This week’s headline announcing the Anchorage School District’s plans to cut 100s of jobs formally kicked off our annual school funding conversation. Our preliminary budget, while not as dire, will likely also lead to the elimination of some positions. Much of our conversation on how to curb expenses will center on our pupil to teacher ratio. For many, an increase to PTR should be a last resort. But after visiting Sterling Elementary last week, I was reminded that while PTR is important, our students’ ability to learn independently is even more critical. A class of 24 can accomplish just as much as a class of 22 if the students are adept at independent learning. In each of the primary classes that I visited at Sterling, I saw a group of students working with their teacher while the rest of the class worked independently in small groups or alone. I was impressed that these young students were for the most part getting on with their work. The teacher rarely had to encourage them.
There is no question that a large class size presents challenges and that we want to keep our classes small. But there is also a need to train our students to learn on their own. This important skill is one of the foundation pieces of differentiation. Acquiring the skills to learn independently doesn’t just happen, it has to be taught. It was obvious that the Sterling teachers have spent time with their students on this.
2 Comments
I don’t think anyone can dispute the fact that a 24:1 PTR is do-able. But the question is, is it ideal? Smaller PTR’s and independent learning are not mutually exclusive.
I’m interested to see if there are studies that show that higher PTR’s having a greater advantage over small PTR.
Thanks for the comment. I don’t think that anyone has found that 27 kids in a class is better than 24. I am aware of studies that show that a small increase in class size does not have a corresponding negative effect on student achievement. I’ll look for these and share as I can. Ideally we keep small classes. However, with our revenues not keeping pace with our expenditures, increasing PTR is one of the options that our board will consider to balance our budget. Students who have learned to be good indpendent learners are the key to the larger class size. As we all know, direct instruction to a large group of students will ineveitibly leave some behind. Small group direct instruction is the way to go.