STAR & SAGE Prove that Small Classes Yield Big Benefits

By Bob Chase, President
National Education Association

Each spring at Passover, Jews sing a song called Dayenu, which, loosely translated, means, “it would have been enough.” The gist of the song is that during the Exodus, one blessing would have been enough, but miraculously, good news kept coming.

I thought of Dayenu recently when more good news was released by the Tennessee Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project, the nation’s most comprehensive study of the impact of class size on student achievement.

Certainly, every parent knows intuitively that reducing class size will improve a child’s education: Children thrive in the warmth of individual attention from adults. But the STAR project confirms this common sense with impressive empirical evidence.

Dubbed “the gold standard” by other class size researchers, the STAR project was launched in 1985 and has tracked some 6,500 students in 79 schools since kindergarten. Initially, it found that children who attended kindergarten through third grade in classes with 13-17 pupils did significantly better on tests than children in classes with 22-25 pupils.

Five years later, STAR found that children who’d been in smaller classes continued to outperform others in reading, math, and science, even though they, too, were now in larger classes. By eighth grade, in fact, kids who’d attended the smaller classes in K-3 were at least one full year ahead of their peers academically. This is huge.

Today, students in the study have begun donning caps and gowns for their high school graduations. And yet, some 14 years later, those from the smaller K-3 classes continue to reap benefits. A greater percentage are graduating from high school than students from the larger classes. Their dropout rate is lower and their GPAs are higher. A greater number are ranked within the top 25 percent of their class and have taken the SAT or ACT exams.

Most impressive are the strides made by minority students. The initial STAR project showed that, while students of all backgrounds benefit from smaller classes, those who gain the most academically are poor, minority, inner-city, and rural children. Now STAR has found that, when class sizes are reduced, the gap that usually exists between black and white students taking college entrance exams is cut by more than half as well.

Currently, a cadre of businesspeople are touting “opportunity scholarships” – i.e. vouchers – as a cure-all for children in troubled school districts. Awarding $600-$1,600 in private school tuition to inner-city children through a lottery, they claim, is the only way to improve education. In Florida, such an assumption has become law. Under new legislation, students in troubled public schools will be given private school tuition vouchers, courtesy of the taxpayers.

The STAR project underscores how reckless and misguided such policies are. Vouchers have not been shown to improve student achievement, and they drain precious resources away from the public schools that need them most. Meanwhile, reducing class sizes in the earliest grades is a proven reform that can improve student achievement wholesale for a prolonged period of time. It has more opportunity, equality, and accountability built into it than any plan to funnel limited numbers of children into unaccountable private institutions.

Right now, the vouchers vs. smaller class sizes debate is being played out in Milwaukee. There, approximately 6,000 children are being educated through a voucher program costing $25 million while 11,000 other children are being educated through SAGE, a statewide program that reduces class size in selected public schools– at roughly half the cost. Tests show that students in the SAGE program outperform their peers using vouchers.

Today’s youth culture often generates peer pressure not to succeed. However, reducing K-3 class size in inner-city public schools primes a critical mass of students for academic success early on. Scholastic achievement is no longer cast as the province of a few who have been estranged from their peers or transported elsewhere.

Yes, reducing class size costs money. But it’s an investment that’s proven to deliver increasing returns for years on end. This, I believe, is news worth singing about.

Posted May 6, 1999