After First Year, Smaller Class Sizes Get High Marks

California invested $1 billion this year in the hope that smaller classes would help the state’s youngest students.

What did the state get for its money? Little victories such as these:

When Fullerton first-grade teacher Vicki Weber took her class from Acacia Elementary School to the Los Angeles Zoo in May, she did not have to race from the monkey cages to the elephant walk, chasing errant students. With just 20 pupils in her class this year, there was time to stop and discuss the reptiles, she said, the kids asking “how much every snake weighed. How big is he? How much does he eat?”

When parents arrived for back-to-school night in San Francisco last fall, just weeks into the school year, veteran first-grade teacher Mary Gong was startled to realize that she could chat easily about each of her students. In previous years, with 10 more in her class, she couldn’t even remember all the students’ names at that point.

And then there’s 6-year-old Steven Escobedo, who started the year as a non-reader. Now he can use his spelling words to write sentences and boasts: “I don’t need help with my homework at all, and all the time my brother had to ask Mom for help.”

Steven, a typically effervescent first-grader, competed with only 19 other students for the attention of his teacher, Sonia Gomez, at Logan Street Elementary School in Echo Park. His brother, on the other hand, had 30 others in his fourth-grade class.

Gomez said the smaller classes made it possible for teachers like her “to focus on who you need to focus on.”

It’s too early, of course, to tell whether students across the state will make the same gains as Steven. And the big payoff, if there is one, won’t be rung up for years.

But what is already clear from visits to schools and conversations with teachers and parents around the state is that the first year of California’s grand experiment with smaller classes has generated tremendous enthusiasm.

Although school administrators have had worries about the program--mostly how to pay for it and how to find the additional space it requires--those concerns are outweighed by the difference it is making inside the classrooms.

Veteran teachers who were feeling burned out talk again about making a difference in children’s lives. Parents whose kids are in the program express renewed support for public schools, while those denied its benefits scowl.

So far, though, it is anecdotes--rather than test results--driving the push from Gov. Pete Wilson, Supt. of Public Instruction Delaine Eastin and legislative leaders to inject another $500 million next year into what is already one of the most expensive state educational reforms in U.S. history.

This year, public schools were able to reduce the number of pupils in each classroom to 20 or fewer in as many as four grades from kindergarten to third grade. One million children in 50,000 classrooms were able to take part.

Wilson is proposing that the state give school districts enough funds to have all students in those four lowest grades--1.9 million kids in all--participate in the program next year.

“I have never seen anything that was such an unequivocal success,” said Eastin, who has viewed the program firsthand at 188 schools in the past year. “There’s wonderful things happening.”

Some Concerns About Program

Still, reactions such as those are not universal. Preliminary analyses show that some concerns remain.

To help gauge the impact, a consortium of researchers from Stanford University, UC Berkeley, the Rand Corp. and the WestEd education policy think tank in San Francisco have surveyed teachers and administrators at more than 90 schools statewide, including 42 campuses in Los Angeles and Long Beach.

Although teachers gush about smaller classes being more manageable, one early finding is that they have not reduced the number of students placed in costly special education programs, said Bruce Fuller, an assistant professor of education and public policy at Berkeley.

It had been theorized that with fewer students, teachers would be better equipped to meet the needs of their most difficult students and would not have to move them into the special classes. Ironically, the classes these students are referred to for extra help often have more students than the classrooms they attend the rest of the time.

Another worry: The program required the rapid recruitment and hiring of more than 18,000 teachers, few of whom were both licensed and bilingual. That means that many students who come to school speaking a language other than English are being taught by inexperienced teachers who do not understand them.

The researchers also worry about the gulf created between schools in more affluent areas, which can put the program in place in all eligible grades, and those in poorer, more crowded areas--such as Los Angeles, Montebello, Santa Ana and Compton--that cannot.

In such districts, schools had to weigh the demands of parents for smaller classes against the sacrifices to find the one additional classroom needed for every two classes that are reduced from 30 pupils to 20. At many schools, new classrooms displaced child-care programs, libraries, computer rooms, music rooms, parent centers and teacher lounges.

Some of that dislocation will be remedied next year, once school districts get portable classrooms they have ordered. But if the state expands the class-size reduction to an additional grade, those facilities may never be reclaimed for their original purposes.

“Even with schools that have dealt fairly well with class-size reduction, they said it is happening too rapidly and they weren’t warned,” Fuller said.

Becki Robinson, vice president of the United Teachers-Los Angeles union, similarly calls the past school year “the worst year for elementary schools ever because of all the upheaval.”

The trade-offs are vividly on display at Amestoy Avenue School in Gardena.

Cramped Quarters at Gardena School

Amestoy is among roughly 150 schools in Los Angeles Unified, and hundreds more across the state, where teachers were forced to share their 960-square-foot domains with another teacher and 20 more students--two classes stuffed in one classroom, in other words.

