Class Size
I don’t disagree with Hendrick Hertzberg very often, but I think this is wrong:
Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.
For one thing, we need to start out with the fact that decreasing class size isn’t an alternative to addressing school finance issues and the lack of equity involved. Obviously, to have smaller classes you need more teachers and that would cost more money. And more money should be spent, especially on schools with lots of poor students (see this from Robert Gordon for some proposals to improve funding issues). But even once we’re assuming that struggling underfunded schools are going to be getting more money, I don’t think it’s totally clear that reducing class size is the best use of the marginal dollar.
There are already a lot of difficulties involved in getting the best staff available into the schools that need them the most. If you simply expand the number of people you’re trying to hire for what are currently the least-desirable positions, you’re going to wind up decreasing the average quality of your staff when we really need to increase it. Clearly, there are a lot of schools in the United States and perhaps some of them have class sizes so large that reducing them is really the most pressing need. But in most cases, I would say that creating financial incentives to better fill hard-to-staff positions is going to be a better use of money than creating new positions.
82 Responses to “Class Size”
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December 7th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
But the two kind of go hand in hand – positions are hard to staff because there aren’t enough qualified people who want to teach in existing conditions for existing wages.
Since reducing class sizes means hiring more teachers willing to teach in better conditions (new classrooms, fewer students/teacher, etc.), and theoretically better wages as well (how else are you going to find the new teachers?), I don’t see why you can’t do both at once.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
You want a better educational system in this country? Send it better students. America has raised a couple of generations of incurious, dull-witted and rude offspring who possess a sense of entitlement and whose heroes and role models are rap stars and athletes. Until being intelligent, well-read, and literate are qualities to be prized instead of ridiculed no amount of top-down change to the educational system is going to result in improvement. Teachers are not the producers of education, they are the conduits. If your child is an undisciplined idiot, look in the damned mirror.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
There are already a lot of difficulties involved in getting the best staff available into the schools that need them the most. If you simply expand the number of people you’re trying to hire for what are currently the least-desirable positions, you’re going to wind up decreasing the average quality of your staff when we really need to increase it.
Which is why we need to engage in some union-busting, right? Oh wait, wrong.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:49 pm
This is a perfect example of why the teacher’s union is the biggest obstacle to sensible school reform.
(I see Francisco has beaten me to the punch.)
December 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm
Just thought I’d note something I read in the L.A. Times by your friend Jonah Goldberg a few weeks ago…actually, let me see if I can find it…OK, here it is: http://www.latimes.com/news/columnists/la-oe-goldberg25-2008nov25,0,2913644.column
And here’s the quote: “According to data compiled by the Washington Post in 2007, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, D.C. ranks third in spending for each student, around $13,000 a pupil, but last in spending on instruction. More than half of every dollar of education spending goes to the salaries of administrators.”
which raises the eternal question, WTF is up with that?
December 7th, 2008 at 3:56 pm
One of the big problems in education is that scientifically developed methods are not used. I have a son who is dyslexic, but the public school (a high quality one) did not try the methods that are known to teach a child to read – orton-gillinham, wilson, etc. I had to find these methods myself. There is no excuse in this day and age for public schools not to use up-to-date and effective methods. Sadly they don’t.
December 7th, 2008 at 3:57 pm
As a teacher, I can tell you that having less students in my class makes a huge difference. The problem is when class size reduction happens without changing other systemic issues in education. We don’t have to think in hypotheticals here, since this has already happened in California where class sizes in K-3 were reduced from as many as 33 or 34 students to no more than 20. For an individual teacher, this is great. For many low-performing schools and their students, this was not so great. When the legislation was passed, all districts, both high and low performing needed to hire many more (38% more) K-3 teachers. High performing districts filled these spots by hiring the best recent college graduates and by hiring well-qualified teachers from other district, keeping their teaching staffs consistently excellent. Low-performing districts also had to hire more teachers, but had to dip even further into their hiring pool. More marginal recent college graduates were hired along with many uncertified teachers who wouldn’t have been hired before class size reduction. To make matters even worse, many of these district’s better teachers left to fill now open positions in more desirable schools. The end result is that low-performing schools had the quality of their teaching staffs decline. Not surprisingly, there is no clear evidence that student achievement improved due to the class size reduction.
http://www.rand.org/news/press.02/csr.062702.html
December 7th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
The seeping of business thinking into the educational field has become so commonplace that it isn’t even noticed anymore. A typical example is the hiring of Joel Klein as head of the NYC school system. Schools are not a business. They don’t make a profit, and they need to be judged not on the basis of economic “efficiency”.
Klein’s role, like others of his bent, is to put the administration at odds with the teachers in the typical labor vs (unionized) worker adversarial arrangement.
Teachers don’t go into the profession to make money. Most are underpaid and while getting more money will, I’m sure, be welcomed, they get other rewards from their profession. Trying to attract “better” teachers by using money as an incentive will attract those for whom money is important, just the wrong message to be sending.
On the other hand making working conditions better so that student outcomes are better is something that teachers will appreciate. What teacher’s (and administrators who aren’t businessmen) want is to see their charges grow up to be well-educated, productive and happy members of society.
That’s what smaller class sizes, better buildings and adequate supplies and other pedagogical improvements will bring.
The big education innovators of the 20th Century: Dewey, Montessori, Steiner, etc. were not businessmen. Hasn’t the capitalist model done enough damage recently? Do we really need to apply it to education as well?
Funding needs to be equalized. Social services need to be improved so that at-risk students can overcome their deficient home environment and the country has to decide that education is a worthwhile function of government (at all levels) and make the proper commitment to it.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Bottom-to-top education reform is one of the critical issues facing the Obama administration. Fixing the problems, especially in k-12, will take both money, bold moves, and the ability to do results-based corrections.
