Bloomberg administration blames parents for larger classes

See the article in today’s NY Times, Class Size in New York City Schools Rises, but the Impact is Debated, a follow up to the article on Wednesday, Class Size Makes Biggest Jump of Bloomberg Tenure.

Though it is one of those typical “on the one hand this, on the other hand that” pieces– citing research that is either outmoded or easily refuted -- it is important because it is the first in-depth article in our paper of record to have dealt with the issue of class size in at least five years.

Indeed, the Times has had a “black out” on class size through most of the Bloomberg administration – as the former education editor admitted in June of 2006 – though at that point, she promised “to explore the class size issue” soon after -- which has not occurred until now, almost three years later.

This omission has persisted, despite the fact that our public school students continue to suffer from the largest class sizes in the state, smaller classes have consistently been the top priority of NYC parents, and in subway and TV ads, the administration has claimed to be reducing class size while being repeatedly cited for misusing hundreds of millions of dollars of state aid meant for this purpose.

In today’s article, the administration once again tries to evade its own responsibility for failing to reduce class size, despite a state mandate passed in 2007. In the previous Times article, Garth Harries of DOE attempted to blame the economy– even though the state provided an additional $400 million this fall, with $150 million of that targeted for class size reduction. He also attempted to shift the blame onto principals, which Chris Cerf tries again in today’s article, without acknowledging that it is the DOE’s duty to see that these funds are spent appropriately.

But now, even more outrageously, they are trying to blame parents – with Harries actually arguing that large classes are the result of popular schools where parents insist on sending their kids.

As I pointed out to the reporter, the vast majority of children attend their neighborhood zoned elementary and middle schools– and DOE entirely controls the admissions for high schools, so blaming parents for the systemic problem of large classes is entirely unwarranted. Who will they blame next – our kids?

Indeed, at the same time that the administration goes around claiming that mayoral control means accountability, they are quick to shift the blame on everyone else when they fail to create more adequate and equitable learning conditions for our children.

The article also repeats the administration’s canard that there is a trade-off between teacher quality and class size, when the two factors are actually complimentary. Indeed, the main reason we have such a high teacher turnover rate here in NYC is that our teachers so often leave for a new profession or to work in suburban or private schools -- because their excessive class sizes do not provide them with a fair chance to succeed.

In a recent national poll, 97% of teachers responded that reducing class size would be an effective way to improve teacher quality – far above any other strategy, including raising salaries, instituting teacher performance pay, or providing more professional development. Indeed, the only way we will ever obtain a more experienced and effective teaching force here in NYC is by reducing class size.

But the most ridiculous part of the article is the “evidence” offered by the administration that smaller classes don’t matter, by referring to an unpublished (and probably unpublishable) internal DOE study that purported to show that the grades schools received on the “Progress reports” weren’t correlated with smaller classes. No mention is made of the fact that most experts have found that the grades schools receive are mostly random – with almost no correlation from one year to the next -- as an article by the same reporter in the Times pointed out last year.

In contrast, the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Department of Education, has concluded that class size reduction is one of only four, evidence-based reforms proven to increase student achievement. (None of the policies that the Bloomberg/Klein administration has introduced are on the list, by the way.)

In fact, the DOE has devised another formula – a “value added” model to evaluate teacher effectiveness, in which class size is included as a “predictor”, the ONLY factor included in the model under the school system’s control. This is an admission that the larger the class, the less a teacher is expected to raise student achievement. All the other factors in the model pertain to characteristics of the students themselves, such as economic status, prior test scores, absences, etc.

See the model here – which includes average class size at both the classroom and school level, showing that both should be taken into account when assessing a teacher’s performance. The DOE also states that the model used “draws on 10 years of city-wide data (test scores, student, teacher, and school characteristics) to predict individual student gains.”

Check out the accompanying FAQ:

Is the DOE’s Value-Added model reliable and valid? A: A panel of technical experts has approved the DOE’s value-added methodology. The DOE’s model has met recognized standards for demonstrating validity and reliability. Teachers’ value-added scores from the model are positively correlated with both School Progress Report scores and principals’ perceptions of teachers’ effectiveness, as measured by a research study conducted during the pilot of this initiative.

