It’s 8:20 in the morning. There are 35 kids in one classroom with one teacher. The teacher is tired because they were up late grading 35 assignments. The classroom is loud, and the teacher struggles to capture the attention of everyone in the room. The students in the back are easily distracted by one another, and they are just far enough away that the teacher can’t quite do anything about it.
We’ve all noticed the large class sizes this year. They’re hard to miss. But, what may be harder to grasp is the impact that larger class sizes have: both on teachers, who have to grade more assignments, and students, who get less personalized attention from teachers.
Take English teacher Elon Fischer, for example. He teaches four sections: three classes of Stranger in Literature, each with 25, 27, and 28 students respectively, and one section of Public Speaking which has only 19 students. He’s been teaching at the high school for 28 years and he says that since he started working in Brookline, he’s never before had as many students per class as he does this year.
“My situation is certainly not as bad as some of the math classes and science classes, but they’re big,” Fischer said. “It’s just that there are a lot of kids in the room. I didn’t anticipate that the classes would be bigger, so I didn’t do anything in advance to think about it. When I saw the bodies in the room this week, it forced me to think, on a simple level, ‘How am I going to be able to keep up with the paper grading?’”
Fischer remembers when English classes were capped at 18 students; this year, he doesn’t have a single class with that few people. He said it is hard for him to get to know all of his students, let alone grade so many assignments.
“The other issue for me is that I spent a lot of time at the beginning of past years trying to get to know my students. I’ve taken a week of class time to do one-on-one conferences,” Fischer said. “I don’t think I can do that [this year]. I think it would take me two weeks to get through all the kids. I don’t want to give it up, but I just don’t know how I’m going to do it. I haven’t figured it out.”
According to data provided to The Cypress by Assistant Head of School Hal Mason, this year there are 104 classes with more than 25 students, compared to only 84 last year. There are now 38 classes with more than 28 students, compared to 17 last year, and 22 classes with more than 30 students, compared to only two last year.
Mason said the larger class sizes are a result of a growth in the student population without a corresponding growth in the number of teachers. He said that, across all grades, the school has about 80 more students this year than it did last year. He also said that staffing cuts played a minor role in the increased class sizes; the high school is two full time equivalent (FTE) faculty units short of where it was last year.
While the total number of students at the high school increased by just 80 students, each takes core content classes, leading to 80 more students across each discipline.
It appears that the large class sizes are not equally distributed: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) classes, especially Advanced Placement (AP) classes, tend to be larger than English classes and non-AP courses. Fischer said that this is because students are allowed to sign up for multiple STEM classes at the beginning of the year, while students are prohibited from signing up for a second English class until everyone has been assigned a first.
Math classes are full too, particularly Advanced Math classes, according to Math Department Chair Josh Paris. He said that, in recent years, AP math class sizes have generally had student sizes in the high 20’s. This year, they are mostly in the low 30’s, meaning most classes are three to five students larger than they have been in the past.
Junior Ilan Luszczynski-Williams ran into trouble changing his schedule because of the large STEM class sizes.
“I’m stuck in Biology I Honors, and I want to switch into Investigative Biology Honors, but the class sizes are too large, so I can’t switch into the class I want to be in,” Luszczynsi-Williams said.
In addition to preventing students from switching into the classes they want, a study from the Vanderbilt University Center for Teaching found that larger class sizes can lead to “student disengagement” and “feelings of alienation.” They have found that it can be hard to speak up or feel like your voice is heard when there are so many people around you.
But, as always, different teachers have different experiences, like World Literature teacher Maria Julian.
“My classes this year are actually a little smaller. I have not been impacted by an increased number of students in my classroom, like others have. But I know others have been impacted by it,” Julian said.
Junior Izel Etkin-Macias estimates that some of her classes have as many as five more people than they’ve had in the past. She said that, as a result, she gets less attention from her teachers and she wishes they were smaller.
“It’s harder to feel like teachers can get around to anyone,” Etkin-Macias said. “It’s uncomfortable, [but] also I feel like you make more friends. It’s worse for my education, though.”
According to Fischer, the problem is exacerbated by the fact that there are many English teachers who are spending less time teaching and more time on professional development.
“There are a lot of people in the English department who are doing a lot of really great work, but that’s not classroom teaching. They’re working on the African American and Latino Scholars Program, they’re working on the Racial Justice program—really great things,” Fischer said. “Maybe we need to ask ourselves, can we really afford to develop new classes right now if it means teachers are going to have fewer students because they’re doing other things, so class sizes are going to have to go up for everyone else?”