David Brooks had a very interesting summary a few days ago, where he suggested that Obama had two groups of educators to please: the reformers (DC and NYC administrators are prime examples) and the ed-school/teachers groups. I’m not convinced that these groups can’t work together.
I don’t know what the solution is. But I’m sure it will be multi-faceted, it will cost money, and it will require a willingness for all groups to make changes.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:20 pm
I think that the falling costs of wireless communication and portable computing along with the increasing capabilities of the internet should allow us to rethink the basic nature of education. With in a few years almost every person will almost always have access to the internet. The federal government could insure that there are freely available, high quality educational systems on line. This is the type of federal program that has high up front cost but low duplication costs.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:28 pm
You want a better educational system in this country? Send it better students. Well,, that’s a nice little start to the debate, followed up by inanity. The strongest indicator of educational performance is family income. So the dyspeptic reactionaries need merely make all families rich. See, e.g., this, and this. The students in DC (and Baltimore) are poor because the are poor. The students in contiguous Montgomery, Fairfax and Howard are good because they are rich. Small classes help, rich parents help more.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
America has raised a couple of generations of incurious, dull-witted and rude offspring who possess a sense of entitlement and whose heroes and role models are rap stars and athletes.
NEAP scores for reading were the same for 17-year-olds in 2004 as in 1971. Scores for 9- and 13-year-olds went up over the same period. Math scores for all cohorts went up between 1973 and 2004. These trends were the same when I was a teenager in the ’80s, when adults were saying the same sorts of things about my generation.
http://www.data360.org/graph_group.aspx?Graph_Group_Id=885
December 7th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
> Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local
> school boards financed by local property taxes and
> replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry
> of Education financed by the federal income tax,
> I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational
> reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.
I have been through the centralize/decentralize, outsource/insource, bigger/smaller cycle 5 times in my business career, and to me at least the verdict is pretty clear: small, decentralized, and practically-oriented beats large, centralized, and run-by-theory by a Norwegian mile [1] every time. Large, strong, centralized, standardized, hierarchical organizations with thousands of policies, procedures, processes, and “metrics” tend to be utter failures. Ref: Nortel/Lucent vs. Cisco from 1990-2000, and many similar cases as well.
It always seems that it “should be” possible to centralize, impose strong procedure-based controls, and increase both efficiency and quality of outcome. In practice it never works out that way. I would suggest some deep research by education reform proponents into this before rushing to propose destruction of the locally-controlled school model.
Cranky
December 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Oops – left out the reference: a Norwegian mile is 25 English miles. As a friend of mine who entered a “3 mile” ski race in his grandparent’s home town in Norway discovered to his peril!
Cranky
December 7th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
Oh, and Kevin Drum.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:52 pm
You really want to improve eduction, particularly in struggling districts? Give each and every teacher a full-time teaching assistant. Preferably one who is at least 40 years old and has at least one child who has graduated from that school/district (although best that they not have a child still at that school).
Cranky
December 7th, 2008 at 5:07 pm
Reducing the class size has a curious attribute- if you make the classes small enough, it doesn’t matter what else you do, you still get better results.
Matt would like us to ignore this well understood fact and, instead, break the power of the teacher’s unions so some hypothetical high-performing teachers could be hired who would, using personal jet packs no doubt, take large classes to dizzying heights of achievement.
It’s at moments like this that I feel pretty damn good about associating with normal people in normal small towns far far from Washington DC.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
America has raised a couple of generations of incurious, dull-witted and rude offspring who possess a sense of entitlement and whose heroes and role models are rap stars and athletes.
Trust me, European and Asian teens are no better in terms of role models. Their heroes might play Soccer instead of Basketball or rap in French but there’s really not that much difference. And yet they do better educationally, so to suggest that the educational plays no role in the disparity is just silly. Its not JUST the schools, but its certainly not JUST the parents either.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
The kids of prosperous black parents do poorly in school, on average. This has been noticed in many school districts: I’ve seen newspaper articles documenting it in Shaker Heights, OH, in the Washington suburbs, at the edge of Silicon valley, in Evanston Il, in Cheltenham PA, in Nyack, NY, in Amherst MA, and in Berkeley, CA. A number of these schools have banded together to investigate this mysterious trend. No progress so far.
Somehow SES doesn’t do it for them.
December 7th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Let me put this in simpler terms for Peter. Teachers can not force education upon students, regardless of class size, available materials and technology, or family background and socio-economic status. Learning is an active process and the desire and effort of the student is the single most important factor. Low income is an obstacle, but there are still public libraries in this country available to anyone who really wants to learn. The teacher is only there to show the path. The student must put significant effort into their own education. That personal responsibility and desire to learn is only instilled at home. I retired last spring afer being a college astronomy professor for many years and although I was offered more money to stay, I chose to depart because I am not a magician who can teach students that do not show up for classes, do not complete assignments, do not read textbooks, and who surf the internet on college-supplied wifi, listen to MP3 players, and send emails and text messages throughout the classes that they actually do attend, and who then argue with me about their grades. If you want to be a champion Olympic athlete you can go out and hire the best coach in the world, but if you don’t do the dozens of hours of practice a week on your own that is required to achieve your goal, you won’t have a chance. How anyone could blame that failure on the coach is beyond my comprehension. Same for teachers. So, save your snide ad hominems for somebody that gives a shit about your opinion.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
Hey Milo, when were you born? BTW an ad hominem attack is when I call your argument inane because you are an asshole. I don’t know anything about you except what your comment reveals.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:05 pm
My understanding of this is limited, but from recent reading on charter schools, done for other reasons, from what I see research bears out smaller class size is an important (possibly the most important factor) dismissed years ago and to this day due to cost factor.
I don’t find a ministry of education that appalling an idea. I also think school boards and hefty administrations, along with teacher tenure is something which needs retooling.