Anyway, please send a letter to the Times at letters@nytimes.com with your name, address and phone number. Let them know what you think – and whether it’s fair to blame parents for the fact that NYC classes have remained the largest in the state, with no significant improvement under this administration.

Response to Mike Petrilli on technology and class size

Mike Petrilli, via Diane Ravitch, responded to my earlier comments on his post on moving beyond the debate on "teacher quality" this way:

I appreciate the feedback on my article, and am glad it resonates with many of you in NYC. As promised at the end of my piece, I'll flesh out my ideas for making average teachers into effective teachers in a future column. But yes, I think that technology-someday at least-will have the potential to help do exactly that. (Programs like K12.com- where I used to work- are already making average Moms and Dads into effective teachers.) So will a strong core curriculum. But I'm very skeptical about reducing class size as a viable solution. Of course it's popular with teachers (which is all the Public Agenda data can show), but the most rigorous studies demonstrate that class size has to be reduced dramatically in order to make a difference, and even then there's only strong evidence that it matters in the early elementary grades. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been reducing class size across the board for decades, which only makes the teacher quality challenge greater.

My boss, Checker Finn, once estimated that if the teacher ranks had grown proportionately with the student population since the 1950s, rather than at three times the rate, we could afford to pay the average teacher $100,000. Instead we've opted, as a country, to hire lots more teachers at lower salaries. Maybe that wasn't the best choice.

My response is as follows:

Michael: Urban high-needs school districts with large numbers of minority students still have far larger class sizes on average than the average middle-class or wealthy suburban school district, and of course any of the elite private schools. See the belwo chart from ETS, for example, in a report called "Parsing the Achievement Gap."

And while there has been a big change in the teacher/student ratio, much of that has gone to intervention specialists, pull out teachers, push-in teachers, etc. but not nearly enough to lower class size.

If we're serious about improving achievement and narrowing the achievement gap we need to prove it by creating the same opportunities that people with means demand for their own kids -- especially as the research shows that it is poor minority kids who benefit from smaller classes the most. Otherwise, there is a strong whiff of hypocrisy about the whole debate.

The Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the US Dept. of Education, concluded that class size reduction as one of only four, evidence-based educational reforms that have been proven to increase student achievement through rigorous, randomized experiments -- the "gold standard" of research. More technology is not included among them.

This combined with the fact that actual practitioners in the field, including teachers and principals, overwhelming respond that class size reduction would be the most effective way to improve the quality of teaching, makes it hard to understand why there continues to be so much intellectual effort expended in combating any attempts to achieve this.

I liked what you started to move towards in your comments on teacher quality -- and I loved your recent column on the importance of extra-curricular activities in educating students and expanding their leadership skills. (For more data to back up your argument there, see two Mathematica reports, "Expanding Beyond Academics: Who Benefits and How?" and "Valuing Student Competencies: Which Ones Predict Postsecondary Educational Attainment and Earnings, and for Whom?" both coincidentally co-authored by my brother.)

But if we really want to make teachers more effective, we should start listening to what they say will work best, rather than imagining that somehow we know better.

Leonie Haimson, Class Size Matters

What do educators themselves say about the best way to improve teacher effectiveness?

See Mike Petrilli's post on the Fordham "Gadfly" about how we should focus more on making the teachers we have more effective, rather than continuing to search for the elusive "higher quality" teacher through strategies like eliminating tenure, pay for performance, or alternative certification.

While I agree with the thrust of his argument, his suggestion that one way of doing this through "augmenting technology" is bogus. No study has shown that technology improves teacher effectiveness or raises student achievement.

Instead, teachers themselves say that the best way to improve their effectiveness by far is to reduce class size. See the recent national survey of first year teachers from Public Agenda, called "Lessons Learned" .

