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“There
are some school districts that might very well have used the smaller class
size money to a far more effective end by spending it on better teacher
training. But that was not a choice available to them.” James
Guthrie, First to Worst
In the mid-1990s, after California had scored last among
the states on the National Assessment of Educational
Progress, a task force assembled by the California state department
of education suggested a number of reforms. The most popular of their suggested
reforms was class size reduction. At the time, California elementary schools
had the largest class size in the country - averaging 29 students.
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Pete
Wilson |
In 1996, using
a large surplus resulting from the dot-com boom, Republican Governor Pete
Wilson and the Democratically controlled Legislature passed Senate Bill
1777 which provided districts $650 per student for each K-3 classroom with
20 or fewer students. The cost to the state in the first year was $1 billion
dollars. Currently the cost is roughly $1.6 billion dollars a year.
“We had a large increase in the number of un-credentialed,
under qualified teachers, because all the new classes required new teachers.
Not only did we get more unqualified teachers, but the better teachers left
the urban districts and went to the more well-to-do districts. So the greatest
concentration of under qualified teachers appeared in the most needy schools.”
Peter Schrag, First to Worst
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According
to experts, Class size reduction had some negative consequences. The new
state money was not sufficient to cover the costs of new classrooms, and
so school resources were squeezed even tighter than they already had been.
Many new classes were held in less than ideal spaces. For example, some
schools stuck partitions into larger classrooms and let teachers deal with
the noise as best they could. In other schools, so many new portable classrooms
had to be added to the campus that there was no longer any playground space.
In addition, large numbers of new teachers had to be hastily recruited and
more than a fourth of these were un credentialed. Therefore, the numbers
of under qualified teachers in the system grew immensely. And even with
the class size reduction, California class size still remains one of the
largest in the country.
(Paradise Lost, Peter Schrag, pp.82-84)
For research about class size reduction:
What We
Have Learned About K-3 Class Size Reduction in California
CSR Research Consortium
(a partnership researching California's class size reform)
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