Reshaping a State: Lawmakers plan cuts to teacher assistants' ranks

DURHAM -- When it's time for morning math in Ms. Erdely's classroom, Melinda Marcin instinctively knows what to do. She grabs a small white board and a blue marker, and sits down at a corner table with four second-graders.

"What do we know about the word 'more'?" Marcin asks the children working word problems. " 'More' is one of our key words for ..."

"Addition!" the children say.

Marcin writes the mathematical equation on her white board and reviews it with her charges. She checks each student's paper. "Close," she tells one boy.

On the other side of the classroom, Kristyn Erdely oversees a group of five. Around the room, 16 other children work quietly in teams of two or four.

Next year, Erdely might be on her own with the children at Creekside Elementary in Durham.

State lawmakers are moving to make deep cuts in the corps of teacher assistants, who number more than 26,000 in North Carolina's early grade classrooms. Of that total, about 18,000 are state-funded; the rest are paid with local funds or federal dollars. The average 10-month salary for a teacher assistant is $21,000.

Gov. Bev Perdue, a Democrat, has proposed a budget that would protect jobs for teachers and teacher assistants by hanging on to most of a one-penny sales tax increase that is due to expire. Republicans, who control the legislature, have vowed to end the penny tax, and that means bigger cuts.

The state House has proposed paying for teacher assistants in kindergarten and first grade, but not in second grade. The state Senate would cut assistants in all classrooms except kindergarten, but spend millions to fund 1,100 more teachers in an effort to drive down class size in first through the third grade. At the end of last week, the House and the Senate were negotiating a compromise that could save some of those jobs in an effort to win over Democrats needed for a veto-proof budget. A vote could come as early as Tuesday.

14,753 jobs at stake

Under the Senate's proposal, 14,753 teacher assistant jobs would be eliminated, the state Department of Public Instruction estimates.

That worries Erdely, who said her students benefit greatly from their interaction with Marcin.

"When you've got 25 students that you need to reach every day, it really would not be possible without her," said Erdely, 29, who is in her fourth year of teaching. "It just wouldn't. I wouldn't be able to get to all 25 and help them every single day with everything - reading, writing, math, social studies."

Before the day is done, Marcin will eat lunch with the children, watch them on the playground, fill their folders with papers, and work with small reading and math groups in two classrooms. She handles struggling kids and high achievers, giving them individual attention. Recently, she shepherded a poetry project for a group of academically gifted students. The children wrote poems, and Marcin printed works by Robert Frost and other poets so the children could compare them.

"This went above and beyond even what I had asked her to do from my straight lesson plans," Erdely said. "She just made it a million times better."

Marcin, 40, a single mother who works part-time showing model homes on weekends, has five years of experience as a teacher assistant and passed a national exam for the profession. She helps with carpool duty and skinned knees. She uses her high school Spanish to communicate with some parents. Mostly, though, she sees herself as an instructor.

"Every day is different," said Marcin, who attended community college but did not get a degree. "I love working with kids, especially when they don't get something and then they finally get something. And you realize you made a difference. It's rewarding. It's definitely rewarding."

For the budget year that begins July 1, the state faces a shortfall of about $2.5 billion. Republican lawmakers, in control of the legislature for the first time in more than a century, have pledged to use the budget to reshape North Carolina. They have questioned long-standing Democratic programs, and have taken aggressive steps to cut taxes, eliminate jobs, curb spending and reorganize state government.

40 percent of budget

Perhaps nowhere are the efforts more striking than in their proposal to recast education. In North Carolina, public school spending makes up 40 percent of the state budget. The state funds public school salaries, though local districts can hire additional staff or pay salary supplements in addition to funding school buildings.

The House has proposed K-12 cuts of $759 million; the Senate has suggested reductions of $697 million. The difficult economic environment presents an opportunity for new directions, said Sen. Phil Berger, an Eden Republican, who leads the Senate.

The most important thing for a student, he said, is having a qualified teacher in the classroom.

"You've got a lot of teacher assistants out there that do wonderful work, that are dedicated to their jobs," Berger said. "It's not a knock on them. ... It's just that the studies are telling us, from an academic standpoint, if you've got limited dollars and you're trying to concentrate your dollars on what works, we're better off concentrating our dollars for more teachers in those early grades as opposed to the TAs."

