Mitt Romney launched his foray into education by visiting the Universal Bluford charter school in West Philadelphia, an impoverished, largely African-American neighborhood. He went to tout his plan for vouchers and charters as the new civil rights crusade of our era.
While there, thinking he was in friendly territory, he made some unfortunate remarks. First, he asserted that class size wasn’t important. That is no doubt the advice he had received from his advisors, who like to claim that having a “great teacher” is far more important than class size reduction. Then, he advised his listeners that one of the keys to education success is to be a child of a two-parent family. He got called out on both comments.
A music teacher rebuked him on the class size issue, saying: “I can’t think of any teacher in the whole time I’ve been teaching, over 10 years — 13 years — who would say that more students would benefit them. And I can’t think of a parent that would say ‘I would like my kid to be in a room with a lot of kids,’” Morris said. “So I’m kind of wondering where this research comes from.”
His advice about having a two-parent family was not well received. It’s the kind of analysis one expects to hear in a think tank discussion, but not the advice you offer to a community that deals with real-life circumstances rather than academic speculation.
When challenged to explain his comments on class size, Romney said that the global consulting firm McKinsey concluded that class size doesn’t matter. Of course, it mattered a lot to the Romney family. Mitt Romney went to the Cranbrook School in Michigan, where class size is said to be less than 6:1. His children also went to an elite private school, and elite private schools are known for small classes.
Parent activist Leonie Haimson called on President Obama (for whom she worked in 2008) to take a stand on the class size issue. She wrote an open letter to the President, asking him to repudiate comments by Secretary Arne Duncan that sounded no different from what Romney had said. Secretary Duncan is a graduate of the University of Chicago Lab School, where class size is 10:1. Just a year ago, Bill Gates set off a firestorm among teacher bloggers when he said that better teachers were more important than smaller classes. Gates went to Lakeside School in Seattle, where classes are never more than 16.
I propose a rule for advocacy by politicians and academic experts: Never advocate for other people’s children what you are unwilling to accept for your own.
Diane
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There are certainly people out there who can handle very large class sizes because they are dynamic, energizing, profound, mesmerizing, and entertaining. They tend to make millions of dollars a year as rock stars, movie stars, national leaders, and so on. So if we kick up salaries a few hundred thousand or millions of dollars a year, then maybe we can attract a few more people like that into the profession. OTHERWISE, you shouldn’t even have to do the math to know that smaller class size is always better.
Yes, Adam, but what are their test scores like? 🙂
Bill Gates did his most important learning on his own. If he had had zero formal education, I believe that he would have learned just fine at home, from whatever fragments of time his busy parents could spare.
Policymakers think the same way about Teach for America. It’s good for poor children, but policymakers wouldn’t have it for their own kids. Can you believe a TfA recruiting poster that was up at my college a while ago: “Solving the nation’s worst social injustice”? I wanted to mark out “solving” and write in “perpetuating.”
Correct. It’s hard to imagine parents of privilege getting excited about sending their kids to inexperienced, barely trained TFA staff.
Rule No. 2. No legislative body shall be allowed to order young people to take a test until they have taken an equivalent one and had their scores made public.”
I would love to see this. Among other things, I think few adults today realize how much more we expect of our kids than was expected of them when they were in school. I can still ace all of these tests, but it is humbling to realize how much I have to draw upon my entire education and maturity to do so.
Take a look at the private school where President Obama and President George W Bush sent/send their lovely girls. If memory serves me correctly, I think Amy Carter was the only president’s child in many years that attended public schools in Washington, D. C. Frankly, I don’t blame President Obama and Bush for wanting the very best education for their children, but they should be willing to subject their own children to their educational restructuring plan. The could try one of the “outstanding” choice schools. Ha!
The research I’ve seen compares class size of 15 to class size of 25. We are working with classes of 45 to 50 kids. I’d like Mr. Romney to show me that research.
I would recommend that any president send his children to a private, very secure school. Who would not, given the nut cases who exist? Security is important.
Next year, we are moving Tier 2 into the classroom. A reading specialist in our school visited a school with a teacher, a para, and an aide, in the classroom, and waxed supreme about how well they differentiated instruction. One of the “excellent” schools. Three teachers in a room? How could she compare that to a 23-25:1 ratio and expect the same results? Oh yeah, “Smile, you guys are awesome and I know you can do it!” Yeah, that’s all we need to do, smile and be awesome! smh
Doesn’t Romney’s message on parents fit right in with your constant refrain that families and poverty matter more than teachers? Single parenthood is one of the biggest causes of poverty, after all — people who get married before having children are much less likely to be poor.
