State Class-Size Reduction Program Gets Rave Reviews

California invested $1 billion this year in the hope of generating one million success stories among its youngest students.

Certainly, the state won many little victories. Vicki Weber thinks she had 20 in Fullerton.

When Weber took her first-grade 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 this year, not the usual 30, there was time to stop and talk reptiles and mammals. Kids seemed more scientifically inquisitive, she said.

“They wanted to know how much every snake weighed, how big is he, how much does he eat. They started looking at giraffes and asking about measurement, how much taller they were,” Weber said. “I haven’t had that in years past.”

Consider Mary Gong’s experience in San Francisco. At a back-to-school night last fall, just weeks into the school year, the veteran first-grade teacher 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 kids’ names at that point.

Or listen to Steven Escobedo. He started the year as a nonreader at Logan Street School in the Echo Park area of Los Angeles. Now he writes sentences on his own 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 had only 19 classmates in first grade, while his brother in fourth grade had 30. Sonia Gomez, Steven’s teacher, said smaller classes enabled teachers “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 sort of gains that parents, teachers and policymakers are betting on. The big payoff, if there is one, won’t be rung up for years.

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But what is already clear from visits to schools and conversations with teachers and parents is that the first year of California’s grand experiment with smaller classes has generated tremendous enthusiasm. Though 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 dynamic impact it is making inside classrooms.

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

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

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

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

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

Eastin said she’s been stopped in the grocery store by parents thanking her.

Indeed, many Californians say they notice student gains even though there is no test data to back them up. A Times Orange County Poll in May found that 60% of county residents think smaller classes are making a “big difference” in helping youngsters learn to read and write.

Still, the high praise is not universal. Some critics say that regardless of class size, California teachers need to put more time into the fundamentals of computation, spelling and phonics before test scores in reading and math show improvement.

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

While 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 new 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 between schools in more affluent areas, which can put the program in place in all grades, and those in poorer, more crowded areas--such as Santa Ana, Los Angeles, Montebello and Compton--which cannot.

In such districts, schools had to weigh the demands of parents for smaller classes against the sacrifices it takes 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.

“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.

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The tradeoffs were on display on a recent morning at Thomas Jefferson Elementary in Anaheim City School District.

There, in one of Orange County’s most crowded school systems, administrators took extraordinary measures to reduce class size in first and second grades. They had already moved most schools to year-round schedules and packed campuses with portable classrooms.

Out of options, the Anaheim officials in February assigned teachers to work in groups of three, handling 60 students in two rooms. About 150 schools in Los Angeles Unified, and hundreds of others across the state, made similar moves.

That might seem like a recipe for chaos.

But Elena Tinder, a first-grade teacher at Jefferson, said the arrangement worked. As a portable stereo played a compact disc of soothing seashore music, students worked quietly on puzzles and reading assignments, apparently unperturbed by teachers shuffling back and forth from one room to another.

Tinder said children were able to dig deeper this spring in their study of oceans and the marine food chain. “We can address individual students,” Tinder said. “Twenty is just a more manageable number.”

One of her partners, Maria Duenas, said: “The students feel more personable with us. They’ve really bonded. They have more confidence, and they can come up to us and say, ‘I need more help. I don’t understand.’ ”

It’s similar up and down the state.

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

Acacia Elementary in Fullerton bumped its library into the cafeteria and dispersed the computers in its computer lab throughout the school. Even so, there’s no ambivalence about the impact inside 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.”

It also was possible to do more hands-on science--studying insects, liquids, solids and weather.

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’re working on adding and subtracting numbers up to 15 and are even tackling Venn diagrams, something she’s never before taught in first grade. “It’s unbelievable,” Hayes said.

In Janice Turpin’s classroom at Garfield Elementary 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.

Times staff writer Duke Helfand contributed to this story.

* TEACHER EXODUS?

Awaiting a contract settlement, hundreds of Orange Unified employees threaten to go. B1