Class Size Reduction Works!

Anecdotal evidence:

Here is the tale of one teacher trying to teach a difficult concept in elementary math. Every day she is pushed to go faster by the District Pacing Guide. The elementary teacher keeps up. Yet at that speed some children miss concepts.

Our good teacher arranges a few precious minutes in her day to form a small group of children who did not to well on the math chapter test--multiplication of more than one digit with regrouping and word problems. She grades the tests. Most student do very well but a few do not. She separates out the tests of low performing students. The next day she brought the low performing students on the math test to the front of the class. The rest of the class was given math challenge activities and math extension activities.

She quickly thumbs through tests to look at exactly where each student performed poorly and how they made their mistakes. She goes over every missed problem with the students. They began to see what they did wrong. Individual attention pays off. It was only a 30 minute review however it did the trick. The next day she gave the alternate and equivalent chapter test to the group she had helped. Not one student scored below 80%. Two days before not one had scored above 50% one student had even scored 0%--every problem wrong. Yet two days later he was tested on different but equivalent problems and scored 80%!

This second chance for low scorers was ONLY possible because the teacher was a third grade VUSD teacher with only twenty students. If she had thirty or more (or like me in my second year of teaching -- 42 student!), she could never have helped those 8 or 9 students. There would have been way too many others and way too many disruptions/questions/whisperings for her to be able to pull out a small group and concentrate on that group.

Those low math scorers would have missed a math skill, perhaps never to learn it. Certainly those students would have been behind in the next math class, but now thanks to class size reduction they aren't.

Maybe that is why in a survey of HIGH SCHOOL VUSD teachers, there was OVERWHELMING support for class size reduction in K-3 VUSD classrooms. High school teachers BENEFIT from class size reduction because their students are better prepared when they arrive in high school. Better prepared students mean better teaching in the high school class. The HS teachers love class size reduction even though they will never have less than thirty plus students in any class they teach because they understand that the students that they will receive in high school in the coming years will have far more skills.

Gee, that gosh darn class size reduction is so evil. Those bad teachers and their nefarious union "bosses" just like it as some form of plot--at least that is what the North County Times and Heartland Institute say. Read what those ANTIs think in my previous blog entry.

For better evidence about how class size really works, read these:

http://www.californiaprogressreport.com/2009/02/class_size_redu.html
AND
http://www.cta.org/NR/rdonlyres/39CEEB46-1F8F-483D-AC49-0A77339CE3F1/0/ProtectSmallerClassSizesFacts2009Jan29.pdf