Having lived in various countries while growing up I agree with “Brooklynmatt”.
December 7th, 2008 at 6:21 pm
Project Follow Through was the largest and most expensive federally funded experiment in education ever conducted. It was originally intended to provide a continuation of Head Start services to students in their early elementary years…
One outcome of Project Follow Through was that it clearly documented the most effective instructional approach. The Direct Instruction model placed first in reading, arithmetic, spelling, language, basic skills, academic cognitive skills, and positive self image.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Follow_Through
December 7th, 2008 at 6:47 pm
So Peter goes directly from ad hominem to personal insult, tautology, and irrelevance. Peter, I was born at a time when I was motivated by my parents, who were decidedly not wealthy, and by our culture to learn as much as I could because intelligence, literacy, and competence were valued by society at the time. I read dozens of books every month from childhood and still do so today. I paid virtually nothing for eight years at a superb and costly private college because I was awarded scholarship after scholarship. I tied with one other student for the top SAT scores in my state in my senior year in high school. I was offered my teaching position because of my achievements, I didn’t seek it out. I became one of the most consistently top-rated professors at my institution for fourteen years despite having no teaching background. I have had a major publisher solicit me to write an astronomy textbook for them. I don’t have to work any more because my intellect and education have provided very well for me. And you?
December 7th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
The trouble with Milo and many others is that they (he) extrapolate from a singular experience to try to create encompassing generalities.
Milo’s first comment is silly. It says that there is no solution. But there are numerous examples of local successes that show this to be false at face value.
Then Milo is offended by an “ad hominen” attack that wasn’t an ad hominem attack. Milo’s second comment is not “simpler”, but it at least makes sense. Yes, a big problem is the attitude of students. Milo, in your first comment, you did not say that. You said it was “the students”, as if it was their nature.
Milo must have been raised in a remarkable period in American history. During Milo’s youth, parents motivated their children. That’s why virtually all students got total scholarships, and achieved the top SAT scores in their respective states. Since everyone in that era was appropriately motived by their god-like parents, all were awarded coveted teaching positions and are rated as top professors. Oh, to revive such a wonderful time!
Milo, you can make a mythology of your past or you can try to solve real problems.
I worry that we live in a society where someone as exceptional and gifted as Milo can’t make more logical arguments. We truly are in a mess.
I hate being so snarky. But education is a serious issue. We welcome constructive argument and ideas. But chest pounding and blaming the victims is not constructive.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:44 pm
But chest pounding and blaming the victims is not constructive.
Neither is calling students “victims” and trying to buy your way out of a social mess.
Frankly, there’s this popular idea that if we offer enough salary and benefits for teachers, enough technogadgets and few enough students in the classrooms, then everything will work out fine. Somehow these “better teachers” will step in and magically encourage kids to be successful.
Given a neutral or positive home environment, sure. Given enough social pressure from peers in school, sure. If the opposites of these statements are true, though, it takes a teacher with truly exceptional charisma to overcome these deficits: a “great” teacher.
More specifically, the “greatness” of a given teacher depends on environment. The “best” teachers compel appreciation, love, respect, and/or admiration from their students. Thus, who is “best” or “great” depends largely upon the school population: what kind of person the students can best connect with, admire, and appreciate?
More money for salary, smaller class size, et cetera won’t make those “great” people magically appear. There’s not enough of them to go around, and those that exist probably have sufficient compassion to go into teaching regardless of pay or class size.
Of course, this “best” quality is hardly necessary when the student is self-motivated or sees inherent value in what he or she is learning. Really, in America, we’re looking for exceptional inspirational teachers: people so charismatic that students would be enthusiastic to learn about boring and irrelevant things from them. Showing students the utility of what they’re learning won’t suffice to counteract the effect of a crappy home life: we need people who are so compelling and interesting and compassionate and X and Y and Z that students will follow them to the end of the Earth!
I think this is part of a generalized American fantasy about superheroic people. Some of these exceptional people do exist. There’s not enough of them to go around, though, and there’s not enough of them to save our schools.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:47 pm
robertdfeinman:
Most are underpaid and while getting more money will, I’m sure, be welcomed, they get other rewards from their profession. Trying to attract “better” teachers by using money as an incentive will attract those for whom money is important, just the wrong message to be sending.
I suppose we should not pay soldiers much more than the cost of living since heroism is its own reward. And we shouldn’t be paying doctors high salaries either – who knows what could happen if we let money-grubbers into this crucial profession?
Teachers deserve better working conditions. But they deserve better pay, too. Fears of money-grubbing don’t seem to have much basis to me. We don’t worry about greed in almost any other profession. Somehow, in education, we seem to invert our logic and insist that normal human behavior doesn’t apply.
Attracting greedier people is one thing – but if those greedy people can do their jobs well, it shouldn’t matter. It seems to me that one of the better ways to reform schools would be to reduce tenure protections, raise teacher salaries, and provide better working conditions – make it easier to fire the money-grubbers and other poor performers, while rewarding those who love and can do their jobs.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:49 pm
Hard to say which of the many relevant factors is most important, since in such studies, it’s hard to change only one variable at a time, in order to establish something reasonably definitively.
My own observation, as a non-teacher member of a curriculum development team with many, many teachers (in the late’80s/early’90s, dated I know)- that teacher quality and societal value on education(not training,which is now so often mistaken for education) are most relevant. In our subject area, grade school science, the teacher-developers focused hard on making curriculum ‘teacher-proof,’mainly because many teachers in those grades know very little science and seem terrified of it. After watching class pilots with hand-picked teachers, and then widespread classroom use, it seemed to me that a really good teacher can work brilliantly with almost anything, and can inspire a love of learning, even when there’s little support outside the school. Conversely, a teacher who is poor or ill-equipped struggles to make even the best circumstances work. I also noticed that students (often quite a mix in the classes I saw) did better if their family culture or local culture sincerely believed in the power of good education, although it seemed it didn’t always trump the teacher effect.
