By Rebecca Cook
Associated Press
BELLEVUE — Gov. Gary Locke on Friday praised the smaller class sizes produced by Initiative 728 and promised to protect school funding, even as other parts of the state budget suffer deep cuts.
"There will be some very painful cuts in every area of the budget, especially human services," warned Locke, who said basic education will emerge unscathed from the budget proposal he plans to release Tuesday. "Education is still my top priority."
Initiative 728 was passed by 72 percent of voters last year, giving school districts across the state $393 million for the 2001-03 school years. At the same time, the state faces a $1.2 billion budget hole. Locke declared the I-728 money off-limits in the budget wars.
"This is all nonnegotiable," he said Friday, before touring Spiritridge Elementary in Bellevue. The Bellevue School District used I-728 money to cut average class size from 23 to 21 children.
While there are no test scores yet to prove it, parents and teachers say smaller class sizes have improved education.
"I’ve really noticed a difference," said Kim McDermott, whose daughter was in kindergarten at Spiritridge last year with 29 pupils and now is in a first grade class with 20 other children. She said her daughter speaks up more confidently in class and is happier when she comes home from school.
"She was overwhelmed" in the large class, McDermott said. "Now she comes home less tired, less edgy and less grumpy."
Catherine Guilford’s son has 19 other pupils in his third grade class and her daughter is in a fifth grade class with 30 kids. Guilford says her daughter pays a price.
"When you give a teacher 30 or 31 children, they cannot personally sit down with each child every day and give them the attention they need," Guilford said. "Those children are more on their own, sink or swim, and I don’t think that’s a fair position to put a 10-year-old in."
Conventional wisdom says smaller class sizes improve education. The issue gets bipartisan support in Congress, and Republican state lawmakers joined Locke on Friday to pledge support for protecting I-728 money.
Several studies over the past 20 years have shown benefits of smaller class sizes, especially for younger students. One of the largest was Tennessee’s Project STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio), a 7,000-child study in the 1980s that found that pupils in smaller classes substantially outperformed those in larger classes, and that the advantage persisted across race, class and gender lines. The federal Department of Education’s position is that class size reduction yields higher academic achievement, especially in grades K-4.
But not everyone believes small classes are a magic bullet. Eric Hanushek, senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, says reducing class size doesn’t significantly help pupils older than kindergarten or first grade.
"Teacher quality is much more important than class size in affecting student outcomes," Hanushek wrote in a March 2001 paper called "Evidence, Politics, and the Class Size Debate."
While 63 percent of I-728 money went to reducing class sizes, school districts could and did use the money for other purposes, such as after-school programs, all-day kindergarten, preschool, teacher training and building new classrooms.
The Yakima School District got $2.5 million from I-728, and spent most of that money to create 27 new all-day kindergarten classes. Next year, Deputy Superintendent Jack Irion said, the district plans to add 15 more all-day kindergarten classes.
In Everett, the school district hired 30 new teachers. In Coupeville, K-5 class size dropped from 24 pupils per teacher to 21.
The Spokane School District spent 90 percent of the $5.8 million it received to add new teachers: 53 elementary teachers, 18 in middle school and 15 in high school. The remaining money went to train 10 teachers as mentors to help new and struggling teachers.
"My class load has dropped from 26 the last eight years to 18 this year. I can’t begin to describe the differences in my class," said Kate Moore, a first grade teacher at Browne Elementary. "I can care more and can have more to give."
Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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