At Amestoy, 10 teachers shared five classrooms. “As the year is coming to a close, we’re just counting the days because it’s been real tiresome,” said second-grade teacher Pearl Tanaka.

Most days, Tanaka or her teaching partner would flee those confines to spend time with students outdoors. To keep out of the hot sun, they split the $200 cost of a sunshade.

On days when it was too cold or rainy, they went in search of room inside. Usually, they wound up in the auditorium. But not always. That’s because the auditorium is used for music classes, classes for the gifted and parent meetings. Some teachers, meanwhile, ate on the stage--having given up their lunchroom. “You feel like a gypsy,” Tanaka said.

And yet she believes her pupils are better off today than if there had been more of them vying for her attention in a single, regular classroom. Half of her students were not reading last September. Now, she said, every one is reading--all but five at grade level.

“It’s really been a real wonderful chance for the children, for the teachers to really be able to meet their needs,” she said.

It’s similar up and down the state.

New Projects for Students

At Monte Vista Elementary in La Crescenta, the smaller number of pupils is motivating teachers to tackle projects that they would not have considered in more crowded classrooms, such as writing books and illustrating them. Other teachers talk of lining up a computer or two, figuring that it will be possible to have small groups of students work on them without supervision in the more placid classroom atmosphere.

Acacia School in Fullerton bumped its library into the cafeteria and dispersed the computers in its computer lab throughout the school. Even so, there is no ambivalence about the impact inside the classrooms. Vicki Weber said her students are months ahead of where they would be otherwise, especially in reading and writing.

“Their writing is beautiful, real colorful. It came alive,” Weber said. “With 20 students, more . . . can share their writing, stand up and read it.”

In Janice Turpin’s classroom in Santa Ana, the progress made by the students who did not speak English fluently was obvious during a lesson on barnyard animals. Previously, she would dictate sentences for the children to write down. “They can now do that for themselves,” she said.

This year, 80% of Heather Hayes’ first-grade class at Hudson School in Long Beach is reading. In previous years, only half the students were. And in math, they are working on adding and subtracting numbers up to 15 and are even tackling Venn diagrams, something she has never before taught in first grade. “It’s unbelievable,” Hayes said.

The differences are obvious throughout Logan, a year-round school in one of the most densely populated areas of Los Angeles, just north of downtown. Because of its year-round schedule, Logan had enough classrooms to have smaller classes in first and second grades without displacing its library, music room, computer lab and parent center.

Principal May Arakaki also was able to attract new teachers who, even though they didn’t have credentials, had graduated from top-notch colleges including UC Berkeley, UCLA and Notre Dame. And all of the nine teachers she hired were able to enroll in a university training program or L.A. Unified’s intern program.

“At Logan, I feel the children got the maximum benefit,” Arakaki said.

Rooms are quiet. Children move from one activity to the next with nary a hitch. They took field trips, such as hiking in the San Gabriel Mountains, that hadn’t been practical when there were more of them.

One day recently, while five first-graders read a book about “Mortimer” with mentor teacher Mary Davis, other students wrote on a computer, worked on math problems or copied down the “daily news” from the chalkboard. At the beginning of the year, Davis said, the five students going through Mortimer were among eight kids she worried most about. Now, each can read, although haltingly.

Teachers at Logan say the greatest beneficiaries have been students who speak Spanish at home. They now have more time to use their budding English skills in the classroom.

Test Results Still Not In

But whatever the benefits of having fewer pupils in each class, it’s clear that the higher test scores Californians thirst for will not automatically follow. That’s because schools statewide are using the same teaching methods as before.

For example, math lessons at Logan emphasize working in groups to “discover” the relationships between numbers, an approach that is criticized for downplaying drilling and fundamentals. Students write about math, use calculators and do math-related games--but spend little time memorizing 5 plus 4 or 9 minus 3. Standardized tests, meanwhile, do stress the basics.

Whether the test scores go up or not, the parents at Logan say they notice a difference. Gloria Rodriguez’s son, Gabriel, has had medical problems that required him to be in the hospital frequently. Even so, the individualized attention he is receiving from his teacher has enabled him to keep up with his peers.

Many parents now come to her wanting to know whether the program will be expanded to third grade and kindergarten next year.

“They come to me and ask, ‘Have you heard anything? Have you heard anything?’ ” Rodriguez said. “They’ve heard that, at other schools, the students are not even reading or speaking English, and they’re just concerned that they want to see the same thing happen for their kids in the third grade.”

But expansion of the program would make it difficult to find the space for new classrooms. One option is to free up time in classrooms by revamping the school calendar--shortening the year by 17 days, but adding 33 minutes to each of the 163 days that would be left. Arakaki said that would not please her, but that the alternative--eliminating the parent center, the music room or the computer lab--might be worse.

“All of these choices we have to make are going to cause tension and disruption,” she said.

Staff writers Nick Anderson and Duke Helfand contributed to this story.