Photo: Julie K in Taiwan's flickr photostream (creative commons)

Class size, that is. According to the New York Times,

NYC’s Department of Education released a report last week stating that the average number of students per class increased this academic year across almost all grade levels. Further, as school districts across the country are facing budget cuts, many fear that increases in class size will follow. But is this really so bad?

I used to think that class size was the silver bullet of school reform. Intuitively, it made sense that if teachers had fewer students to teach, they would have more quality time to spend with each student, and provide a higher quality of education.

Not so, I learned in one of my grad school classes. The argument: If you have a mediocre teacher in a classroom of 30 students, and you reduce class size by 5 students, you end up with a mediocre teacher in a classroom of 25 students. Replace the adjective “mediocre” with “excellent” or even “dismally inept,” and the equation stays the same. The bottom line: Unless a particular reform actually impacts pedagogy, and changes the nature of the interaction between teacher and student in some fundamental way, it will not cause a noticeable change in the quality of teaching or in student achievement. Especially if we’re talking about one or two extra students per class, which is the case in NYC.

And as far as the discipline argument goes (i.e. it’s easier to “control” smaller groups of students than larger ones), I have learned the hard way that it only takes one student to disrupt a whole class – regardless of its size. Either teachers command the respect and interest of their students sufficiently to be able to guide their learning, or they don’t.

Apparently, Mayor Bloomberg of NYC agrees with me. He said:  “If you’re going to spend an extra dollar, personally, I would always rather spend it on the people that deliver the service…It’s the teacher looking a child in the eye, and teachers can look lots of children in the eye…If you have to have smaller class size or better teachers, go with the better teachers every time.”

takepart in reading about several studies in which small reductions in class size had little impact on student performance. Or, read arguments from folks who think that class size really does matter.