Class Size Reduction: Learning from the California Experience

Dana L. Grisham

What difference does class size make in the lives of teachers and the experiences of schoolchildren? In California in the 1980s, class size for the primary grades (kindergarten to Grade 3, with children aged approximately 5 to 8 years) was capped by statute at 32. In practice, however, teachers often found themselves with more children to teach. In the rural Riverside County school where I taught at that time, I made several instructional concessions because of the sheer number of first graders in my classroom. I taught whole group lessons more often than I liked. I had a great deal of diversity in my classroom (though not nearly as much as today's teachers often face), but curriculum differentiation to meet children's individual needs was difficult. My colleagues and I frequently lamented that we could teach much more effectively if only class sizes were smaller.

Still, as primary teachers, we were lucky. In the upper elementary years, class sizes sometimes reached as many as 40 students. In one of my son's advanced placement science courses in high school, there were almost 50 students in a portable classroom -- until someone mercifully called the fire marshal to report the safety violation. We teachers often “joked” that we were doing more crowd control than teaching.

For the past 3 years, however, class size reduction in California has become a reality, at least for the primary grades. Class sizes are now capped by statute at 20 children for Grades 1 to 3. Most kindergarten classes have been made smaller, and recently ninth-grade classes have been reduced to 20 students in some places. What impact has this class size reduction produced?

A recent technical report from the CSR Research Consortium (a partnership researching California's historic class size reduction reform) entitled “Class Size Reduction in California: Summary of the 1998-99 Evaluation Findings” (Stecher & Bohrnstedt, 2000; online document) provides policy makers and the educational community with a broad overview of results to date of this education reform movement, which is now nearing full implementation. Among the findings are the following:

• With more teachers needed for increased numbers of classes, teacher qualification levels have declined K-12, with the greatest decline noted at the elementary grades
• Smaller class sizes have resulted in more individual instruction, but not in differentiated curricula
• Small improvements in achievement among third-grade students in reduced-size classes persisted into fourth grade classrooms where class size reduction had not yet been implemented
• Special populations, especially English language learners, benefited least from CSR for several reasons (described below)

In addition to reporting the findings of the 1998-99 evaluation (the second in a series), the authors present several important recommendations for policy makers in California:

• Continue toward full implementation of CSR -- it's too soon to make final assessments
• Address funding and facilities issues to ensure lack of money doesn't undermine results
• Ensure that state policies focused on improving the teacher workforce address the full range of problems
• Make CSR at the primary level more effective for the schools and students most in need
• Encourage strategic use of federal funds, especially to ensure equity for special needs populations
• Mandate improvements in the state's education data system to allow better investigation of the effects of reform
• Evaluate future reform efforts thoroughly to get maximum value for effort

The brief executive summary of the report provides food for thought for all educators working in systems where CSR is being discussed or implemented. First, the authors point out that, unlike the much smaller scale and highly controlled CSR experiment in Tennessee, California's reform effort involves 1.8 million students with vastly different demographics. In addition, California has implemented many other reform efforts and interventions simultaneously with CSR, all of which “interact in intricate and complex ways, making it difficult to attribute changes to any single effort, including the CSR program.” In sum, California's experiment is unique and must be judged as such.

Student achievement gains, the most important goal of CSR, are modest to date, with a CSR “increment” of third-grade students scoring above the median -- the 50th U.S. national percentile rank as measured by SAT-9 scores is 1.4 percent for reading, 3.6 percent for mathematics, 3.5 percent for language, and 1.4 percent for spelling. The good news is that there is evidence that the benefits of being in a smaller class persisted into a nonreduced class for 1 year. While these are truly modest gains, the evaluators point out that this is only the third year of implementation. However, because there is at present no way to track student populations from year to year -- it is impossible to know, for example, whether a particular group of students experienced smaller classes for 1, 2, or 3 years -- it's difficult to focus on the real effects of class size reduction.

Three disturbing findings of the report concern teachers and special needs populations. Figure 1 shows that kindergarten to Grade 3 teachers with CLAD (cross-cultural language and academic development) and BCLAD (bilingual CLAD) certificates or credentials are not working in the schools and districts that need them most. Note that schools with 40 percent or more English language (EL) learners have an almost flat rate, while schools that have 7.5 percent or fewer EL students have increased the numbers of CLAD and BCLAD credentialed teachers by 25 percent since 1995-96. Thus, the students who most need teachers with specialized training are not getting them. This problem has been exacerbated by the 1998 passage of California's Proposition 227, which in essence outlaws bilingual education unless parents sign waivers for it to continue. Since nearly half of all bilingual students in the United States live in California, the need for highly qualified and committed teachers for this group is critical.

Source: CBEDS and R-30 language census forms. Reproduced by permission from Class Size Reduction in California: The 1998-99 Evaluation Findings (Executive Summary)

A second disturbing finding is that, since CSR began in California in 1995-96, fully credentialed teachers have been employed significantly less often in schools serving high-needs populations. Figure 2 illustrates that in schools where less than 7.5 percent of students come from low-income homes, the percentage of fully credentialed teachers has fallen from nearly 100 percent to about 95 percent. At the same time, in schools where 30 percent or more students are from low-income families, the percentage has fallen from about 96 percent to about 80 percent, a disturbingly significant drop. The teacher shortage is thus most acute in areas where it is hardest both to recruit and to retain qualified teachers. Many institutes of higher education are grappling with the need to revise their teacher education programs to address this urgent need.

Notes: AFDC = Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a California public assistance program available to low-income families.
Differences between the top and bottom quartiles in the same years are statistically significant at the 0.01 level.
Source: CSR Consortium analysis of California Department of Education, CBEDS-PAIF data. Reproduced by permission from Class Size Reduction in California: The 1998-99 Evaluation Findings (Executive Summary)

A third disturbing finding is that in reduced-size classes, students did receive more individual instruction, but the curriculum did not differ. Why might this be? The authors do not speculate, but I'd like to do so here. At the same time that California has reduced class sizes, there has been a concomitant push for standardization. As elsewhere in the United States (and beyond), California teachers are being urged to use certain materials, meet specific standards, and raise test scores. Combine this with the fact that the state has many new teachers and one shouldn't be surprised at a homogeneous curriculum with little room for differentiation and experimentation. For those of us who focus on teacher education, this also represents a sad movement away from the professionalization of teaching.

Most educators are convinced that the standards movement is here to stay. The challenge for all of us is to avoid turning teaching into an assembly line effort. Ideas for accomplishing this in view of the push towards standards are badly needed. I invite your ideas on this subject -- and your thoughts about class size reduction in your community. Join our Online Communities and share your comments.

Reference

Stecher, B.M. & Bohrnstedt, G.W. (Eds.). (2000, June). Class size reduction in California: Summary of the 1998-99 evaluation findings. Sacramento, CA: California Department of Education. Available: www.classize.org/techreport/index-00.htm
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Citation: Grisham, D.L. (2000, November). Class size reduction: Learning from the California experience. Reading Online, 4(5). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/editorial/edit_index.asp?HREF=/editorial/november2000/index.html

Reading Online, www.readingonline.org
Posted November 2000
© 2000 International Reading Association, Inc.   ISSN 1096-1232