We've seen a major difference in the amount of interaction between teachers and kids, and discipline problems are going down. It's a lot harder to raise achievement in an inner-city district when you have 30 kids in a class than when you have 20. He laments that the state does not pay all the expenses of shrinking class sizes. When San Francisco officials announced significant improvement among 1st and 2nd graders on the Comprehensive Test of Basic Skills last year, they immediately credited smaller classrooms. At the city's E.R. Taylor Elementary School, where the number of 1st grade classrooms rose from four to six, CTBS scores rose 8 percentage points last year.
Instruction is much more focused.
Teachers are less stressed out. And although Ms. Hiroshima had to hire several teachers with emergency permits last year, she says a mentoring program helped ease the transition. Joan McRobbie, a spokeswoman for WestEd, a San Francisco education research firm, cautions that it's hard to link improved test scores directly to class-size reduction. What we are sure of is that urban districts have the hardest time doing it. It has been one of the few states without a mandatory statewide test since 1994, when Gov. Pete Wilson vetoed the reauthorization of the California Learning Assessment System because it did not provide individual test scores.