News Briefs
California class sizes squeeze students as state dollars shrink
Oct 15, 2009 11:09 AM
Think New York classrooms are oversized? In California, the state with the biggest budget deficits in the nation, many school districts are really packing them in. In Los Angeles, it’s common to see 50 students shoehorned into a classroom designed for 30. Teachers might have 200 students in the course of a day, which means 200 tests or essays to grade, while students risk feeling anonymous.
That class-size explosion is a byproduct of the $6 billion cut in education funding enacted by the state Legislature and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as well as the relaxation by state leaders of penalties for not following class-size reduction guidelines. This new flexibility allowed districts to back away from the state’s popular class-size reduction program, enacted in 1996.
Said state schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell, “The Legislature has created almost a perverse incentive to go to higher class sizes.”
Some districts were hit harder than others, either by failing to salt money away in good times or by not winning concessions from staff unions.
There has been no across-the-board increase in class size in the Los Angeles Unified District, where the superintendent has given schools the option of making other cuts in order to keep as many teachers in the classrooms as possible.
All the same, many L.A. Unified schools have lost teachers, resulting in bigger classes, and there have been big cuts to clerical, custodial and cafeteria staffs and, in secondary schools, to counselors and administrators as well.
Los Angeles Times, Sept. 20.
Capital Weekly (Calif.), Sept. 3
