I’ve written quite a bit recently about class sizes, which is topical as the new school year begins. Last week I made the motions to approve the addition of 7 more teachers for the 2010-11 school year. This allowed us to add three more sections of All Day Kindergarten and add more support teachers at the high school level. The motions passed, thankfully, despite some hemming and hawing from some Board members. I did not hesitate.
As a result, the average class size in elementary this year will be 22.3 students per class. As I said at the Board meeting, this is incredibly favorable. But how can we tell how it really compares? The state does not require districts to report class size averages unlike other staffing and financial metrics.
However, the state DOES track the ratio of teachers to students, the most reasonable proxy to class size. It stands to reason that the lower the ratio of teachers to students the lower the class size. This is one of the data points I included in the development of the Financial Benchmarking Report I introduced to district operations about three years ago.
The data from these reports lag by about a year as they are based on audited numbers. So the most recent report is from 2008-9. The report shows GPPSS’ average general education pupil to teacher ratio is 20. By state definitions, GPPSS is a category D district since we are between 5,000 and 10,000 students. This is not small in comparison, by the way. We are the 31st largest district in the state. There are 49 total category D districts in the state.
Among all 49 category D districts, only four districts have a lower student to teacher ratio than GPPSS – and three of those four edge us out by a single number (19 to our 20). The district with the lowest ratio, Bloomfield Hills, happens to rank first in the state in revenue per pupil (they receive $4,000 more per pupil than GPPSS) and last year closed a third of their elementary schools and announced they will merge their two high schools into one. Our financial strategy has allowed us to avoid such actions, yet we still have very competitive ratios of teachers to students.
If we were to expand the comparison to all category A through E districts, a group that constitutes about half of all Michigan students, GPPSS would rank 6th in the state.
Any reasonably objective analysis of this data would support the conclusion that GPPSS has very favorable ratios of teachers to students and thus very favorable class size averages.