Class Size Reduction at Secondary Level

Class Size Reduction to Enhance Student Achievement

I believe schools need to examine the effect of individual class size on a child's education at the secondary level. Due to budget cuts, districts cannot afford to pay for more teachers. Thus, they place students in classrooms to the point that the classes are well over capacity. Discipline issues increase; individualized instruction decreases; and students begin to fall through the cracks of the education system.

Particularly in Texas, many districts are not meeting standards according to the assessment scoring system. When a district or particular school within a district continually falls below expectations, students zoned to that district or school are allowed to transfer to another district or school within the district. As a result, well-performing districts are being packed full of students. For example, in my district, we are a town of 18,000, but our schools service over 10,000 students. Many of the surrounding districts are falling under, and their students are transferring to my district. My school is 170 students over capacity with every room in the building being used as a classroom including a resource workroom and a computer lab. We are out of individual desks, thus students are sitting at tables crammed into any available space in the room.

I have taught at several different districts at all grade levels ranging from 5-12. I have had various class sizes including 15-18 students during my second year to my current situation in which all my classes contain 33-35 students. The most productive I have felt as a teacher was in my second year when I had a small group of students. I was able to offer more individualized instruction, and students were engaged with minimal distractions. Currently, I have 35 students in one of my classes, and while I am doing my best as a teacher, it is hard to not spend my time redirecting because the students have so many different potential distractions. It is nearly impossible to give individualized instruction every day to every student because there is not enough time in each 70-minute period to truly invest. I have talked to several board members, teachers, parents, administrators, and other stakeholders who believe that smaller classes sizes will solve several issues that occur in our educational system.

I believe it is very important that we begin to analyze the effects that these large class sizes are having on student performance. It is important that we continue to push individualized instruction, but for this to be effective, districts have to decrease the class sizes so that teachers can truly invest in each student. I always say that we could solve so many of the problems in our schools if we had smaller class sizes. It is inevitable that some students are going to fall through the cracks when you have a class of 35 students for only 50 minutes. It is nearly impossible to expect a teacher to be able to individualize instruction for so many students in such a short amount of time with very little to no support or resources. As a result, students' learning gaps grow bigger and bigger to the point that the students end up dropping out because it just gets too hard. I think we will improve the quality of the education we offer if only we could have smaller class sizes so that we can truly individualize instruction.

Review of the Related Literature

History of class size reduction. Evol Graham (2009) provides an explanation on the history of the education system in which he explains how everyone has been given an opportunity for a free education. He places emphasis on the word 'equal', and he furthur emphasizes how it is hard for teachers to give every student the same equal education when students come in at all different levels, and it is too hard to individualize the instruction when there are so many students to reach. He says that the struggle began during integration in the 1960s because the impoverished children needed more personal assistance from the teacher, thus productively running a large class was difficult. He essentially argues that the shift from homogenous populations in school to more diverse populations is the main reason overcrowding classrooms cannot exist. According to Graue, Rauscher, & Sherfinski (2009), Class-Size Reduction (CSR) initiatives were prominent in the 1990s due to the economy boom. It was easier for districts to implement such a large undertaking because funds were allocated to them to support hiring more teachers. In 1999, the federal government implemented a Class-Size Reduction Program in which they allocated federal funds to the states to give to districts who qualified based on a combination of poverty and enrollment (Millsap et al., 2004, p. 1). According to Millsaps et al. (2004), "As part of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA), the CSR program was folded into Title II, Part A, of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB)" (p. 1). Currently, districts may still use those funds for the reduction of class sizes. Matthew Chingos (2013) summed up the current exploration of these initiatives as being mostly a budget issue. He suggests that policymakers need to examine the district's funding to allow for such initiatives as to appease taxpayers who have overwhelmingly expressed their desire for smaller class sizes for students. As a result of the federal initiative, many states began a state-wide CSR program, and I will address some of the major implementations and benefits of these programs.

