By DAVID BOYLE
We have heard some teachers complain that they have more than 40 students in their classes. This may be true for a few certain required classes. But this is the exception rather than the rule. It does make for good chanting by the teachers’ unions.
There has been much discussion in the Alaska Legislature regarding capping the number of students in a classroom. This is called the pupil-teacher ratio (PTR).
Several bills have been filed to cap the number of students per classroom. Rep. Zack Fields (D, Anchorage) has filed HB 98 in an attempt to limit the pupil-teacher ratio in public schools. But his bill only applies to a district that has more than 40,000 students — the Anchorage School District. It seems that class sizes don’t really affect student learning anywhere else in Alaska.
Rep. Julie Coulombe (R, Anchorage) filed HB 165, which also caps the number of students per classroom. But her bill only applies to a district that has more than 35,000 students. It appears as if Rep. Coulombe recognizes that the Anchorage School District is quickly losing students to home schools and private schools. Interestingly, Rep. Fields signed onto her bill as a co-sponsor.
Rep. Coulombe is in a swing district and has to heed the K-12 education industry’s power in the next election.
The Anchorage Teachers’ Union wants to also limit the number of students per classroom. It reinforces this policy by charging the district for every student that exceeds the PTR. It is apparent that the union is very concerned with the declining number of students and the resultant loss of teacher union members.
Here’s where the data get very, very interesting. The Department of Education and Early Development submitted its Annual Progress Report to the legislature as required by AS 14.03.078. This report contains the PTRs for all Alaska K-12 schools.
Here are some Pupil-Teacher Ratios in selected school districts:
| School District | Pupil-Teacher Ratio |
| Anchorage | 17.95 |
| Fairbanks | 19.10 |
| MatSu | 18.89 |
| Juneau | 16.46 |
| Kenai | 15.92 |
Granted, the above are averages across the entire district. Some classes will have a large number of students; other classes will have very few students; and the district correspondence schools (home schools) will have extremely large classes. But the average gives one the big picture of the PTR district wide.
Drilling down into the data shows more precise information. Here are some of the Anchorage class sizes:
| Anchorage School | Pupil-Teacher Ratio |
| Aquarian Charter School | 17.67 |
| Alaska Native Cultural Charter School | 13.05 |
| Bartlett High School | 20.16 |
| Clark Middle School | 16.48 |
| Eagle Academy | 15.83 |
| Goldenview Middle School | 19.76 |
| Inlet View Elementary School | 16.70 |
Except for Anchorage’s correspondence schools, all the schools have a PTR ratio of less than 23 students per teacher.
Here are some class sizes for the Fairbanks North Star Borough School District:
| Fairbanks School | Pupil-Teacher Ratio |
| Anderson Crawford Elementary School | 19.21 |
| Denali Elementary School | 16.82 |
| Lathrop High School | 18.53 |
| West Valley High School | 18.57 |
| North Pole Middle School | 15.88 |
| Ryan Middle School | 16.35 |
Except for the Fairbanks correspondence schools, all the schools have a PTR ratio of less than 21 students per teacher.
Here are some class sizes for the Kenai Peninsula Borough School District:
| Kenai Peninsula Borough School | PTR |
| Aurora Borealis Charter School | 16.02 |
| Homer Middle School | 13.80 |
| Kenai Central High School | 18.10 |
| Seward High School | 16.03 |
| Soldotna Elementary School | 12.20 |
| Skyview Middle School | 14.18 |
| Sterling Elementary School | 11.18 |
Except for Kenai correspondence schools, all Kenai schools have a PTR ratio of less than 19 students per teacher.
Here are some class sizes for the Mat-Su Borough School District:
| MatSu Borough School | Pupil-Teacher Ratio |
| Academy Charter School | 13.24 |
| Colony High School | 20.60 |
| Colony Middle School | 22.26 |
| Cottonwood Creek Elementary School | 15.86 |
| Knik Elementary School | 15.46 |
| Wasilla Middle School | 18.47 |
| Palmer Middle School | 18.29 |
Except for its correspondence schools, all Mat-Su schools have a PTR ratio of less than 24 students per teacher.
Here are a few select smaller school districts with their PTRs:
| Bristol Bay | 9.83 |
| Juneau | 16.46 |
| Ketchikan | 12.43 |
| Kodiak Island | 13.95 |
| Lake & Peninsula | 8.57 |
| North Slope | 11.45 |
| Pelican | 7.50 |
| Sitka | 12.32 |
Several people from the education establishment have testified to the House and Senate education committees that their classrooms are overflowing with students such that some don’t even have desks. But the data provided by the various school districts belies those testimonies for the most part.
