Seattle Public Schools: Measure Teachers Twice, Don't Cut Class Size Once

One-on-one instruction, a hallmark of public education

From the Research, Evaluation, and Assessment page of the Seattle School District site, I learn the Seattle school district has a Director of Research, Evaluation & Assessment; a Gates Data Fellow; a Senior Data Analyst; a Program Evaluator/Data Steward; a Assessment Systems Analyst, a Student Information Systems Analyst; and a Lead Education Systems Analyst.

None of these people, I'm told, can tell me how many students are in classrooms, and whether class size has grown over the past ten years.

The district can tell me that in October of 2009, Ballard, Garfield, and Roosevelt all had enrollment of over 1,600 students, but they claim that until this year tracking classroom size was done by principals at each school, and the district did not compile those statistics centrally. (They also can't seem to provide an Excel spreadsheet measuring enrollment against school capacity.)

This is surprising to me because in the district's 2009-10 collective bargaining agreement with the Seattle Education Association (SEA), the district agrees that it will "take actions to limit class size to thirty-two (32) students for core classes in grades 6-12." It would seem odd to agree to that without tracking class sizes. Maybe this can be addressed if and when the SEA goes on strike this fall. As Melinda French Gates says, "Evidence gives you an argument for action."

It also raises the question of how--when the district was closing schools last year because "there is currently too little classroom space in North Seattle to meet demand, but too much space in the Central, South, Southeast and West Seattle clusters"--it actually knew that. The district's "Capacity Management" page doesn't contain a single number or percentage related to the district's student capacity.

Research on the effect of class size on the quality of education has become less popular as it's become clearer how expensive a proposition it is. If under 20 students is the optimal size, then given classes of 35 to 40 students, you'd need almost twice the teaching staff.

In 2008, the superintendent of Seattle Public Schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, told the Seattle P-I that class size has taken on too much importance, and that "the bottom line is quality of teaching in the classroom."

That's the mantra of the national education reform movement that's predicated on teacher assessment, which has won the approval of the Gates Foundation: "Data show that an effective teacher has more impact on student performance than any other school-based factor." Richard Conlin and Tim Burgess are for it, too.

None of you wants, really, to get into the history of education reform, but one thing reasonable people can agree on is that, to date, no educational reformer has stood up before the public and said, "Data show that the project we're attempting to manage is highly complex and responses to any particular input are non-linear." Today, in other words, it's effective teachers. (You have to like "effective teachers," I mean the adjective says it all.)

There's no question that teachers unions have their thumb on the scale when it comes to seniority and job security. Getting better at weeding out terrible teachers is common sense. As for best practices, Bill Gates has been impressed by the KIPP "method": "The amount of time they spend with the kids really is unbelievable. Between the long day (7:30 to 5) and every other Saturday and three summer weeks it is 60% more than normal schools."

A teacher friend of mine (not with the Seattle school district) is now teaching several classes of over 30 students. Her students have to borrow chairs from the multipurpose room, because more desks won't fit in the room. She's an effective teacher. She will be until the day, not too far from now, when she burns out.

Last year, she had ten juniors and seniors in an essay-writing class of 36 who could not construct a paragraph. That is, she had a full class of students writing at grade level, along with a half-class of students who weren't. She already gives up more than every other Saturday; she already regularly works past 5 p.m. with students on extracurricular activities.

Can we talk about classroom size again?