Nancy Bailey writes about the one proven reform that will schools safer: smaller class size
Smaller classes is REAL personalized learning, and it guarantees that no student will be anonymous.
“High school teachers in this country face class rosters of 30-40 students per class. This means that within the course of a day teachers face approximately 200 students! With so many students it’s difficult to get to know everyone.
“Teachers who strike for better wages and working conditions always ask for a reduction in class size.
“Education reformers have rejected class size reduction. Jeb Bush spoke against it when Florida voted for lowering class size when he was governor, although he is a huge proponent of online “personalized” learning.
“Bill Gates has also been against lowering class size.
“Teachers cannot control what happens in a student’s home, but they can work with students to make school a warm environment, where students learn that they have someone they can always turn to who will help them. This is best done with smaller class sizes of 20 or less.
“Even if all classes are not reduced, students should have access to at least one period a day where teachers and students can get to know one another.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
We can’t make smaller class sizes. That would mean we would have to hire more teachers. More teachers cost more money. Mke classes even larger and saves money.
When I taught French on the secondary level, I had large classes of thirty plus students, and when I taught ESL, I had classes between twelve and twenty students. I did not have much of a personal relationship with students to whom I taught French. I had an entirely different relationship with my ELLs in both high school and elementary school. We really had a sense of community. I learned more from observing these students than from most tests. I remember when I was hired for ESL in the high school, Haitian students had acquired a negative reputation. The ex-Marine assistant principal, when he met me said, “So you’re the blonde that will be sending me your bad Haitians.” There is so much wrong with this statement! I never sent him any “bad Haitians” because I didn’t have any. What I had were very needy, traumatized students that were trying to find their way in a new culture and language despite academic deficiencies. With a smaller class size, I was able to build a relationship with these young people. It would have been impossible with twice as many students. I would have had to waste a lot more time on management, not teaching. Students learn better when a sense of community is created in the classroom, and a smaller class size allows a teacher to develop that sense of community so that efficient, effective learning will occur.
Great piece about a charter consulting group in DC:
“Everybody’s afraid.”
That’s a D.C. charter school administrator’s assessment of TenSquare, one of the city’s most connected, lucrative, and controversial charter consulting companies. And true to his word, he was talking anonymously. Not many people feel comfortable discussing TenSquare publicly.
“It’s a racket,” says Jenny DuFresne, a former charter principal whose school contracted with TenSquare. “It’s a bunch of good old boys who are talking to each other and scratching each other’s backs. Like honestly, that’s all it is. It’s not about children in my opinion.”
They are profitable, the charter spin-off businesses. There are tens of them in my state. A whole bunch of adults making a whole lot of money off charter schools.
Are these adults ‘self interested” like ed reformers say public school employees are “self interested?”
If not, why not? They’re employed in the charter industry. The more charters there are the better they do financially. How are they not “self interested”? Why does the self interest accusation only apply to public schools?
https://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/21006459/behind-the-consulting-firm-raking-in-millions-from-dc-charter-schools
Charter Schools run by white men connected to Wall Street. White,minority, women,are the front to the parents. There is no discussion ever about education and children. Its all a scam. Charter Schools do not need a plan outside of hiring there friends. Class sizes have to be large because there is no funding for teachers, students, cutting food programs. The rich just get richer and the poor or not even in the picture except when a photo op is needed.
The billionaires send their kids to elite private schools with class sizes of 10 or 12 pupils. When I started teaching, I had a class of 38 children; by the end of the school day, I was flat out exhausted and spent. It almost amounted to a fire hazard to have that many kids in a classroom but the administration was perfectly happy and smug with high class enrollment. The superintendent would joke that as long as the class size was less than 40, it was all good. What a total jerk, it was a joke for him but a matter of survival for the teachers and children.
I had similar numbers in Pennsylvania when I taught French. Our joke was we should combine classes and teach in the auditorium with a bullhorn. One teacher would teach, and the others would run around with a stick to keep students awake.
It’s one of those “Duh” things. Anytime anyone tells you class size doesn’t matter that person should be completely ignored when they pontificate on teaching and learning.
Small classes make a world of difference for teaching and learning but only the rich are allowed small classes for their privileged children. Small class size is restricted to the elite who can pay privately for it. The teacher unions refuse to campaign or strike for this enormous benefit. This society is certainly rich enough to finance small classes for all students but to do so requires a movement of teachers and parents against elite privilege to force changes in tax laws providing low tax rates for corporations and billionaires. Tax policy is an crucial education issue.
