Class-size researcher spreads message

Parents need to raise hell in direct proportion to decisions by policy-makers that increase class sizes in elementary schools.

That’s the opinion of Helen Pate-Bain, who mixes the grandmotherly appearance of a 77-year-old retired teacher with a take-no-prisoners educational mission to convince Americans that small class size is at the core of improvements in student achievement.

“Class size is the important foundation,” she said Monday during a visit to the Journal-World. Pate-Bain’s trip to Lawrence is sponsored by Kansas-National Education Assn. “Teachers need to have small classes so they can know the children.”

Pate-Bain, former president of the National Education Assn., said limiting kindergarten to third-grade classes to 17 or fewer students each was the best way to help them excel in math, reading and science. The nation’s foremost study on the advantages of small class sizes, dubbed the Tennessee Star Project, makes that clear, she said.

As a key researcher on the Star Project, Pate-Bain frequently leaves her retirement home in Gulf Shores, Ala., to explain that students placed in classes of 13 to 17 students throughout their kindergarten to third-grade years outperformed students in classes of 22 to 25 students in fourth grade and beyond. The Star researchers studied 11,600 students in 79 Tennessee schools and continue to track their progress.

“The longer you stay in a small class, the greater the gain,” she said.

Pate-Bain plans to share her perspective with the Kansas Legislature today in Topeka. Lawmakers should expect a blunt presentation, because she says any policy-maker governor, legislator, school board member who doesn’t buy into the small-class idea should be defeated at the ballot box.

“The public schools belong to us,” she said.

In Lawrence, based on preliminary staffing projections, less than one-fourth of the district’s classes from kindergarten through third grade will have 17 or fewer students in 2002-2003. It is primarily at the kindergarten and first-grade levels that the Lawrence district manages to keep classes under or near Pate-Bain’s threshold.

State budget woes are likely to exacerbate class-size challenges in Lawrence and other public school districts.

Pate-Bain said states that failed to heed the Star research were inviting expansion of remedial education in elementary schools, growth in high school drop-out rates and more trouble with teen-age pregnancy and juvenile crime.

Policy-makers who ignore Star findings send children down a path that prepares them to be “the next welfare recipients,” she said.

She acknowledged class size wasn’t the only requirement of a good education. Districts also need to hire qualified teachers and make certain they’re trained well, she said.

“It’s not a one-legged stool,” she said.