First Coast News reports that a district in Florida is meeting class size limits by creating a lower-paid assistant teacher position that still requires a license but requires less prep time. The question I raise in my book about co-teaching arrangements to reduce ratio is whether it has as much effect as a smaller group of kids per room. It’s certainly better than nothing though.

My wife was having a particularly stressful week and I had two days off in a row she didn’t have, so I went in to her first grade class to help. I focused on the four kids she was having trouble with, periodically praising and redirecting their choices, if you will. I also did some 1-on-1 reading testing that I don’t see how she’s ever supposed to have time to do. Things went much better, of course. So no, there’s nothing wrong with having that extra adult. The question is whether that extra adult is always used effectively. There were certain stretches where I did feel I was just watching.

Does having two adults tend to encourage having a larger group of kids in order to produce the chaotic events that will keep the second adult busy?

Many assume we won’t be able to find enough teachers to lower class size. The state of Queensland, Australia has 2000 extra certified graduates this year! There are about 54,000 total school employees in Queensland (source).

Education Queensland figures show that of the 2751 teachers applying for jobs in state schools, only 787 have a permanent or short-term contract position for 2010.

Education Queensland should take advantage of a glut in qualified primary school teachers and reduce class sizes in the state’s schools, the teachers’ union and State Opposition said yesterday.

Queensland class sizes were set at 25 from prep year to third grade, 28 between fourth and 10th grade, and 25 for grades 11 and 12.

source

A suit was brought against the NYC schools recently for not moving on a plan to reduce class sizes. The best part about the plan is that it’s not just another K-3 “glorified preschool”, but K-12 across the board.

According to that plan, by 2012 the city will reduce class sizes in kindergarten through the third grade classes to an average of fewer than 20 students from 21; in middle grades to 23 students from nearly 26; and in classes of core high school subjects to 24.5 students from 26.6.

Instead, preliminary city data for this year shows that class sizes in the lower grades have an average of 22 students; in the middle grades, 25.8 students; and in the upper grades, 26.8 students.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/nyregion/06classsize.html

It’s a broad coalition:

Class Size Matters joined with the UFT, the NAACP, the Hispanic Federation, and parent leaders from the Bronx and Queens

http://classsizematters.org/classsizelawsuit1510.html

Other info:

http://www.yournabe.com/articles/2010/01/15/queens/queensdiglscz01152010.txt

According to the Tampa Tribune, a bill to weaken the voter-approved amendment limiting class size in every grade has been introduced in the state senate.

Paradoxically, the economic downturn has both raised the profile of the class size issue nationwide and endangered one of the last decade’s boldest measures to reduce class size.

Apparently Wales has an elementary class size limit of 30 and it’s being violated and fudged with by leaps and bounds this year.

Across Wales, 3,119 children aged five to seven are taught in classes with more than 30 pupils – the Welsh Assembly Government’s statutory limit – compared with 2,013 last year.

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2009/11/30/classroom-overcrowding-up-by-a-third-since-2008-91466-25284139/

I found this article a while back and meant to comment on it: “Grades soar after school floods classes with 17 teachers - one for every two pupils.”

A leading secondary school has improved the grades and behaviour of its students after flooding classrooms with 17 teachers at a time.

Culverhay Boys’ School, which has 375 pupils aged between 11 and 18, trialled the experimental scheme which saw 16 trainee teachers assist in subjects including science, music, PE, maths and English.

The group came into the Bath school once a week to teach classes of between 22 and 26 boys.

Culverhay Boys’ School  is among the top 10 per cent of UK secondary schools according to last year’s results.

The experimental project is the brainchild of John Lee, a Postgraduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) course leader at Bath Spa University. He said that the saturation teaching scheme was beneficial to both the children taking part and the trainee teachers instructing them.

I find two things annoying about how the issue is framed.

One, the article (and perhaps John Lee himself) never considers whether more plentiful adult attention might be worth making the regular diet of children in classrooms. It remains an issue of how to use teacher trainees rather than how to use teachers. So all the results it touts are momentary and necessarily localized to only a few places that any system’s finite number of teachers-in-training could visit. There is a naive emphasis on how amazing the results were when they were actually quite predictable, which leaves the question hanging in the air of how long the results will last when it’s back to just one adult—back to normal.

Two, if you were going to use this sort of special event approach and not connect it to anything more systemic or enduring, why not go to a school that really needs the help? Why choose to go to a school that ranks in the top 10 percent in test scores and that only has 375 pupils and class sizes that are at the national average? If you’re going to use these limited resources to make a momentary difference for kids while training your teachers, why not go to a large school with large classes that’s getting below-average test scores? Weird.

On Nov. 2nd Leonie Haimson of Class Size Matters in NYC did an interview for a local station. Check out the second half of this podcast:

http://publicthinktankradio.org/podcasts/PTTNov3podcast.mp3

Here is another of her appearances (at minute 31) on a recent Oregon Public Radio program:

http://www.opb.org/thinkoutloud/download/http://stream2.opb.org:9000/tol/episodes/2009/1019.mp3

She also did a piece for the Huffington Post recently critiquing Mayor Bloomberg’s failed class size promises, among others:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leonie-haimson/bloombergs-original-campa_b_333013.html

Her organization is in the list of links on the right.