Class sizes are important. But it is not the most important factor in student success. I attended a one-room rural schoolhouse that had one teacher and 26 students in 8 grades. When I went into the big city school, I was more than six months ahead of my classmates in virtually every subject.
Class size does matter but it is not nearly as important as the culture in the classroom. That culture includes respect for the teacher. Respect for one’s fellow students to learn. And respect from the school administration for the student and parents.
If you want to find what the Pupil-Teacher Ratio is in your child’s school, you can find the Pupil-Teacher Ratio for every Alaska School here beginning on page 88.
Fake news. Your looking overall. We have severly disabled programs that are 1:1 in nearly every school in urban areas. However class size is ranked 4th lowest in effect size. This means it is the 4th lowest indicator for student academic growth. It could however get out of hand. Right now class sizes are managable but it is neessary to not cram in too many. Management then becomes impossible. Back to my point, you can’t look at number of students compared to number of teachers. You cannot have 28 students with severe autism with one teacher. Look at PTR with regular education students to get the numbers right.
Exactly, one of the pressing issues are behavioral problems. One teacher for 20 well behaved students can be a productive learning environment. 5 unruly students with 5 teachers is still a challenge.
John, hold up a minute please. Are not special ed programs funded by the feds and actually paid by special ed student enrollment numbers? Has there ever been an attempt by public schools to increase Special ED enrollment numbers to boost school coffers?
Wow. Class sizes were MUCH larger when I was attending school. (We also didn’t get an A in many of those classes unless we were at 92% or better.)
“You cannot have 28 students with severe autism with one teacher.”
Nobody said you have 28 autistic students and only one teacher. The writer clearly said you can have more or less than the average.
But, you do raise a coouple questions: Just how many autistic students are there in, say, Anchorage? Now, compare that to the number of non-autistic students. What is the ratio?
Also, here another question nobody asks: What are the effects of autistic students in a classroom with non-autistic students? Do they affect the outcomes of those other students?
Thank you in advance for answering these questions.
ALL of my teachers had two pupils.
Haaaahaha!
Thanks, David. This is one of the lies that educators constantly state. You would think legislators would check the actual data and not just listen to the district and teacher who don’t tell the truth! My question is do we not think an additional $1,000 per student would cover this problem? Or do we want that and additional money. District class size should be a district decision, not a law by legislators.
Oh David, you are SO good at cherry picking anything that tells your story. Here’s a thought…go visit 10 elementary/middle/high schools at random (perhaps not all charter schools) and use a Ticonderoga pencil to tally the number of kids in a general education classroom. Then see if your “numbers” still add up.
SalmonSupper, I looked at all the K12 schools in the lengthy report. Note, that I did say there are some classes with more students and some classes with very few students. But the bottom line: the class size chant by the teachers’ union members also only applies to a very few classes.
What about the “culture” aspect mentioned? Note that the DOD schools rank at the top of the national NAEP tests. Could this be the “culture” impact?
We do have parents that are not engaged in their children’s education. That has always been the case and it is disheartening. Class disruptions by students who misbehave take away the learning opportunities from the remaining students as well. That can be “fixed” by the principal if that principal is backed up by the district’s Administration. Note that in my former one-room rural school house there were no disruptive students. Why? The one teacher, Mrs. Clothier. would not have allowed that. And even more important, parents would not have allowed their children to misbehave. There were consequences and they were applied.
I did not cherry pick as you say. I chose charter schools, elementary schools, middle schools and high schools for the 4 major school districts.
You, too, can look at the data.
Teacher to pupil ratio is NOT the same as class size!!! It’s dishonest to conflate the two. And it’s funny how the author uses the “when I was a kid, 60 years ago, Miss Olson had no problem managing 26 of us, and I turned out just fine” line. Most kids now days are nasty little buggers with loads of emotional baggage, attention spans of gnats, behavior nightmares, with entitled parents that enable their kids terrible behavior. Miss Olson couldn’t handle 5 of these little monsters now days, and we are asking teachers to handle 30 or more. No wonder their outcomes get worse and worse. You know one way to ensure outcomes never improve? Let class sizes increase even more!
