was piling up. Each of these people required an "office" whether that be the former Nurse's Room, the dressing room behind the stage, or a conveniently large storage closet. It had happened to the Army and to IBM, why should schools be exempt? John Taylor Gatto New York, New York A Quality Education
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