When Tiffani Torres was in middle school, she always had a teacher she could go to for help. Her classes were small and she never worried about disrupting the class by asking questions.

Now, as a senior at Pace High School, the experience is different. Torres started the year with 35 students in her AP Calculus class—one more than teacher union contracts allow. Four students have dropped the class because it got to be too overwhelming. Even at 31 students, Torres still feels distracted and confused.

“When there are over 30 students in a room with a single teacher, all struggling, yet unable to receive the attention they need, we begin to understand how black and Latinx students are consistently left behind,” said Torres at a recent City Council hearing on class size.

And her school is not an outlier.

According to data from the advocacy group Class Size Matters, one-third of New York City’s public-school students were in classes of 30 or more last year. Despite research linking small class sizes to improved academic achievement, New York City’s public-school classes are 15% to 30% larger than those in the rest of the state. Currently, classes are capped at 25 in kindergarten, 32 in elementary school, 33 in middle school (for some it is 30) and 34 in high school.

But these class size caps—set by teacher union contracts—are not always followed. And to make things more complicated, they are not the only set of numbers informing class size.

The School Construction Authority, the public benefit corporation that designs and builds the city’s schools, uses their own set of numbers. In calculating school capacity and usage, they assume classes of 20 in kindergarten to third grade, 28 in fourth to eighth grade and 30 in high school, all of which are lower than the current class caps. The city is effectively filling classrooms with more students than they were designed to hold.

A third set of numbers—from the 2007 Contract for Excellence—was developed with input from experts who studied the impact of class size on student outcomes. The contract calls for class size limits of 19.9 in kindergarten, 22.9 in fourth to eighth grade and 24.5 in high school.

The contract grew out of the 2006 Campaign for Fiscal Equity case in which the New York State Court of Appeals found that the state was failing to provide a “sound, basic education” for its students. The state agreed to provide $5.5 billion in Foundation Aid over four years the accompanying Contract for Excellence was supposed to ensure funds were spent effectively.

New York City had an extra mandate to reduce its class sizes by the 2011-2012 school year.

But the state has never fully-delivered the funding it promised and New York City’s classes are larger than they were in 2007.

While education advocates recommend adopting the Contract for Excellence class size numbers, state and city officials view them as aspirational guidelines.

Currently, the average class size is 26.4 across all grade levels.

Is this progress?

“That depends on which yardstick you use,” said Sarah Morgridge of Class Size Matters.

But “the averages the DOE talks about are not reflective of the reality in many of our schools,” said Leonie Haimson, Executive Director of Class Size Matters.

“We have had to turn offices into classrooms and closets into offices,” said Brian O’Connell, principal of Scholar’s Academy in the Rockaways. “Every available space has been squeezed.”

Teachers, parents, students and advocates turned out to testify about similar experiences at a recent City Council hearing on class size. Ironically, the room was so crowded that people were turned away.

“I know all too well how difficult it is to teach and to learn in an overcrowded classroom,” said Education Committee Chair Mark Treyger to the standing-room-only crowd. He relied heavily on his experience as a former teacher while he questioned Deputy Chancellor Karin Goldmark—also a former teacher—about the DOE’s failure to make progress on reducing class size.

“Do we wish class sizes were lower all across New York City?” asked Goldmark. “We do. Do we think we can do that with the funding that we have?” We don’t.”

Reducing class size means not only creating more classrooms but hiring and training more teachers. This is not easily done when the state still owes $1.1 billion in Foundation Aid.

“So much of that failure to deliver is bound up in Albany politics,” said Treyger. “At the same time, we can’t let the city off the hook.”

And advocates are not.

Class Size Matters called on the City Council to allocate $100 million of next year’s budget to reduce class sizes, focusing on early grades and underperforming schools. The amount—which represents only 0.3% of the Department of Education’s $34 billion budget—could fund 1,000 new teachers, reducing class size in nearly 4,000 classrooms, according to Haimson.

While Goldmark acknowledged the value of smaller classes, she was hesitant to identify it as a priority for the DOE. When Treyger asked Goldmark to rate the importance of class size on a scale of one to ten, she ducked the question. Twice.

“I can’t give you a simple rating,” said Goldmark, claiming that the question was too reductive.

When Treyger asked the same question of Torres, she didn’t hesitate with her answer.

“Absolutely a ten.”