Wisconsin's CSR program. In Wisconsin, three women studied the impact of reducing class sizes. Graue, Rauscher, & Sherfinski (2009) looked at a class-size-reduction (CSR) program in Wisconsin over 3 years in 27 classrooms in 9 schools. This program was titled Student Achievement Guaranteed in Education (SAGE), and it reduced the class size to a ratio of 15:1, students to teachers. These three women found that instead of seeing class size and teacher quality as competitors, people need to see them as complements to each other. They used mixed research to analyze the data from the schools in Wisconsin, but they explain how it is very hard to measure the quality of an education. To gather their research, they had seven half-day observations, interviews with the staff, surveys, and analysis of different measures of student achievement. Also, they used CLASS for the assessment scoring system due to its empirical record, and it covered the domains deemed important in analyzing class-reduction programs. Further research done in Wisconsin's SAGE initiative confirmed an increase in achievement, especially in the lower grades. Thompson (2006) found that there was a significant increase in achievement in low-income children and black children. In my opinion, this was an especially important finding because where we see the lowest achievement scores and dropout rates are those of low-income children and black children. Districts spend much time and resources trying to search for answers to increasing the scores of these with such labels. Perhaps, this is a viable solution.

California's CSR Program. California implemented a very expensive program, and Jepsen and Rivkin (2009) took a deeper look at the effects of California's class-size-reduction program that began in 1996. They looked at seven different school calendar years to evaluate whether California's class-size-reduction program was successful or not. They found that there was a significant positive effect on student achievement for those in small class sizes in primary grades. In analyzing the data, districts saw an increase in reading and mathematics achievement. The program was especially effective for grades K-3.

Tennessee's CSR program. The most widely known and effective CSR program was Tennessee's Project STAR. It was the results and success from their program that inspired many of the other state's initiatives. The Tennessee STAR Experiment started with a kindergarten class in which the district randomly assigned teachers and students to either a class of 15 or a class of 23 (Chingos, 2013, p. 417). The students who were randomly assigned stayed in a reduced class size throughout the years of the experiment. The results were positive as they saw significant increases in student achievement and student scores, not only during the experiment years, but it impacted these students positively in the years following the experiment (Gilman & Kiger, 2003, p. 83). However, I believe the most positive impact came for minority students who received instruction in a small class for reading as proven through the study by Nye, Hedges, and Konstantopoulos (2004). They found that there were "lasting benefits" for minority students who were a part of the experiment. Once again, I think such a finding is important when considering CSR program.

Teacher quality and additional implementations. In order to best implement a CSR program, you cannot just simply reduce class sizes; there are additional things to consider for it to be most effective. Graue, Rauscher, & Sherfinski (2009) concluded that there is more that affects student achievement than just class size. While small class sizes did allow for more individualized instruction, they advised that if a district wants to implement a CSR program, they have to be prepared to implement other things. They need to evaluate the climate of the school, the quality of instruction and teachers, and the physical space in the classroom. All these other factors affect student achievement in addition to class size reduction. Jepsen and Rivkin (2009) not only analyzed student achievement, but they also looked at the quality of the teachers in these schools. However, they essentially concluded that it does not matter the size of the class if the quality of teaching was lacking. Many other resources that I came across during my research suggested the importance of teacher quality in addition to reducing the class size. In evaluating the research, I have synthesized that teachers, if given the opportunity to teach to small group of students, will be more likely to increase their quality of teaching. I think they will be more willing to seek out professional development on individualized instruction and differentiation because they will be able to effectively implement these best practices.

Benefits of a CSR program. All stakeholders benefit from a CSR initiative. When student achievement is higher and learning gaps are closed, students become a positive impact for their community even moving into adulthood. Gilman and Kiger (2003) sum it up when they said:

Teachers report experiencing lower levels of stress and job dissatisfaction with smaller classes, primarily because they are better able to attend to each student individually and, as a consequence, student motivation increases and discipline problems decrease. Parents believe that teachers' individualized instruction leads to improvements in their children's academic performance. Teachers of smaller classes also have more time to interact with parents, and their increased knowledge of their students strengthens those interactions. (p. 83)

References

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