Karen Hawley Miles

Karen Hawley Miles, President, Education Resource Management Strategies, notes that although schools average one adult for every nine students, many teachers are allocated to special pull-out or support programs instead of being in the regular classroom. As a result, class sizes typically are large and students don't feel known. This system has taken responsibility away from the classroom teacher; it also has fragmented the instructional program for many students.

"We've got one adult for every 9 students, one teacher for ever 13, and in some cases, high poverty schools might have one teacher for every 11 because they've got extra resources from Title One and special education, and you see at the same time, we are not teaching ninety percent of these students to read. You have to ask the question, 'How can I use this whole pie completely differently?' So, I asked the question to all those teachers and got them to really looking deeply into how the schools are organizing so that even though they have one adult for every 9 kids, or one teacher for every 12, still students don't feel known and they're in large class sizes. What happened of course is that the resources are added over time. And so what they did, is they added a new person to implement the new program to help kids who weren't fitting into the mold. So, by the end of thirty years, what we have are almost fifty percent of the resources are now allocated to special programs, so that instead of adding them to the regular classroom and reducing the class size, instead we have a host of pull out and student support programs. The net affect is to draw resources out of the regular classroom, to take the responsibility away from the primary classroom teacher for dealing with individual exceptions and to really fragment the instructional program for most children."