In recent years, the false “reformers” have told s again and again that having “a great teacher” (defined by test scores) is more important than the size of the class he or she teaches. They have proposed finding those great teachers (they are still looking, but haven’t found the right method to identify them), then assigning them classes of 35-40 or more. It never occurs to them that the great teachers might no longer be so great with large classes. They are looking at cost, not quality of education.
But now Professor Diane Whitmore Schanzanbach of Northwestern University has published a report demonstrating that class size really does matter. The needier the students, the more it matters.
” “Class size matters,” writes Schanzenbach, an economist and education policy professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “Research supports the common-sense notion that children learn more and teachers are more effective in smaller classes.”
“Citing evidence from the academic literature, Schanzenbach explains that “class size is an important determinant of a variety of student outcomes ranging from test scores to broader life outcomes. Smaller classes are particularly effective at raising achievement levels of low-income and minority children.”
“Conversely, she points out, raising class size can be shown to be harmful to children. “Money saved today by increasing class sizes will result in more substantial social and educational costs in the future,” she writes.”
So when false reformers say they are advocating for the civil rights of poor and minority children, point out that if they mean it, they will reduce class size for children who need the most attention.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I thought I had seen reports in the last few years that class size turned out not to be a significant factor in outcomes. Perplexed.
Check the funding sources for those “studies”.
Also, check out what the studies actually say vs. what the media makes them out to say. I haven’t done in depth research on the class size research vs. what the media says about it, but with charter schools, for instance, the CREDO study has been used to support charter schools, claiming that charters “out-perform” public schools, whereas the study actually said that charters on average do the same as or worse than public schools.
Should we dismiss Professor Diane Whitmore Schanzanbach’s work because it was funded by the NEA and state affiliates, or should we judge the “study” on it’s merits?
NO TE
You should spend one week teaching a 7th grade math class with 36 students, many of which have special needs and subsequent behavioral issues. Then you can spend one week teaching a class half that size. Then get back to us.
One of the aspects of class size that cannot be understated is the importance of ability levels. Teaching 36 highly motivated students of similar math ability is not unreasonable (not ideal either). However change it to that mixed group with IEPs, 504s, ELLs and associated behavior issues and it become nearly impossible regardless of a teacher’s skill set.
I have no doubt class size matters. I have taught a large class of at least two hundred students every semester for the last fifteen years. We don’t teach large classes because we think they are the best way to teach the class, but because it is less expensive to teach that way and we are trading off cost for quality. Decisions like that keep our tuition under $10,000 a year for instate students. Should we increase the tuition and shrink the class size? I think reasonable people can differ on this question.
My post concerned the importance of the funding source on the validity of education research. Poster Dienne expressed concern that the source of funding tainted the results of any research. Does the fact that the research cited in the post was supported by the NEA taint the result?
My point is that both points are moot.
And when a college professor teaches 200 students there is no pressure regarding the success rate of those 200 learners. You have no responsibility to motivate. I have spent enough time in college lecture halls to know that this is the case. Don’t compare your college teaching experiences with K – 12 – its apples and orangutans.
Again, my point is that funding source is secondary to the validity of the work done. That applies to all academic work, not just when you happen to agree with the conclusions.
I am not comparing the teaching I am doing, I am talking about an institutional question. Should my institution double tuition so that my class of 260 can be shrunk down to 8 classes of no more than 35 students each? Would that depend on the qualities of the folks teaching the other seven sections of the class?
Scott,
Do you teach?
What’s that concept, uhhh, ahhh, common sense, yes common sense dictates that more teaching and learning can happen in smaller classes (20 & under) vs larger classes (over 20).
By age:
K to 6th: max 15 students with one certified teacher, an adult aide and a SPED teacher(s) as needed.
7th-12th: max 20 students with one certified teacher, an adult aide and a SPED teacher(s) as needed.
Don’t need any research for those figures, just un poquito de COMMON SENSE.
I cannot imagine how wonderful it would be to teach a class of 20 instead of the classes of 30-35 8th/9th graders that I usually teach (without any assistance). I pleaded this year to FINALLY get a special education aid when I had 9 special education (several of whom have multiple issues) in a single class.
