In this decade-old program, this is the first I’ve heard of any CA district getting in trouble for falsifying class size documents in order to get state class size money. I will say that it happened all of the time, both in the school where I taught and in colleagues’ schools.

Here’s how: school starts in September and teachers get their class rosters with 19 or 20 students. In the first couple of weeks of school, six or seven of those students don’t show up, but seven or eight others do.  Students get shifted between classrooms to even out the class sizes.  Sometimes teachers have to shift grades and sometimes additional teachers—usually substitutes—are hired.  If a school is lucky, it has an extra classroom or space for a portable and a class of twenty students is cobbled together.

Santa Ana is a city with high poverty and high mobility, and is a first stop for many immigrants.  In such school systems, students enter and leave school all of the time. Sometimes they return; sometimes they don’t. When class sizes tip over 20 students, a principal has to decide whether and how long to wait before hiring some adult to teach a newly formed class.

What’s a teacher to do? We could have complained, but it did seem like the schools were trying their best to keep class sizes under 20.  Plus, it was pretty obvious that the school needed money for everything—textbooks, a social worker, bilingual paraprofessionals, soap for the bathrooms, etc.

The benefits of small class sizes, especially for students in poverty, are indisputable. But, there is not a good way to manage a class size reduction program in a school or district with exactly the students most likely to benefit from small class sizes—one with very high mobility rates, overcrowded schools, and an inability to attract enough certified teachers.  There is also the issue of whether it a good idea to take a couple of students out of a classroom with a certified teacher and place them in a room presided over by a substitute so that the schools gets desperately needed funds.

Yes, deliberately falsifying documents is wrong, but, based on the reports so far, I believe that the district was doing its best to provide some semblance of a sound and stable education while securing needed funds.