<p>What is the average number of students in your kid's high school classes? My D attends a small public high school. She is in several honors classes. One of the classes has more than we usually see in an honors section, and some of the parents are pretty upset. The kids don't seem to mind, but they only started school this week.</p>
<p>Just wondering what the highest number of students is for a particular class (English, Math, History, etc).</p>
<p>My urban/suburban system in Georgia can have 36 kids in high school core classes and up to 100 in classes like band, etc. I am not making this up. In theory, the state limits AP and gifted level high school classes to 27 but a system can go up to 36 and simply forego the little extra money (which generally isn’t enough to hire extra teachers) that the system offers for keeping the class size at 27.</p>
<p>GA is doing a terrible job financing education. When my children started in public school, the state covered about 60 percent of the costs, now the cover 40 percent.</p>
<p>36 is the max. where my kids attend school. A lot of the AP courses start around 36 but eventually drop into the low 20s because so many kids get out within the first few weeks of class.</p>
<p>34 is contractually the max with a cap of 50 for Phys Ed and music. There are other caps in place for instructional support classes ( SPED)</p>
<p>Most of my classes were in the range of about 30-35 in high school, but a notable number of classes in the 20s. I don’t think I ever had a class of more than 40 but I think I had at least a couple at 39 or 40.</p>
<p>I didn’t take many AP and Honors classes, but I don’t think they were noticeably smaller than regular classes.</p>
<p>Class sizes are much smaller here. I have the impression that S’s HS classes usually had 18-22 students. His Honors French IV class had only 12 kids! (It was one of two sections, for scheduling reasons. They added a section rather than make kids drop the subject, unlike many schools one hears about on CC. I think that the AP French class the following year was in the 20ish range, since there was only one section.) An academic class with 36 students was unheard of.</p>
<p>D’s classes were about 15, she was in very small private though, 33 kids in her class and they did not allow APs before Junior year and no more than 3 APs / year, I guess to make it fair
In college, where it is very important to have prof accessible, Honors are usually much smaller than regular classes. I do not thing it is so crucial in HS. What is the most crucial in HS is parent’s involvement, much more than class size.</p>
<p>Budget cuts. It used to be low 20s, with some classes, such as AP French, only having 6-8 students. Now the classes can be in the mid to high 20s, and all of the extremely small classes have either been eliminated, or combined with the IB classes, much to our chagrin.</p>
<p>I grew up with 36-40 in a class and never thought twice about it. Elementary to high school. Same kids too! I don’t think it made much difference really to overall quality. We had great teachers and high expectations from not only the teachers but from the parents.
I do think we had a TON of parental involvement back then much more so than it is now–it seemed EVERY parent expected good grades and good behavior and that was just the norm. Everyone knew each other.
Bad teachers weren’t protected by a union and problem students were expelled as a matter of course. Different times.</p>
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<p>Gee, I grew up in the same era and we had a very mixed mag of good and bad teachers, and kids were suspended, bounced back in and caused trouble again. Troubled students were still required to go to school- so they had to be somewhere, and union policies had very little to do with anything, except perhaps enhancing teacher salaries and job satisfaction.</p>
<p>Studies have shown that class size is directly related to learning outcomes. Whether or not we “thought twice about it” is irrelevant.
As a parent, I’d rather have my kid in a class with 15 students and a mediocre teacher than in a class of 36 with the best teacher in the school. Much of the learning that takes place is the result of student attention, student motivation, and student effort, all of which is made easier by a smaller, more personal classroom experience.</p>
<p>Most classes had around 20-25 students. A few like AP Latin were tiny. (5 students I think) I know one section of AP Bio ballooned to close to 40. Both my kids got 5’s on the Bio AP so it doesn’t seem to have affected outcomes too much. One of the things the school said at one point was that they thought the low achieving students needed the small class sizes more than the high achieving ones. I have to admit they had a point. I’d much rather my kids have the best teacher with 36 students than a mediocre one with 15. That said, my older son ended up in the smaller section of AP Chem and said they moved through the book faster than the bigger class (same teacher). So class size can matter even at the AP level.</p>
<p>At my school
Ap physics b 6 students
Ap calc ab 20
Ap calc bc 5
Ap lang 30 and 20
Ap bio 30
Ap chem 30
Ap stat 12
Ap lit 10,17
Ap ES 12
Ap us like 50 5 passed last year.
Ap world history probably 30 but 2 pass per year.
I also have SEM this year with 6 students.
At my school the higher your grade the lower the advanced class size. </p>
<p>Sent from my iPhone using CC</p>
<p>When you have fewer students, you have fewer questions about the material, so the teacher can move on to the next topic. And with fewer students, the teacher actually has time to answer all of the questions and make sure kids are ready to move on. Kids can’t hide in a small class, so they are more likely to do the reading. The students usually get to know the teacher a little better, and may feel more inclined to ask for help when needed. It may be true that low achieving students need small class sizes more, but I think that shyer, less assertive kids also do better with smaller classes.</p>
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<p>Some kids can thrive anywhere.</p>
<p>This thread is making me very thankful for my kids grant money to attend private school.</p>
<p>Largest class was 12 students.</p>
<p>One-on-one for higher math.</p>
<p>^Absolutely some kids can thrive anywhere, but my older son much more than the younger one. Obviously, I’d rather have small classes, but if resources are limited I’d rather have good teachers. I really feel my kids got as good an education as I did with a few exception (and they got a MUCH better science education) than I did in my very well regarded private school where all my classes had fewer than 15 students.</p>
<p>My classes are typically around 20 kids. For gym last year, we had about 40 in a class. But for more advanced classes, like Latin 5, I’ve heard of classes that only had 3 kids in them.</p>
<p>20 is nice. Public or private?</p>
<p>My biggest class is 16, I think. And that’s choir! Smallest is 4. Most are around the 12-14 range. Private school with ~175/class</p>
<p>@moonchild
It is technically a public school. But it is a public vocational school, meaning you need to take an entrance test to get in. Only a certain number of kids get in each year. I think this year there are about 280 kids total in my school.</p>
<p>We had lots of one-on-one at home with us, parents, even for a bit of college material. Whenever, D. asked, we would answer. If we did not remember, material was in her textbooks, we would open and read. The requirement in our family was that all homework is done correctly with 100% correct answers. If she could not get it, then she was seeking our help. It is funny to read teacher’s comments in grade reports, which we just found and planning to keep. Each teacher indicated that D. had a talent in his specific subject. So far from thruth!!! She did not even like some of her subjects and others she considered “boring”. It is just her doing homework in every single class and getting correct answers in every single problem…it works, hard work always works, in class of 10 and in class of 35.</p>