And in other headline news: WILD BEARS SH!T IN THE WOODS!
This just in: NSF study suggests that children may prefer pizza to Brussels sprouts.
I do not mean to poke fun at Professor Schanzanbach’s research. In this time when deformers are routinely making the absurd claim that class size does not matter (see, for example, the disgusting dance video put out by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute), such research is extraordinarily important. It’s a shame, however, that it should be necessary to gather data to prove what actual teachers already know.
The notion that class size doesn’t matter falls into the category of “extraordinary claims,” like claims about having invented perpetual motion machines. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. However, education deform is a faith-based enterprise, so deformers don’t feel themselves bound by the overwhelming warrant provided by everyday observation and practice.
Robert,
Bill Gates, Bloomberg, and Arne recommend larger classes under “great” teachers, not asking if those teachers would still be great with double class size.
Here’s a critique of the numerology by which Dobbie and Fryer came to the conclusions that class size and spending on schools don’t matter.
http://nepc.colorado.edu/blog/dobbie-fryer%E2%80%99s-nyc-charter-study-provides-no-meaningful-evidence-about-class-size-pupil-spendin
Romney was spouting this stuff on the campaign trail. Gates refers to this nonsense often.
Look, extraordinary claims require unassailable evidence, not over-the-moon-speculation. If you think that you have created a perpetual motion machine, people are rightly going to expect that it is more likely that you have made errors than that we have to toss the first and second laws of thermodynamics. As Hume put it,
“No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavors to establish.”
But the deformers are quite ready to believe this nonsense because it accords with a more general article of faith that they have–that less government spending on public goods is always better.
Again, this stuff about class size is entirely faith-based.
I’ll leave it to others to wade through the deformers’ “studies” on this issue. Life is too short to spend reading people’s writings about their method for squaring the circle, how they built their perpetual motion machine, their abductions by aliens, how reading The Secret made their dreams come true, about the reptilian alien Illuminati and their spaceport under the Vatican.
Thank you, Professor Schanzanbach, for your study. It’s important at this time when we have lunatic cultists determining K-12 education policy at the highest levels.
Of course it matters. It matters a lot.
Every teacher knows this. What’s surprising–shocking, in fact–is that anyone would be so foolish as to think otherwise.
And it isn’t just challenged students who need individual attention, BTW.
Our prime directive as teachers should be to nurture intrinsic motivation–to meet the child at his or her zone of proximal development and learn enough about that child a) to help him or her choose engaging, productive paths on which to move forward and b) to assist that child by clearing the particular obstacles on his or her path.
Within any class, at any given ability level, kids are going to have differing interests, motivators, strengths, and weaknesses, and teachers have to have to one-on-one time to identify these and to respond to them appropriately.
The worst thing about the best job in the world, teaching, is that there is never enough of one’s self to go around, and every excellent teacher knows this. Anyone who makes a claim to the contrary thereby reveals his or her utter ignorance of the job.
Hearing education deformers talk about class size is very like hearing Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church talk about cosmology, with this one difference: the cluelessness of the deformers does more damage, a lot more.
I would bet that if every one in the country was asked, would you rather have your child in a class with 20 students or a class with 40 students, everyone would give the same answer. There is only one logical answer, just ask anyone you know.
It would be nice to see Arne Duncan spend a week actually teaching classes with forty students.
Wait, not so fast…Arne dribbled his ever-present basketball in Haiti, where he observed HUGE classes, and he ‘could hear a pin drop’. Conclusion: the more kids sitting so close they breathe the same air bubble, hearing a pin drop, and showing enthusiasm for learning…Bingo! Successful learning is happening. How’s it working for kids in Haiti?
Someone needs to show Pearson the way to Haiti where $$Zill are rolling in and most $$ never reaches the poor people. Another corporate profit venture? Do notice that Bill Gates has not been saving starving children in Haiti. Something’s up with that. He probably can’t figure out the continued corruption in Haiti, yet.
“. . . in Haiti, where he observed HUGE classes, and he ‘could hear a pin drop’.”
