Studying Smaller Classes
Are smaller classes better when it comes to learning? Two preliminary studies on efforts to shrink classes in Wisconsin and California offer slightly different views on that perennial question.
Students in a Wisconsin program aimed at poor students showed impressive gains on test scores compared with students in larger classes who weren’t in the program, researchers from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee found.
The program, Student Achievement Guarantee in Education, or SAGE, requires schools to reduce the number of pupils per teacher in grades K-3 to 15, upgrade their curricula, provide activities and services before and after school, and devise professional-development plans for educators.
The researchers gave reading and mathematics tests to students in the program during the fall and spring of the 1996-97 school year and then compared the results with those from students who did not participate in the program. Though both groups started with similar scores, the SAGE students outscored their counterparts at the end of the year.
The researchers don’t yet know whether the gains will last or whether they were due entirely to smaller classes or some other aspect of the program. As part of the state-funded evaluation, they will track the students for four more years. Even so, says Alex Molnar, one of five co-authors of the study, “I think what we’re seeing is the class-size effect.”
The California study does not yet have achievement data. Instead, it surveys staff members in 89 school districts on the effect of the state’s effort to reduce class sizes, which began with grades 1-3 in 1996-97 and expanded to grade 4 this year.
So far, the survey concludes, the $1.5 billion program has resulted in widespread shortages of classrooms and in qualified teachers. And, although most teachers said the smaller classes are improving education, almost one-third said they had not altered their teaching practices to take advantage of the smaller settings.
The survey is part of a comprehensive, ongoing evaluation of California’s sweeping initiative. California Policy Analysis in Education, a nonprofit, Berkeley-based group, is leading a consortium of six research organizations undertaking that study.
N.J. Finance Reform
Poor, urban districts in New Jersey got a boost in funding in 1991 after the state passed the Quality Education Act, a controversial effort to equalize school spending.
But contrary to critics’ expectations, a new book says, the extra dollars were not squandered.
Three researchers--William Firestone, Margaret E. Goertz, and Gary Natriello--spent three years studying the effects of the school finance reforms on 10 districts. They discuss their findings in From Cashbox to Classroom, published last fall by Teachers College Press.
The group focused on six of the state’s poorest districts and four of its wealthiest districts. They reviewed district and school budgets, interviewed administrators and teachers, surveyed teachers on conditions in schools, and conducted statewide surveys of superintendents.
Critics of the reforms had predicted that urban districts would waste their additional aid on hiring administrators or on raising teacher salaries. Instead, the investigators found, the districts used the money to make needed investments in facilities, to hire teachers for basic programs, to expand programs for poor students, to offer professional development for teachers, to buy educational materials, and to upgrade their curricula.
“Educators seem to be doing reasonable things with the money given what we know about how to teach kids in general and how to teach in poor, urban districts,” says Mr. Firestone, who is the director of the Center for Educational Policy Analysis in New Jersey and a Rutgers University education policy professor.
Nonetheless, at the end of three years, the gap in educational quality between the state’s poorest and wealthiest districts had barely budged. Part of the problem, according to the researchers, was that repairs to long-neglected buildings and expenditures on students with special educational needs ate up a greater proportion of the poor districts’ funds. The districts were also constrained by district property-tax relief measures, spending caps, and political opposition.
Last spring, however--months after the researchers had completed their book---New Jersey school officials funneled another $246 million to poor districts at the direction of the state’s highest court.
“In a fiscal sense, this is remedying the issue,” Mr. Firestone says. “The burden is now on educators in a way it hasn’t been before to make things better.”
The Achievement Gap
Black students make greater intellectual gains in college than white students do, according to a soon-to-be-published study by a group of researchers from Washington University in St. Louis.
The researchers decided to compare intelligence-test scores of black and white students after reading the controversial book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life. In that 1994 book, Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray suggested that blacks may be intellectually inferior to whites. As one piece of evidence, the authors pointed to a gap between the scores of white and black high school students on the Armed Forces Qualification Test. The test was given periodically to nearly 13,000 nonmilitary students as part of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a national study that has tracked a group of students since 1979.
The Washington University researchers used the same data but analyzed it differently. They looked at two samples of students: those whose education ended at high school and those who went on to college. In both groups, scores on the intelligence test increased more steeply during the high school years for white students than they did for black students.
But, for the second group, a different pattern emerged after high school. In college, the black students improved their scores at a much greater rate than white students did.
“The data suggest that at least one major factor for that gap in intelligence scores is differences in educational experiences,” says Joel Myerson, a research professor in psychology and the study’s lead author. Black students tend to go to poor-quality urban high schools, while white students are likelier to attend better-off, suburban schools. But, Mr. Myerson explains, students’ educational experiences at the college level are less segregated.
The study is scheduled to appear in March in the journal Psychological Science.
