Elsewhere, teachers have resorted to downloading books from the Internet and printing them.
At P.S. 127 in Elmhurst, Queens, teachers are making copies of the few workbooks they have with such fury that the copy machine repairman is being summoned weekly.
“He’s a regular,” said Noel Warshaw, a fifth-grade enrichment teacher at the school. “We have 10 workbooks for each class, but classes are 30 kids, so they are trying to make copies. It’s as frazzled as it’s ever been.”
A month into the school year, teachers in New York City’s public schools are pushing on despite missing important new math and English materials that were ordered in the spring to match the tougher Common Core learning standards taking root across the country.
Problems have surfaced in a mishmash of ways. Books are not only late in arriving, they are also sometimes shipped to the wrong places, sometimes to schools with similar identification numbers. They are shipped out of order: some materials to be taught in winter are in hand now, while units created for September are still missing. Sometimes student textbooks are there, but teacher handbooks are not.
At P.S. 216 in Gravesend, Brooklyn, there are enough math “manipulative materials” — blocks, counters or other tools — to supply only three of the four second-grade classes; classes sometimes have to be combined so students can share.
On Friday, officials with the city’s Education Department acknowledged the problems, but noted that many books had indeed arrived on time during what Dennis M. Walcott, the schools chancellor, called “the largest mass textbook delivery in the history of New York City.”
“Any gap that exists, we are going to respond to right away,” said Mr. Walcott, who said there had also been delivery problems with books not associated with the Common Core. “It is an unacceptable problem, no matter the size or scope, even if it is small, or a ‘one-off.’ I find that unacceptable.”
The city attributed some of the bottlenecks to CEVA Logistics, the company hired to receive the books from various publishers and distribute them to schools.
In a statement, Kay Hart, a spokeswoman for CEVA, said that while she would not comment on the specifics of its work in New York City, “we continue to expedite the delivery of materials as we receive them.”
Teachers, union leaders and parents, however, said the curriculum delivery problems could not have hit at a more critical time. Come April, for the second straight year, students in New York will take standardized tests aligned with the Common Core.
This year, students across the state saw double-digit drops in their test scores. More is now at stake: Teachers and principals are facing new evaluations that, in part, will grade them on whether their students’ scores improve.
Michael Mulgrew, the president of the teachers’ union, the United Federation of Teachers, said on Friday that he had been deluged for weeks by complaints about missing materials at hundreds of schools.
According to a union survey in mid-September, 78 percent of schools that responded said they did not have all of their English materials; 64 percent reported missing math materials.
“They want to evaluate us on how well the kids do on the test,” Mr. Mulgrew said, “but they are not giving us the materials to teach the kids to ensure the kids are doing well on the test.”
In interviews, several teachers said they got a sinking feeling over the summer, when they showed up for special training sessions on the new curriculums but found the materials absent.
They said they were promised materials by opening day, but when it arrived, the materials were still missing.
Filippo Casamento, 42, said teachers at his son’s school, P.S. 216, told parents this week that mislabeling and shipping mix-ups had delayed the delivery of books.
“It’s sad,” he said. “They want the kids to learn at a certain level, but they’re not providing them with the proper materials.”
When Inna Albert, 41, a parent of a fourth-grader at P.S. 216, was told by her son that the school was missing books, she came up with a solution the boy might not like.
She told him on Thursday, “You’ll have to take tutoring.”
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