public v. private school, first in a series

For a few weeks now, since a bunch of my friends seemingly simultaneously moved their kids from public school to Chiara and Mario's private school, I have been dealing with a nagging fear that I am at least partly responsible for white flight from our public schools. I think the issues are more than I can address in one blog post. So I am going to confront the various issues one-by-one and hopefully a common theme will emerge.

Topic #1 Class size matters. A lot!

At a kid birthday party this last weekend, I got to talking to another mom and it turns out that she's a kindergarten teacher at a school in the area. Her school is 99% free and reduced-lunch (which is another story entirely, but we'll get to race, class and SES/Socio-economic status later), and she has personally dealt with not only being repeatedly pink-slipped, but also class sizes that have grown from 20 to nearly 30 just within the last few years. She told me that her original plan was to send her son to public schools, but then class sized increased. As she put it, "once they went to 29? No way! I know how my kids are!" So now her son is in kindergarten at Carden, benefiting from a class size of....12?

"But wait!" some would argue. What about teacher training and quality? That is another tough topic and one that I will leave for another post.

Ask ANY teacher in any school and they will tell you that absolutely class size is critical, but I cannot even begin to convey with words how significant the effect is in those critical first few years of education. Most people in education can tell you that K-2 are the most important grades because that is when a kid really needs to learn how to read. Many kids face HUGE drops in their grades after that time, because it is in the 3rd grade where you stop learning how to read and start reading for comprehension. This is a critical change. Studies show that if a student is not reading at grade level by grade 3, they will never read at grade level. They just fall further and further behind. Grades K-2 lay the foundation for ALL the learning that follows. In a class of 20, a single teacher can be fairly sure that she (and it's almost always a she) has worked with each student. This is especially important when you have many different levels in the same classroom, i.e. kids who are already reading mixed in with kids who don't speak English and/or have never had a book read to them. The varying ability levels is another topic for yet another day, but suffice to say that when class sizes increase even by 5, the teacher just has that much less time to get to all the kids. A friend of mine told me that she feels like she has to work with the lowest kids, that the top kids will take care of themselves, but that it's the kids in the middle who get lost. Do we want any kids to get lost in this shuffle??

I have 36 kids in almost every one of my classes right now, and of course I would LOVE to have smaller classes, but really, at the secondary level, we are dealing with the survivors. By the time they get to me, a great many kids have dropped out and/or gone to alternative schools. Half of the kids who start school as Freshmen are not there by their Senior year. This is yet another subject for another post, but my point is that our resources really need to be focused on elementary education and especially on class size. Now that kids are being pressed to do so much at earlier ages (hey! yet another topic!), and are coming to school with such wildly varying levels of preparation, the dismantling of class size reduction is such a tragedy.

This is one topic where my public school advocate friends are going to lose; smaller class sizes matter. and please don't tell me that parent volunteers can make up all the difference! They make a difference in neighborhoods where you have middle-class or affluent parents (not to mention literate parents!) who can afford to take the time out of their day to go into the classroom to read or otherwise work with kids. This type of community involvement is of course what we need to help fill the gap, but it cannot completely make up for an elementary school classroom teacher who is stretched to her limits. I'm sure it is significant in some schools where that type of participation is strong, but it is definitely not apparently in all schools. The kindergarten teacher friend tells me that at her school, they essentially have to bribe parents to show up to school events by offering free food. Otherwise they won't show up. I have a feeling that parental involvement at this school is not going to help close the gap that was opened when class sizes went from 20 to 30.

I know that Governor Brown's budget proposals are tough and I know that community redevelopment personally helped me financially (the city of Riverside guaranteed our loan to move downtown), but in an economy that demands tough choices, I really think that elementary school education should get the highest priority. Increasing class sizes make sense economically in the short-term, but I am afraid that the long-term implications will be disastrous.

Okay, now that I've thrown this bomb down, think about where and why you send your kids to school. why class size matters. and why, as a society, we don't seem willing to pay for it.