Kent School District near Seattle just settled with teachers to end a strike for lower class size limits and support for teachers with the largest classes and pupil loads.

To get class sizes reduced, [the teachers] accepted a slightly lower compensation package in the two-year contract they overwhelmingly approved Monday morning.

(Kent teachers settle; class-size issue to live on. Though the Kent teachers strike has ended and schools were reopening Tuesday, teachers inside and beyond the Kent School District vowed to continue fighting for smaller classes. Nancy Bartley and Linda Shaw. Seattle Times, 9/15/09)

A great victory in lean times.

This is the school year that Florida’s voter-initiative-driven constitutional amendment of 2002 goes into full force.

The amendment requires that by the start of the 2010 school year, core classes not exceed 18 students in prekindergarten through third grades, 22 in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school. Until now, districts were in compliance if they met those limits on a schoolwide average. But next year, they must meet them classroom by classroom.

(Pinellas school superintendent backs more fundamentals, but not the class size amendment. Ron Matus, St Petersburg Times, Friday, August 14, 2009)

This is a unique event because most states have comparable limits for grades K-3 only, if they have limits this low, or have limits at all. (Many states didn’t need such a law to get small classes.) Ron Matus starts this article with a glib summary: “Give the people what they want. Unless research suggests you shouldn’t.” But how do we interpret what “the people” want when what they want is smaller classes? What end are they thinking it will be a means to?

The superintendent of the Pinellas County Schools, where St. Petersburg, Florida sits, thinks she knows what the people want from smaller classes, higher test scores: “I’m not sure there are any statistics out there that says 25 students in the class yields much higher student success than 30 students in the class.” But is it really what’s foremost on the agenda of the 70% of Florida voters that appear to favor paying for smaller classes across grade levels? (http://www.sptimes.com/2006/04/06/State/Smaller_classes_popul.shtml)

Maybe voters think smaller classes are simply more ethical no matter what their outcomes but there is no readily available rhetorical frame in the public sphere that they can use to express that gut feeling. It’s sad that public education spending is so narrowly constrained to questions of efficiency at the expense of ethics.

Take the analogy of road budgets. One might argue that they should be justified only on whether they keep traffic flowing as efficiently as possible. But there is still vast room for spending that is justified on ethics and not efficiency. Crosswalks, speed limit signs, bike lanes and the like are not subjected to protests claiming they are a wasted expenditure that doesn’t increase traffic flow. No one doubts they are necessary ethical measures to limit the negative impacts of vehicular travel.

No one claims these ethical concerns are tangential. Furthermore, there is no pretense to a goal of ever-faster commutes. Nor is there constant rhetoric about how much faster we’d get to work if the city could only find enough competent civil engineers (like in the good old days? like in the countries that are “beating us”?). On the contrary, people accept logically that commutes will get longer as their city gets bigger.

With education the issues are framed so that none of this line of thinking holds true: The mainstream frame of public education spending is that ethical concerns get in the way of the prime concern of seeking ever-increasing efficiency. And, unlike with traffic in cities, big is equated with efficiency from the get-go!

This is partly made possible by the discourse of “schools in crisis,” “failing schools,” and the like. If it’s going to hell in a hand basket, then we’ve got no time for ethical concerns, right?

What this translates to, to return to the analogy, is no space to discuss speed limits or crosswalks, only the fast lane. After all, if it’s an emergency, who’s worried about the speed limit? People should know damn well to stay out of the crosswalks when the ambulance of public education comes screaming down the street of civic discussion.

This framing of educational expenditures is so pervasive that even sincere advocates of class size reduction feel compelled to justify their arguments around increased learning rather than ethical checks on the negative impacts of schooling. This is how rhetorical frames work on us: they orient us to an issue with a certain set of assumptions that we never think to question.

Let’s have the courage to argue for smaller classes on non-”educational” grounds.

Perusing recent class-size related news I ran across an interesting example of an intervention for low-achieving, low-income kids that doesn’t pin hope on novel method, technology or extraordinary teaching. What it highlights is the radical old idea that kids spending time with adults who have time to spend with them are likely to learn what those adults want them to.

This program in South Carolina capitalizes on two aspects of what I describe in my book as relationship load reduction: class size and continuity (keeping students and teachers together longer).

[T]he students in their summer classes will be the same students they work with this school year. They will have substantially smaller classes.

Williams, who taught one of the Quick Start classes at James Simons, will have 10 students in her third-grade class this year, compared with 18 last year. The smaller class will ensure her students receive more one-on-one attention, she said.

She agreed to participate in the program because it gave her the chance to develop relationships with her students and learn their academic strengths and weaknesses before the school year began.

“I couldn’t turn that down,” she said.

She wished she could’ve had more time with her students this summer, but she feels confident that they will be reading on or above their grade level by the end of this school year.

(“Failing our students series: Fast Forward Summer programs bolster students’ reading, math skills.” Diette Courrégé. The Post and Courier. Thursday, August 6, 2009)

More time with the same, fewer students. Radical.

Garrett Delavan