Well of course you could hear a pin drop. The almighty giant white god came down to visit, sorry to proselytizse, them.
Duane
This political visitors have no idea how staged their visits are. happens all the time and they remain clueless.
And how does that work out in Haiti? How’s the literacy rate there?
No, it wouldn’t be nice. The permanent damage done to the students would be unspeakable.
Right, Arne is clueless and Obama likes it that way. Why would he want someone with credentials, knowledge and experience in that job? He wanted an Arne and, by god, he got an Arne.
Arne refers to a clueless state of mind! As long as he can dribble his ever-present basketball, he represents all that is well in American Education. The dribbling embassedor with an Arne State of Mind! For Corporate Profit Mongers it doesn’t get much better than an Arne.
Then, no 1st Responders in US Presidency, not in US BOE, not in the 50 States, not with Superintendents who were paid off with RTTT$. No one standing in the way of $$$$$ profits off children. Oops, forgot about the teachers who jump in front of bullets and drape their bodies over children during tornadoes….oh, wait there is VAM.
Slam, VAM, thank you Ma’am!
Just ask Bloomberg, Gates, Rhee, Rahm Emmanuel and John King why they send/sent their kids to private schools.
On the other hand, check out the creepy inBloom vision video. This is what they have in store for our kids. Large class sizes are no problem for teachers because technology helps them manage the data. At mark 3:36 there’s a video screen that shows students’ character strengths in bar graphs. “Shows enthusiasm” is now measurable and it doesn’t matter if you have 75 kids in the class – the computer keeps track of it all!
Creepy is precisely the word for this. Borg-like also springs to mind.
I sometimes think I must belong to a completely different species from the folks who envision such futures and do not find them utterly repugnant.
From the Rheformish Lexicon
differentiation. n. See individuation.
individuation. n. automated process by which individual variation is identified so that rectification can commence; necessary preliminary to standardization via rigorous micromanagement of allowable cognitive activities and affective states. Individuation (in the Rheformish sense of the term) requires Total Information Awareness, which is necessary for standardization via data-driven decision making, or numerology. See data-driven decision making, standardization, and Total Information Awareness.
hive-mind. n. The collective consciousness of the proles under uniform, automatic, reflexive, unquestioned (and, indeed, unquestionable) direction by their superiors; the goal of education deform, or Rheeformation.
It’s an amusing coincidence that the URL for the inBloom “vision video” ends in the numbers 666. LOL.
Yes, the inBloom “vision video.” I do hope that people will watch this.
Orwell envisioned a future in which Overlords achieve absolute compliance via a boot on the throat, forever. Huxley envisioned them doing this by drugging everyone.
The education deform visionaries–those “envisioneers” of our futures–have developed a third way, one far less messy than either of those cruder alternatives. Their way will be technocratic micromanagement of thought and feeling.
To Orwell’s credit, he saw that coming, too. It’s what the Party in 1984 is working toward, though not as diligently as it might because Party members relish the sadistic pleasures they are able to enjoy through their approach to totalism.
The ed deformers seem to be more cerebral about the pleasure they take in control. They would agree, I suspect, that power is an end in itself, that “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” as Henry Kissinger infamously put it.
As an NC teacher of an elective, I have routinely had classes of 40, until this year, it’s my every day and I am very good at it. So We began using PowerSchool and due to some kind of technical malfunction, I ended up with 1 class of 22 students. I am literally flying through my curriculum, I had forgotten what this was even like, when I first began teaching I had classes of 20-25, it’s wonderful. I feel more connected to my students, they to each other, we are doing great work. Now I know this won’t happen again, they figured out what the problem was and have since corrected it for next year, but I’m going to just enjoy it. So anyone who says class size doesn’t matter has just never taught. It shouldn’t even be a discussion point, anyone who has every taught or had a child in school, shouldn’t get to make that decision. How do I know class size matters, I live it.
“Anyone who says class size doesn’t matter has just never taught”
precisely
By saying this kind of thing, the deformers reveal what their opinions about education are worth.
