Class Size DOES Matter

I live in a state which has fairly good education scores throughout the last 30-40 years. Because of that, our legislature is often not interested in discussing class sizes for early childhood classrooms. Because our scores are average, our government officials often don't see the need to address class size. However, they often wring their hands about the 5th, 8th, and 11th graders not being on level in reading and math. Most of us in early childhood have worn ourselves ragged trying to explain to the powers that be that concentrating on learning in early childhood years (K-2 in our public system) is the best way to assure children are on level when they reach the upper grades.

Five years ago I left the university because I decided that I wanted to end my teaching career back in the public school classroom. I just retired after teaching first grade for five years. During the 2023-24 school year, I spent most of the year with 29-30 students with 7-8 non-English speaking children. It was a frustrating year to say the least. It was almost impossible to provide reading and math support to all of my students as I walked around most of the day with a handheld translator and keeping behaviors in check with so many students in our small classroom. At the end of that year our on-level percentage was 46%. Not bad when my class began the year at 5%.

This past school year (2024-25) I had an average of 19 students in my class and two English Language Learners who had attended our kindergarten so they had a working knowledge of our language. I was able to provide such a great educational experience for this group of children. Our on-level percentage at the end of the year was 89%. No one will ever be able to convince me that class size doesn't matter. It does.