A ballot measure in Washington state to set hard caps on class sizes in the state’s public schools at between 17 and 25, depending on the grade level, narrowly passed in last week’s election, 50.8 to 49.2 percent, the Seattle Times reports.
The measure, known as Initiative 1351, is expected to cost about $5 billion over the next five years and will result in the hiring of not only teachers, but custodians, principals, and other non-teaching personnel as well. In fact, according to the Washington Policy Center, an independent think tank, 71 percent of new staff hired under I-1351 would not be classroom teachers.
Newspapers in the state had almost unanimously opposed the measure, which failed to inform voters of the cost. “In other words, voters essentially were asked if they favor lower class sizes, which has long been a popular idea in Washington and throughout the country,” wrote John Higgins and Justin Mayo for the Times.
Politico quoted Leonie Haimson, executive director of the advocacy group Class Size Matters, as calling the victory good news. “Washington kids will shoot to the head of the pack in terms of achievement, graduation rates, and real learning,” she was quoted as saying.
The initiative, however, will shift the responsibility for more than half of the cost onto local school districts, which could present a challenge. If the money’s not there, what are school boards supposed to do? You can’t pay teachers in chickens or goats these days. “Indeed, I-1351 could follow in the footsteps of another voter-approved class size measure: Initiative 728. Approved in 2000, it was suspended, amended and repealed in 2012,” the editors of the Seattle Times wrote today.
Questions have surfaced as to whether voters were adequately informed about their decision. Although measures that cap class sizes are bound to win—especially here, where the ballot measure also had the backing of teachers’ unions—recent experience has shown that taking a “hard cap” approach, as opposed to a more flexible and locally controlled approach, has led to revision.
In addition to Washington’s previous class-size initiative, money has been proven more powerful than the will of the people elsewhere: California, Georgia, Nevada, Ohio, Utah, and Wisconsin all loosened some class size restrictions during the Recession in order to consider the availability of funding, the New York Times noted.
In that 2011 article, Ms Haimson was quoted as saying, “Now, in the majority of states, you’re seeing definite increases in class sizes because of the recession and budget cuts. Unfortunately we’ve also seen the rise of a narrative that’s become dominant in education reform that insists that class size doesn’t matter.”
Perhaps the closest thing to the Washington initiative came in Florida, back in 2002, when voters approved a constitutional amendment that set hard caps on class sizes: 18 for pre-K through third grade, 22 for fourth through eighth grades, and 25 for high school, which took effect at the beginning of the 2010-11 school year. Legislators in the state tried but failed to change the amendment several times. In 2010, state Sen Don Gaetz and Rep Will Weatherford, both Republicans, sought a more flexible, funding-aware methodology for lowering class sizes across the state.
“It is painfully obvious that we need to update the class size amendment in the Florida Constitution in order to properly manage student enrollment at each school and allow our teachers to focus on teaching and our children on learning,” a press release quoted state Sen Steve Wise, then chair of the pre-K appropriations committee, as saying. “The proposed constitutional amendment, when passed, will ensure that the existing management of class size enrollment will be the responsibility of the school principals and not the individual classroom teacher,” he said, referring to Sen Gaetz and Rep Weatherford’s proposal.
The amendment’s ratification caused the state to invest some $16 billion in public schools between 2002 and 2010, just to meet the hard caps. We wonder if the I-1351 vote in Washington will meet a similar fate a few years from now or if a more flexible law is possible, as opposed to caps on class size that are so narrowly defined by absolute number.
Describe qualities or features of your school that other schools should copy. See Common Core writing standard WHST.11-12.1.A for more information.