Class Size and Student Achievement
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-03-08/class-size-and-student-achievement
In Wisconsin the state legislature remain at a total impasse over a vote on legislation that would largely strip public employees of collective bargaining. Teachers are among state employees caught in the ongoing bitter battle over the budget and union rights. The governor of Wisconsin has already announced $800 million in cuts to schools. In Wisconsin and many other cash strapped states across the country, teacher lay-offs are expected and class sizes are likely to grow … but not everyone thinks this is necessarily a bad idea. Join us to discuss what’s lost and what isn’t as class sizes expand in the K through 12 years.
Guests
Diane Ravitch
author, professor at New York University, and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
Leonie Haimson
executive director, Class Size Matters.
Eric Hanushek
senior fellow, Hoover Institution.
Kris Amundson
communications manager, Education Sector.
Kerry Sylvia
high school teacher, Cardozo High School, Washington, D.C.
Comments
Please familiarize yourself with our Code of Conduct and Terms of Use before posting your comments.
Here is what W. Edwards Deming had to say about performance rating:
"Fair Rating is Impossible.
"A common fallacy is the supposition that it is possible to rate people; to put them in rank order of performance for next year, based on performance last year.
"The performance of anybody is the result of a combination of many forces--the person himself, the people that he works with, the job, the material that he works on, his equipment, his customer, his management, his supervision, environmental conditions (noise, confusion, poor food in the cafeteria).
"These forces will produce unbelievably large differences between people. In fact, as we shall se, apparent differences between people arise almost entirely from action of the system that they work in, not from the people themselves. A man not promoted is not able to understand why his performance is lower than someone else's. No wonder; his rating was the result of a lottery. Unfortunately, he takes his rating seriously."
Page 71, "Out of the Crisis," W. Edwards Deming
Deming's concepts are based on his work with corporations and other organizations. However, there is much in his approach that should be applied to public schools.
Great program, Diane, as usual!
Politicians have long wanted a solution to the cost of education. My uncle used to say "figures don't lie but liars do figure." People will do with numbers what they will in order to support their pre-determined position. When figuring class sizes, it is common to include all teachers. However, those teachers such as coaches, instructional leaders, team leaders, department chairpersons and others who have fewer and smaller classes during the day and therefore fewer if any students. Factoring these people into the class size formula reduces the student to teacher ratio.
I taught science in public schools. There are several reasons that smaller class sizes are important in science classes. If experimentation is included (and it should be) safety and logistics are compromised if sizes reach more than 18-24 students.
The size and cost of administration in education was not fully addressed on the show but it is an important issue. An audit of the administrators and quazi adminstrators in each jurisdiction would help determine those who are needed and not needed. The savings would help fund classroom teacher position. In the schools in the county where I taught, there were three instructional leader teachers per building. These people are there to help raise state and national test scores. Since they were experienced individuals with more than 15 years on the salary scale, and since they were given one more month of employment than other teachers, the cost of having them (including benefits) would be close to $400,000 per school.
Last thought: Shouldn't board of education members be educated people themselves? Also, teachers should have more involvement in decisions made by the board of education excluding salaries and some other conflict of interest votes. We had a man on the board of ed who passed out bibles as students exited schools and who wanted to end the teaching of evolution and teach the bible version of life and earth science.
There is this cliche like statement: "Think out of the box!". sorry none of the commenters thinks out of the box. The schools have by far to much money. It hurts badly how the county willie nillie collects taxes to be wasted. Schools do things they should not be doing like competitive sports. They should not teach to drive or to dance. That should be left to private businesses. There should be no school buses or crossing guards. Children should learn how to take public transportation which naturally needs to be revamped to serve the pupils. All participants in traffic should learn to respect pupils in the road and they should be fined seriously if they don't. Kids get pampered with special rights when crossing streets instead of learning to respect others. In my secondary school we were up to 56 pupils and we learned because we had discipline. No freedom of speech - freedom of listening. The principal was no god, he was a teacher at the same time. There was no school police, no school nurse. No school secretary and it all worked.
I once discussed FCAT with a teacher and she could not explain to me why that is so much of a problem. either I am stupid or the system is just to complicated. I taught more than 20 years in education departments of big companies. We never had a problem to set goals, define a path to get there and devise a test to make sure we got there.
May be it is time to develop a new school system without participation of the one's currently involved because they all have a bias. A real school revolution is needed. May be the kids who have no support at home or have no home need to go to boarding schools. May be parents need to be held responsible if they squander their kids chances, and I am not talking prison but community service.
Look at other countries and you may learn something!
One last thought about class size: The best is five teachers per pupil. Then the teachers don't get exhausted and they can really focus on the weakest link.
to hlh
Last paragraph: Only in America!
Wonderful show today, Diane! Very informative!
My very first year as a teacher I had 50 children on my class roster of kindergarten and 1st graders. I was expected to teach, in addition to the basics, some music, art and PE. I was responsible for the recess and lunch; no breaks. This was a remote northern rural area with very poor families and kids walked to school, so dressing them to go outside was a daunting chore. There were no aides, no parents in the room at any time, but I had no discipline problems. At the end of the year achievement scores were fine. Everyone learned to read, including the kindergarteners who completed three pre-primers. For this year I was paid $1,800, some of which I used to buy supplies. What made this possible? The children were sent to school with a firm directive: Mind your teacher. I had the most fun year of my career!