76% of teachers overall said that reducing class size would be "a very effective" way of improving teacher quality, and 78% of teachers who work in high needs schools. 21% of teachers said reducing class size would be "effective", for a total of 97% -- far outstripping every other strategy mentioned, including :

Increasing teacher salaries (57%), increasing professional development opportunities (54%), making it easier to terminate unmotivated or incompetent teachers (41%), requiring new teachers to spend time under the supervision of experienced teachers (35%) requiring graduate degrees in education (21%), requiring teachers to pass tough tests of their knowledge ot their subject (21%), tying salaries to principal or colleagues assessment (15%) tying rewards and sanctions to student performance (13%), eliminating tenure (12%), reducing regulations for teacher certification (8%), and relying more on alternative certificaiton (6%)..

(In each of the categories I have put in parentheses the percent who said this would be a "very effective" way to to improve teacher quality.)

By the way, these views about the effectiveness of reducing class size to improve teacher effectiveness are shared by more experienced teachers and most principals as well.

See this 2006 public agenda survey of teachers and school administrators, "Is Support for Standards and Testing Fading."

"If the public schools finally got more money and smaller classes, they could do a better job." 88% of teachers agreed with this statement, and 85% of superintendents and principals, far outstripping any response.

Compare how many teachers, superintendents and principals agreed with this statement: "More testing and higher standards will ensure kids will master the skills they need": 1% (teachers), 7% (supers); 10% (principals).

If we really respected the opinions and views of the professionals who work in our schools, we would do everything in our power to reduce class size.

Why CFE funds must be used to reduce class size and student load

Despite what Michael Rebell and Sol Stern may have said at the Century meeting, as recounted below, class size reduction is one of only four evidence-based education reforms that have been shown to work, according to the federal government.

The others? One-on-one tutoring for at-risk readers in grades 1-3, Life-Skills Training for junior high students, and phonics instruction for early readers. Teacher training is not on the list.

Moreover, both Stern and Rebell have been inconsistent in their remarks on class size.

A few months ago, Stern suggested to me that if I wrote an open letter to the Mayor in support of class size reduction in addition to phonics instruction, he would sign onto it.

Rebell was the chief attorney in the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit. The CFE case provided expert testimony and evidence showing that smaller classes were closely linked to student success, and that class sizes were too high in NYC schools in all grades to be able to provide a sound basic education.

The Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, concluded that there was “a meaningful correlation between the large classes in City schools and the outputs…of poor academic achievement and high dropout rates” and that NYC students were deprived of their constitutional right to an adequate education because of excessive class sizes in all grades.

Rebell was recently quoted as saying that our schools should be provided with "the professional development, the quality teachers, the smaller class sizes, and the other things that they need. "

Yet the main problem here in NYC in terms of quality teaching is neither a lack of sufficient teacher training or the availability of qualified candidates. It is the rapid turnover of teachers -- with about 25% leaving our schools each year. The number one reason for this high rate of attrition is poor working conditions, and most prominently, the excessive class sizes and teaching loads, which are nearly twice as high than the state and/or national average.

Here is what William Ouchi has recently said about these issues. (Ouchi is a UCLA Professor of Management, who first proposed weighted student funding .)

"The most important single indicator of a school's quality is a metric you've never heard of: total student load. It's the number of classes a teacher teaches times the number of students per class. In New York City, by union contract, a teacher may teach up to five classes, and a class may have up to 32 students, for a total load of 160. ... Then visit an elite private school, like those where many of your readers send their children. The total load is 55 to 60."

Clearly, Ouichi is referring to both class size and student load. The load at the private schools Bloomberg and Klein sent their children to is about four classes of 15 students or less. Nationally, the average student load for middle and high school teachers is 89.

Yet the administration has done nothing to improve this situation in six years. In fact, with the 37 1/2 extra minutes, the student load has significantly grown for most NYC public school teachers.

I have calculated that for the average middle or high school teacher, simply spending five minutes per week correcting each student's homework, and spending another five minutes with each of them after class would take about 40 hours per week. This is a whole second job, and as a result, it doesn't happen. No teacher, no matter how experienced or well trained, can reach all students with the sort of class sizes we have in our schools.

Only by reducing class sizes, which will also lower teaching loads, can we ensure that NYC students get the attention and help they need, and the effective -- and experienced -- teachers they deserve.