When Maryland first- and second-graders return to school over the next few weeks, many will find themselves enjoying one of the fastest-spreading school reforms of the 1990s: smaller classes.
Driven by a growing demand to boost achievement -- particularly in reading -- schools and districts across the state are trying to find ways to decrease the number of pupils assigned to qualified teachers in early grades.
For some educational researchers, the jury is still out on whether lowering class sizes leads to better pupil performance, though the latest research points more and more that way for children learning to read.
State schools Superintendent Nancy L. Grasmick says there's little question: "The research seems to be clear that significantly lowering the class sizes for children in grades one, two and three can improve achievement. Lowering class sizes has to be a high priority."
This fall, a state task force examining class-size reductions is to issue a report to the governor recommending how such reductions might be accomplished, how much they would cost and how quickly they could be done.
But decreasing the number of pupils in the classrooms of more than 800 Maryland public elementary schools will be far from easy -- especially if the state is to avoid the problems encountered elsewhere of too few qualified teachers and too little space in buildings.
In fact, the state's much-publicized teacher shortage likely would be worsened in the lower-paying (and lower-performing) school systems if the wealthiest districts suddenly need to grab more of the limited pool of talented teachers.
"We have to find a way to get our society to produce more teachers, so our wealthiest systems don't end up recruiting qualified teachers from everyone else," says Carmela Veit, former president of the Maryland PTA and a member of the state task force.
Nor is it clear when funds might become available for such an effort. While the federal government has provided some money to all 24 Maryland school systems to hire extra teachers, this year, the governor and General Assembly have given additional funds for that purpose to only one district -- Montgomery County.
In the meantime, school systems and individual schools are trying to find funding and devise creative solutions to make smaller classes.
For example, at Fifth District Elementary School in northern Baltimore County, Principal Susan Deise has essentially done away with the position of assistant principal to create smaller classes. Instead, she has two "advisers" who divide their time between teaching pupils and helping other teachers improve instruction.
"By making adjustments to our schedule, we're able to create groups for instruction in reading that range from eight to no more than 20, depending on the skills of the students and how much attention they need," Deise says. "Sure, I'd love to get more teachers, but there's a limit and we need to work within it."
While the specifics of Fifth District's plan can't be copied by too many other schools, many elementaries across the state have their own ways of juggling teacher scheduling to try to create smaller classes, particularly for beginning reading instruction.
Leading the pack this fall with broad efforts at cutting class sizes are Howard and Montgomery counties.
Montgomery's plan -- the only one the governor felt was developed enough to be worthy of state funding -- calls for all first- and second-graders to receive 90 minutes of continuous reading instruction in groups of no more than 15 pupils. Teachers being added to schools aren't assigned full-time to classrooms, but switch between the two grades for reading instruction.
The county's 61 neediest elementaries had the class-size reduction plan in place last school year, and this fall -- with the help of the state funding -- it is expanding to Montgomery's remaining 67 elementaries.
Howard County is pursuing class-size reductions in a more traditional and targeted way this fall, aiming to cut the average number of pupils from 25 to 19 in first- and second-grade classes at 17 of its neediest elementary schools. The school system's other 20 elementary schools are each receiving one extra teacher for first grade, which will reduce first-grade class sizes in some of those schools to as few as 20 pupils.
Howard has added a total of about 56 teachers for the class-size effort and a companion plan to improve fourth- and fifth-grade special education instruction. Ten of the teachers are paid for by federal funds, with most of the rest coming from a tax increase approved by the Howard County Council in the spring.
"This is where we can make the biggest difference with extra teachers," says Patricia Tidgewell, Howard's elementary instruction coordinator. She said she hopes the reductions can be extended to all of Howard's elementary schools in the 2000-2001 academic year.
Over the past two years, Baltimore also has cut class sizes in the early grades, working to reduce its pupil-teacher ratio to less than 22-to-1. At least one of the leading candidates in next month's mayoral Democratic primary has called for further reductions.
But finding enough qualified teachers won't be easy. Personnel directors across the state report that this summer's market for teachers is the tightest in two decades, and the problem is only expected to get worse with rising pupil enrollments and a wave of anticipated teacher retirements among baby boomers.
"It always has to be coupled with quality teachers," Grasmick says. "I would rather have my child in a class of 50 with a qualified, talented teacher than in a class of 10 with an incompetent teacher."
More teachers needed
The lack of qualified teachers has been the biggest factor in the disappointing early results of a massive class-size reduction effort in California. While a recent class-size study in Tennessee -- the most widely respected study to date -- showed sustained achievement gains for pupils, California pupils' test scores have improved only slightly.
"What seems to have gone wrong in California is that they didn't have enough qualified teachers, so their gains have been much less," says Paul E. Peterson, director of Harvard University's program on education policy and governance and co-editor of a recent comprehensive book on school reform. "Just putting people in classrooms won't improve achievement. They need to be trained, qualified teachers."
Members of the state class-size task force say that finding enough qualified teachers is a concern for them, too. They're expecting to recommend that a statewide class-size reduction effort -- perhaps limiting early elementary classes to 17 pupils -- should be done in stages, perhaps over five years.
"We're not going to be able to suddenly hire 1,000 more teachers across the state, because they're not there," says Gerald L. Boarman, chairman of the task force and principal of Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Prince George's County, a district facing a big shortage of certified teachers.
The state task force is unlikely to recommend any kind of broad reduction of middle- or high-school classes. Though members say they believe it's common sense that classes should be smaller, there is almost no research on whether decreasing class sizes for older students would improve achievement. Instead, they likely will suggest that the state and one or more local universities begin their own comprehensive study of that question.
Space concerns
The movement to decrease class size should be aided by Maryland's enrollment trends, which suggest that the current bulge of elementary pupils will move up to middle and high schools over the next few years. If systems simply hold onto their elementary school teachers, they might not have to hire quite so many to reduce the sizes of classes.
Even if school systems find extra teachers, the new hires need space to teach -- something many of the state's fast-growing suburban school systems simply don't have.
For example, when Harford County school officials recently studied the idea of reducing all of their first- and second-grade classes to 18 pupils or fewer, they realized they would need 50 more classrooms.
"That's the equivalent of building 2 additional new schools," says Patricia L. Skebeck, Harford's director of elementary education. "We know that we just can't afford to do that."
So some school systems will likely look to Montgomery County's compromise of putting teachers in schools for reading instruction but not assigning them full-time classes.
"Teachers are able to pay a lot more attention to every child and identify very quickly what help they need," says Jane Litchko, principal of Jackson Road Elementary School in Silver Spring. After its first year with the extra teachers last school year, Jackson Road cut in half the number of pupils who moved to third grade reading below grade level.
Montgomery also put in place a massive, hands-on summer training program over the summer in which teachers learned from watching others instruct pupils.
"You need the training to make any class-size reduction plan work," says Patricia Flynn, Montgomery's director of academic programs. "Without teachers properly trained for small group reading instruction, I don't think that any of this would be successful."
Pub Date: 08/23/99