Small Classes, Big Possibilities

School Administrator, Oct, 1997 by Charles M. Achilles

A researcher laments the lack of action on the class-size issue despite documented results

The Los Angeles Times recently asked in a front-page headline: "$1 Billion Question: Do Smaller Classes Work?"

While the newspaper's prime interest is in California where Gov. Wilson is trying to reduce the student load in kindergarten through 3rd-grade classrooms, the answer ought to be strikingly clear everywhere, based on nearly two decades of validating research, on common sense and on similarities throughout education. As the National Education Association implored in an Education Week advertisement: "We need a little class."

Indeed, if public education is to be a class act and U.S. schools are to become world class, improvement should start at the class level.

A Domino Effect

Size matters, and small class size matters a great deal for the schooling of young children. The debate over class size still rages--less so on the merits, more so on economics, lack of clarity and terminology--in spite of the compelling evidence.

Perhaps the idea of small classes for students in the early grades is so commonsensical today that educators don't consider it a challenge. Yet education's leaders must look beyond the surface variables to understand the systemic, domino-effect possibilities of class-size changes.

What other education reform attracts the unbridled support of parents, teachers, researchers, policymakers and even students? One also would expect that business and government leaders, especially those who believe in the concept of span of control, would rush to support a teacher-to-pupil ratio of about one teacher to 15 students.

The span-of-control notion that undergirds many bureaucratic structures is that one manager can efficiently and effectively work with about seven or eight subordinates--presumably, subordinates who can read, write, feed themselves and find their way to the bathroom. In his ongoing plan to reinvent government, Vice President Al Gore urges federal agencies to reduce the span of control from about 1:7 to about 1:15. Surely, our youngest students deserve the same 1:15 consideration. A class-size reduction to 1:15 is one way in K-3 education to address the politically popular conundrum, "less is more."

Documented Results

Conclusive research has show the benefits of class sizes of 1:15, especially in the primary grades. Since the early 1980s, a large-scale project in Indiana, a major experiment in Tennessee, numerous smaller studies and evaluations of projects that use low adult-to-student ratios have found that youngsters in small classes (1:15 or so) as compared to youngsters in larger classes:

* obtain higher test scores;

* participate more in school;

* demonstrate improved behavior; and

* retain many benefits of early class-size reductions in their later years of schooling.

These results should not surprise anyone familiar with young children and the schooling process. Perhaps only the skeptics of educational research may be surprised that, at least in the class-size arena, studies support common sense and some consensually validated best practices. What charter school or exclusive private school attracts students by promising large classes? Does home schooling use big classes?

Consider, in addition, the other education efforts that also benefit from the small-class effect: tutorials, apprenticeships, special education, remediation projects such as Success for All, mentoring, peer tutoring, Advanced Placement.

Wouldn't an adjustment to smaller classes, especially in the early primary grades, make an exciting platform for the systemic reforms for which most district reformers clamor?

Major Implications

Early information on the impact of class size, such as the 1978 meta-analysis linking class size to student achievement by Gene Glass and Mary Lee Smith, as well as Educational Research Service reports in 1978 and 1980, showed that small classes bolster student learning. Glen Robinson's synthesis of class-size research in the May 1990 issue of Educational Leadership, work by Robert Slavin and others at Johns Hopkins University, Tennessee's Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) experiment, and Harold Wenglinsky's 1997 Education Testing Service study titled "When Money Matters" have shown that all students can benefit from early instruction in small classes or small groupings and that benefits are differentially distributed. Minority students and youngsters of low socioeconomic status get substantially larger benefits from beginning their schooling in small classes than do other youngsters.

Wenglinsky said it well: "4th graders in smaller-than-average classes are about half a year ahead of 4th graders in larger than-average classes" and "'The largest effects seem to be for poor students in high-cost areas." The benefits of small classes in early grades have major policy implications for massive redirection of education resources.

Some critics say that the probable costs of small classes do not justify the demonstrated benefits. A reasonable question for them is, "How do you know?" Class-size benefits seldom have been evaluated carefully because small classes are not widely used in public education except for special-needs youngsters. (Aren't all youngsters special?) The full benefits of 1:15 in early primary grades can't be known until classes of such size are used and evaluated and until the students reach later grades. This is not a quick-fix remedy.