Some of my colleagues pointed to differences between Scotland and England at the time. They said the Scots had far better education outcomes, and also far higher standards for incoming teachers. Who knows, there may have been other differences, such as a better-funded system (I vaguely recall that wasn’t so), or higher societal value on education. I accepted all this, because it was consistent with what I saw.
If these observations have even a grain of merit, it still leaves an open question about how to ensure teacher quality and assessment. It seems to me that teacher pay alone is far from the answer.
December 7th, 2008 at 7:52 pm
Milo must have been raised in a remarkable period in American history. During Milo’s youth, parents motivated their children.
I agree with this criticism of Milo. It’s mythology to believe our population ever had this characteristic. Of course, about a century ago the majority of our population didn’t attend school and child labor was predominant among the least wealthy. It’s hard to say that was preferable to today’s system, under any metric!
Personally, I’d rather we focus on improving home environments, a sense of community in a local environment and emphasizing the relationship not just between education and one’s own financial security, but between education and achievement of one’s dreams. I’ve been glad to see increased emphasis on good early childhood programs over the past decade, for example. More work needs to be done in the general category of “improving people’s lives” and ensuring that communities have ample opportunities for work.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:00 pm
> More money for salary, smaller class size, et cetera
> won’t make those “great” people magically appear.
Strangely, this principle doesn’t seem to apply to Wall Street executives: no matter how interesting and engaging their jobs are, how much fun they have flying around the world in corporate jets and drinking $500 bottles of wine, how much pure enjoyment they get from making world-shattering decisions, it is still necessary to pay salaries of $5 million – $200 million/year to attract them to the jobs. What is the difference I wonder?
Cranky
December 7th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
I think funding schools with income taxes is critically important because funding them with property taxes makes less than no sense. Schools have nothing to do with property and funding them that way creates this destructive, vicious circle; school quality depends on surrounding property values and property values are distorted by the quality of neighborhood schools.
So much like the parking meter issue, changing the school funding mechanism would have other important benefits that are independent reasons to support it. And it would help make class sizes smaller.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:11 pm
Strangely, this principle doesn’t seem to apply to Wall Street executives… What is the difference I wonder?
Heh. I guess the same logic applies to pro athletes: they seen their chances and they took ‘em. Of course, pro athletes are by all accounts fairly exceptional at their sport, and there’s about the right amount to go around – we don’t need 50+ of them in every county. But CEO jobs? They aren’t nearly as demanding on a person as teaching. Heck, I could’ve steered Citigroup into the ground in my spare time…
You really want to improve eduction, particularly in struggling districts? Give each and every teacher a full-time teaching assistant. Preferably one who is at least 40 years old and has at least one child who has graduated from that school/district (although best that they not have a child still at that school).
Most brilliant idea I’ve heard so far. Do you teach?
December 7th, 2008 at 8:27 pm
> [good idea] Do you teach?
My partner fits that description in a middle-middle class district that voluntarily (and for the last 2 years, at our own expense) takes 15% of its students from an utterly failed urban district. I personally attended an inner city school in a large urban district that was in a death spiral at the time but has since pulled out and recovered somewhat (but which produced well-educated, high-achieving graduates even in its darkest days). I also have other connections to the various worlds of education. So I have seen this issue up close and personal from several sides.
Cranky
December 7th, 2008 at 8:35 pm
I’m an elementary teacher (fifth grade–six years of experience). Here’s another opinion to add to the debate.
First, there is no question that extra-school variables are by far the most significant, when looking at student achievement. Having said that, however, we have to focus on what can be changed. I do think it’s important to recognize that teachers–even the very good ones–are fighting a tremendous uphill battle in many cases, as others have pointed out. I worked in Chicago for two years, and I will say that most people can’t even imagine the difficulty level of teaching in settings such as that.
Second, at my school we have several highly motivated, extraordinarily gifted teachers, and they still have a tough time with many students. (And our school is average.) As “salient” (#27) says, the pool of exceptional teachers is quite small, and even then, there is a limit to what they can accomplish.
Third, if I ask myself “What do I need to become a better teacher myself?” my first answer is not smaller classes. Smaller classes would help, of course, but more important than that is learning new and better teaching techniques–practical changes in the way I teach. Watching veteran teachers has helped me tremendously. Reading good books about successful teachers has helped. Attending GOOD workshops can be very valuable. Perhaps we could have an incentive system that offered more pay for attending training or for completing peer observation sessions, or something like that.
Finally, I agree with those who say that attracting better teachers to begin with is crucial. I’m not sure how we will ever do that without increasing salaries. The difficulties of the job do not easily them themselves to being ameliorated by improving “working conditions.”
December 7th, 2008 at 8:37 pm
So I have seen this issue up close and personal from several sides.
Yes, it seemed like the idea of someone who has had direct experience with the teaching workload as well as the real needs of teachers. I’m contemplating bringing it up at our SBDM council meeting this January. It might be possible to accomplish with volunteers, scaling the ambition of the program from part-time volunteers to paid full-time assistants over several years, thus a mild upfront cost.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I didn’t read all of the comments so I may be repeating some, but reducing class size is not the one size fits all solution to America’s educational system. First of all, besides from major inner city school districts it has not been proven that the public schools are substantially differnet than they were, say, 30-40 years ago when I went. In grade school class size is critical but speaking as a high school teacher, besides the 40 in a class spots, it has not been proven to make much of a difference. I could believe there should be a Ministry of Education in DC that would only be concerned with setting and measuring standards for different grade levels and then spear heading geographical areas that need special assistance in getting this done. Besides that, I would leave it up to the individual states to implement the standards. Get rid of the local school boards and just make it a streamlined and accountable state system. My personal belief is that too much is left up to the individual teacher.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Salient,
I think Milo was “blaming the victim”. Student who spend 12 years in dysfunctional schools and exit without an education are, in my minds, victims. Milo was saying that it is the students’ fault that the schools are bad. Isn’t that blaming the victim.
