Class-Size Reduction Sounds Like a Futile Waste of Resources

January 7, 2017

Bryan Hassel, co-founder of Public Impact and an education consultant in Chapel Hill, NC, makes a very straightforward and convincing case that the NC General Assembly made a big mistake when it passed legislation as part of the 2016 state budget to reduce class sizes statewide in Grades K through 3. You can read his full blog post at Education Next, but here’s a summary of his main arguments:

Smaller class sizes mean that schools must hire significantly greater numbers of teachers each year.
The finest teachers will reach fewer students each school year if their classes are reduced by 5 – 10 students.
Such teachers will effectively be rendered less, well, effective.

As a follow-on to his first argument, Hassel notes that larger and better-funded districts such as Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg will end up cannibalizing schools in less-affluent parts of the state as they “dig deep” into their applicant pool to find additional teachers—and find them very rapidly, in time for drastically reduced class sizes in the 2018-19 school year. Significant numbers of these teachers will inevitably be underqualified. The state is not overrun with certified, talented, unemployed K-3 teachers. Western Carolina Education Professor Lori Caudle has predicted that various NC school districts “are going to have to hire less qualified teachers because of the teacher shortage,” as the Asheville Citizen-Times reported in January 2016.

When it comes to hiring teachers quickly, size really does matter. Larger districts with bigger budgets can more easily absorb the costs associated with rapidly ramping up recruiting efforts to identify and hire a large number of additional teachers. And larger districts always have a larger applicant pool from which to draw.

Wake County Public Schools (WCPSS) Superintendent Jim Merrill has said that Wake would need $1.8 million more in their annual budget for 2017-18 in order to hire 32 additional teachers—but this was after the law had been altered in the 2017 budget negotiations to temporarily allow for classes as large as 22 students. As the law was originally passed in 2016, Wake would have had to hire 460 additional teachers at a cost of $26 million. And unsurprisingly, the class-size reduction law didn’t allocate additional funds to pay all those salaries.

Wake is a large county, but is it realistic to expect WCPSS to hire an additional 460 experienced teachers who specialize in grades K-3? Within a year? And what if I’m Robeson or Warren County rather than Wake or Mecklenburg? How will I significantly increase my annual hiring when I’m already having a hard time recruiting qualified people and my budget is either flat or declining?

You’re probably aware of the proliferation of research that links student achievement very closely to teacher quality. This research summary provides a review of multiple studies that focus on teacher quality and that try to define the characteristics of a star teacher. So Hassel’s second argument also makes plenty of sense: excellent teachers should be placed in classrooms with more, not fewer, students.

Hassel himself writes elsewhere that teachers in the top quintile of their profession are three times as effective as average teachers if the measurement criterion is student test results; he therefore refers, in other research, to top teachers as “3X teachers.” These premium teachers are capable of teaching larger classes, and their skills enrich the learning experience of every student they teach. Their influence should not be arbitrarily restricted to groups of 16 or 17 students each school year.

The mandate to reduce class sizes applies statewide, but in Wake County alone, the school system has estimated that compliance will cost approximately $320 million, which would include hiring more teachers and building more schools. More frightening is the estimate that Wake will need the equivalent of 559 new classrooms, or approximately 14 additional schools, to reach compliance with the NCGA’s class-size mandate.

Classroom space is a factor that Hassel doesn’t even mention in his argument against the new K-3 class size legislation. Presumably, each elementary school will have to divvy up the K-3 population into more, smaller classroom spaces. But the physical school buildings cannot grow to accommodate these new classes. Wake taxpayers are already footing the bill for population growth in Wake and are not psyched about building even more new, larger schools. One wonders whether this class-size reduction legislation was unduly influenced by the companies that make and sell portable classrooms to the public schools in NC.

As the Raleigh News & Observer reported last October, the Wake County School Board has already taken the following steps to accommodate smaller class sizes for K – 3 before starting to hire additional teachers or to build new classrooms:

Added enrollment caps to eight elementary schools.
Lowered the existing enrollment caps at an additional two traditional-calendar schools.
Lowered the enrollment caps at six magnet schools.
Lowered the enrollment cap at four year-round schools.

The News & Observer also reported that various Wake County elementary schools were already “converting art and music spaces to regular classrooms, putting two classes in the same room and increasing class sizes to more than 29 students in fourth- and fifth-grades.” A more recent report notes that art and music “enhancement” teachers at some Wake elementary schools have already lost their classroom space and must keep all of their supplies on a portable cart. These moves—especially increasing the sizes of fourth- and fifth-grade classes in order to reduce K – 3—are clearly a step backwards if the goal is to provide a quality education to every child (and let’s hope that it is).

Clearly, smaller class sizes in the lower grades cannot be considered in isolation. If we absolutely must—politically, not pedagogically, speaking—reduce teacher-student ratios in the lower grades, additional teacher assistants should be considered as part of the larger discussion. Teacher assistants could provide more one-on-one contact with individual students who are in need of extra practice or who just need an emotional boost in order to perform well in school.

Teacher assistants work for low salaries. They are thus a cost-effective way to increase contact time between teachers and students, assist the lead teachers with classroom management to ensure that learning is not disrupted by students with poor self-control, and create more opportunities for individualized lessons and intensive, focused practice time. Effective deployment of teacher assistants could obviate the need to physically add to or partition school buildings or reduce the number of students who are taught by each lead teacher.

But even with the addition of trained staff to assist lead teachers, are smaller class sizes (or lower student-to-teacher ratios) the panacea that the NCGA seems to believe they are? Where’s the evidence that this drastic, expensive legislation is likely to be effective?

http://wakeednews.com/2018/01/07/really-bad-legislation/