LSE Principle Investigator: Dr Emilie Courtin
LSE team: Pavithra Manoj
Funder: National Institute on Aging
Country: United States
Partners: Professor Peter Muennig (Columbia University)
What is Tennessee Project STAR?
In 1985, Governor Lamar Alexander looked for ways to improve schools in Tennessee. Working with educators and state elected officials, the governor and state legislature set out to see whether AN answer might rest in smaller numbers of children in the classroom. They were aware of a promising study carried out in nearby Indiana but were also aware of the large costs associated with additional classrooms and teachers. The Tennessee legislature authorized a four-year study to reduce the number of children in half of the state’s schools on a random basis (13 to 17 pupils). The other half of the students in classes in the same school had about the same number of children as the year before (“regular’ or 22 to 25 pupils).
What makes Project STAR unique?
Three features make Project STAR a unique study.
First, it was a randomized controlled trial, meaning that students entering kindergarten in the participating schools were assigned to a small class or regular class at random. This means that, to the extent possible, we can draw causal conclusions about the impact of smaller class sizes on a range of outcomes. We can confidently attribute the effect on learning described below to the smaller class sizes.
Second, the study was very large, with more than 11,000 students participating in total. This number is much larger than a typical randomised study. It is also longer in duration, with children assigned to a small or regular class for up to four years. The size and intensity of the intervention really set Project STAR apart.
Third, researchers collected a lot of data on how pupils fared, but also about their teachers and their schools. Pupils took achievement tests in all school subjects at the end of each school year. School experiences (e.g. school changes) were also recorded, together with time logs and questionnaires from teachers. This huge array of data was then supplemented with routinely collected information on school performance beyond Grade 4 (when the experiment ended) but also on other characteristics well into adulthood.
In short, a longitudinal study of the quality, ambition and scope of Project STAR is extremely rare.
Project STAR: key findings to date
In the words of Alan Krueger, a highly regarded economist who studied Project STAR, “Project STAR came to eclipse all of the research on class size that preceded it”.
Education
Many studies of Project STAR have shown that students in small Classes perform better than their peers, going on to score higher on standardized tests. They graduated from high school and attended college at higher rates. Teacher quality also mattered.
Outcomes in adulthood
Researchers followed the Tennessee Project STAR participants from kindergarten into adulthood to understand whether the intervention had a lasting impact on their lives. They found that students in the small classes attended college at higher rates and did better on several measures such as retirement, savings, marriage rates and the quality of their neighborhood.
What do we hope to do?
We are researchers who believe that improvements in education in childhood might also have benefits for the health of adults. For example, a higher income might make it possible to eat healthier food, have more time for exercise, and to live in a safe neighborhood. But we cannot know for sure without reaching out to the participants in the original Project STAR study.
So, we are currently contacting subset of people who were in participating schools in Tennessee in 1985-1989. We already received funding to do what we are doing now—to reach out to people like you who were enrolled in school during this time. If enough people are interested, we will apply for a larger study and provide a financial incentive to participate. If funded, participation in the study would of course be optional.
You can find more details about Dr Emilie Courtin’s work here and about Professor Peter Muennig’s work here.