Class Size: Is Less Always Better?

What's the Policy?

A major achievement of our schools during the twentieth century was reducing class size from fifty and sixty students early in the century to a national average of seventeen today. However, reducing class size even further has been, is, and will continue to be on the reform agenda of the American schools. For example, in 1996, the state of California, as part of a massive movement to fix its ailing schools, initiated its Class Size Reduction Program, a well-intentioned and expensive effort to reduce class size to twenty in kindergarten through third grade. Other states such as Texas, Nevada, Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia, have also instituted class size reduction initiatives.

How Does It Affect Teachers?

Almost every teacher and administrator we know would enjoy having smaller classes. Teachers with fewer students are often able to spend more time on instruction and less time hassling with the discipline problems that seem to naturally accompany large groups of young people. Fewer students also means less time tending to "administrivia." Teachers have the chance to get to know each student and teach each one in ways that meet his or her individual needs.

What Are the Pros?

There is widespread agreement that public school classes are too large and reducing the student-teacher ratio will substantially improve student outcomes. Fewer students means more attention to each one so that students can achieve better results. Surely a fourth-grade teacher with seventeen children can know and meet the needs of his class better than one with twenty-five. Surely an algebra teacher with 85 students can zero in on her students better than one with 150 or 160 students. Much of educational theory seems to suggest that increased individual attention can help students with special needs, students at risk for dropping out, students who are not achieving as much as they could—in fact, just about all students.

What Are the Cons?

A key problem for those who wish to make classes smaller is money. Teachers' salaries represent the bulk of most school districts' budgets, and any significant reduction in class size would be extremely expensive. For instance, lowering the pupil-teacher ratio from 20 to 19 in a school district with 100 teachers would mean hiring five new teachers and increasing the school budget by approximately 4 percent or paying for the five teachers by making cuts in the sports program, the computer lab, or the counseling services. But if reducing class size improves student achievement, wouldn't it be worth it? This takes us to the scientific reason for resistance to this reform.

Few educational questions have been more frequently studied than the relationship between class size and student achievement. Several well-executed studies have found that small class size does have a positive effect at the lower elementary grades. The conclusion of a review of more than 300 individual studies, however, was that, in elementary and secondary schools overall, most of the studies suggested that either the fewer educators per student (yes, larger classes!) the better or that the achievement gains made in smaller classes were trivial.

The explanation for such unexpected research results lies in the answer to the following question: "Would you rather have your child in a twenty-seven-student class with a skillful, experienced teacher or in a fifteen-student class with an inexperienced teacher on an emergency certificate?" During California's late 1990s e class reduction push, for example, thousands of people accepted appointments and entered the newly created reduced-size classrooms on emergency teaching certificates. Only then did they learn that an emergency certificate does not make a person a teacher. California's effort to improve early elementary education through reducing class size has been widely judged a failure. However, with intensive professional development for emergency certificate teachers, student academic performance has shown progress in recent years.

What Do You Think?

1. How many students would be in your ideal classroom? Why?
2. Do you think that if qualified teachers could be found for smaller classrooms, research results on student achievement would show greater gains for students in small classes?
3. Do you believe there are any other reasons besides academic achievement that small classes would be better than large ones?

Sources: Debra Viadero, "Small Classes: Popular, But Still Unknown," Education Week, February 18, 1998; Reducing Class Size, What Do We Know? March 1999. Available at:  http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ReducingClass/Class_size.html#research.

For more information on class size, visit these web sites, then reflect on the questions that follow.

Web Links

Reducing Class Size. What Do We Know?

http://www.ed.gov/pubs/ReducingClass/Class_size.html#research

This March 1999 report from the Department of Education is mentioned in your textbook.

Class Size

http://ericir.syr.edu/cgi-bin/print.cgi/Resources/Educational_Levels/K-12_Education/Grouping/Class_Size.html

This collection of links to research on class size is compiled by AskERIC.

Hot Topics: Class Size Reduction

http://www.wested.org/pub/docs/258

This summary of policy issues associated with smaller class sizes, from WestEd, describes several state programs to reduce school class sizes.

SCR Research Consortium

http://www.classize.org/

This web site houses reports on California's large-scale effort to reduce class sizes, including a capstone report issued in 2002, which suggests that it is unclear whether the program made any difference in student achievement in that state.

Using What We Know

http://www.ncrel.org/policy/pubs/html/weknow/index.html

This 2000 Educational Policy Report from the North Central Regional Education Laboratory is designed for administrators and policymakers who want to reduce class sizes, but also includes a section on effective teaching in reduced-size classrooms.

For Further Reflection:

1. How would effective teachers behave differently with smaller classes versus larger classes?
2. Why do you think that large-scale efforts to reduce class size, such as the one in California, have shown unclear results?
3. Do you believe that smaller class sizes make more of a difference in earlier grades or are equally helpful at all levels? Why?