Teacher assistants were first employed in North Carolina schools in 1975, and the initiative was fully implemented statewide during Democratic Gov. Jim Hunt's first term.

Teacher assistants vary in their level of training and experience. State and federal regulations require that teacher assistants have at least a high school diploma, though individual school districts can require more education. Assistants must have associate's degrees or equivalent certification if they work in a school with a large low-income population.

What research shows

Some research has shown that teacher assistants contribute to students' academic progress. A 1993 study of a program in Columbus, Ohio, showed that underachieving students made gains on tests of oral and reading skills after instruction from trained teacher assistants.

But other studies have cast doubt on whether teacher assistants boost student performance.

In 2001, researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo and Eastern Michigan University published an analysis of data, concluding, "Teacher aides have little, if any, positive effect on students' academic achievement." The research did show an improvement in reading scores for students who attended a class with an assistant for two or three years, but added, "These results were the only exceptions to a plethora of negative findings."

State Superintendent June Atkinson acknowledged that research is mixed on the impact of teacher assistants. But people should remember that the assistants lift many burdens from teachers, allowing them to do their jobs better, she said.

"Sometimes you need more than two hands," Atkinson said, "because you're dealing with so many children's needs in the classroom."

Berger and his staff have focused on Tennessee's Project STAR, a long-term study that began in the 1980s and looked at the effects of placing students in one of three learning environments: small classes, regular-size classes without assistants, and regular-size classes with full-time assistants. Small classes were defined as 13 to 17 students, and regular-size classes were defined as 22 to 26 students.

The Tennessee study found that at every grade level, the students in small classes had significantly higher test scores, and the positive effects were lasting for students who spent at least three years in small classes.

Adjusting class sizes

But getting to small classes in North Carolina would take time and money. Though early grades are now funded on a ratio of 18-to-1, that covers all teachers, including art, music and physical education. So actual class size is larger. State policy specifies a maximum class size in kindergarten through third grade of 21 on a districtwide average. Classes can add as many as three students, for a total of 24, before schools have to seek a waiver to go beyond that limit.

Berger said the funding ratio would go to 17-to-1 next year under the Senate plan, but the ultimate goal is 15-to-1.

The N.C. Association of Educators, the state teachers group, said the additional money for teachers in the Senate plan offers "false promises" to distract from massive cuts to education. "They're misleading the public," said Marge Foreman, research specialist at NCAE. "There are no class size restrictions in grades four to 12. They can put 50 kids in a classroom."

School administrators, who are constantly juggling tight budgets, are skeptical, too. Wake County Superintendent Tony Tata said recently he wants to keep assistants in the classroom. "They help, particularly in those early years," he said.

At Creekside, a fast-growing school with 880 students in Southwest Durham, administrators converted two teacher assistant jobs to hire an extra fifth-grade teacher. They had no choice, Principal Nathan Hester said, because fifth-graders are in trailers, and the class size was inching over 30. Now, fifth-grade classes at Creekside are at 26.

Hester has heard the 15-to-1 ratio mentioned but can't envision classrooms with 15. "That will never happen," he said. "Think about it. Where would I put them?"

He wants to keep Creekside's 13 "instructional assistants," as he calls them.

"Ultimately, what's most important for me is, 'Are they having an impact on student achievement?'" he said, and the answer is, "Absolutely."

One of them, Deborah Garrison, broke her foot in April. She returned to school as soon as she got a wheelchair.

One day recently, the chair became a teaching tool. In science, her students were studying simple machines and compound machines. They were having trouble getting the concept, so she took them into the hallway, where she got her speed up and swirled the wheels in different directions, turning the chair around. That, she said, is a compound machine.

Garrison, 47, has been a teacher assistant for seven years. She has an associate's degree and is working toward a bachelor's degree at N.C. Central University. The children need nurturing, she said, but they enhance her life, too.

Last week, she worked with six first-graders who were reading a book titled "Telephones Through Time."

In a soft voice, she guided them through a list of vocabulary words in the book. "What does 'determined' mean?" she asked.

They mumbled a few guesses.

"You have it fixed in your mind, and you are going to do it," she said. "Like Ms. Garrison and her wheelchair. She is going to come to school and be with her little people."