Joe Smyth, can you help me define the Pupil-Teacher Ratio? Actually, I was a kid more than 70 years ago in that one room school house. I do understand the behavior problem of some of today’s students. A teacher friend of mine said the children in her elementary school classes were “feral”.
Maybe an even better way to improve student outcomes is to “manage” the disruptive students so the remaining students have a decent chance to learn. That would take an effort by the Administration to back up the principal, the principal to back up the teacher, and the teacher taught how to “manage” the classroom. It would also require the parent to back up the teacher. Isn’t classroom management taught in the UA education program?
Exactly! Many children don’t have home lives. They get shuffled between relatives with stints in foster homes. They can’t function in a school setting.
I just pulled up my class photo for 2nd and 8th grades at a Catholic elementary school in 1963 and 1969. Our 2nd grade class featured 41 students, and our 8th grade class had 44. There were no distractions like boys in the girls bathroom, and the subjects were heavy with reading, writing, arithmetic, and religion. I remember feeling like a genius when I started high school at the local public high school, and suddenly I had lots of time for the easy subjects………..like social studies, with a focus on the loose dress and behaviors of teenage females.
Good stuff, David…
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Point is this thing seems to be broke beyond the ability of any resposible, honest taxpayer/parent to fix.
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So… instead of worrying about PTR’s, maybe we should be putting our heads together, figuring out Plan B, what it takes to educate our children in spite of this fu… (oops!) albatross tied around our necka?
Pupil Teacher ratios are very useful. If one takes into account the full number of staff, including administrators, the ratio in Fairbanks drops to under 10 students per staff.
If out comrade educators can’t keep up with indoctrination quotas they need to be taken out back and shot.
Does this question even really matter? Note that just yesterday, the Urban Institute ranked Alaska’s NAEP scores at the very bottom of the scale, just behind Oregon. No matter how low the ration might be, the NEA and AFT will fight for more teachers, higher salaries, lower standards, more in-service days and less accountability. The result will be a continued slide of test scores and ability of graduates to function in society. Until the influence of these two organizations approaches zero, there will be no progress in education in Alaska or the US.
That was then. If a student was unruly they met the paddle. If that didn’t work the parents would be called to come pick them up. We don’t have those tools anymore.
The numbers reported here are very misleading. Actual class sizes – number of bodies in desks per classroom teacher – are much higher. These “official” numbers are skewed by factoring in all the special education teachers, who work with much smaller groups of students for specialized support on a limited basis.
The better discussion would be to talk about outcomes. For example, we’re seeing a huge problem with the actual education being delivered, as measured by Grade 4 and 8 reading and math levels. Why?
Speaking as a high school teacher in ASD, I have no idea what kind of formula they’re using to calculate pupil-teacher ratio, but it sure as heck isn’t based on actual class sizes. For example, I think every world history section in my school is over 33, and many are over 35. Some are approaching 40. And before anyone comes at me with “when I was in school class sizes were 42 and we were just fine”, I’m going to ask that you spend one day- just one- as the only adult in a room full of 35 or 40 teenagers and then we can talk about how it’s really not that big a deal and teachers are complaining about nothing. The quality of teaching I can deliver with a group of 25 students vs. a group of 35+ (and to be clear, my two biggest sections so far have been 38) is night and day. In the former I can actually teach the curriculum, in the latter it’s almost entirely classroom management. Maybe there are magical genius teachers out there who can do a good job with 40 students crammed into a classroom that was built for 30 max, but I’m 13 years into my career and haven’t figured out how yet…
Weird, in the 1980’s going to school in Anchorage our class sizes were bigger, yet the ASD was in the top ten in the country. Seems to me more money doesn’t equate to a better education. The US is not in the top 50 world wide in education. What has happend to our education? We spend the most world wide and have fallen behind. Time to take out the Union influences and make the teachers teach and leave their politics at home.
My kid’s pupil to teacher ratio averages about 0.125
I have an interesting thought. Is our education system that bad? I have 4 kids, they all did very well in public schools and the two oldest that are in there mid 20’s actually are in the top 20% of income eraners and earned academic scholarships based on SAT and ACT scores. All my friends kids that have good parents and have stable families their kids arer all doing well also. Maybe the state should stop scoring schools on graduation rate and suspension data and have real expectations for behavior, attendence, and work ethic. Kick the kids out and stop giving free lunch to students who won’t work. Pull thye PFD if students dont attend school and get suspended for behaivior. I bet our test scores and ranking go up real fast. Just a thgought.