I agree that throwing money at the problem won’t fix it. But money, hard work and a willingness to try difficult solutions are required. We also need better parenting, the courage the turn off the TV and better role models from our communities and the media. But better schools are an essential part of the mix.
In my mind, a key ingredient in a good or great school is the atmosphere. Do students feel its possible to achieve? Is educational achievement valued? Do students feel that, if they put in the work, they will achieve rewards in self worth, mastery and preparation for life? Mediocre teachers can be come great in the proper atmosphere while good teachers will become alienated and discouraged in a school where education isn’t really valued. As Milo does point out, much of the atmosphere and motivation comes from home. But a lot comes from the school itself. Kids do spend thousands of hours in school.
Finally, Jeff Hellmers makes some great points about technique.
December 7th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
In my mind, a key ingredient in a good or great school is the atmosphere.
“Atmosphere” is a really nice word used by people who look at things from afar and paint with a broad brush and believe in a nation of superheroes, if only we can awaken and summon them.
December 7th, 2008 at 9:53 pm
Well said jim moore.
The Federal Govt. could create a great online curriculum for netbooks and ebook readers. It could start with Math. Maybe publishers could then offer modules in other subjects. The technology is now such that the promise of pc’s, internet and tech generally can be realised – as long as a coherent investment is made in the content.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:34 pm
One thing that is related to smaller class size is special needs students. Teachers could handle larger class sizes if they did not have so many students that because of learning disabilities, mental deficits or behavioral problems require extra attention from the teacher.
I was chatting with 5th grade teacher how had to modify the lessons of fully one third of her students. The modifications include removing answers on multiple choice tests, giving extra time or a myriad of other modifications. Each of those modifications takes time, and law requires each modification of every assignment to be customized.
The problem is that federal law requires each student to be in the “least restrictive environment”, which is considered normal classrooms more often than serves either the special needs student, teachers or average students well. Having these students in normal classrooms, especially when you have more than one or two, takes away time that teachers would otherwise spend working with average students. Just about every teacher has stories about having students in their classroom that took more than 50% of their attention due to behavioral problems. These students have always existed, but 30 years ago they would have gotten expelled. Now they are much harder to get out of a classroom, to the detriment of other students.
Bright students get taken care of, via AP, IB or other G&T programs. Special Ed students mostly get taken care of, especially one they get diagnosed. Our system handles the average students most poorly, especially those that would be better served by vocational programs that are either underfunded or nonexistent.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I live in an area that could be a little educational experiment. My district is about 60% minority with a 20% free and reduced lunch population, almost all of which is black. Right next door is a 99% white upper middle class suburb with a free and reduced lunch population — I kid you not — last reported as zero. The average class size in both places is roughly the same. The curriculum is basically the same. The salary differential once enjoyed by the wealthier district has substantially narrowed in recent years. The biggest differences between the districts are race and class.
In the aggregate — surprise, surprise — the test scores of the wealthier, lily-white district are substantially higher. Yet, the disaggregated test scores for our white students are every bit as good as next door.
It’s the achievement gap, stupid. Yes, there are things we can do to improve things educationally, but they are only tinkering at the margins. Unless and until we address its underlying causes, which are in place long before kids reach the school house door and continue for long thereafter, we aren’t going to close the gap.
December 7th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
jim moore (at 11) the internet approach is a gimmick. Students who do not already have motivation on their own just plain give up, sayingbeen there, done that, boy was that a bummer.
Milo Johnson (at 21) couldn’t agree with you more. Cube (@26 & 38) Milo is just describing a reality lots and lots of teachers run into every day…neglect that at our collective peril. And, no, he is not blaming the victim.
Of course it would be nice if parents read to their kids, or had books at home or whatever. But that is beyond the scope of reform.
Johnleemk (@28) you’re making more sense to me than you were in the last thread. The problem is that politics (hence reform) has to do with the art of the possible. If we cannot produce excellent teachers on demand (and we can’t), then what can we do. We can improve the underlying conditions in which teachers try to do what we hope they shall do. That does mean smaller classes and fewer sections and so on; Cranky Observer has this right. Such conditions would, so I think, make the difference between teachers of acceptable capacity and those who should do something else for the good of us all much more apparent, assuming of course that the same applies to incompetent administrators and folks whose idea of reformis to proceed on the cheap.
We’ve lots and lots of students, folks. That requires a big system one way or another. We should at least figure out ways to keep that system from becoming too corrupt. Seeing that most ideas about reform are just means to promote corruption (as anyone who works as a teacher in an education system can probably quote you chapter and verse), perhaps we should all go back, reread our Aristotle on measuring too closely that which should not be measured closely, and think about what is possible to make changes to–class size being prominent. Then we can think about funding (and thats going to be lots of money no matter how we slice it).
December 7th, 2008 at 11:09 pm
My point is not that I am gifted or exceptional, I am neither. Anything I’ve ever done, any human with a normal brain and body can do. School is not where you go to become intelligent, it’s where you go to learn how to become intelligent. Teachers have no magic knowledge syringe to inject pure education into the brains of those who see no value to learning and don’t put any more intellectual effort into going to school than is necessary to just get by. If parents don’t inculcate those values in their children during the years they spend with them, teachers sure won’t be able to in the few hours a day they have. If you still don’t grasp this, you aren’t worth explaining it to again.
December 7th, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Two big issues here:
1) Class is not the number one variable in education outcome; teacher quality is. An excellent teacher will do a better job, usually, for most kids with 30 in the room than an average teacher will do with 20. I have seen this in action in high schools where I have taught. A bad teacher will have a better behaved room with fewer students, but will not accomplish a lot more in terms of learning.
