BY DANA DiFILIPPO
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Teachers need it to hammer home the difference between hexagons and pentagons. They want it to foster closer relationships with students. It may even help them identify the sources of spitballs and paper airplanes that sail mysteriously from the back of the room.
It is smaller class size.
President Clinton made it a crusade when he proposed spending $7.3 billion to hire 10,000 teachers to reduce class size in early grades. Ohio lawmakers seized the issue in February, when they ordered districts to reduce the student-to-teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grade to 15-to-1 by 2002.
But although lawmakers required districts to start shrinking classes this year, Cincinnati Public Schools administrators are finding the mandate difficult to meet.
"School districts have a finite amount of resources," Assistant Superintendent Kathleen Ware said. "Lowering class size significantly takes a tremendous amount of resources."
The average student-to-teacher ratio nationwide is 22-to-1 and statewide, it's 23-to-1, according to the New Ohio Institute, a Toledo-based education reform group.
At CPS, there's one teacher for every 22 students in grades 1-12, and one teacher for every 23 students in kindergarten, according to 1996-97 data.
Cincinnati Federation of Teachers President Tom Mooney credits the most recent teachers' contract for those ratios. The contract limited class size to 28 students for academic classes in grades K-3 and 30 in grades 4-12, and 32 students for nonacademic classes in grades K-3 and 34 in grades 4-12.
"The district tends to press the limits, but class size should be even smaller than it is now," Mr. Mooney said.
Class size at CPS isn't likely to change this year, because the district spent all $15.7 million the state allocated for class-size reduction to extend about 30 half-day kindergartens to all-day programs.
But administrators emphasize that it figures into their long-term plans.
"This is an issue that is certainly on our minds and one that will be used with a series of designs to improve achievement," Superintendent Steven Adamowski said. "But it's a question of financial priorities."
The issue has drawn mixed reviews from experts nationwide. The National Education Association, the country's largest teachers' union, has been calling for smaller class sizes since the 1960s.
But some experts say the reform is unproven and extremely expensive. "Smaller class size means more money to employ more teachers, so of course the unions like it," said Dave Deschryver, a policy analyst with the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Education Reform.
"But there really is no correlation to student achievement. There are much better ways to spend money -- charter schools or programs that create performance incentive and focus on teacher evaluation and quality."
And Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli of The Fordham Foundation likened class-size reduction in a policy paper to "a warm Labrador puppy of a policy notion, petted by teachers and parents alike, but destined to bite when it grows up."
"There's not a lot of concrete evidence that cutting class size from 20-to-1 to 15-to-1 means kids learn a lot more and their scores go up," said Mr. Petrilli, program director of the education reform group. "It is the most expensive school reform you could possibly dream up, and it has no proven results."
Yet some educators maintain the need for smaller class size. "When you have 30 kids in a room, it's very difficult to get to the source of the problem -- you can only treat the reaction," Chase School Principal Barbara Shells said. With smaller classes, "you generally just get better teacher-pupil attention."
