Coalition to Protect Florida, facts and opposition re. "class-size" amendment.Official Price Tag on Class Size Initiative - Florida Tax Watch, FR link w/ more links.
Posted on 11/02/2002 8:32:33 AM PST by Ragtime Cowgirl
Florida voters will have a chance Tuesday to vote on the latest silver-bullet proposal to fix public education, a constitutional amendment known as Amendment 9, which would limit the size of classes in our public schools. As a public school teacher with more than 25 years of experience in the Miami-Dade public school system, I am going to vote ``no.'' I would urge my colleagues in the profession and all citizens of this state who are concerned about the quality of public education in Florida to do the same. According to Jay P. Greene, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute's Education Research Office in Davie, U.S. Department of Education data show that there were 22.3 students per teacher in the United States in 1970, the beginning of the decade in which I started teaching. Since then, the student-teacher ratio has declined steadily to an estimated 15.1 in 2001. That's a big reduction in class size. And yet, over the same period, Greene reports that there has been no significant improvement in test scores in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nation's education report card issued annually by the U.S. Department of Education. For 17-year-olds, the average science score was 305 in 1970; today it's 295. The average reading score was 285 in 1971; today it is 288. In math, the course I have taught since I began my teaching career, the aver age score was 304 in 1973; it's now 308. A few points' difference out of a 500-point scale is not much to show for such a reduction in class sizes. This history alone suggests that spending as much as $27 billion over the next 10 years to reduce class size is not a good investment. For my money, the answer is high-quality teachers, good classroom management and consequences for lack of results. Yes, consequences. The education of our children and the future of our nation are so important and so intertwined that I am willing to be held accountable if my students do not learn. I now know that those in my classes have alternatives if I do not perform - perhaps a charter school, a magnet school, another school in one of the county's new proposed ``choice zones,'' and if my school totally fails, a private school voucher. This is the new reality, and my colleagues should not fear it. If we know that we must perform, just as do workers everywhere, then the quality of the product we deliver will improve. Discipline, hard work, high standards and superb, dedicated teaching are the not-so-secret formula to success. My colleagues know this, and the better ones set the tone at the beginning of the year. While smaller classes would be nice, class size is not a major issue if teachers know how to manage kids. The class-size amendment is a well-meaning but mistaken proposal to improve our schools. We need only look to the experience of California for proof. In 1996, persuaded by a much smaller pilot project in Tennessee that smaller class sizes would raise its students' dismal test scores, the state legislature appropriated $1 billion to reduce elementary school class sizes. But a Rand Corp. study shows that California students who attended larger elementary school classes have improved at about the same rate as students in smaller classes; Rand concludes that no link can be shown between smaller class sizes and improvement in test scores. However, the study did find that smaller classes had produced one major change in California education: a breathtaking increase in the number of teachers without full credentials and a massive increase in the expansion of the state's teaching staff - from 62,226 to 91,112 in just three years. By the time this frantic hiring spree was over, the percentage of teachers without full credentials had jumped from 1.8 percent to 12.5 percent - a sevenfold increase. Florida voters would do well to remember this problem as they go to the polls on Tuesday.
Ira J. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Hialeah-Miami Lakes High School.
Please let me know if you want on or off my "'til election day" Fla. ping list.
Coalition to Protect Florida, facts and opposition re. "class-size" amendment.Official Price Tag on Class Size Initiative - Florida Tax Watch, FR link w/ more links.
You forgot homeschooling, Bub.
The class-size amendment is a well-meaning but mistaken proposal to improve our schools. We need only look to the experience of California for proof.
The unintended consequences of California's classroom size reduction act (which was spearheaded by Jack "NEA Stooge" O'Connell, who is NOW running for state Supt. of Public Instruction) was twofold: there were not nearly enough teachers to fill those new classrooms, so the schools filled those slots with damn near anybody, or "emergency credentialed" teachers. The second effect was that the "good" teachers left their schools to work at the "good" schools that now had openings. You can imagine the effect on the mediocre and bad schools when their best and brightest flew the coop.
I wish they'd present the WHOLE picture when discussing class size reduction plans, but I guess that's too much to ask for.
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