Even beyond literal poverty, it’s not just academic speculation to say that single parents are going to have a harder time producing academically excellent children, if only because (on average) they don’t have nearly as much time to do things like read to their children, because they’re the only adult around the house to do chores, work a job, cook, run to the store, etc.
No, Romney’s message does not fit right in with anything I believe. Romney will destroy public education, on which our nation has relied for more than a century. Families don’t get stronger if public education is replaced by a free-market system of vouchers and charters. And no one will benefit by the empowerment of for-profit corporations in education. Ruining the public education system will weaken families, not strengthen them. Lecturing people about the virtues of a two-parent family does not create two-parent families. There is a huge number of children now growing up with a single parent. They need education now, not pontificating by candidates about why they are doomed because they don’t have two parents.
Well, you could say the exact same thing about poverty: “Lecturing people about poverty does not eliminate poverty. There is a huge number of children now growing up in poverty. They need education now, not pontificating about why they are doomed because their single mom is poor.”
That sounds like what Michelle Rhee would say, come to think of it!
That’s not at all true. You can do something to reduce poverty. You can make sure that kids and families get food and medical care.
But if kids were born to a single parent, it does no good to tell them that the key to success is to be born to two parents. What are they supposed to do when they hear that? How can you change the fact of their birth? Can you outlaw single parenthood? Can you compel single parents to find a husband or wife? What is your plan?
Is it not a good idea to 1) exhort adults to get married and stay married before having children, and 2) exhort young people not to make mistakes and have babies in their teens, because that will hurt their futures?
Poverty may be associated with academic failure, but one of the main reasons for that is single parenthood. Contrary to what you say, no governmental anti-poverty program can make up for that fact. No matter how much money you give single parents, that won’t make up for the absence of a second parent to read to the children, help with their homework, etc.
Giving poor people money may help their lives in lots of ways, but it won’t automatically make their children any better in school. Finding ways to prevent single parenthood WOULD result in children who do better in school, because children do better when two parents are sharing the household work and child-rearing duties.
yes, exhort, exhort, exhort.
But in the meanwhile, how can you help the children who are alive and living with one parent or no parent? And how does it help them to tell them they might have been successful if only they had had the good sense to be born to a two-parent family?
And good luck if you think that exhortation will create two-parent families. Why didn’t we think of that sooner?
Well, I don’t think he was talking to children there — wasn’t he talking to potential parents? Moreover, one could say the same thing about poverty: does it help anyone to tell children, “If only there were an anti-poverty program so lush that it would pay for a private tutor to live in your home and help with your homework every night, you’d be able to do better, but for now and the foreseeable future, it’s hopeless to expect teachers to be able to teach you much of anything”?
Romney was in a charter school talking to teachers, school leaders, and members of the community. He was talking about improving education. The teachers were thinking of the children in their classrooms, not of unborn children.
And truly, I don’t think that decisions about whether to get married are based on exhortations by politicians. Do you?
It would be nice if all children had two parents, but in the meanwhile what do we do with the huge numbers that don’t?
Why do people tend to think of “single-parents” as teenagers? I was a single parent for four years until I remarried. I raised two boys and made sure they had what they needed academically.. Should they have been written off because their mom was suddenly a “single parent?” Or is it only a certain type of single parent that is bad for their kids?
I learned better in large classes, so I find it easy to believe that some children learn better in small classes, some in middle sized classes, and some at home. I don’t expect an affordable mass-education system to be ideal for every student.
Reblogged this on Teacher as Transformer and commented:
Diane Ravitch is a leading American educator. Although it can be argued that what happens south of the border is not important to us, this article poses a great question. Who is advantaged those with resources or those without resources? Servant-leadership, which is lost in education, asks the leader to serve those around him or her and help them grow. That focus increases for the most disadvantaged. When can we expect politicians, bureaucrats, and technocrats to allow teachers in the classroom to be leaders who can serve students and the community?
My son will be going to one of those elite private high schools next school year. Being a public school teacher, I struggled with this decision. But, the bottom line is class size – the average class size is 14. Of course that makes a difference!
I don’t know about research by McKinsey & Co, but I do know that much of the conventional wisdom about class size comes from academic work by econometrician Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His “studies” are actually meta-analyses of many other studies, trying to sum up existing research. Not only has he been active in the academic sphere, but he has been a popular expert witness in Washington and in legislatures around the country.