With finite resources, every dollar put into smaller class sizes is a dollar not spent on higher average teacher salaries. (Don’t make arguments about how we should spend more, or not waste in on administration – whichever side you are on, class size vs. teacher salary is a ultimately zero sum game.) Let’s say you currently have a school with 10 math teachers, and each averages 22 students per class. Next year we can add an 11th teacher and cut class size to 20, or keep class size the same and pay everyone 10% more. At best, that extra teacher is someone slightly worse than the people already teaching. (Not guaranteed, but not an unreasonable assumption.) Smaller class sizes slightly better for the 20 people that got to stay in the best teacher’s class, but much worse for the two bumped down to the worst teacher’s class.
But it may actually be worse than that – because people actually do leave teaching because of pay. Rarely the only reason, but often a significant one. The 10% pay increase is enough that it will keep some people from leaving the profession. And a lot of the people who leave are the brightest with the most initiative. So quite possibly you are not only hiring one person who did not previously have a teaching job to allow smaller class sizes, but a second to replace the good teacher who left because you chose to reduce class sizes rather than significantly increase salaries.
2) I think Baumol’s Cost Disease came up on MY’s site in regards to education recently. To me this is a big deal going forward, and flies directly against trying to reduce class sizes. If I want to paid like a real professional, and even close to what other people with my math skills make, I need to find a way to successfully work with more than 20 kids at a time. Probably that involves using technology better. I think it probably does involve having more teaching assistants, and fewer licensed teachers, with a lead teacher actually having a supervisory as well as an instructional role.
The number of people out there who can not just understand math and science concepts, but can also effectively communicate them, is limited. If you want to find enough to teach kids in groups of 20, which means keeping pay around $40-60k, you’ll never even come close. If you can figure out a model that works with 40 students per lead teacher, you don’t need as many teachers, you could afford to pay $75k, and you might actually have enough truly qualified people to fill all the jobs.
How this works for 5-8 year-olds is beyond me. It is a fundamentally different job requiring completely different skills than most high school subjects. It just happens that essentially the same standards and pay scales are applied to the two areas.
December 8th, 2008 at 12:10 am
I’ve been in a lot of off-teaching positions– spent a lot of time as a substitute, I’ve seen many dozens of classrooms, from kindergarten through college in a number of different cities. I don’t have nearly the depth of experience that some of your commenters do, but feel I at least have some breadth– The thing that struck me is this:
1) Class size matters. A lot. Both in terms of the quality of the work environment (and thus attractiveness to teachers) and in the quality of the result. At least at the elementary and middle-school level, you may, in fact, be better with 20 kids in a classroom and mediocre teacher, than 34 kids in a classroom and a pretty good teacher. David may well be right with regards to high school math and science courses; some sort of a bifurcation in our system may be needed, with smaller class sizes earlier on and larger ones (with more-highly specialized teachers) later.
2) A lot of students are coming into the system (even at 5 or 6 years old) already behind (in terms of both fundamental skills and socialization) in a way that our schools are not set up to remedy– and in a way that disrupts and undermines classrooms. Milo Johnson phrases this in an offensive blame-the-culture sort of a way, and I think it kind of misses the point. I don’t think it’s productive to rail against the generalized wretchedness of our culture; however, I do think it has to do with an absence of parental involvement, unstable home lives, and families that aren’t encouraging values that are conducive to education (hard-work, respect for learning, et cetera) in their children. Some of these things do have components impacted by the larger culture.
Annoyingly, I don’t think there’s a whole lot we can do to fix that within the confines of the school system.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:04 am
The entire educational concept that the US labors under is so brain dead, so technologically backward, so totally at odds with the way humans ACTUALLY LEARN STUFF that supporting the US education system is THE biggest cause of the decline of the US.
Kill the American education system dead between the eyes and replace it with ANYTHING and it will be an improvement.
Matt is the poster boy for this fact.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:06 am
Teacher quality is the number one variable in education outcomes? Oh really?
December 8th, 2008 at 1:54 am
I was under the impression that it wasn’t actually an open-and-shut case that class size has a clear positive effect on student performance. That, while it is a boon to teachers in several ways and considered a good thing by parents, any positive results from reducing class size depended on the subject of the class, the age of the students, and other socio-economic factors. So, I guess, what Matt said.
December 8th, 2008 at 2:00 am
Also, as a point of reference, I taught at a public school (Realschule) in Germany and grew up and went to school in Indiana and Ohio. The classroom experience is not significantly different.
December 8th, 2008 at 3:56 am
djeri:
If we cannot produce excellent teachers on demand (and we can’t), then what can we do.
My sense of this is that producing good teachers is a long-run problem. In the short run, we can and should make do with what we have. This is why I am a fan of Michelle Rhee’s experiment with keeping on teachers who prefer tenure, but offering higher pay to teachers who opt to reject tenure, and also refusing tenure to new teachers. No teachers except those who voluntarily put themselves on the line are affected, while better new teachers are attracted and/or incentivized by the higher pay.
Countries with better education systems, I think, often have higher compensation for educators. In some places like Singapore, it is through high pay (I have Singaporean friends whose public school teachers drove luxury cars). In others like Sweden and Japan, it seems to be not just high pay but high regard as well. My guess is that high pay is correlated/commensurate with greater respect, so if we want to engender respect for the teaching profession, that is yet another potential argument for higher pay. That is just a guess, however, and even if it is wrong, doesn’t invalidate the plenty other reasons we have to get rid of underperforming teachers while rewarding those who do their job well.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:37 am
I first heard this about 30 years ago. My mother taught for 25 years and was involved with “cutting edge” efforts like non-graded and open classrooms in elementary schools, so she and her fellow teachers spent a lot of time studying what might be the improved methods Matt claims to desire.
