Overcrowding in Schools

Overcrowding in schools refers to a situation where the number of students exceeds the capacity of the educational institution, leading to challenges in providing adequate learning environments. This issue is prevalent in many regions and can be influenced by factors such as population growth, inadequate funding for education, and urbanization. Overcrowded classrooms often result in larger student-to-teacher ratios, which can diminish the quality of education and individualized attention students receive.

Furthermore, overcrowding can lead to increased stress for both students and teachers, impacting overall academic performance and the classroom experience. Facilities may also face strain, as insufficient resources can hinder extracurricular activities, access to technology, and proper maintenance of school environments. Addressing overcrowding involves a multifaceted approach, including potential solutions like building new schools, enhancing funding for existing facilities, and implementing policies that manage student enrollment effectively. Understanding the implications and solutions to school overcrowding is essential for fostering equitable education and ensuring that all students have the opportunity to thrive academically.

Published in: 2021

By: Hornick-Lockard, Barbara

Subject Terms

Overcrowding in Schools

Abstract

Overcrowding occurs when a school facility enrolls more students than it was designed to accommodate. Most schools identified as overcrowded are in areas where the school-age populations are growing fast, particularly in California, Florida, Texas, and Las Vegas, Nevada. Overcrowded schools are also a chronic issue in our largest urban areas—New York, Chicago and Los Angeles—as immigrant populations continue to grow and more public education options are made available. Charter schools and educational accountability dictated by the No Child Left Behind Act allow families to transfer students from inadequate schools to those with more successful educational programs causing imbalances within school districts. Some claim that school overcrowding would not be a serious issue if immigration were restricted in addition to a crack down on illegal aliens. The long-term solution to overcrowding is to build new facilities and upgrade old ones. Taxpayers funded a construction boom that reportedly improved the situation around the country and proposed legislation at the federal level could help, but overcrowded schools may never fully be eliminated in a mobile society.

Overview

Overcrowding in public schools has been a challenge throughout the history of American education as school districts have had to adjust to meet the needs of growing or shifting demographics. A 1963 Education Digest article, written when the peak of the Baby Boom generation was moving through elementary school, reported that there was a shortage of 121,200 classrooms in the United States with half of those needing to be replaced and the other half to be built to relieve overcrowding ("Classroom Shortage," 1963). The issue resurfaced in the late 1990s and has continued since then, as the school-age population has bubbled once again and high-growth areas of the country have struggled to meet the demands.

Overcrowding in schools is a significant problem in areas of the western and southern United States, which continue to experience rapid population growth with an influx of immigrant populations and from mobile Americans seeking jobs and warmer climates. The stress of overcrowded schools has been most disproportionate in our most populous state, California, which has tackled the problem with expansive initiatives, but many other states including Florida, North Carolina, and Texas are also struggling to cope. Las Vegas, Nevada, one of the fastest growing cities in the country, on average, opened a new school each month between 1994 and 2003 to deal with a fifty percent increase in the school-age population (Zehr 2006).

Major urban school districts throughout the country are also experiencing school-aged population growth. New York City, always a melting pot, has experienced a boom in its school-age minority and immigrant populations, but new educational options such as charter schools and the legislated accountability of the No Child Left Behind Act, Race to the Top, and Common Core State Standards have required juggling acts of school administrators as parents move their children from poorly performing schools to those with successful track records or more desirable programs.

For example, the A. Phillip Randolph Campus High School in Harlem, a model amidst failing schools, experienced major overcrowding at the start of the 2004–5 school year as many new students enrolled to take advantage of its success (Watson, 2004). Most other major cities, including Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, and Houston, can point to similar situations as they have struggled to meet the consequences of higher standards.