Bernadette: as a former bilingual (Eng/Sp) and SpecEd aide, I cannot tell you the number of times that, some days after first working with a teacher unaccustomed to having another adult in the room, she/he would remark to me what difference it made just to have another adult right at hand to assist and extend her/his efforts.
Combine experienced classroom aides and small class sizes with experienced certificated teachers and—Gloryosky!—teaching and learning are much improved.
In fact, even students would sometimes comment to me that having me in the classroom as a “second teacher” was helpful and appreciated.
Pardon the usual caveat, but when it comes to the leading charterites/privatizers, large class sizes with “education delivery specialists that are great test-score raisers” is for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN.
For THEIR OWN CHILDREN, well, take a gander at Harpeth Hall [Michelle Rhee], under “50 Reasons”:
“29. 8:1 ratio: Our teachers know our students.”
Link: http://www.harpethhall.org/podium/default.aspx?t=151749
And then there’s Lakeside School [Bill Gates], “About Us”:
“AVERAGE CLASS SIZE: 16”
Link: http://www.lakesideschool.org/aboutus
And who better than Governor Chris “What is it with YOU people?!?!” Christie to nail the coffin shut on this issue as we gaze with trembling awe on the “Academic Program” of the Delbarton School website:
“The faculty, many of whom hold higher degrees in field, consists of 80 men and women. And because the average class size is 15 and student-teacher ratio 7:1, the learning environment at Delbarton is designed to be intimate and challenging.”
Link: http://www.delbarton.org/academics/academic-program/index.aspx
I think the self-styled “education reformers” just made your point, Bernadette.
😎
KTA,
You keep bringing up those damn facts about what the edudeformers want for their kids versus what they want for the rest of the, as any old Greek would have said, hoi polloi.
Keep bringing it up, as it can’t be repeated often enough!
Ooops, that should have read “anyone who hasn’t ever taught…”
I just wrote about that in my blog the other day. Check it out.
http://teacherslessonslearned.blogspot.com/2014/02/size-matters_18.html
Anne Tenaglia: I just posted comments above and then saw yours.
Consider my contribution a small supplement to yours.
Thank you for your blog posting.
😎
Anne Tenaglia: if I may, let me add one more.
You may have heard of Michael Bloomberg, mayor of a large city not far from Philadelphia?
He sent his two daughters to Spence School. Under “School Profile” are the following tidbits:
“17 students per class in Lower School”
“14 students per class in Middle and Upper Schools”
“Grades K-2 have two teachers for each class”
“Student/Faculty ratio is 7:1”
Link: http://www.spenceschool.org/about_spence/school_profile/index.aspx
But for OTHER PEOPLE’S CHILDREN?
Inquiring minds want to know…
😎
Actually a “class” size of one student is the ideal class size.
If teachers would CEASE defining the problem for students, gathering and organizing the resources necessary to solve it, thinking about how to solve it, solving the problem, and then telling the students how to go about solving it, some actual learning on the part of the students would actually take place. What passes for “teaching” in most instances is the scenario I just mentioned. This applies to any subject not just math and science.
Learning takes place when students are able to perform all the tasks that I just mentioned plus posing the initial question that leads to a problem definition. This implies an interest on the student’s part in some subject. The teacher’s role changes to that of mentor and motivator: introducing students to subjects that might be of interest to them, letting them discover questions that they want answers to, and letting them go through all the steps necessary to solve a problem.
Mentors can still provide motivational lectures, but these are purely informational in nature or done for pure fun. The number of attendees at these lectures could be very large.
Therefore, what schools need to do is individualize instruction: each student works on a problem of interest to themself, in a subject of interest to themself, at a pace suited to their individual cognitive ability. Just watch the learning take off. The mentor’s role in this situation is to help individual students in a one-on-one situation. Under these circumstances (no day-to-day lecturing), the mentor can have as many clients as will consume their time in a given period of the day. This max number is a function of the average response time needed to answer students’ questions. These are the kind of statistics we need to be collecting in schools to maximize the effectiveness of the learning process and size the “classes” (number of clients) appropriately.
