Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Class sizes--elementary school

K-3 in our overcrowded California schools are 31 and 4-6th grades are 34-35.

Class sizes here in public schools are around 30. I'm starting a school with target classes of 12-15 students.

30ish is normal here at that age, but DS's school imposes a limit of 16. Without having looked into it very carefully, I gather there's essentially no research evidence that a smaller class size is better, although people have looked. Yet, it's a big part of what I'm paying for. This is because I suspect what's the case is that a small class makes it possible - not automatic - to teach in a different and better way. If you're trained and experienced in big class techniques, giving you a small class may not benefit the children at all. But if your entire school culture is based round small classes, you may learn that it's normal and practical to treat children as individuals.

Different country (NZ) and the class sizes go up and down according to government policy. Not so long ago the aim was to get primary classes down to 15, then someone read research that teacher skill is more important than class size so they upped the class sizes to pay for training. 2 years ago my 5 year old had a class of 18 kids, 4 weeks ago my second child started in a class of 24 kids. We have one teacher per class who teaches everything from reading to swimming. Aides are based on assessed need (by funding people) so the deaf kid might get a translator only for the morning, the kid who is a couple of years delayed gets one hour of aide time a day etc. I think class sizes trend upwardsto the low 30's over the primary years but like I said it changes. When I was a kid in the 70's 35 was considered perfect.

They ability group at our school for the first 2 years, they used to stream maths for the next 2 but they just stopped. I had hopes when ds7 said he was in a maths group but it sounds like it is a low/medium/high mixed group to do "group work". Bleh.

Eta as the post above crossed with mine. There is no evidence that class size is pivotal but it is certainly calmer and quieter with 15 kids in a class of 5 year olds all other things being the same.

I don't understand the research that says that class size does NOT make a difference. How is that possible? If there are 30+ kids in a class no way is the teacher going to have a chance to get around to everyone who needs one-on-one attention.

The district is using this research as an excuse to raise class sizes. Meanwhile the teachers are saying that it may be better to not accelerate DS and put him into a zoo like that. So obviously the teachers think small class sizes help. Why doesn't the research show it?

Looking at some data for our local elementary school we are in the teens (17-20 or so). Officially our state average is like 20.

This is just data from a website - not first hand information.

When my older child was in third grade, the class size in our local public school was 20. Two years later, when my other child was in third grade, the class size had grown to 31.
Both of my kids got the highest score you can get on our state CA STAR test for math and language arts but the average score for third graders at our school dropped a lot. I assume that was due to the huge class size.

That's what it says for our district schools as well (around 18), but that is not the case in the actual classroom, because it includes special ed teachers. One of the schools has the autism program so that school shows a really low ratio because of all the spec. ed students, but the class sizes are more like 25 than the 16 that the data shows. It does vary from grade to grade as well depending on how many students are enrolled (hence, 32 kids per class in one grade vs. 22 for another). DD currently has 25 or 26 but they are talking about getting rid of a teacher next year and then it would be 35.

I attended private parochial elementary school and class size hovered from 30-35. Teachers ruled with an iron fist back then (in the olden days...long, long ago), but I really feel like class size was a non-issue.

That being said, I prefer that the non-iron-fist-ruling teachers in our local public schools have smaller class sizes. I especially prefer this, because we have usually been in need of differentiation. Class sizes tend to increase for the older children, but 20 for younger grades (sometimes less) is probably average.

Still, I know that one of the years has a larger number of children overall, and parents were very upset, because the class sizes were slightly larger this year than they typically are for most rooms.

Class size reduction used to be a HOT topic in my district when my kids were in early elementary. What I understand about this research is that AVERAGE kids do just as well in a class of 20 or 30. It is the gifted/bright, the kids with LD's, the slow learners that lose out when we change class sizes. Basically if all your learners can work well enough at the same pace and are reasonably compliant class size makes little difference. But a teacher of 30 kids has less time to deal with kids that need differentiation.