Crowding, Overcrowding & Overenrolled. When does a crowded school become an overcrowded one? Is there a difference? Probably not. Many would argue that any number of students that exceed the planned capacity of a classroom or a school building impact the quality of instruction and learning because of the stresses that it places on access to teachers and services, not to mention additional wear and tear on the facilities.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) at the US Department of Education conducted surveys of public school principals in 1999 and 2005 that quantified the extent of the problem nationally. Overenrolled, synonymous with crowded and overcrowded, is the term used in the study to define what occurs when the number of students enrolled in a school facility is larger than the number of students it is designed to accommodate, statistically defined as more than 5 percent of the capacity of a school building (National Center, 2000; 2007).

The good news is that data from the second survey from fall 2005 indicated that progress was made over the five-year period in addressing over enrollment at many schools. Principals in 1999 reported that 14% of their schools were overcrowded by 6–25% of capacity; the 2005 figures are improved with 10% overcrowded by 6–25%. However, 8% of the schools were overcrowded by more than 25%, unchanged over the five-year period. Another plus was that 40% of the principals in the 2005 survey indicated that they "anticipated that the overcrowding would be substantially reduced or eliminated within the next 3 years" (National Center 2005, p. 17).

A Sampling of Solutions. Although the data indicated some improvement, overcrowding is a real, day-to-day crisis in a significant number of school districts and the expedient overrides the long-term solutions. Most of the decisions on dealing with overcrowding are not dictated by national or state laws or standards but are decided at the local level. School boards and their administrators, down to principals and teachers, must deal with the fallout of over enrollment when they encounter it--often unexpectedly on the first day of class. When there are no seats for some students, principals look to what free space they have. Cafeterias, libraries, gymnasiums, and closets and other common spaces are pressed into service.

Budget-pressed school officials, caught in the push and pull of local politics, are often forced to find ways to pack more students into inadequate buildings. In New York, the teachers' union and parents claimed that the A. Philip Randolph Campus High School was overenrolled when it had 1,900 students, but school officials asserted that it could accommodate 100 more. The well-respected principal, with his track record of success, was confident that all would be well (Watson, 2004).

Although officials in some school districts squeeze pupils into crowded classrooms, the state of Florida has a found a way to penalize school districts that do so. Palm Beach County school district faced fines for over enrollment in four of its schools in violation of the state's class-reduction law, which capped class sizes scaled to grade levels ("Palm School," 2006).

The Florida class size law was approved by voters in 2002. Caps for grades were: K to 3, no more than 18 students per teacher; grades 4 to 8, cap of 22 students per teacher; grades 9 to 12, cap of 25 per teacher. It was reported that although the enrollment did not increase overall in the fall of 2006 in the Palm Beach County schools, "some faced a space crunch because campuses need more classrooms to comply with the law" ("Palm School," 2006).

Other creative short-term solutions that are used to diminish overcrowding are:

Staggered scheduling,
More lunch periods during a day,
Different start times during the school day, and
Variable start dates during the school year.

Online learning (also called distance learning) has also been considered in a number of districts. None of these, however, get to the heart of the problem.

The most popular interim solution to providing classroom space is to bring in portable buildings. Mobile buildings can provide more than adequate instructional space and are frequently used on a permanent basis by school districts to house special functions or programs. They are air-conditioned, which is not the case for many school buildings in northern climates. The 2005 NCES survey reported that 78% of those principals with overcrowded schools had used temporary portable classrooms, 44% had increased class sizes, and some (5%) had to resort to using off-site instructional facilities.

Long-Term Solutions. Regardless of whether a school must be expanded or remodeled or constructed, the long-term solution to overcrowding takes time. Planning and funding of new facilities often gets bogged down in local politics and issues can be debated for years. Money is always an issue as construction is costly and local taxpayers generally must pay all or part of the bill, usually by issuing bonds or raising taxes, and often with little help from state coffers.

During the late 1990s, a prosperous economic time, voters approved many construction bonds in districts across the country. They did this in response to hearing a decade of public complaints from many quarters about the poor condition of many American schools. The criticism was backed by a 1995 study for Congress by the General Accounting Office in 1995 that said that $112 billion was needed nationally to bring schools up to code.

