Nearly one-quarter of parents of New York City public school students are dissatisfied with the size of their children’s classes, according to the results of a survey commissioned by the city and released earlier this month.

The survey was distributed in early May to the families of the 1.1 million children enrolled in the city’s public schools, in conjunction with Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s controversial efforts to reorganize the school system.

Only 26 percent of the parents completed the survey, and the rates were higher in wealthier school districts. As an example, at P.S. 6 on the Upper East Side, 46 percent of parents responded to the survey, while only 23 percent of parents of children who attend P.S. 36 on Morningside Drive responded.

Since Bloomberg announced his plan to reorganize the way city schools receive funding, class size has been a contentious issue. Activists feel it is an ongoing problem that hasn’t been adequately addressed.

“We need smaller classes,” said Harriet Barnes, president of the Community Education Council for Harlem’s District 5.

Local activist Leonie Haimson, of the non-profit Class Size Matters, agreed. “Smaller classes is an incredibly important issue for both students and teachers,” she said. According to the organization’s Web site, smaller classes have been shown to increase students’ test scores, decrease disciplinary actions, lessen racial tensions, and spur more parental involvement.

But after class size, 19 percent of parents who responded said they would want “more or better enrichment programs” in the school system­—a point Bloomberg emphasized at a press conference shortly after the results of the survey were released.

“By a big majority, two to one, parents would rather have you spend more money on enriching the programs rather than reducing the class size,” Bloomberg said.

But critics argued that Bloomberg calculated this figure by lumping several categories into the phrase “more or better enrichment programs.” Parents would have checked off more than one of the 10 potential boxes in the survey if they had the option, said Haimson.

Department of Education spokesman Andrew Jacob said in an e-mail that he believed the survey showed parental satisfaction with the city’s schools.

“Two things about the results are very clear. First, parents, teachers, and students are generally satisfied with their schools. But for just about every question, there’s a wide range of answers among otherwise similar schools,” he wrote. “For almost every school that received a low score on a particular question, you can find a similar school that scored well on that question.” The DOE plans to use the information gleaned from the surveys to grade all schools on an A through F scale.

The mayor also noted that parents expressed little discontent with the amount of test preparation students were receiving in classes, citing that 10 percent of respondents seek more test preparation compared to 1 percent who want less. Haimson, herself a proponent of decreased emphasis on testing, protests these results, claiming that they would have been different had the survey included a question asking only about the amount of test preparation.

This questionnaire, along with a student survey and a teacher survey, is the beginning of a $3.3 million, three-year campaign to collect responses from as many as 1.8 million students, parents, and teachers about the flaws and successes of the city’s school system.

Colin Sullivan can be reached at news@columbiaspectator.com.