The two major predictors of how well the child will do in school are class size and how much the parent reads.
Every once in a while I check to see if this is still true and it always is. It doesn’t seem to change because you or someone you know knew a great teacher who motivated a class of 40 students.
Now people like Matt are saying we shouldn’t spend more money reducing class sizes (which we know works), we should spend more money hiring super-smart teachers.
Well, who decides who is super-smart? Would MBAs from Harvard qualify as ’super-smart’?
This is America in a nutshell. Everyone has a smart-alec ’solution’, none of which have any relation to the 50 or 60 years of careful research and reproducible conclusions we already have. The goal, of course, is to find the unobtanium mine, the wonderful place where you get something for nothing.
Well, good luck with that one.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:38 am
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December 8th, 2008 at 8:30 am
Johnleemk,
I think serial catowner (@ 52) makes a point that should guide a lot of how we conceive what is possible. Further, it goes to why am I ambivalent about various attempts to try and think about education as if it were a market, which is what this business about incentives and technology and so forth all comes down to.
What if economic man is not a very good model? What if education can not be made really efficient? We’ve been thinking for 30 years as if market theory were everything, when nobody has perfect information and most, if not all, transactions involve externalities.
I get students after they’ve been thru K-12. Many of them have had little after school supervision–they and their friends have raised themselves; often enough their families don’t eat together and so forth. If it weren’t for Harry Potter and Limony Snickett, a lot of them wouldn’t read. The vast majority would just as soon never see another powerpoint presentation (and I for one think they are right). 19 year olds, in some cases, are just to bored with school to do any work.
I think I’m pretty good at what I do (that’s teaching anthropology to 18 year olds who ain’t been out much). I can’t do much, if anything, about their homelife; I can inspire some students (if they are willing to read and talk and so forth), but the deeply bored often don’t even bother to get their assignments in. I’m not good at being a classroom fascist. So you can offer me more money (I’ve got a morgage), but I don’t think that will necessarily make me a better teacher. While I see what you are getting at, I don’t see how what you propose changes the fundamental conditions in which teachers teach.
If I understand you properly though, its not just a matter of compensation but also a matter of respect. Here is where I think MY is out to lunch. In practice a lot of this stuff about producing better teachers just comes across as teachers being the problem, particularly when the internals of whats being said show pretty clearly that the speaker hasn’t done much if any teaching; most teachers probably aren’t the problem.
The longer I think about what is actually susceptible to reform, that is about the structure of institutions, the more I come back to 30 years of trying to do stuff on the cheap. Throwing money at problems may not solve them, but if education is as important for us collectively (and there is a big rub given the post-Prop 13 world with its assault on notions of the common good), then it seems to me we will have to sped a lot more money to have far more people (even if not so good) up close and personal with a lot of kids. If we put these folks into classrooms together, the new ones can learn from thiose who’ve been around, see what works and what doesn’t. Otherwise, it’s back to powerpoint and movies and warehousing our children.
December 8th, 2008 at 8:47 am
djeri:
One thing that’s struck me about education is that much like healthcare, it is a very emotional and sensitive topic, and that most reformers seem to speak about it in a nonchalant, almost even cold manner. (It doesn’t help that a good number of reformers are also more interested in further particular ideologies or particular goals instead of actually helping kids.) But I think good policymaking sometimes requires a dispassionate analysis.
As I posted in the other thread, we ought to separate the idea of ethical and policy blame. We use the word “blame” in both contexts, but it carries very different connotations each time. To “blame” teachers in an ethical sense is tantamount to accusing them of not having pupils’ best interests at heart. To “blame” them in the policy sense is to suggest that teaching is a weak link which could be improved on, but not that there is any moral culpability resting on any individual. In other words, the moral “blame” is more on the system of teaching rather than on teachers themselves.
Your point about most teachers meaning well is a good one and well taken. However, I do think that there is a great problem when both administrators and teachers do not have an set of incentives aligned with what is best for students. Teaching is a heroic profession, but we don’t send soldiers into battle expecting their heroism to be enough. We pay our soldiers for their work, we give them medals and promotions when they serve well, and we reprimand and dishonorably discharge them when they disgrace us. If we do that for soldiers, I don’t see why we don’t do that for teachers. There are many teachers who deserve a Medal of Honor and significantly higher pay – but surely there must also be more than a few teachers who also deserve to be dishonorably discharged or at least have their pay docked. (One figure I have seen quoted suggests that Illinois only fires two teachers a year – it sounds almost too bad to be true, since if it is, Illinois either has managed to attract some of the most perfect human beings into its teaching force, or is not providing the right incentives for teachers who do their profession a disservice)
Again, this is not to say that teachers are doing a horrible job. It is merely to say that there is a lot of potential out there we might not be tapping, and I think it is still too early to make an empirical call either way. Joel Klein’s and Michelle Rhee’s reforms are still in an early stage, and although I support them in principle, I will wait for the final results before deciding if they work in practice. From a purely theoretical standpoint, it still sounds absurd to me that we treat teachers as homogeneous heroes, paying them the same low wage and affording them the same rigorous tenure protections, when we could be threatening the worst with disciplinary action, and rewarding the best with significantly more remuneration. I cannot imagine many, if any, scenarios where such a policy would have only mundane and insignificant effects on teacher motivation and performance. I would like to believe that teachers are so heroic that they are immune to incentives, but unfortunately it seems to me that teachers are still human.
December 8th, 2008 at 9:20 am
johnleemk,
I am enjoying thinking with you. But I have to go give a final exam…an essay discussing a quote from Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. More later?
December 8th, 2008 at 9:45 am
Incidentally, maybe I should mention what happened when one of the best school districts in the state took their best teachers and principal and built them a state-of-the-art school (cluster teaching rooms with sliding partitions and carpeted floors for non-graded students) to try out the best new educational techniques.
