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CER and Education In The News
Do smaller classes equal better students?
Douglas S. Wood
CNN Interactive
Reducing class sizes to improve student achievement might seem like a no-brainer but in the world of education reform, no topic is without debate or dispute.
The smaller classes/higher student performance argument gained credence in the early 1990s when a Tennessee study found that reducing class sizes in the early grades led to improved student performance, especially among disadvantaged and minority students who traditionally had lagged behind their white counterparts.
The White House has seized upon the issue and has pushed for more funding to hire more teachers. In 1999, for the second year in a row, President Bill Clinton successfully argued that more schoolchildren, an aging teaching force and the demands for a well-read, technologically-savvy workforce all cry out for making smaller classes a national priority.
The first round of money -- $1.2 billion approved after a partisan budget debate last year -- was doled out in July 1999 to most of the nation's 16,000 school districts. Congress and the White House agreed to include another $1.3 billion for the class-size reduction program in the fiscal 2000 federal budget. Advocates for increased school choice say the issue has merit but is being used to blunt arguments for options like voucher programs. Jeanne Allen, president of the Center For Education Reform, a Washington, D.C.-based lobbying group which promotes vouchers, charter schools and other forms of educational choice, says those who oppose greater school choice "desperately" want the public to believe that vouchers and reduced class sizes are inconsistent with one another. "It's definitely a deflection," she said.
Allen, who worked in the U.S. Department of Education from 1984 to 1989, says reduced class size is a popular notion because it's "conventional wisdom" but she said that it is not a "panacea" for education woes. "It's counterintuitive to suggest otherwise," she said.
Vouchers are 'riskier'
But do smaller classes work? Supporters point to studies that show the benefits, most notably the Tennessee study that tracked students in smaller classes over time in comparison with students in larger classes.
The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) study found that in kindergarten through the third grade, students in smaller classes performed better on standardized tests than their counterparts in larger classes. In April 1999, the STAR researchers reported that follow-up research found that students placed in small class sizes in grades K-3 have better high school graduation rates, higher grade point averages and are more inclined to pursue higher education.
An independent study by Alan Krueger, professor of economics at Princeton University, confirmed the data from the Tennessee study. He concluded that smaller class sizes increased the test scores of those students by 4 percentage points and the advantage for those students increased by 1 percentage point in subsequent years. His studies also found that class size had a larger effect for minority and economically disadvantaged students.
Krueger said he would advise school systems to try and reduce class sizes before trying out a school voucher program. Data available shows smaller class sizes have a beneficial effect whereas, he said, the results of the few voucher programs are quite mixed.
"I think vouchers are much riskier," he said.
But Allen said the benefits of reduced class sizes are "short-lived," adding that smaller class sizes cannot overcome poorly-trained teachers or other factors. "We can reduce class sizes tomorrow across the board, but without a school that is held accountable for failure, it really doesn't matter if the class size is 10 or 100," she said.
A 'power struggle' over funding
Teacher unions, which fiercely oppose vouchers and other school choice programs, support smaller class sizes as a way to improve student performance. Both the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) support reducing class sizes. The AFT compares the two issues on its Web site, concluding, "Small class size trumps vouchers in terms of results, costs and public support."
AFT spokeswoman Celia Lose said the AFT supports reducing class sizes as one of many efforts to improve student performance.
"Smaller class sizes, especially in the early grades, is certainly a reform that the research supports," she said.
Lose said vouchers require a "huge" infusion of money and are targeted only at a small percentage of students in struggling schools. Smaller class sizes would help all students, she said. "We're looking for reforms that work, that work with the most children and that work within the existing school system," she said.
Other critics of teacher unions point out that smaller class sizes benefit teacher unions because they add more teachers, who are likely to be union members. Lose dismissed that argument.
"The bottom line in school reform is student achievement," she said. "The objective is not to get more union members, the objective is to raise student achievement."
Allen, however, said school reform efforts are more about who has control -- if parents had more choice over where to send their children to school, the parent-school relationship would supercede all other relationships. "This is a power struggle," she said.
If public schools had to compete with private schools for students, Allen said, public schools would no longer be guaranteed funding based on student population. Instead, public schools would have to work to attract students, which she said would lead to increased student performance. "I'd love to have someone knock on my door and tell me why they want to educate my child," she said. Lose, however, said that vouchers are an attempt to "shift resources away that could be used in the public schools."
Krueger has offered a different kind of voucher. In an idea he first proposed in an article in the New York Times, he said low-income parents should be offered a scholarship, or voucher, to send their children to summer learning programs in an effort to stem the "summer learning gap" cited in a 1997 book, "Children, Schools and Inequality," written by Doris Entwisle, Karl Alexander and Linda Olson of Johns Hopkins University.
In that book, the authors studied 800 Baltimore public school students from the time they entered first grade in 1982 and found that during the school year, children from both high and low socioeconomic backgrounds did equally well on standardized math and reading exams. But after summer vacation, children from low-income families either fell behind or stagnated while children from higher income families advanced in their performance.
Krueger proposes giving low-income children a scholarship in the form of a refundable tax credit or cash grant to pay for their enrollment in a summer academic enrichment program like existing public school summer programs or private tutoring organizations such as Sylvan Learning Centers.
Lose was not familiar with Krueger's proposal but said any program should be offered through the existing public schools. "For the children, that's the sort of thing that should be provided by the school district," she said.
Record enrollments and a teacher shortage
Beyond the debate over reducing class sizes is the problem of a teacher shortage as there simply are not enough fully qualified teachers to go around. The situation will get worse as teachers retire, student enrollment grows and college graduates choose higher-paying careers outside of education.
Amy Wilkins of the Education Trust, a group that works on the local level to promote high academic achievement for students, says schools have to make sure the teachers they hire are qualified. "The difference between a well-prepared teacher and an under-prepared teacher can be a whole grade level's worth of achievement in a single school year," Wilkins told CNN last year. "For kids, that can mean the difference between a remedial track and the college prep track."
Compounding the problem is that 2000 is the fifth straight record year of school enrollment. The nation's public and private schools are opening their doors to more than 53 million children this fall, according to an annual report on school enrollment released in August by the federal Department of Education. The report says more than 53 million children will enter kindergarten through 12th grade this fall, up from 52.8 million last year. The new figure is considered a record because the department had lowered its estimate of last year's enrollment to 52.8 million from 53.2 million.
Some of the counties surrounding Atlanta and Washington, D.C., have nearly doubled their school enrollments over the last decade.
California, Texas and New York expect to enroll the highest number of children this year. Nevada, Arizona and Florida have posted the highest rates of student population growth over the last decade.
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View a transcript of the Online Chat with Jeanne Allen, President, Center for Education Reform, and Elizabeth Coleman, Director of Civil Rights for the Anti-Defamation League.