class size

For the last several months, lawmakers and school districts have been at odds over class size requirements for grades K – 3.  On one side, some members of the…

Over the last six years, the Republican-led General Assembly has granted school districts unprecedented budget, staffing, and class size flexibility.  Much of that flexibility has come at the request of…

This study synthesizes findings from 888 articles published since 1990. Based on these, we can say that in recent years North Carolina has been moving in the right direction on school reform. Policymakers should continue the momentum and resist attempts to backtrack.

RALEIGH – North Carolina’s education lottery would set aside too much revenue for unproven educational programs, a new John Locke Foundation report argues. A better formula could lead to…

As the law is currently written, the education lottery will do little to fund the most critical needs of North Carolina’s students. Too much of the revenue will be used for unproven class-size reduction efforts and pre-kindergarten programs. Too little of the lottery revenue will be given to school districts and charter schools that have critical school facilities needs. The General Assembly can maximize the educational benefit of the lottery revenue by distributing more funds for capital expenditures to high-growth school districts and to charter schools.

RALEIGH – Smaller class sizes do not translate into better public-school performance. That’s the key finding in a new analysis from the John Locke Foundation. The idea behind the state’s…

In November, the State Board of Education released the final report of the High Priority Schools Initiative, a four-year, $23 million class-size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools. The report offered no statistical evidence that smaller class sizes raised student achievement. Between the first and final year of the program, fewer schools met their state ABC growth targets and even fewer made Adequate Yearly Progress under the federal No Child Left Behind law. Reduced class sizes failed to significantly increase student performance on state reading assessments. In the future, legislators and policymakers should not fund class-size initiatives because of their expediency or popularity but because they produce measurable gains in student achievement.