The teachers loved it. The kids loved it. Testing was done and the kids outperformed kids in traditional structures.
Most of the parents liked it. A few really didn’t and it only takes a few to tire a teacher out. Some parents couldn’t understand how their child could be free to go to the library any time they weren’t actually in a learning group. Some wanted their children to bring home traditional homework.
The district eventually lost interest- probably about the time Boeing went TU and laid off 100,000 people, ending a lot of federal matching funding for schools. There was probably also some feeling that students in the district outperformed almost everyone else in the state anyway, so why bother gilding the lily?
Special schools need money and commitment. If you spend the money right, you won’t need to pay the teachers anything extra and they will bring armloads of commitment to the job for free. And one thing that makes teachers willing to work for less and spend extra time is small classes.
Who knew.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:07 am
I learned the most in a class room of 40 kids; but it was a split class, with half 3rd grade and half 4th grade, we had the same teacher for two years, and I got along with her well. Kids that didn’t must have suffered terribly; and fallen far behind.
And I think that is a most undervalued thing — the importance of the match between the teacher and the student.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:28 am
No no no. (But Steven Attewell is right.) Look, I understand the need to increase the quality of the teachers. But if you want to address the quality of the teacher do then do things that directly assist those who are interested in teaching.
Anyone who has ever worked in a troubled school district knows that small classes is the #1 factor in getting kids motivated and attentive. And it helps the teachers to not get overwhelmed by the troubled few.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Great question. And in my experience, that money is being wasted because administration is mostly incompetent. I’ve actually heard some results of some great administrations (which just happen to reside in wealthy districts, go figure) but a troubled school districts should be paying really, really well qualified individuals good money to not just get the job done, but to encourage staff in positive ways.
December 8th, 2008 at 11:50 am
Right Judy, thank you for sharing. In the realm of special ed, the problem of our education system is even worse. Unfortunately, costs dictate far too much on local school boards decisions. Imagine if the 1.9% of the federal budget spent on eduction simply doubled?
December 8th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
nah, gotta get out of that “statistics tell us all we need to know” mode, especially when writing about teaching and education. class size has to be the single most important element here, it relates to absolutely every aspect of teaching, and many teachers who are currently described as “bad” or “underperforming” will in fact do much better when you get the class size down. but its not just class size – its available resources.
even if you have a small class with one hyper-active kid who’s parents don’t believe in meds, you will spend all of your time, as a teacher, on that one kid. but you’ll still have a hope. a class of 18 with a hyperactive kid is hard enough. a class of 30 with one – forget it. you are a baby-sitter, not a teacher. you will be called a bad teacher, the unions will be blamed, etc. but its just the logistics of the situation.
but these days, they track teachers much like students. first year goes badly and you’re likely to be fired or shifted to a different situation, when really you were probably just lacking resources in the first place.
we, as a culture, barely value education in a real sense. we pay it lip-service if that, and in some ways are openly hostile to it. we want the schools to be perfect, make our kids into beautiful sports starts, we don’t want to help with homework and reading, and we want the kids baby-sat, without incident, day after day after day so we don’t have to do it until they graduate. our educational system is treated incredibly poorly by nearly everyone in the country. no wonder it isn’t working, on the whole.
December 8th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
i do think class size makes a difference but it won’t make a difference if twenty kids are taught by an idiot. so here’s a different solution.
why don’t we fund more teaching assistant positions.
you take a great teacher give her/him a class of 40 people and give him an assistant or two. that way content and method are controlled by the teacher and the assistant can help them with the day to day things and help them with focusing on individual kids or groups of kids.
it would be cheaper than hiring more teachers and likely smarter. i think we need to look at the way we train teachers and perhaps formalize – make it more professional. that way we recruit better applicants and can make better standards.
December 8th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
Good heavens! pb says it won’t make a difference if “twenty kids are taught by an idiot” and then proposes splitting a class of forty between a teacher and an idiot. Is that some of the “new math” I’ve heard so much about?
Or maybe you’re going to tell me that college actually makes teachers dumber than they would be if they were just classroom aides. If that’s the case, why are you even worrying about whether people can learn enough to go to college?
In any case, we don’t need to look far to see how the aide supervised by skilled person model works. In healthcare that’s called “team nursing”. It’s a big favorite of administrators who want to hold costs down and don’t need to worry about quality. That “works” in a nursing home, where the basic expectation is that you’re going to die anyway, so what’s the big deal?, and the family members are too confused and distraught to actually deal with the problems they see.
In healthcare the end result is that the best people go somewhere they can practice “primary care” nursing, with few or no aides, and the mediocre “skilled people” are happy ticket punchers, pushing meds and signing off on more patients than they can actually monitor and supervising more aides than they can actually control. Because you only save money with this system by keeping wages low, turnover is high (like 100% every two years usually) and new hires are common. But hey, you’re going to die anyway, right?
Strange to say, in my local district the teachers actually do get help, from the parents. Even stranger, the parents who are helping out don’t seem to feel that the teachers should be paid less or pushed around more by the administration. We recently booted several school board members who were interfering in the classrooms. This, incidentally, is one of the poorer counties in the state.
December 8th, 2008 at 10:51 pm
Matt, do you research any of the education issues on which you comment? Incentives can entail much more than pay. Half of the student-teachers I work with will have left the profession within five years. One of the primary factors behind their leaving is that the institutional framework in which they work discourages them from doing what they really want to do… which is teach. Lowering class sizes would have a big impact on keeping many of the potential quality teachers we train every year and quickly leave the profession.
Think, Matt… I generally enjoy your blog, but your education posts are annoying. You seem to have adopted the neo-conservative narrative at every turn in the education debate. Please do pay attention to the Finnish model. There is another way.
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