VPerspective
DOE knows, but won’t admit: Class size counts
Mar 27, 2008 5:50 PM
For all of its single-minded focus on quantitative data, there is one hard number that the Department of Education invariably dismisses as relatively insignificant: class size.
Listen to Chancellor Joel Klein and his chief lieutenants and you will hear myriad excuses about why New York City should not be required to spend its Campaign for Fiscal Equity funds on lowering class size. It’s too costly, they say, and the evidence of its beneficial effects — especially at the high school level — is too limited.
Ask a high school teacher about the beneficial educational effects of smaller classes and he will explain how they make it possible to give much-needed individual attention to his students, inside and outside of class, and how they support the personalization and differentiation of instruction. He will tell you that when he sees between 150 and 170 students a day, he is limited in what he can do for them. But Tweed gives little credence to that educational common sense — at least in its public policy declarations.
The DOE’s own data tells a much more complicated tale. In December 2007, it published for the first time class size averages for all New York City public schools. The published data is far from complete: On the high school level, for example, it includes only classes in the four major subject areas — English language arts, mathematics, social studies and science. There are also indications that it is not entirely accurate; some schools, it appears, took collaborative team teaching classes and reported them as two separate and smaller classes, one of general education students and one of special education students — even though they were explicitly instructed not to do that. Yet even with this partial data, some very revealing patterns are evident.
We separated out from the DOE’s list all reports of grades 9-12. This allowed us to capture not only the traditional high schools, but also the high school grades of secondary schools, which go from grade 6 to grade 12. We took only the general education class sizes, since special education class sizes are governed by the students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). We then sorted the high schools, listing them from the school with the highest student registers to the lowest, so the schools went from the largest to the smallest.
What becomes stunningly clear is that in New York City public high schools and secondary schools, the larger the school, the larger the class size. In the first quartile — the 95 largest schools — the average class size in the core academic areas rounds down to 27. In the second quartile, it rounds off at 25 and in the third quartile, at 24. In the bottom quartile — the 95 smallest schools — it rounds up to 22 — more than five students per class fewer than in the largest schools. The difference in class size between the largest schools and smallest schools is just under 20 percent.
To those who have closely followed the New York City public schools, these results are not surprising. In October 2007, the New York City’s Independent Budget Office released a report which found that the disparities in classroom spending among New York City public schools were not due to differences in teacher seniority and salaries, as Tweed had been trumpeting, but to differences in class size. Small schools were better funded and used that funding for smaller class sizes.
Chancellor Klein and the DOE are never reluctant to praise the successes of new small high schools and secondary schools. But nowhere in their narrative do they provide a full, intellectually honest account of the vital differences between the new small schools and the large high schools they replaced, such as the divergence in the student populations they serve. Now, we have powerful evidence that these differences extend to the resources the DOE provides to the schools, with the small schools having considerably smaller classes.
On the issue of class size in high schools and secondary schools, the actions of Chancellor Klein and the DOE speak louder than their words. When it comes to supplying their prized small high schools and secondary schools with resources, lower class size leads the list. The DOE knows that lower class size is a good educational investment, but in a cynical policy, it just decides it won’t make that investment in all high schools and secondary schools.
It is time to end the DOE’s policy of “have” and “have not” students and schools. If a class size of 22 is appropriate for small schools and their students, it is every bit as fitting for large schools and their students. We say to Chancellor Klein and the DOE: End the class warfare now. Reduce the class size for all high school and secondary school students.
