Policy from the Hip: Class Size Reduction in California

Abstract: In the spring of 1996, California Gov. Pete Wilson pushed a class size reduction plan through the state legislature to limit all classes in grades K-3 to 20 students in a state where many had 30 or more students. With one significant exception, there was little research to support such a sweeping plan, a point Wilson himself had made when he opposed CSR earlier in his administration. But Wilson, faced with a constitutional requirement to put a large part of the state’s new revenues into the schools, and wanting to keep the money off the union bargaining table, prevailed over the warnings of skeptics to go slow.