NYC Teachers' Mr. Jones
NEW MATH: Subtract Teachers, Add Pupils
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| Overcrowding in Classrooms: Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer people than before the recession. |
By MOTOKO
RICH
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Donna Guy’s fourth-grade class at Caln Elementary School here is
too big — 30 pupils — for the room, so some of them sit halfway into a coat
closet. Across town at Rainbow Elementary School, the 36 third graders in
Kristen Pleasanton’s gym class rotate on and off the bench during 25 minutes of
seven-a-side soccer games, because she cannot supervise all of them playing at
once.
And during social studies class at Scott Middle School, Keith
Lilienfeld tries to keep control of a class of 25 students, 10 who need special
education services, four who know little or no English and others who need more
challenging work than he has time to give.
“I’m up there putting out fires like you wouldn’t believe,” said
Mr. Lilienfeld, who used to have the help of two or three classroom aides.
“There’s only one of me, and there’s a need for about five of me in there.”
Across the country, public schools employ about 250,000 fewer
people than before the recession, according to figures from the Labor
Department. Enrollment in public schools, meanwhile, has increased by more than
800,000 students. To maintain prerecession staffing ratios, public school
employment should have actually grown by about 132,000 jobs in the past four
years, in addition to replacing those that were lost, said Heidi Shierholz, an
economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.
Coatesville, a diminished steel town with 7,200 students, used to
employ more than 600 teachers, psychologists, reading and math specialists, and
other certified personnel. Since 2008, the district has cut close to one-fifth
of that staff, according to Angelo Romaniello, the district’s assistant
superintendent.
“We didn’t cut to the bone,” said Audra Ritter, a middle school
special education teacher and president of the Coatesville Area Teachers
Association. “We cut into the bone.”
School districts in other hard-hit states, including California,
Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and Texas, are coping with similarly
squeezed resources. Along with budget cuts at the federal, state and local
levels, rising public school enrollment over the past five years has
exacerbated the pinch.
The staffing gap has pushed elementary class sizes to 30 students
and more in parts of California, where special state funds had been designated
since the mid-1990s to keep classes in kindergarten through third grade capped
at 20 students. In Dallas this year, the public school district has applied for
more than 200 waivers from the state’s maximum class size of 22 students for
kindergarten through fourth grade.
Class sizes in some high schools in Charlotte-Mecklenburg County
in North Carolina have swelled to as many as 40 students, and some guidance
counselors are advising up to 500 students. In Cobb County, Ga., where the
district has laid off about 1,300 staff members — or about 16 percent of the
teaching force — in the past five years, average class sizes in fourth and
fifth grades are now about 33 students, five above the state maximum of 28.
Districts are making these difficult trade-offs at a time when
schools are raising academic standards and business leaders are pushing schools
to prepare a work force with better skills.
“We can’t have the doublespeak where everybody talks about how
important education is to our being globally competitive,” said Daniel A. Domenech, the
executive director of the American Association of School Administrators, “and
then education is not a priority when it comes to funding.”
In Pennsylvania, although the state’s education budget is now
above prerecession levels, a large proportion of money is being diverted to
replenish underfunded pensions, leaving less for actual classrooms, saidMichael Wood, research
director at the Pennsylvania Budget and Policy Center.
The cutbacks have been particularly pronounced in less affluent
school districts, which have trouble raising local property taxes or asking
parents’ associations to fill in gaps.
Wealthier communities can lean more on parents and local
taxpayers. Just 35 miles from Coatesville, in the Lower Merion
School District, which shares a border with the ravaged
Philadelphia school district, enrollment has swelled by about 15
percent to 7,900 students in the past five years. Property taxes have increased
every year since 2008, and even elementary students now study foreign
languages. The district has avoided cutting any staff members, leaving class
sizes in the low to mid-20s.
Here in Coatesville, by contrast, where more than half of the district’s
students are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches, the school board has
twice raised the maximum class size for third through fifth grades in the past
five years, with some classes topping out at 33 students.
Staff cuts among reading, special education and English language
specialists have hit especially hard.
On a recent afternoon at Scott Middle School, Mr. Lilienfeld
placed a red rubber ball atop a stool at the front of the classroom. The setup
served as a makeshift buzzer in a quiz game intended to help students review
for a coming test.
One English-language learner put his head on his desk and refused
to participate. Another girl, who receives special education services, spent
the entire period doodling on a notepad. When several boys taunted a girl and
she responded with an explosive “Shut up!” Mr. Lilienfeld ordered her out of
the room.
“There is no way I could adapt the curriculum to meet the needs of
all the kids in my class,” he said. During the next period, 26 students filed
into Mr. Lilienfeld’s classroom for a study hall period, which is used to fill
out their schedules because the school has cut so many electives.
The cutbacks in staff levels during the recession and its
aftermath followed two decades in which the teaching force across the country
expanded at a much faster rate than student enrollment.
According to Richard M. Ingersoll, a professor of education and
sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, the public school population
increased by 24 percent from 1987 to 2012, while the number of working teachers
grew by 46 percent.
Teachers say the delicate balance of a class ecosystem, with its
range of personalities, academic abilities and social skills, can be upset by
just a few more students in the room. Still, research on the importance of
class size in helping students learn is mixed. Although a study in
Tennessee in the 1980s
showed that children benefited from smaller class sizes of 13 to 17 students in
the early grades, other studies have shown few effects.
Students, nonetheless, take notice. In Mrs. Guy’s fourth-grade
class in Coatesville, Julian Rodriguez, 9, said the number of students resulted
in “too much noise for the other kids.”
Then, mustering the philosophical resilience of a child, Julian,
who eagerly waved his hand in the air when Mrs. Guy asked questions, smiled.
“But it’s good because you make a lot of friends,” he said.
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