THE WHITE HOUSE

                    Office of the Press Secretary
                          (Dover, Delaware)
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                        May 8, 1998

Class-Size Reduction and Teacher Quality Act

FACT SHEET

The President today forwarded to the Congress a legislative proposal to help States and school districts recruit, train, and hire 100,000 additional teachers in order to reduce the average class size to 18 in grades 1 through 3. The legislation would also assist school districts in ensuring that the new teachers hired, in the national effort to reduce class sizes, have the skills and training needed to educate their students to high standards.

Need for the Bill

The need for this legislation is clear. As schools across the Nation have struggled to accommodate increasing enrollments, educators and parents have become increasingly concerned about the impact of class size on teaching and learning, particularly in the early elementary grades, where students learn reading and other basic skills. This concern is justified: rigorous research has shown that students in smaller classes, especially in early grades, make greater educational gains and maintain those gains over time. Moreover, the benefits of smaller classes are greatest for poor, minority, and inner-city children, the children who often face the greatest challenges in meeting high educational standards.

Smaller classes will have the greatest impact on student learning if the new teachers brought into the classroom are well qualified to teach reading and to take advantage of smaller learning environments. For this reason, the proposal emphasizes not just class-size reduction but also educator professional development, and it will give school districts adequate time to recruit and train staff while phasing in smaller classes.

Summary of the Proposal

• The bill would provide $20.8 billion in mandatory appropriations over a 10-year period, beginning with $1.1 billion in FY 1999. This proposal is fully paid for in the President's FY 1999 Budget, and therefore would not reduce the budget surplus.
• The Department of Education would distribute these funds to States on the basis of each State's share of funding under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act Title I program (which provides formula grants primarily on the basis of counts of children living in poverty).
• States, in turn, would distribute the funds to school districts that have the most crowded classes, in grades 1 through 3, and the least ability to finance class-size reductions with their own resources. In order to ensure that the neediest districts are treated equitably, districts with high levels of child poverty would be guaranteed the same share of funding, under this program, as they receive under Title I.
• School districts would use most of the funds to reduce class sizes in grades 1 through 3. Because students learn best in small classes, at least 10 percent of the funds allocated to school districts would be used for such activities as training teachers in proven practices for teaching reading and in effective practices in small classes; providing mentors or other support for newly hired teachers; recruiting well-prepared teachers; testing new teachers before they are hired; and developing rigorous new assessments for new teachers.
• The initiative would help ensure teacher quality by requiring States to give teacher competency tests to new teachers hired under this initiative, and it would help States adopt rigorous assessments of teaching proficiency and upgrade certification requirements for new teachers.
• The Federal Government cannot, and should not, bear the entire cost of making reductions in class sizes; rather, this should be a shared local, State, and Federal responsibility. For this reason, the bill would require school districts, except the neediest ones, to provide a portion of the costs under the program. It would set a matching rate of up to 35 percent, depending on the poverty rate of the district.
• The proposal stresses accountability for results. Schools and school districts participating in the program would issue report cards to parents and the public, documenting progress in reducing class size, recruiting well-prepared teachers, and, most importantly, improving reading performance in the early grades. Schools whose students fail to make reading gains, over time, would be required to undertake serious improvement actions or, ultimately, lose program funding.

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