“If teachers would CEASE defining the problem for students, gathering and organizing the resources necessary to solve it, thinking about how to solve it, solving the problem, and then telling the students how to go about solving it, some actual learning on the part of the students would actually take place. What passes for “teaching” in most instances is the scenario I just mentioned. This applies to any subject not just math and science. ”
Garrett, what evidence exists that this is “what passes for ‘teaching’ in most instances”?
At what age would you recommend this discovery approach begin?
Have you MET a middle school child? Because this method wouldn’t work with them, in fact I don’t know what age one would start this ridiculous idea. And it sure does sound an awful lot like the ‘reform’ suggested by some charter schools. The closest to what you are describing is Montessori education, which provides them the opportunity to explore within some structure. Children need structure, there’s plenty of research to support that, and they need to explore the world. Your idea is a bit extreme in assuming that ALL children will be self-motivated and also have access to the necessary information.
“Actually a “class” size of one student is the ideal class size.”
NO, it’s not (see we all have opinions just like . . . ). Please explain why you believe it is the ideal class size.
“Therefore, what schools need to do is individualize instruction: each student works on a problem of interest to themself, in a subject of interest to themself, at a pace suited to their individual cognitive ability. Just watch the learning take off.
Please explain the structural and procedural systems that would need to be in place in order to accomplish this K-12. (otherwise it’s pie in the sky thinking)
This implies an interest on the student’s part in some subject. The deformers don’t understand that if you don’t have that, you have nothing and will get nowhere, even if you get good test scores. I have said this again and again: Our prime directive as teachers should be to nurture intrinsic motivation to learn. We need life-long, independent learners, not dutiful bubblers of bubbles.
Yes, given the choice what parent would pick 40 students instead of 20?? Also waiting for research ( That should already be evident like class size) that extra hands in the classroom makes all the difference for special ed kids : meaning classroom aides. They help foster independence by following IEP not enable them!
Who the hell is Ted Mithell?
A recently lost fling?
Robert, your observation, “. . . there is never enough of one’s self to go around” immediately brought to mind the challenges I face when teaching writing. My experience is that most students don’t improve their writing much based on my written feedback, even when it’s focused on a particular aspect of writing–say, elaborating on ideas. They either disregard my feedback entirely or don’t know how to apply it on their own. They need one-on-one conversations with me in which I can walk them through my feedback and guide–often push–them toward improving their work.
Large class sizes make such interaction difficult to come by. Not only that, larger class sizes entail a larger grading load, so even if all students needed was solid written feedback, I’m hard-pressed to find time to provide it.
Superb point. A class load of 150 middle school students in ELA logistically constrain even the hardest working and best intentioned teachers. Just do the math. If Dufrense spends just six minutes per essay with a load of 150 – that’s 15 hours of grading alone. The average teacher gets about 10 to 12 hours of “free” time per week, if they are lucky. And grading is just one slice of the pie.
I don’t ELA, I teach social studies, but I do a great deal of writing. I have 256 8th and 9th grade students. It’s takes FOREVER to get through their writings. I would do more if I could, but there’s no way I can because of the volume of reading. And I know I could give better assistance if I could spend more time with each student’s writing.
Absolutely. As someone who taught writing to 165 students per term (5 classes), it’s pretty obvious. Writing depends on thinking. You must teach someone how to think before they can write clearly. And you must model sentences. It’s a very individual process.
Then you must go home and read a zillion essays, finding just the right balance of encouragement and critical remarks.
Anyone who says class size doesn’t matter, never taught English.
If I may correct your last sentence:
“Anyone who says class size doesn’t matter, never taught.”
I was just looking a few minutes ago at a stack of short stories by 5th graders. One kid’s work had astonishing unity and coherence but looked as though it had been dashed off because he had something more important to get to. (Halo? Call of Duty? Battlefield?) Another’s was full of telling, concrete detail–it was astonishingly clearly envisioned–but it wandered aimlessly. Another kid had a really great grasp of basic plot structure but no original ideas and no engaging detail. The kid with the best vocabulary in the group had the worst syntax. This last is a very interesting one; that’s more common than one might expect.
