Should Classes Be Smaller?
As Enrollment Rises, Issue Divides Educators



By Jay Mathews and Valerie Strauss
Washington Post Staff Writers Monday,
December 15, 1997

At Bradley Hills Elementary School in Bethesda, 35 fourth-graders crowd into Room 15 for Jodi Pincus's science class, attempting experiments with balloons and water while also chatting and daydreaming.

Occasionally, Pincus starts to clap as a sign that the class has come somewhat unglued. Most of the children pick up the rhythm with their own hands to show they are ready to get back to manipulating water and air masses. But with so many students scattered about the room amid clumps of desks and equipment, it is difficult to keep everyone focused.

Pincus looks tired. "They did fine," she said, "but sometimes they get a little out of hand."

In many schools in Montgomery County and other parts of the Washington area, teachers are doing more clapping for attention, repeating more lessons and spending more time working after school, as a surge in enrollment has crowded some classrooms to a level that many parents and teachers consider uncomfortable.

School officials in Fairfax, Alexandria and Howard have launched studies of class size, and last week Montgomery school Superintendent Paul L. Vance announced a $9.2 million program to add 238 teachers to help ease the problem. Virginia Gov.-elect James S. Gilmore III (R) tapped into voters' worries about crowded classrooms by promising to provide elementary schools with 4,000 more teachers statewide over the next four years.

But although it may seem obvious that smaller classes are better because the teacher can spend more time with each student, many educators warn that the issue is not that simple.

Major efforts to lower class size usually involve hiring less-experienced teachers, because there are not enough teaching veterans to keep pace with student enrollment growth. And most educators agree that it is better to have a seasoned professional leading a class of 27 children than an inexperienced teacher with 15.

Moreover, research suggests that classes might have to be trimmed to about 17 children -- a sharp and expensive drop in size for most Washington area districts -- to provide much of a boost in student achievement.

Ronald Ferguson, a lecturer at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, said his research shows that teacher quality, not class size, is the most important factor in education. Smaller classes won't have any benefit without accompanying changes in teaching methods, Ferguson said.

"The issue is whether teachers teach any differently to a small class than to a large class," he said. "If you cut class size and the teachers don't teach any differently, it won't matter."

Instead of spending millions of dollars for extra teachers and classrooms, school districts should consider using that money to provide current teachers with more training and to add aides and special instructors who can focus on helping the weakest students, Ferguson and several other researchers say.

But classroom teachers say that class size matters to them more than just about anything else. In large classes, they say, they cannot give each student the kind of daily feedback they would like. They also note that cramming students into small rooms -- especially with today's teaching styles, which allow students to be active -- can create discipline problems.

Average class sizes in most Washington area districts are still in the mid-20s, although they have been creeping up since the 1980s. But individual classes sizes can vary widely within the same jurisdiction, and many teachers, like Pincus, have 30 or more children to handle.

At Horace Mann Elementary School in Northwest Washington, Carolyn Dickey has 32 pupils in her third grade, with one aide to help her. "It's impossible to give individual instruction in a class of 32," she said. "Would you want your child in a class of 32?"

At Roosevelt Senior High in Northwest, Sandra Willis has 45 students in her U.S. government class and no aide. She divides the class into groups of five or six and has students critique each other. It's not ideal, she said, but it works.

Across town at Langdon Elementary in Northeast Washington, Audrienne Womack's first-grade class has only 15 students, partly because of the closing of a nearby housing development. "It's the perfect size, especially considering the fact that a lot [of students] are coming to class without a lot of basic skills," Womack said.

Districts regularly redraw their school attendance zones in an effort to distribute the load of students evenly. But in practice, the numbers never balance out. Some schools will get more students than expected but still not have enough to justify adding a teacher. Within the constraints of their budgets, principals make choices about class size based on the quality of teachers and the needs of students.

Ask teachers what class size is best, and they seem to agree that anything above the low 20s is too big. Nationwide surveys by the U.S. Department of Education show that teachers with fewer than 24 students do not see class size as a major problem, and those with more than 24 do.

But education researchers have not pinpointed the maximum number of students for a good classroom. Instead they have found that elementary students learn more when class size falls to 17 or lower and that class-size reductions in middle and high schools appear to have much less effect.

A four-year Tennessee study concluded that students in kindergarten through third grade who were in classes of 13 to 17 significantly outscored those in classes of 22 to 25 on standardized tests. Poor inner-city children appeared to receive the greatest gains from smaller class sizes, although suburban and rural pupils also had gains that seemed to hold up as the years went by. Studies in Nevada, Wisconsin and Fairfax County produced similar conclusions.

In rapidly growing school districts in the Washington area, such as Prince William, Loudoun and Anne Arundel, school officials say they are aware of such research but don't know how they could afford to make classes any smaller. There is hardly enough money for classrooms to house the influx of new students, much less build extra rooms so that teachers have fewer pupils, they say.

In Montgomery, Vance unveiled his proposal for adding 238 teachers after County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) said the county should take advantage of a revenue windfall to tackle the class-size issue.

Officials say it would cost $7 million to lower Montgomery's average class size by one pupil. Instead of recommending an across-the-board reduction, Vance proposed hiring more teachers for elementary reading, middle school math and high school algebra, saying that those were the students who would benefit most from smaller classes. The plan would reduce the average student-teacher ratio for first- and second-grade reading instruction to 15 to 1, from the current ratio of 24 to 1.

But Vance's plan would not help the crowded science and social studies classes at Bradley Hills Elementary. More than 50 parents in the largely affluent neighborhood school attended a special meeting on class size two weeks ago. PTA president Niki Popow said that although they appreciated Principal Robert Grundy's explanations and his efforts to reduce the classes, "the end results were still not acceptable."

Charlotte Ripa, a teacher at Bradley Hills, has 27 students in her third-grade class. It's the most she has had in four years, she said, and she is repeating herself more as some students on the fringes of the class fail to get it the first time. She also finds herself spending more time after class to plan activities that will engage every student. It is sometimes past 8 p.m. before she can head home.

"You need to be very organized, and you need to bring in as much help as you can," she said. Two or three parents volunteer about two hours a week, she said, and she has a few more she can call in emergencies.

Several private schools in the area have about 15 students per class, and that is one of the reasons parents cite when they opt to spend as much as $14,000 a year to send their children there.

But some private schools, particularly those run by the Roman Catholic church, are academically successful despite having large classes. They can be somewhat selective in which students they take, but they say they also have other strengths.

Timothy McNiff, superintendent for Catholic schools in the Arlington Diocese, said his 40 schools throughout Northern Virginia have average class sizes of 25 to 28. "Everybody understands what the mission is," he said. "And the spiritual component of our schools certainly lends for better academics, from a perspective of discipline."

But many teachers insist that no matter what kind of school they are in, numbers matter. "The single most important factor as a teacher is class size," said Dickey, the third-grade teacher at Horace Mann Elementary, "and my question to those experts who say it doesn't matter is, how much individual attention do they want the children to get?"


Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company