It is generally understood that well educated citizens provide many positive impacts for a nation including strong economic growth, higher incomes, and a distribution of success across the population. The sad fact that US students are quickly falling behind their peers around the world in academic success is also no secret. The March 2008 Fact Sheet published by the Alliance for Excellent Education reports that US students ranked 15th of 29 countries in reading literacy; 21st of 30 countries in science literacy; 25th of 30 countries in mathematics literacy; and 24th of 29 countries in problem solving. It is obvious that the US educational system is doing something wrong. When asked, most people will parrot the widely held belief that large class sizes are the major contributing factor to our students’ dismal ranking and that reduction in the number of students per class will somehow magically improve our students’ performance.

Follow up:

This belief is based on The State of Tennessee’s large-scale, four-year, experimental study of the effects of reduced class size in grades K-3 conducted during the 1980’s.  The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project concluded that there was “no doubt small classes have an advantage over larger classes in reading and math in early primary grades.” [STAR] Yet when investigated, there are anomalies in the facts on which these findings are based. Eric Hanushek, in his testimony before the US Senate’s Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions argued against the movement to mandate smaller classes in grades 1-3 and the proposed $1.4 billion in additional federal spending for the fiscal year 2000 required to staff these classrooms as a misguided action that would possibly hurt student achievement. In fact, he argued that “class size reduction may be one of the least effective educational investments.”

Hanushek bases his argument specifically on the fact that improvements achieved in STAR kindergarten students remained essentially unchanged through the sixth grade. It was his contention that if smaller class sizes directly affected the improved performance of the students in the study then their achievement gap over non-study students would widen. Furthermore, if there was any credibility in the premise that reductions in class size has a direct relationship on student achievement then we would expect that classes in the countries who performed better than US students in the rankings above would have to be much smaller than those in the United States. “In fact, just the opposite is true. Asian countries that routinely outperform the US generally have class sizes of 30-40 students.” [HANUSHEK]

In addition to being ineffective, class size reductions are extraordinarily expensive as we’ve seen above. A nationwide mandate to reduce average class size to 18 students per class would require hiring over 100,000 additional teachers. Not only is focusing on class size reduction expensive but it also diverts attention away from potentially productive reform efforts. Improving teacher quality immediately comes to mind. The biggest gift we can give to our students is an extraordinary teacher. Funds that could be used to hire a multitude of warm bodies to babysit in classrooms would be better spent on:

• Improving undergraduate teacher education programs and standards.
• Developing effective review programs for existing teachers.
• Developing remedial training for teachers who are rated unsuccessful.
• Providing grants and scholarships to teachers producing high achieving students who wish to pursue advanced educational degrees.
• Negotiating with teachers’ unions to eliminate the outmoded concept of tenure allowing schools the ability to dismiss poorly trained, ineffective, and burned out teachers.
• Increasing salaries for our most effective educators.

For those of you who are still unconvinced, I’d like to pose a question to you. How many students were in your fourth grade classroom…your sixth grade classroom…your US History class in high school? Think about how your classroom was laid out…how many rows of how many desks were there? By today’s standards, classrooms of 22 students are considered over-crowded. How would your experiences rate? I did this exercise and estimate there were at least (4 rows of 8 students) 32 in my fourth grade class…an unknown number in sixth grade but I do recall that we had to move desks out of the way for students to walk from the front of the room to the back because we were so packed into the classroom…and US History, well there were at least 35 students. Despite these incredibly “over-crowded” conditions I still managed to master each grade’s courses and ultimately graduate from college. It wasn't the number of children in my classrooms that affected my education but the quality of my teachers. What we need to improve the academic performance of our students are innovative, well trained, and  well-compensated teachers who can teach.

Sources:

1. Fact Sheet: How Does the United States Stack Up? International Comparisons of Academic Achievement. Alliance for Excellent Education. March 2008. http://www.all4ed.org/files/IntlComp_FactSheet.pdf.
2. Hanushek, Eric A. Should Class Size Reduction Substitute for Innovation? University of Rochester June 23, 1999. http://edpro.stanford.edu/hanushek/admin/pages/files/uploads/senate.pdf.
3. Project STAR: Tennessee’s K-3 Class Size Study. I Herosi. http://www.heros-inc.org/star.htm.

Further Reading:

Education Week: Class Sizes Show Signs of Growing 

NWPE: New Developments In Class Size Debate