Oh, honestly, do you know how much smaller class sizes would cost? Do you realize how many more teachers we’d need to hire? Why would we spend that kind of money on overpaid, lazy, entrenched teachers when security firms and tech companies could be profiting off that money? Sheesh, you talk like student needs should be the priority at schools or something. Crazy talk!
(In case needed: /sarcasm)
Much enjoy being called “crazy” by you, thanks!
You’re very welcome.
Diane: SMALLER CLASSES is, and always has been, the biggest “DUH” in education and ever since education broke away from the family to become a distinct institution.
I love theory, but you don’t need it to understand WHY. All you need is a brief experience. Anyone who has been around children in the pre-K to 6 (or even higher) age group has to be dumb as a ditch not to realize the vast difference in import and potential between having 6 or 10 or even 15 children in one classroom to teach, and having 25 to 45, and regardless of what “supports” you have as a teacher.
The old saying to “follow the money” to find out what’s REALLY going on, and what people REALLY value; whereas in the case of education, the adage becomes: to follow its absence, and then to draw your own conclusions. CBK
While I admire and support the concept of smaller class sizes, and more personalized learning, I am having difficulty latching onto the reasoning. How can smaller class sizes contribute to the physical security of a school? A maniac can still get in, and shoot up the place. More teachers, means more eyes on the facility, of course.
Schools will never be made safe. They can only be made safer. And the traditional methodology will work. Video cameras, uniformed (armed) security personnel, fencing, secure doors, alert and trained staff, better mental health services,
It may sound odd, in the wake of the recent violence. But schools are statistically the safest place for children 6-18 years old in the USA. Children have a much higher chance of injury/death standing on the street, than they do in school. And overall school violence, as a statistic, continues down.
We still have a lot to do, though.
Charles: Smaller classes allow the teacher to conduct class on a more personal level, exchanging conversation about material within the class, getting the children to work faster, giving them more feedback on their work, all of which gives the child the impression he is valued by the system. He will thus be less likely to act against the system.
A panecea? Hardly, but Nancy’s post makes a good case, as Nancy usually does.
“And the traditional methodology will work. Video cameras, uniformed (armed) security personnel, fencing, secure doors, alert and trained staff, better mental health services.” – No, this only turn schools into prisons. They already look very much like prisons.
Your syllogism is imprecise and wrong. Hospitals have armed security guards and video camera systems. Installing security systems and having armed guards have not turned hospitals into prisons.
America’s most precious and innocent resource, our children, must be protected from being shot by maniacs. If it takes employing some of the technology that hospitals, banks, airports, and prisons also employ, then so be it.
“Bill Gates has also been against lowering class size.’
What a (unprintable word) this toxic, arrogant think is. The private school Gates attended as a child and teen is the same school he sends his children to.
The student to teacher ratio at Lakeside School is 9 to 1.
https://www.privateschoolreview.com/lakeside-school-profile/98125
I taught for 30 years. The average class size was 34 and up. For the first few years, we had no planning period and taught six classes with a few minutes between classes and a lunch period that was about 30 minutes long.
We fought hard and long to gain a planning period and won. Then we taught five classes but the class load stayed 34 or higher.
The classrooms we taught out of were not designed to hold that many desks and students. The HVAC system struggled to work against all that body heat and failed most of the time.
The walking room between the rows of desks was tight. For years, the roof in one of my classrooms leaked when it rained. I had to cover the old computers with plastic sheets because most of the leaks were above the computers. The carpet would become soggy like walking on a giant sponge.
I meant to say Gates is a “Thing” not a “Think” He can’t think.
Let’s never forget that Betsy DeVos’ biggest cheerleader, Eva Moskowitz, went to Congress to lobby AGAINST small class sizes, saying they were a luxury that public school children did not need and should not have if she had anything to do with it.
Then she spent her time on a media tour to tell the public how unimportant class size is.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-cost-of-small-class-size/2011/03/03/AFPGSkkB_story.html?utm_term=.d53e4e9c66bb
https://www.npr.org/2011/03/29/134956184/school-founder-says-class-size-doesnt-matter
As usual, the truly inept journalists who interview Moskowitz do no follow-up questions while Moskowitz demands that public schools increase class sizes and accept all the children she dumps.