However, much of his conclusion rests on a statistical analysis that is suspect, at best. A respectful but firm critic, economist Alan Kreuger of Princeton, argues that Hanushek’s analysis is biased or mistaken in a number of technical but very important ways. For instance, much of Hanushek’s conclusion is based on findings of “no significance” in small studies where class size was not even the variable of interest. By treating estimates for various population sub-groups as if they were each separate studies, he magnifies the influence of some studies and makes it more likely that statistical significance will not be found (because the subgroups are smaller and thus require much larger effects to be called “significant”).
It’s a technical debate, but it shows why we need to look very closely at the foundations of research that we’re using to determine major public policy. (It also, in my opinion, supports arguments many mathematicians make about why schools ought to have probability and statistics as the aim of the curriculum, rather than differential and integral calculus. Understanding concepts in those areas is becoming more and more important to being an informed citizen.)
Two main essays, and some reflections on the debate, can be found in this volume published by the Economic Policy Institute:
http://www.epi.org/publication/books_classsizedebate/
The reason an idea like “class size doesn’t matter” can gain currency today is that education policy has been effectively removed from democratic control. The more the federal government steps in, the less meaningful say people have over what goes on in their schools. In elections for President and Congress, other issues naturally overshadow educational issues, even for someone like me, who’s pretty worked up about education policy. So something other than democratic preferences ends up driving the policymaking.
When our state education director said that keeping class sizes small was not a goal worth pursuing, I chided him that he could never get elected to a school board anywhere in the state with that position. His response: “Good thing I’m not elected!” Hmm. Really?
I enjoy reading the EPI output but, as with many other information sources, it comes preloaded with an ideology.
The further we move from the basis of community the further we move from democracy. Class size, issues such as poverty, and a feeling of well-being and safety make a difference in the classrooms and schools of any country. No child chooses to be born into poverty. No child chooses to be left behind. The question becomes, “What will we do in a democratic society to help those in the greatest need?” It seems like the argument is one of rhetoric rather than of action.
I’m currently doing research in the area of ‘Pupils-per-Teacher’ in the classroom, analyzing data from California’s STAR reports to determine if smaller class sizes do, in fact, make a difference. I can tell you from a fair bit of research (n > 500) that the R^2 correlation, on a scale from 0.00 – 1.00 (1.00 being the strongest), is less than .05 between less pupils-per-teacher and higher student achievement. That is to say, smaller class sizes don’t help. I’m not a Romney supporter, but–if we can accept on some level the external validity of a sampling of California’s schools–I do have to say that he is correct here. I know what the curious onlooker might think, but this is truly a case of ‘what we expect’ vs. what is an accurate determinate of our children’s education.
In summation, we should not worry if our child’s school raises the student-to-teacher ratio from 19:1 to 25:1 (if your concern is for the educational quality of our schools). However, I think the real time for concern is when our schools threaten to raise the threshold to 35+:1. At that time, I think concerns about a ‘noisy, destructive learning environment’ come into play. Until then, we should all acknowledge that around 70-80% of schools’ budgets are tied up in teachers; if you want Johnny to keep his music classes in fifth grade, and struggling, often already-impoverished districts won’t accept a raise in taxes, then something has got to give.
I would also like to speak for myself and say, as a graduate of an elite private school, I matriculated to an elite public school for my undergraduate studies, and found no difference in my education there, despite a much larger group of peers. In fact, I enjoyed my time with a broader network of like-minded students; far from being put-off or distracted, I had more individuals who were “swimming in the same direction,” so-to-speak, and we supported one another in our academic endeavors. Let’s not forget that the real world isn’t comprised of interactions between fifteen or fewer people; if there is no educational dropoff, then why should we be upset that our children have a few more peers than last year? I say that’s five more chances to make a great friend.
Don’t you think that children who are struggling to learn benefit by getting more attention from the teacher? There is a large body of peer-reviewed research on the value of small classes for minority children in the elementary grades. Are you familiar with it?
If we could use RTT money to lower class sizes instead of hiring coaches, what a difference that would make in all communities! “Does Class Size Matter? http://oldschoolteach.blogspot.com/2012/06/yes-it-does-at-least-when-it-comes-to.html
“No child chooses to be left behind.” Some do, including two of my siblings. We’ve had very different life courses as a result.