This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2012, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Sen. Karen Morgan deserves more than a pat on the head for her dogged effort to convince her colleagues to allocate money to reduce class sizes in kindergarten through third grade.
Morgan, a Democrat from Cottonwood Heights, has tried before, and will try again this year, by sponsoring legislation aimed at helping Utah's young children get the early academic boost provided by smaller classes.
She is up against tough opposition in the form of Sen. Howard Stephenson, who keeps beating the old anti-public education drum no matter what his constituents say about how they want their education dollars spent.
Utah's public school classes, the largest in the nation, present an almost insurmountable challenge for teachers. The median class sizes are 22 for kindergarten, 23 for first grade, 24 for second grade and 25 for third grade. It is during these earliest years of a child's education when he must learn reading and math skills needed to succeed in all the higher grades and eventually graduate from high school with the basic academic tools to get a decent job or go on to college.
Research, particularly an extensive study by the University of Minnesota called STAR (Student-Teacher Achievement Ratio), which looked at Tennessee K-3 to gauge the impact of smaller classes, has shown that young children do benefit from fewer classmates.
STAR compared classes of 13-17 students with classes of 22-26 students both with and without an additional teacher aide in the larger classes. Participating teachers did not receive any professional training for teaching smaller classes. The report states that "STAR was unusual because it possessed essential features of a controlled research experiment designed to produce reliable evidence about the effects of reducing class size." It included 79 schools, more than 300 classrooms and 7,000 students, and students were followed through four years in the assigned class size.
Student testing showed that the students in the smaller classes outperformed students in larger classes, despite whether teachers in the larger classes had an aide.
Other studies have shown similar results, but the Tennessee study is the most scientifically valid and extensive.
Smaller class sizes in K-3 can have an ongoing positive effect, even raising the graduation rate, especially among minority students who don't have access to good preschools.
But lowering class size is expensive and would require an on-going commitment from the Legislature. Morgan and others like her should keep fighting to convince the Republican conservative ideologues. Utah's kids deserve it.