Some CPS classes have 30-plus kids
CTU has put class sizes, staffing at center of strike
Chicago Public Schools employs just over 21,000 teachers for a population of just under 300,000 kids at district-run schools, a ratio of about one teacher to every 14 students. So how did some schools end up with classrooms packed with 30, 35 or even 40 kids?
It’s a question that’s been swirling as the Chicago Teachers Union has put class sizes and staffing issues at the center of the teachers strike that’s now on its second week. The union wants Mayor Lori Lightfoot to commit $24 million to put teacher’s assistants in crowded classrooms and it wants firm caps that would limit the number of kids in kindergarten classrooms to 20 and in primary classrooms to 24.
The union complains that current caps limiting class sizes to around 28 kids aren’t enforceable and are routinely ignored. A union analysis of district data shows that enrollment exceeds the caps in roughly 1,300 elementary and more than 1,000 high school classes. The key to solving the problem, the union says, is to hire more teachers.
But what about all the teachers who are already employed by the district? Why can’t they be shuffled around to give relief to the overcrowded classrooms?
Education policy experts say that simply dividing the number of students in a district by the number of teachers paints a misleading picture of a district’s resources. That’s because not all teachers are directly responsible for a class of students.
An elementary-level arts teacher, for example, may visit several classrooms in a single day, rather than being responsible for a distinct group of kids. And most staffing decisions aren’t made by the district, which has decentralized its authority so that principals at individual schools can make decisions to fit the unique needs of their schools.
Getting a clear and accurate picture of overcrowded classes, where they’re located and who is affected by them is such a challenge that lawmakers in Springfield passed a law earlier this year that will require all Illinois school districts to collect and publish class size data in the first two months of each school year.
Until that law takes effect in 2021, the class size information that’s readily available to parents is merely a schoolwide average on each school’s report card. The report cards don’t provide a teacher count or class sizes for individual classes. And the schoolwide average can be misleading.
Take Simeon Career Academy in Chatham, for example. The school’s report card lists the average class size as 29. But a Tribune review of CPS data found that there are also 50 classes at Simeon with 37 students or more.
While CPS has been reluctant to publicize the overcrowding issue, district officials acknowledge that there is a problem. Both the district and the union say drastic underfunding is the culprit.
The district’s budget of $6 billion is about $2 billion shy of what it would need to reach “adequacy,” according to the Illinois State Board of Education. The state’s “adequacy” standard includes measures like capping class sizes at 15 or 20 students at schools with low-income populations. Three-quarters of the students at CPS are considered low-income.
And at CPS, dollars are distributed based on the number of kids in each school. That creates a financial incentive for schools to pack students into classes and makes it difficult for schools with declining enrollment to hire more teachers.
Those factors have combined to create an uneven distribution of resources where the kids who are most in need of more attention from teachers are often most likely to be in a crowded class. But even advocates of smaller class sizes say putting firm caps on classes won’t solve the problem if the money isn’t there.
“One of the issues with having hard caps is that if your system overall is underfunded, as soon as you set requirements in one area, then other stuff gets cut,” said Cassie Creswell, whose advocacy group, Illinois Families for Public Schools, has pushed for better state funding of schools. “If you snapped your fingers and put class caps in place, the overall system is so underfunded still, you’d end up just pushing around the dollars that you have. So you’d end up with people cutting arts or libraries. Some things (would) improve but other things won’t.”
Overcrowded classes typically fall into one of three categories. There are the neighborhood schools that cannot physically accommodate the number of students who’ve enrolled. These schools may have the money they’d need to hire additional teachers, but no classrooms to house additional classes. And there are the selective enrollment schools where principals have decided that having more students — and the dollars that come with them — is better for the school than keeping class sizes down. In both cases, the crowding is seen as a sign that parents value the quality of the schools enough to tolerate larger class sizes.
A CPS official told the Tribune that the district wants to focus its efforts on a third type of school: The under-enrolled neighborhood school where studentbased budgeting has caused a downward financial spiral. As kids have left these schools, the schools have lost dollars, hurting their ability to attract new students. It’s at these schools where principals struggle to balance resources. For example, splitting a kindergarten class of 35 into two wouldn’t generate any new dollars from the district or the state, but it would require hiring a new teacher.
A committee of district and union officials exists to monitor class size issues and intervene when needed, but there’s not enough money to hire new teachers or place teacher’s assistants in all the overcrowded classes.
That’s why the union and the district are pushing for targeted interventions at the neediest schools first. That’s the right approach, said Diane Whitmore Schanzenbach, director of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.
“That’s where I would put the marginal dollar,” Schanzenbach told the Tribune. “We know that class size matters more for disadvantaged children … That doesn’t mean that class size doesn’t matter at (the other) schools. It just means that for most bang for the buck, you’d be better off investing in that (underenrolled) school.”