Even though the national economy slumped in the early 2000s, the approved funds were still there for a construction boom, which carried into the decade with record expenditures on construction and renovation projects. Joetta Sack reported in an Education Week article that "… beginning in 2002 And for the first time construction of new schools sharply outpaced renovations or additions to existing facility, reversing a long standing trend" (Sack, 2004, para. 2).

Although the country-wide investment in renovation and new construction of schools has shown signs of relieving overcrowding (with the exception of periods of economic stress such as the Great Recession of 2007–9), it is argued that progress is slow in low-income and minority school districts where overcrowding is most severe.

BEST released a study in 2006 that analyzed the disparities and advocates for the federal government and states to provide aid to poorer schools and school districts. The report asserted that over $600 billion was spent on school construction between 1995 and 2005, an impressive figure, but also stated that "the least affluent school districts made the lowest investment ($4,800 per student), while the most affluent districts made the highest investment ($9,361 per student)" (Filardo, Vincent, Sung, & Stein, 2006, p. 4).

Further Insights

Population Growth. The bubble in the school-age population that began in the late 1990s has been attributed in part to what is termed the "Baby Boom echo," which refers to the children who entered school through the first decade in this century. They are "… direct descendents of the Baby-Boom Echo—the expanding birth rate begun in 1977 when millions of young adults born between 1948 and 1975 began to have children themselves . . ." (U.S. Department of Education, 1999, p. 3).

Census projections indicate that the school-age population will grow steadily to mid-century. Table 1 also clearly illustrates a declining percentage share of white student populations, an unchanging percentage of African Americans, and a strikingly disproportionate percentage increase in Hispanic/Latino students.

Even more striking is an analysis of the immigrant school-age populations. The Center for Immigration Studies' data show that "… by itself Mexican immigration accounted for more than a third of the national increase in the size of the school-age population since the early 1980s" and a quarter of the schoolchildren in California have Mexican immigrant mothers. Children of immigrant mothers from all countries account for 43 percent of all of California's school-age population (Center for Immigrant Studies, 2001).

Although the birth rate of US citizens has been in decline, the school-age population has swelled with immigrant children. It has also been pointed out that Hispanic families have on average more children than white families (CIS, 2001).

Federal, State & Local Initiatives. Funding for schools from federal sources is rarely granted directly to school districts and legislation specifically to alleviate overcrowding needs has been slow to materialize. However, as part of the Federal Tax Relief Act of 1997, the federal government began offering some indirect support for repairs and renovation (not new construction) through the tax code and the Qualified Zone Academy Bond (QZAB) program. The program helps qualifying districts (generally low income) cover the interest on construction bonds. QZAB has saved local taxpayers billions.

In 2002, the California legislature approved the Critically Over-crowded Schools (COS) facility program, which made it easier for overenrolled schools to speed up the process to receive funding for construction. The program was backed with the allocation of billions of dollars of additional state funds over subsequent years. Other programs provide funding for construction of new classrooms to reduce school site pupil density and to replace portable classrooms with permanent construction (California Department of Education, 2006; 2007).

Although the bill need not pass through Congress, Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) introduced a measure in in August 2007 to "fund capital projects of state and local governments," which included plans for an allocation of billions for school infrastructure (U.S. Fed News, 2007).

New school construction also boomed in Los Angeles with local support and the help of state funding. The Los Angeles school district opened 13 new schools in 2006 and 150 new schools were anticipated by 2012 ("L.A. Continues," 2007).

In 2014, New York governor Andrew Cuomo signed a bill into law that requires the School Construction Authority (SCA) to use population data in conjunction with five-year educational facilities capital plans when determining new school construction, including additions, across the state.

In the summer of 2014 Congressman Jared Huffman (D-California) proposed the Investing for Tomorrow's Schools Act of 2014 to improve financing for school construction and repair, among other school-related upgrades. The bill calls for schools to utilized green construction, and the bill is supported by several national and state organizations, including the American Federation of teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA), and Rebuild America’s Schools.

