Tennessee started experimenting with class sizes in 1985 as part of a broad education reform effort led by then-Gov. Lamar Alexander. Kindergarten students were assigned to one of three classroom settings: in classes with no more than 17 students, in classes with 22 to 26 students, and in classes with 22 to 26 students and a teacher’s aide. All the children remained in similar settings through the third grade.
More than 12,000 students participated in the four-year study. Findings showed that the students from the small classes outperformed their peers from both of the larger settings; low-income and minority students demonstrated particularly strong improvement. When the students from the small classes were placed back into larger ones, they continued to perform at higher than average levels for five more years.
Does Tennessee’s experience offer any lessons for Springfield School District 186? District 186 is devoting a night to the topics of smaller classes and schools on Tuesday, Nov. 18, from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. at Springfield High School. The meeting will start with introductory remarks by an administration official and a presentation by Karen DeAngelis, assistant director for the Edwardsville-based Illinois Education Research Council, an institute funded by the Illinois Board of Higher Education. After the talks, the audience will break into small groups and generate ideas for improving the district.
Tennessee created a bandwagon. Before 1985, not much research or attention was paid to class size. Since then, everyone wanted smaller classes. Many states, citing Tennessee, have implemented their own class-reduction initiatives — with varying degrees of success. One half of the education portion of the $25 billion Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation is devoted to creating smaller classes and schools.
District 186 class sizes, not including special ed, range from about 12 to 35, according to Cinda Klickna, president of the Springfield Education Association.
Klickna, on leave from her teaching job while she heads the union, says smaller class sizes are obviously beneficial because they allow teachers to spend more time with each student.
“Everything is leading toward tracking individual students,” says Klickna, whose own classes have ranged from 22 to 35 students. “Teachers have only so many minutes per kid.”
But creating smaller classes isn’t easy, DeAngelis says. It can be very expensive, it can divert resources from other district programs, and it’s not a panacea. “There’s no magic bullet in education,” she says. “If there was, I could get rich traveling the country talking about it.”
DeAngelis points to other states that have tried to jump on Tennessee’s coattails. California, she says, tried to cut class sizes across the board at every grade level. It moved too quickly and hired many unqualified teachers, most of whom were placed at the most troubled schools. The state reduced class sizes to about 20 students, a dramatic decrease from the state’s average of nearly 30, DeAngelis says. But Tennessee’s model recommended classes no larger than 17 students. “The research suggests really small: between 13 and 17 students,” she says. California went from bad to only less bad.
DeAngelis will also talk about the impact an entire school’s size has on student performance. There’s a movement to create smaller schools, but no one can agree on what a small school looks like.
“In general, at least at the high school level, there’s no consensus about what ‘small’ means. Some say a student body between 200 and 400, some say no more than 500. One empirical study suggests 600 to 900 students is optimal. Very small schools of 100 or less or very large ones of 1,000 or more are generally not considered conducive to learning.” Like most city public high schools across the country, Springfield’s three have student populations well above 1,000.
While DeAngelis says she’s only charged with providing information Tuesday night and isn’t supposed to make any recommendations, she says smaller schools offer a variety of benefits: teachers have more time to collaborate with one another and it’s easier to create “mixed-ability groups,” or classes in which advanced students are paired up with disadvantaged ones. Such settings show remarkable benefits for low-income students, she says. More than half of all Springfield District 186 students come from low-income families.
Creating mixed-ability classes requires radical changes in curriculum as most schools currently separate students into classes based on achievement levels. It’s one reason why creating smaller schools are expensive. With millions of dollars in cuts in the past couple of years, such costly changes in the district aren’t likely.
They are also hard to reverse if they don’t work out. Experimental programs like Tennessee’s are almost unheard these days, DeAngelis says, because parents don’t want their child ‘randomly’ placed in the less ideal settings now that the secret about smaller classes is out. “Small classes are enormously popular,” DeAngelis wrote in a review of Tennessee’s program. “Once implemented, class size reduction programs are difficult to dismantle.”
Klickna says district teachers aren’t afraid of experimenting. “There’s a misconception among the public about what we’re doing,” she says. “We’re trying different strategies: problem solving, student presentations, working in student teams. Regardless, it’s harder still to do all this with larger class sizes.”
Any discussion of class size and student performance will ultimately lead to discussions of other variables. For example, students from District 186, in general, score much lower than public school students statewide. But class sizes are, on average, smaller than those of Chatham’s school district, whose students blow state averages out of the water.
DeAngelis warns of comparing a district like Springfield, with its 51 percent low-income rate and a minority population that makes up more than 35 percent of the student body, with Chatham’s, whose low-income and minority population rates are both at about 6 percent.
Ultimately the school climate matters more than its size, DeAngelis says. That could mean any number of things, such as smaller class sizes, different approaches to teaching, or even changing the makeup of the district’s faculty. Chatham’s teaching staff is 100 percent white, which, while disappointing, at least mirrors its student population. District 186’s staff is more than 93 percent white, which is completely out of sync with its diverse student body. While the district is trying to recruit more minority teachers, it’s one of many factors District 186 is struggling to address.
But as DeAngelis says, “This all works only if it’s set up correctly.”
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Tuesday’s meeting is the fourth of ten the district is holding through
June to let the public propose ideas for the development of a new long-term
plan. More information about the process is available online at www.springfield.k12.il.us/voices/info.html
This article appears in Nov 13-19, 2003.
