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Friday, April 13, 2012

School Tech Connect: Kindergarten Update

School Tech Connect: Kindergarten Update:


Kindergarten Update

I was going to do a series of lunchtime posts about CPS, but I never got started. Usually my lunchtimes are limited by my need to hoover down vast quantities of food, barely even chewing.

Anyway, here's something interesting. 


Despite compelling research that reducing current class sizes would benefit CPS students, Chicago class size guidelines are the same today as the maximums set in 1990: 28 in lower grades, 31 in middle grades, and 28 in high school. In fact, actual class sizes have steadily risen. In 2011, Chicago’s average kindergarten class size was 24.6. However, averages don’t tell the whole story. In kindergartens across Chicago, students spend several months in classes with as many as 40 students, while CPS figures out how to reduce the class to 28. Chicago’s kindergarten