Times: West Contra Costa school district slashes jobs, increases class sizes
— by Jeffrey Wisniewski — 30 April 2009 — 1 comment below »
Budget cuts means bigger class sizes… “As a way to help close the school district’s budget gap, the board voted 3-2 this week to increase kindergarten class sizes from 20 to 24 children and third-grade sizes from 20 to 28. The move — subject to bargaining with the teachers union — will save the district an estimated $3 million a year.“
I grew up in rural schools in Pennsylvania, with no expectation that any of us farm children would amount to much beyond farming, factory work, or, for the lucky few, being a manager at the local supermarket. However, as the years have gone by, I have grown confident that my education was far superior to the training offered to my own children a generation later. I left sixth grade being able to do arithmetic in binary or hex numbers, whereas students today struggle with fractions. At the end of 11th grade, I could describe the difference between leptotene and zygotene chromosomes, whereas todays’ 11th graders seem not to know the difference between mitosis and meiosis. Nearly all of my classes had about 35 students. I am convinced that smaller class sizes has almost nothing to do with educational achievement and is based almost solely on teachers’ unions trying to limit the effort of teachers. Larger class sizes mean that we need fewer teachers and, if the system worked properly, that means we could select the best among them. I feel strongly that larger class sizes are in the best interest of our students’ education. Those who feel otherwise should question the trends in class sizes and measures of achievement over recent decades.