By Joanna Dupuis

A three-year-old program of small classes in Wisconsin is raising the academic achievement of participating students, according to a new evaluation.

Wisconsin's program, known as Students Achievement Guarantee in Education (SAGE), shows gains especially for African-American students. For example, third-grade African-American students in the program succeeded in narrowing the gap between their achievement and that of white SAGE students. In comparison schools, the gap widened.

The Wisconsin findings mirror a Tenneessee initiative, known as Project Star, that also found gains for young children in small classes, especially African Americans in inner-city schools.

Wisconsin's SAGE was first implemented in 1996-97 in kindergarten and first-grade classrooms in 30 public schools throughout Wisconsin. Its goal is to increase the academic achievement of children living in poverty by reducing the student-teacher ratio in kindergarten through third grade to 15:1. The latest study of the program, released this January, found that smaller classrooms tended to score significantly higher when adjusted for socioeconomic status and attendance. But in all cases, classrooms with more affluent children outperformed classrooms with children from lower-income families.

SAGE expanded to include 80 schools in 1998-99. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Education evaluates the original 30 schools and 16 comparison schools annually.