Kids differ. They have unique challenges and strengths. One size does not fit all. There is no substitute for a reflective teacher who knows his or her students and has time to work with them individually.
Idiots who champion larger classes under better teachers don’t understand what a good teacher does. They clearly have no notion what it takes to teach writing–how incredibly individual and labor intensive writing instruction is.
Kids differ. Bullet lists of standards, standardized high-stakes tests, rubrics, boilerplate lesson plan designs and teacher evaluation checklists, scripted curricula, monolithic learning progressions, a single basal textbook for all, and videos for flipped classrooms do not (though it is quite possible to prepare a range of materials and point kids to particular ones).
They need one-on-one conversations with me in which I can walk them through my feedback and guide–often push–them toward improving their work.
YES YES YES!!!! It’s difficult to overemphasize the importance of this.
Smaller class sizes are important, especially in elementary school. However, it’s my experience as an English teacher at a low-income multilingual high school that the numbers never bothered me. I enjoyed the energy that charged the room and some of my most successful classes were in the 40s and 50s (I had seating for 36, so we used every nook and cranny in the room). I once had a journalism class of 72 kids, which was the most fun I’ve ever had as a teacher. When you love what you’re doing, it’s not that hard to adjust.
You can’t tell me that you were able to cover the same amount of material with the same amount of depth and attention to individual students in your larger classes as you did in the smaller classes. The two classes would look entirely different and therefore would not be directly comparable. I have no doubt that people can design an effective class with a large group of students, but I would contend that it would be an effective large class and would not meet the same criteria planned for a smaller class.
How on earth did you have 72 students in a class? That’s ridiculous. No kid can get ANY kind of individual attention in a class like that. As a parent, I would be FURIOUS if my sons were in classes of that type. Appalling. And I agree with 2old: Covering any kind of material would be impossible in that situation. It would just be crowd control.
Your nom de plume says it all*. Self deception is a great personal trait to have as it absolves one of the responsibility one has for causing harm to innocent others, i. e., students.
*and if you don’t understand why, respond and I’ll let you know.
Let’s crunch some numbers.
One of the truisms about writing news stories is that one has to write a LOT of them to become any good at it. Ask any veteran reporter or editor about that. She will almost invariably tell you that most baby reporters write crap. And she will admit that her own early work is embarrassing, that she doesn’t much like looking back at those early clippings. I once heard an experienced and talent news writer say, “You have to write a thousand news stories before you write the first good one.”
Suppose those 72 journalism students in Da Coach’s class wrote one news story apiece every two weeks for 18 weeks (working to deadline on a lot of different stories is an important discipline for a journalist in training). So, at any rate, 72 x 9 = 648 news stories. Suppose that these pieces averaged, say, 600 words apiece. That’s 388,800 words for the teacher to attend to. And that’s just the review of the student work, before one even begins to think about the rest of what goes into teaching such a class.
I seriously doubt that many students came out of that class able to take an assignment from an editor at a city desk, go do the interviews and research, and write a publishable story on deadline. Writing is extraordinarily complex. Different kids have different issues that have to be identified and addressed. They have to write a lot, and their particular issues have to be addressed, meaning that that lot of writing has to be attended to, and it has to be attended to individually, with specific kids, whose salient common characteristic is that they have no salient common characteristic. And that becomes clear quite quickly to anyone one is paying attention, who has the time to pay attention.
Now, it is possible that Da Coach had that rare thing, 72 highly intrinsically motivated, identically conditioned and capable Stepford Children a single class and that he or she could follow a one-size-fits all model. Unlikely, but possible.
It’s amazing the difference even a couple of fewer students can make in a classroom – not only in terms of teacher workload, but also classroom dynamics. Yes, there’s a big difference between a class of 40 and a class of 20, but it’s amazing how different 30 is from 25 is from 20 is from 15.
and every decent teacher know this
The crap studies that purport to prove that class size doesn’t matter are done by clueless policy wonks–by people in think tanks with degrees in political science and a grant from the Gates Foundation to do a study in partnership with the American Enterprise Institute.
Consider the source. These papers aren’t written by K-12 writing teachers, clearly.