Many new staff, same old class size
Last spring, Milwaukee Public Schools committed to reducing class sizes, setting new guidance that schools should include no more than 22 students in kindergarten classrooms, increasing up to 32 by middle school. Earlier, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran its own analysis, finding that the majority of the district’s classrooms were already well within district recommendations. The average kindergarten classroom size was 22, for example.
At the same time, the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction’s database reports that MPS has only seven students for every staffer. What do we make of this discrepancy? How can we explain the large gaps between class sizes and student-teacher ratios?
There will, of course, be variability due to basic enrollment differences. The Journal Sentinel’s own reporting, for example, found a spread of kindergarten classrooms ranging from as few as nine students and as many as 34. When I was a teacher, my classes varied because of scheduling constraints, students testing into or out of various classes, and enrollment differences across grades.
But how can there be one staff member for every seven students and yet classes as large as 34?
Simply put, there are way more administrators, instructional aides, janitorial workers, and other support staff than teachers. Consider the growth of students, teachers and other staff since 1959, according to datafrom the National Center for Education Statistics:Increase in… Student enrollment47%Teachers139%Principals and assistant principals210%Instruction coordinators631%Guidance counselors779%Instructional aides1,476%
In six decades, staff growth has bloated far beyond actual student growth. To put the numbers another way, in 1949, teachers were 70.3 percent of all school staff. In 2022, they were only 47.5 percent. Herein lies the explanation for the discrepancy: Districts hire lots of new people, while classes themselves remain the same size.