Additionally, by 2015, several schools had begun to transition to year-round schooling as a more cost-effective means of dealing with the issue of overcrowding. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the number of public year-round schools had increased by 26 percent from the 2006–7 school year to the 2011–12 school year. Proponents of this method argue that multitrack systems implemented in year-round schooling allows the school to stagger vacations and provide education for a larger amount of students without having to increase the physical capacity of the building (Will, 2014).

Many other states have been addressing overcrowding with planning and significant allocations of construction funding. For example:

The North Carolina legislature was presented with a comprehensive study on construction funding in early 2007. The report specified that local school districts would require nearly $10 billion for new facilities and repairs and proposed issuance of bonds and increases in sales taxes upon voter approval (North Carolina House, 2007).
New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson made education a priority. His state provided $90 billion during 2007 for school construction and the citizens of Albuquerque agreed to a tax increase to pay for the city's new schools (Zehr, 2007).
In 1997, Ohio formed the Ohio School Facilities Commission with the charge to help "school districts fund, plan, design, and build or renovate schools." The agency has fulfilled a 12-year plan, "Rebuilding Ohio's Schools," for completion in 2012. In August 2007, the commission targeted a new category as part of their building replacement funding program--"overcrowded" schools (Ohio School Facilities Commission, 2007).

Viewpoints

Since the late 1990s, there have been many positive signs of improvement in the condition of overcrowded schools, with much new construction. Taxpayers have been forthcoming in approving funding, often including self-imposed tax increases (except for periods of recession), while state legislatures have often been creative in offering support, sometimes focused on the neediest districts. There are even hopes that Congress will include schools in the push to revitalize the American infrastructure.

There are those who argue, however, that all of this would be unnecessary and overcrowding would not exist if the country were to restrict immigration and crack down on illegal immigrants. Billions would not have to be laid out by taxpayers to support new or non-citizens, critics say. The numbers do confirm the huge stress that immigrants, particularly Mexicans, have placed on the system.

The National Review argued that the there is no shortage of teachers and classrooms, but there is "… a 'longage' of immigrant students, and students who are the children of immigrants. It cited the statistic that births in California increased by 204,000 between 1970 and 1994, but the births to native-born American women fell by 9,000 ("Another Schools Crisis," 1996). In the same article, then New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani was quoted as saying that it would be wrong to "blame" immigrations and to do so would "… feed a national agenda which says that immigrant children should be thrown out of school" ("Another Schools Crisis," 1996, p. 16).

Terms & Concepts

Charter Schools: Publicly funded schools that are freed of some of some restrictions of other public schools in exchange for other forms of accountability. Charter schools are intended to provide educational alternatives. In New York City there is competition and overcrowding in some successful charter schools as families flee underperforming schools.

Class Size: Smaller class size promotes a better learning environment, a belief that is increasingly supported with research findings. Caps on class size are left to local school districts and in the case of Florida, voter approved.

Class Density: The physical space allotted per student and teacher in a classroom.

Critically Overcrowded School Program (COS): A major initiative in California to ease the process for getting construction and remodeling funds to beleaguered, overcrowded school districts with overcrowded schools.

Overcrowded / Crowded / Overenrolled: Synonyms for the same problem—with more students than a classroom or facility were designed to accommodate.

Qualifying Zone Academy Bond (QZAB): Federal grants to qualifying school districts that relieve the district of paying interest on bonds used to pay for school expansions and renovations.

Teacher-Student Ratio (TSR): Also called pupil-teacher ratio; one way to identify an overcrowded school. There is no national standard. Acceptable teacher student ratios may vary depending on student needs within a classroom (special needs, second language, etc.) or grade level (lower grades--higher ratio).

Bibliography

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Overcrowding in Schools

On this Page

Subject Terms

Overcrowding in Schools

Abstract

Overview

Further Insights

Viewpoints

Terms & Concepts

Bibliography

Suggested Reading