My second year was in an affluent area with very involved parents. I had twenty first grade children on my role but much of the year less than eighteen were present. I was using the same basic reading program as the previous year, and the children achieved the same results, with a number reading two years above grade level and a little group of the youngest a bit below graade level but at appropriate level for their age
For many years I was assigned to administer and score standardized tests. I charted the achievement of all students from year to year at a school with very little turnover of students or teachers. No matter whom the teacher, students remained at about the same percentile through school. I also (unknown to teachers) charted the achievement of each section of every class in three subject areas and compared them to other sections of the class. Some teachers were loved, some feared, some innovative; some I admired, some I faulted, but over a dozen years there was NO discernable difference in the gains each section made.
I went to a Catholic School from 1959 through 1967 (1st through 8th grades) in a small town in Nevada. Our class sizes were 25-29 kids and I received an excellent education. We were expected to do homework - lots of it - from first grade on. And we didn't have any "teacher's aides," no parents came and volunteered in our classrooms, there were some extracurricular activities, but nothing like these days. I also think that for the most part the kids in my classes were pretty homogenous - we were all white, lower to middle class, and while there were some divorces among the parents, as well as some alcoholism, still families were pretty cohesive.
I think a large part of the problem today is that the budgets of schools have been gutted for a long time now, with lots of money siphoned off by the "charter school" movement, which has NOT proven to be a better system by any stretch of the imagination. Our communities are not truly committed to providing public school funding in a meaningful way, and it's complete nonsense that the Republicans have been allowed to redistribute the wealth of this country in a way that insures education is a very low priority and will continue to be so.
It also seems like the only things we're educating people for these days is to either become soldiers or fast food workers.... There are a lot of problems with the priorities of this country!
Education effects not only the student individually, it also effects society as a whole. A society of undereducated persons are unable to make educated decisions about daily life and politics. They are easy prey for shady advertisements, trick pricing, and scammers. Both political parties are guilty of disinformation, innuendo, and carefully phrased sound bites that are designed to take advantage of the ignorance of the masses.
I am concerned that the 'haves' that are running corporate America and congress are systematically ensuring the 'have nots' have no opportunity to learn enough to understand what is really going on. How many CEOs, Senators, or Representatives went to public school?
This is a real question, not an attempt to put you down.
How many people in your school were drug addicts? How many carried guns? How many were not English speakers? How many were dyslexic? Developmentally Disabled? Homeless? How long did it take before you lost your fear of speaking your mind? I am still working on that myself.
I cannot tell your age, but I am 50+. There is a lot more to learn now than there was then. There were no calculators, computers, internet, aids, or Watergate just to name a few.
I have taught in Corporate America. I have taught pilots. I have taught complex aircraft systems and physics to engineers. I have also taught in Community Colleges. The big difference is that the corporate, pilot, and engineering community are well motivated: they want to get or keep a job. Many Community College students are much less motivated. It is much more difficult to get and keep their attention.
I absolutely agree that competitive sports are a waste of school money.
Furthermore, studies show that every time a linebacker hits his head or a soccer player 'heads' the ball brain damage results. The results may be subtle but the ability to learn may be impaired for years. That is not what I want for my children.
I thank you for your well thought-out comments, and for keeping the discussion civil. It is apparent that you feel very strongly about this.
I have been teaching since 2005. I wrote a really long blog post in response to this podcast (which can be seen here, as it is too long for this comment box). The gist of my post? That class size makes a huge difference on both the ability of a teacher to teach and the ability of a student to learn, and that the impact of class size upon education is far greater at the grade-school level than at the university level. I googled Eric Hanushek… while he has impressive credentials, it would seem that he has never taught at anything less than the university level. This makes me wonder how he can possibly be qualified to say so unequivocally that in elementary/middle/high school, class size doesn’t matter as long as you have a good teacher in the classroom.
In his book, Confucius Lives Next Door, TR Reid describes his daughters' experiences in Japanese primary schools while the family lives in Tokyo (for two years as I remember it). There the teachers have a minimum rather than maximum ideal class size because they so often make use of small groups and require that students switch around and take turns leading a group. We've all read that Japanese culture values the group over the individual. Still...it is interesting to realize that there are radically different approaches out there to a seemingly intractable problem.
Love your show.
Let me just mention this, Fairfax County Virginia has a median income of over $100,000 per household. This is twice the average of the state and the nation.
Perhaps your "expert" needs a dose of reality.
Penny - Not the area of Fairfax County I represented. Both high schools are majority-minority. We have elementary schools where 90 percent of the kids are on free and reduced lunch (a proxy for poverty). In some of the schools, well over half the students speak a language other than English. It's one reason I feel so strongly that averages tend to hide much more than they reveal. My part of the County, let me assure you, is much more diverse and much more low-income than most people would ever imagine by looking at the "average" income in Fairfax.