Catherine Shreves asked me to forward the district's response to my question about whether demographics were controlled when assessing improvement from smaller class sizes. The honesty is appreciated, though the answer is what I feared: students who are in smaller classes longer also have other, basic advantages. That makes it impossible to know exactly how much of the test score improvements are due to class size alone. That said, I'm still a strong supporter of the referendum, because overall, things seem to be moving in the right direction. I remain skeptical that the best way to spend money is making classes smaller, but I'm not an ed expert so I won't overrate my doubts. David Brauer Kingfield - Ward 10 Dear David, Catherine, and Judy: David asked a good question regarding the correlation of Minnesota Basic Standards pass rates with years of enrollment during the referendum reduced class size period. Since the referendum was not implemented as a controlled study (e.g. randomly assigning schools to small class size vs. large class size)there were no controls for student demographics. The students who were continuously enrolled in Minneapolis from 1st to 7th grade were, by definition, more stable than students who were enrolled 4-6 years, 1-3 years, or no years. They also were less likely to be students of color, more likely to live with two parents, and less likely to receive free or reduced price lunch. Controlled studies with random assignment of students to treatments are relatively rare in education. Fortunately there is a study of reduced class size out of Tennessee (the Tennessee STAR program,www.telalink.net/~heros/classsizeresearch.htm) that did randomly assign students and found large effects for reduced class size. Our study is consistent with these finding but since it is correlational, we cannot claim that reduced class size caused the increased MBST pass rates. Thanks for asking. - Dave ***************************************** David Heistad, Ph.D., Director Research, Evaluation & Assessment Minneapolis Public Schools 807 NE Broadway Mpls. MN 55413 Ph: 612-668-0570 Fax: 612-668-0575