If Moskowitz thinks small class sizes don’t matter, why does she demand that her school not have to teach any child who isn’t up to snuff by 4th grade? She insists on leaving empty seats because she says her teachers should not have to teach children who aren’t good enough. Since Moskowitz refuses to have those children in her own schools, it’s hypocritical for her to insist that public schools must accommodate the students she won’t teach in large class sizes.
Moskowitz also just flunks young children who don’t learn in large class sizes over and over again — she’ll flunk a kid 3 times if their parent hasn’t yet gotten her message that their child is not wanted by Success Academy. She hides retention rates except when someone questions why a large % of a cohort of children has disappeared between a testing year, and then she’ll acknowledge her flunking policy for kids who don’t learn in large class sizes. They get “retained”. As many times as needed.
I guess that’s the Eva Moskowitz way of excellent teaching. If a kid isn’t learning in large class sizes, flunk him because it is all his fault because small class sizes are unnecessary.
No wonder SUNY Charter Institute Chair Joseph Belluck insists that Eva Moskowitz should be given the special privilege of training her own teachers to understand how you treat the children in your large class sizes who don’t learn. Joseph Belluck watched that video of the model teacher whose job was to train other teachers and watched her punish a child and said we need to let Eva Moskowitz train more teachers just like that.
If you want to know who is providing cover for the politicians who insist that class size doesn’t matter, it is Eva Moskowitz. Belluck and Cuomo and other politicians keep pointing to her 100% success rates in large classes and saying see, she proved that class size doesn’t matter and public schools should take their large class sizes and deal with it. Because Eva Moskowitz says that they must. And she always tells the truth.
“She proved that class size doesn’t matter and public schools should take their large class sizes and deal with it…” There is a truth to larger class sizes working: when selective student enrollment carefully selects already socially standardized students, even as it carefully rejects and pushes out children who may have issues with special needs, language, disruptive homes, homelessness, food insecurity…
Well folks–the link below is to Gates himself speaking on October 19, 2017. Here are a couple of snippets:
“A great K-12 education and a college degree or job-training credential is a bridge to opportunity like no other when it comes to good jobs and career paths, and personal growth and fulfillment. Thanks to the leadership of educators, policymakers, and others, tremendous gains have been made over the …”
“The K-12 website empowers leaders who are dedicated to making America’s public schools exceptional by sharing resources and key learnings gained through our collective work. . . ”
“Over time, we realized that what made the most successful schools successful – large or small – was their teachers, their relationships with students, and their high expectations of student achievement. . . .”
(CBK): Frankly, I like what he has to say for many reasons (note: “say”); and I think the Gates are well-meaning in many regards. In this note, he charts his and Melinda’s learning process over the last 18 years. Again, I like the sound of it.
One question I had when reading it, however, (which was reflected in some of the “comments” following the talk on his blog), was whether or not he understands the vast political and moral problems that come from what he (seemingly) sees as an innocuous relationship between public education (which he refers to positively in his talk and in other pages on his site) and charter schools.
Politically, Gates doesn’t seem to understand that the present neo-liberal movement (code for rich, arrogant, and ignorant, e.g., ALEC, Devos, etc.) . . . to break with PUBLIC education is the camel’s-nose-under-the-tent for a wholesale break with democratic institutions and truly PUBLIC oversight and private (or pseudo-public) accountability. What Gates SAYS is not what’s ACTUALLY happening for other oligarchs working outside of his good vision as set out in his talk.
Gates also apparently has great respect for Abraham Lincoln; but seems to be tone-deaf about the systematic loss of Lincoln’s breath flowing into today, and that of a long-line of others’ who understand the import of democracy’s institutions, and their ideas about the intimate relationship between all-things-public, all persons in the re-public, and the good of a country’s democratic political system.
Morally: Gates also seems to ignore the socio-MORAL issues accompanying a release-from-accountability (self-regulation? . . . you mean, like our banks self-regulate well?) that many charter-owners are calling for; though he is (rightly, I think) attentive to well-gathered and well-mediated evidence for that same accountability in educational programs.
