Does class size matter?

Few education reforms make as much sense on a gut level as giving teachers fewer students to teach.

The idea is popular with parents and politicians alike - at least 40 states, including Iowa, have carried out some kind of class-size reduction in the past 15 years.

But despite more than four decades of research in the United States and abroad, the effects of this simple idea about how to raise student achievement have been hard to isolate and measure, leading to academic squabbles over its value.

Researchers generally agree that smaller classes, at least in the earliest grades, are linked to positive educational benefits such as better test scores, fewer dropouts and higher graduation rates, especially for disadvantaged children.

They disagree, however, on whether those benefits outweigh the costs.

Studies, based on classroom observations and interviews, have revealed some surprising insights:

l The most obvious explanation for why reducing class size works - that teachers give students better, more-tailored instruction in smaller classes - probably isn't the reason why achievement goes up. Teachers for the most part don't change their practices automatically when their classes have fewer students.

l Students behave better and pay more attention in smaller groups, and this may account at least initially for the gains. For example, it's harder for a couple of troublemakers in the back of the room to derail the class when they can't hide in a crowd.

l Reducing class sizes can have the potential to make a big difference for students only if teachers get the training and administrative support to take advantage of the situation by changing how they teach and how they interact with parents.

The most persuasive class-size research in the United States comes from a large experiment in Tennessee in which students in small classes outperformed students in larger groups, even when teachers had the help of aides.

Project STAR (Student Teacher Achievement Ratio) was conducted in Tennessee from 1985 to 1989 and involved more than 1,200 teachers and almost 12,000 students, according to Jeremy Finn, of the University at Buffalo, the State University of New York, a statistician who helped set up the experiment and publish its results.

In Cedar Rapids, district administrators base their class-size considerations on similar research, said Val Dolezal, the Cedar Rapids Community School District's executive director of pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. Other factors - including feedback to and from students, teachers' management of student behavior and interventions for struggling students - come into play, Dolezal said.

The district follows state guidelines for class sizes, Dolezal said, which say that kindergarten classes should average 21 students; first- and second-grade classes 23 students; third- through fifth-grade classes 25 students; and sixth- through 12th-grade classes 27 students.

'We also know there's times when a class size of 28 just doesn't work,” Dolezal said. 'It's unique to that particular group, and then we have to make arrangements to make that work.”

Joe Crozier, the chief administrator of the Grant Wood Area Education Agency, agreed.

'The problem is, you don't know the makeup of that particular class - how many kids with behavior issues, poverty,” Crozier said. '…

There, when you say 25 would be just fine, isn't necessarily the case.”

There's scant research on the effects, positive or negative, of reducing class sizes in the upper grades because the variables are much harder to pin down, the University of Buffalo's Finn said. But Finn and his colleagues proposed that students behave better and participate more often when they can't hide in the back of the classroom.

Dolezal agreed.

'They're giving feedback about their own learning, or they're getting feedback,” she said. 'Teachers aren't just letting them sit in the back of the class and not pay attention.”

Teachers' classroom management skills and the classrooms themselves, however, also can factor significantly into academic performance.

'The practices of a teacher in the classroom (and) the competence of that teacher really has more to do with student achievement than class size,” Crozier said. 'If we don't have well-trained, highly qualified teachers, then it doesn't really matter.”

And if a teacher doesn't have enough space for her or his students, he added, even good classroom management can be disrupted.

'If a classroom was built for 20 students, and now you have 27 in there, you can imagine how that disrupts the flow of learning,” Crozier said.

Those are the types of challenges local schools have had to manage in recent years. Cedar Rapids elementary enrollment continues to grow, Dolezal said, and the district hired 32 elementary teachers this year.

In Iowa City, the district hired additional teachers in 2012 to cut class sizes, but since has chosen not to fill some open positions due to budget cuts, resulting in some of its smallest classes growing.

Four middle schools in the Cedar Rapids district moved this year to eight-period bell schedules, rather than seven-period schedules, meaning teachers teach more students each day and have less time for prep.

The schools are still experiencing 'growing pains,” Dolezal said.

'Our class sizes don't necessarily look bad, but it's the number of kids that our teachers see that's a little bit higher,” she said.