Do Not Increase Class Room Sizes
Writing for the liberal Newshoggers blog, Fester opines that “increasing class room sizes is most likely good policy.”
I’ve got only one thing to say to that: no it’s not. Trust me. We tried it here, it didn’t work. The only effect it had was that the average student got less attention from the teacher resulting in lower grades. Less direct contact with the teacher results in students studying less and being less involved, we have experienced.
Students need to have a bond with their teacher, if they do not, school leaves them lukewarm. They need to develop a personal and professional relationship with their student, neither of which are possible in big classrooms, which force teachers to divide their attention to even more students than they already have to.
Schools are not businesses. You cannot run them the same way, and students are not employees. You cannot treat them the same way.
Whatever you do, don’t increase class room sizes. Keep them like they are, better, make them smaller: the more personal contact between the teacher and the student the better.
If you have to save money, do so by other means. Destroying your education system is not a wise investment for the future of your country.
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What a ridiculous suggestion. I benefited from smaller class sizes. No, classes don’t need to get bigger.
He tries to argue this from an economic perspective, but surely the economy will be impacted if we don’t produce smarter students who can make the US more competitive?
According to the article decreasing class size has a smaller impact and a higher cost than other strategies that would be more cost-effective then a decrease in class size, not that bigger class sizes are themselves beneficial.
Though obviously not an expert, it’s a little counter-intuitive at least to me. The higher the student to teacher ratio, the easier it is for disruptive students to get out of control, the less time there is for teachers to explain things individually. It seems a little like arguing that hospitals would benefit from having fewer doctors in relation to the number of patients.
My class size was hefty, and it certainly seemed to affect things badly.
Yes, I understand that, and my point that schools aren’t business enterprises. You shouldn’t treat them as such.
Class size: same here. In fact, they changed the size of classes and schools while I was a high school student. The result: horrific. Higher drop-out rates, people less interested, not good.
We’ve got 26 students per class here at my kids’ school. I think that’s about right: they are getting a fabulous education — even though they get less funding per student than any other state in the US. Our schools here aren’t nearly as top heavy as other districts, and charter schools are extremely popular here.. more choice in where the kids go means the schools work harder to make sure families choose them.
Yesterday I watched while a teacher “mummified” one student with spices and oils (lotion), pretend jewels, and toilet paper, while telling the wide-eyed children about ancient Egyptian beliefs and rituals in regard to care for the dead. Then she had the children gather around on the carpet too while she referred to one of the student’s library books on Egypt. Mary is 6, and she talked about Egypt all evening.
Do you know how this would have been taught in a richer district? With full color workbooks.
I chose my first sentence to be provocative, and it worked. Thanks Claudia for reading the entire argument. If there are limited resources for education (or anything else) and there is evidence on a variety of practices for both effectiveness (degree of change) and efficiency (cost per unit change) than as a public policy consideration, going to policies that produce the same degree of change (moving from ~25 kids/class to between 15 and 20 kids per class ) for 10% to 15% of the marginal policy cost is the smart decision to make.
Ideally, there are unlimited resources so every kid is in a class of 15, there is sufficient music/arts education, there are sports, there is good food available, there is rapid assessment/feedback loops and there is plenty of tutoring assistance available. But we don’t live in that world, so the policy question is how do you help the most kids out to do the best that they can. And sometimes going to the non-intuitive is the thing to do.