When it comes to secular theology, the worship of education is high in the statement of faith; and when it comes to education, dogma number one is the belief in the benefits of class size reduction. On the surface it seems logical that a teacher with fewer students can give more attention to each, and it seems logical that a student who receives more attention from teachers will learn more. Right? Well, apparently not. Despite America's devotion, class size reduction has little effect on learning.
Tennessee's Project STAR (Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio) - a study conducted between 1985 and 1989 - seemed to support that conclusion. Over 6,000 students were involved in the study in which children from 79 schools were randomly sent to large, medium and small classes. The study's conclusion was that smaller classes led to significant performance improvement, estimating that students who stayed in small classes for four full years - kindergarten through grade 3 - ended up 5.4 months ahead of their peers by the time all had entered grade 8. Moreover, benefits for minorities outpaced the positive affects for white students, producing nearly twice the gains. The STAR study seemed to substantiate all that pro-class-size-reduction forces had expected, and is now cited as fact by educators, academics and policy makers. ...Harvard University's Caroline Hoxby argued that the methodology of STAR was lacking. Its biggest flaw was that study participants knew they were being studied and hence tended to work to achieve outcomes desired by the researchers. As Hoxby writes, "the schools in a class size experiment may realize that if the experiment fails to show that the policy is effective, the policy will never be broadly enacted. In such cases the schools have incentives that the fully enacted policy would not give . . . . the experiment alters the incentive conditions . . . In addition, some individuals temporarily increase their productivity when they are being evaluated."
Eric Hanushek, then at the University of Rochester, also examined the study's methodology, but pointed to different shortcomings. Among these were:
* Between 20 and 30 percent of students in STAR quit each year, leaving less than half of the original group by the study's end.
* The students who quit were disproportionately low performers, providing a statistical boost to smaller classes.
* No pretests were given to students at the beginning of the study, providing no baseline off of which to measure achievement gains.
* While students for the program were chosen randomly, teachers and schools were not.
In other words, STAR was bad science. The researchers found what they set out to find. Real-world experience in California -- at great expense -- has demonstrated that reducing class size has essentially no effect on student learning.
Inspired by STAR, the state of California forged a plan to implement a massive class-size-reduction effort. Starting in 1996 the Golden State set in motion a program to lower average state K-3 class size from an average of 28 to 20 students. Unfortunately for Californians, there have been no achievement gains as a result of reducing class size. According to a series of reports by the state commissioned Class-Size-Reduction (CSR) Research Consortium, class-size-reduction has not achieved anything like even the questionable gains reported in the Tennessee experiment. In its third and most recent report, the Consortium reported finding no evidence that class-size-reduction has produced improved scores, though it has indisputably cost a great deal of money and displaced many effective programs and teachers. While they found that "achievement has been increasing during CSR's implementation," the researchers concluded that there "was no strong association between differences in exposure [to reduction efforts] and differences in achievement effects during this period." In other words, there was no correlation between how long students were in reduced-size classes and changes in their test scores. And the cost to achieve so little? To date, an estimated $8 billion.
Go read the rest of that article and you'll see that countries all around the world have larger classes and higher performance than the United States -- if anything, it appears that large classes are beneficial, at least for some subjects. Why? Perhaps because large classes allow good teachers to work with more students. The paper goes on to argue that what really helps students is a reduction in school size.
It shouldn't be any surprise that the primary culprits behind the dogma of class size reduction are the teachers' unions. Smallers classes means more teachers with easier jobs, so the unions have a monumental incentive for advocating the failed programs. The $8 billion dollars wasted by California tax-payers went straight into the pockets of the unneeded teachers and their union organizers. What's more, larger classes with fewer teachers would mean that the best teachers could teach more children and the worst teachers could be dismissed -- a concept antithetical to the unions.
Smaller class sizes produced better results at the District I work for. Our smallest elementary school served 42 students, grades K-5. The class sizes were, obviously, very small. The performance of those students was noticeably higher than that of other District students who went to our larger elementary schools. The teachers were of the same caliber between the schools.
Unfortunately, due to budget cuts, we had to close that school.
I do not believe that one study either way should set a precedent as fact. I can go find statistical evidence to support any outcome that I desire depending upon how I set up my experiment and measurement procedure.
Do you really believe that one teacher in a classroom with 40 students is as effective as one teacher with 20?
Let's face it. California's education system could be much better in many ways. I believe that it would greatly benefit from getting back to basic educational principles and stop trying to reinvent the educational process in an effort to achieve some new result.
With a spouse that works for the LAUSD special education department I marvel daily at the beauracracy that she is continually faced with. She spends much more time dealing with assinine beauracracy then with students. How does this help?
Maybe that's why we are moving???
Mark: So wait, did the students do better because the classes were smaller, or because the school was smaller? What other factors were in play? I don't think a sample size of one has much meaning.
Eric: The California data isn't the result of a study, it's from accumulating test scores from all California schools for the past decade. And yes, I believe that students in a class of 40 with a good teacher will do better than students in a class of 20 with a poor teacher (while the good teacher is off teaching another class of 20).
The bureaucracy you mention, which I also agree is strangling public education, is largely the result, again, of the teachers' unions.
I'll be curious to hear how public education is different in your new area.
MW: I'm not sure how the school being smaller would have anything to do with it. The school is physically about the same size as our next smallest school, which serves a little over 100 students... but there's still one room per grade, as in the other elementary schools.
As for other factors, I don't know what you think would matter.
I think a better description of the article is that the advantages of smaller class size are unproven. My wife, when she worked as a substitute, definitely noticed the difference of smaller class sizes--although you might argue that she was an atypical substitute.
Other countries have larger class sizes without negative consequences at least partly because some of those countries (e.g., Japan) still have children who have been raised to behave in the classroom.
That is something that no one running for public office dares discuss: a lot of parents are failing to discipline their kids, which makes it rather difficult to much teaching.
CEC: Discipline is indeed a part of the problem.
I don't really get why a smaller sized classes would be better. Part of me somehow thinks that may be the case but there doesn't seem to be much rationale behind it. It's not like the teacher would be teaching one-on-one and most of the kids in the class don't ask questions that often. Aside from not being able to see the board clearly or not hearing the teacher clearly due to sitting to far away, which doesn't seem to be the problem with most of the larger-sized classes, I don't really see how a smaller sized class would do better. And if some kids won't behave then the other kids, few or many, would suffer anyways. Perhaps someone can enlighten me.
Michael,
You can't make that jump of one good teacher for 40 verses one bad teacher for 20. All things being equal (taking the teacher out of the equation) do you actually believe that a student will receive the same educational experience if he or she is in a classroom with 19 others verses 39 others. The same teacher in a classroom of 20 verses 40 will be grading twice as many papers, gathering twice as many supplies, explaining the assignment to twice as many students that don't understand, have twice the discipline problems, etc.
If they are in California they will have at least twice the number of non-english speaking children to contend with...
I agree with you completely that the teacher's union is a corrupt establishment that does little for the education of a child and is wholly self-serving.
Smaller class sizes may not be the best answer, better teachers of course is. I would contend however that if given a choice, the best teacher applicants are not going to choose an environment where they are contending with 40-50 students alone. One may very well lead to the other.
I think it'd have to do with the subject more than anything - smaller classes in highly technical undertakings or advanced English - where a workshop might be best - probably a good thing.
Look at college - your gigantic lectures are for simpler, fact-based subjects that don't require a lot of interpretation. But as those classes become more specialized, the class size shrinks.
The more engaged the students are in discussion, the better/more interesting the material being taught.
hln