Iowa City hiring teachers to cut class sizes

With 34 students, Annalise Rummelhart's fifth/sixth-grade class at Longfellow Elementary School is the Iowa City school district's second largest, and much bigger than the district's target class size.

Her mother, Kristen Rummelhart, praises Longfellow's staff but is worried the number of students in her daughter's room is making it harder for kids to learn and creating a more stressful environment.

Rummelhart relayed her daughter's thoughts as, “It's loud and hectic and we're crammed.”

Longfellow's parents have been vocal about their concerns, but several schools in the growing district are seeing larger than desired classes this school year.

Class size also has become a national issue as school systems battle tight or shrinking budgets. Some research shows reducing the number of students in a class, which usually requires hiring more staff, may not be the best use of limited financial resources.

“There's no more expensive intervention that a school district can engage in than lowering class size,” said Grover “Russ” Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution think tank.

The Iowa City school district finalized a plan this week to spend $175,000 on the equivalent of 8.5 teachers to reduce class sizes in nine rooms at seven elementary schools - Coralville Central, Garner, Kirkwood, Longfellow, Penn, Van Allen and Wood, Superintendent Stephen Murley said.

The kindergarten through second-grade classes that get extra teachers will go from an average of 25 students to 18. The third-grade through sixth-grade classes will drop from an average of 33 students to 25.

The district's policy is to have roughly one teacher for every 25 students in grades three through six and every 20 or 21 students in other grades.

Its average class sizes are actually pretty close to that at the elementary level, but there are more big classes than in the past, officials said. Many junior high and high school class sizes are several students above the goal.

A plan for addressing large classes in secondary schools this year is being developed.

While it may seem logical that reducing large class sizes is a good way to boost student achievement, research is split on the issue.

Whitehurst co-authored a paper in May that reviewed several studies on the subject. His conclusion was that a decrease of seven or more kids from a room in kindergarten and first grade and for students from more disadvantaged family backgrounds had the biggest effect.

But doing so at the older grades and by just a few students makes little difference, studies show.

What's more, initiatives to limit class size often result in the hiring of new teachers, and having inexperienced teachers can offset the benefits of smaller classes, Whitehurst said.

The money would be better spent on salaries to attract and retain the top teachers, he said.

Iowa is one of the states that has tackled the class-size issue with money. The Iowa Early Intervention Block Grant Program began in fiscal 2000 with a goal of reducing the average kindergarten through third-grade class to 17 or fewer students.

But despite more than $29 million going to the initiative each year for the past decade, class sizes have inched upward and are at 20 or more for each grade.

Iowa Department of Education spokeswoman Staci Hupp said the program can be called a success because districts have worked to reduce class sizes and some use aides to break classes into smaller groups for subjects like reading, which doesn't show up in class-size data.

After hearing from parents, the Iowa City school board told Murley to use the district's cash reserves to hire more staff now.

The district is one of the fastest-growing in the state but ran into the class-size problem this year for a couple of reasons.

First, its enrollment increased 442 students, which was more than expected. And in Iowa, school districts receive state funding based on the previous year's enrollment.

The state also didn't provide any increase in what is known as allowable growth, which is new per-pupil state funding.

“This year, we didn't have money to swoop in and save them,” Assistant Superintendent Ann Feldmann said of the larger classes.