Though I believe that there is nothing inherently wrong with the IDEA of charter education (like Montessori and many others), politically, it stands on a foundational fissure that, by inviting omissions, can easily erupt into the body-politic; and morally it invites capitalism’s principles to overtake educational principles and it opens the door to the application and preservation of all sorts of biases. I do wish that I could see some evidence that such a powerful person would understand these deeper issues that will be so influenced by his well-meaning initiatives. See link below: CBK
http://k12education.gatesfoundation.org/our-work-going-forward/
Our Work Going Forward – K-12 Education
15!
How knowing your students will make the school safer? This is absolutely baseless assertion pulled out of thin air. If this were true, universities, which routinely have several hundred students at once in a lecture hall, would be hotbeds of violence.
You can read my reasoning based on experience above, but Nancy’s original post more than explains the process with references to other things you can read. Saying that this is a baseless assertion to people with years of classroom experience is like suggesting a dairy farmer knows nothing about milking cows
Roy, but of course I read her blog entry. She has the nerve to suggest that “there’s another solution for schools” to address “gun control, mental health services, and school safety,” which is smaller class size. These are like apples and hand grenades. You cannot prevent school shootings with small class size, you need to take serious actions like they did in Australia. Apparently realizing her shaky position, she quickly switches from gun safety to making “school a warm environment,” which is a different topic altogether.
BackAgain, it is obvious you don’t get her reasoning and don’t want to because her reasoning doesn’t fit your biases.
A smaller class size, say 10 or less, allows the teacher to have more time to get to know all of her students better, and that will lower the odds that one of the students will show up one day and shoot several of the other students and teachers killing some of them.
Why? Because having fewer students and knowing them better helps her identify children that need interventions that might have started in kindergarten to overcome whatever led up to a shooter going ballistic with a twitching trigger finger that is similar to Trump’s twitching twitter fingers and Trump attended private schools.
But this wouldn’t work very well with short-term, untrained, unprofessional TFA recruits. For this to work, every teacher would have to have teacher training with long-term follow-up support similar to the way teachers are trained in Finland or in a full-time urban residency program here in the states that have been around for decades.
I think you should read her post a few more times. Then the point she is attempting to make might sink in but I doubt it because you already made up your mind or someone else is thinking for you and you are just the parrot.
https://nancyebailey.com/2018/05/20/smaller-class-sizes-and-real-personalized-learning-are-needed-for-safer-schools/
BackAgain: Ditto for Roy Turrentine’s note. I would add that your post shows an absence of knowledge about the principles of child development. The smaller-classes, and more-personal guidance they foster, is especially important for younger children. Children’s nurturing needs don’t disappear when they leave the home to go to school. They change as they grow, and so “age-appropriate” curricula, including the ratio range of teacher-to-student, changes with it. It would be good to contribute here–what you actually know something about and not merely perpetuate ignorance on public forums.
Lloyd, I can read and comprehend what she is saying: “Policymakers must address gun control, mental health services, and school safety. There’s another solution for schools. One that few education reformers entertain. Smaller class sizes and providing students with real personalized learning.” So maybe it is you who needs to re-read this again and understand that she is saying that smaller classes is “another solution” that addresses “gun control, mental health services, and school safety.” No, it does not. A completely sane and likable student can go nuts and kill his classmates having firearms accessible. On the other hand, a bully or a psycho will not be able to kill ten or twenty people in a matter of seconds with bare knuckles. So it is she and you who steer the discussion away from gun control and to the matter of class size. And by the way, the perpetrator does not have to be a student at all.
It’s one of the solutions, a long-term one. I never said it was the only solution, DA.
BkAg: you would dare suggest that part of the solution to this problem would not include personal relationships with students? Then you would suggest that smaller class sizes would not help this process? It must be a strange life not to know how people come to love and respect each other. Nancey’s post simply pointed out that smaller classes develop more positive relationships between teachers and students. To argue with that is to admit complete misunderstanding of the dymamics of human relationships.
Students can have very rewarding relationships in big classes. I would have been mesmerized by a lecture given by a historian like Marc Bloch in a hall with thousands of students. But we do much more than impart knowledge and wisdom. We listen to students to find the place where they are. We use our understanding of them to move them closer to the respect for education that turns them into good citizens. Maybe the most important thing we do is to care when something horrible happens to them or their family. These personal things are more likely to occur when the teacher sees fewer students per day and fewer at a time.