This editorial is from the NW Florida Daily News
EDITORIAL: Counties, costs and class sizes
Published: Friday, October 25, 2013 at 16:13 PM.
Congratulations to the Okaloosa County School District, whose planners appear to have complied with Florida’s class size limits at all schools — and to have done so while keeping costs and hirings in check. “We did it with absolute fidelity,” said Superintendent of Schools Mary Beth Jackson.
It’s no reflection on school officials that they’ve done an excellent job of meeting questionable goals.
The goals were set 11 years ago, in 2002, when voters approved a constitutional amendment capping class sizes in Florida’s public schools. The caps: 18 students per class in kindergarten through third grade, 22 in fourth through eighth grades, and 25 in core subject classes in high school. The limits were phased in and now are in full effect.
This newspaper opposed the class size limits from the beginning.
There was something inherently nutty about the idea of constantly moving students around to meet cookie-cutter targets. Supporters said smaller classes would improve education, but research on that point was fuzzy. Beginning in the late 1980s, Kansas City, Mo., reduced student-teacher ratios to about 12-to-1 and built 15 new schools; a 1998 study found that those reforms had failed to raise test scores.
Test scores aren’t booming in Okaloosa County, either. In June of this year, we reported that FCAT results “showed the number of students passing the writing exam had fallen below the state average and that fewer third-graders passed the math section of the (test) than last year.”
Clearly, smaller classes are not a quick path to educational excellence.
School officials in Walton and Santa Rosa counties are reaching a similar conclusion. They say they’ve struggled to meet the class size limits by shuffling students from classroom to classroom and hiring more teachers, but it’s a losing battle.
Said Walton Superintendent of Schools Carlene Anderson: “I’m not going to start scrambling children around just to make the numbers fit.”
Unfortunately, making the numbers fit is what the class size decree is all about.