A Classic-ic Mistake

Periodically, public education is seized by a fad regardless of whether it has any real effect. One such is the rush toward reducing class size to some arbitrary number.

Class size does make a difference. But that difference depends on many variables, including grade level, the types of students, the subject matter, the skills of the teacher, the teaching method, etc.

California, under former Gov. Pete Wilson, mandated smaller class sizes in some grades. An initial cost of $1.5 billion, now grown to $4 billion, resulted in a mad scramble to find teachers and space. Even child-care centers and libraries were converted to classrooms, hardly a net gain.

Peter Jennings reported on February 17, 1998 that 21,000 non-certified teachers were hired. Jennings cited a district that reduced class size only to see student achievement go down. Another district chose not to reduce class sizes, because eight new teachers and eight new classrooms would have cost more than $1,000,000--money the district did not have.

Weigh Benefits against Costs

Research has concluded that class size, by itself, is unimportant. Eric Hanushek, former chairman of the Economics Department at the University of Rochester, analyzed 152 class size studies. He found only 14 reported positive relationships; about an equal number showed negative results; while most showed no significant difference either way.

Students in other nations are commonly in larger classes. The children of the Vietnamese "boat people" in the 1970s performed very well in U.S. public schools, scoring, for example, in the 95th percentile in mathematics. Yet in Vietnam they had been in schools where the average class size was 75. Japanese high school classes typically have 50 students. South Korea's students have ranked first in math among 20 nations, yet the average class size there is 43 students.

Oddly enough, the argument that classes in the U.S. are too large has intensified at the same time the student-teacher ratio and average class sizes here have declined. From about 37 students per teacher in 1900, the average class size dropped to 27 in 1955, 18 in 1986, and about 17 today.

Assume that reducing class sizes further, say to 15 in the first two grades, would bring achievement gains of 14 percent, as one study suggests. To go from the current average in those two grades of about 25 students per class to 15 means there must be five teachers and five classrooms for every 75 students, compared to the present three of each. That's a cost increase of 67 percent--nearly five times the increase in achievement that would be gained.

And what does a 14 percent achievement gain mean? If students rank in the 35th percentile, a 14 percent gain would move them, at great expense, from the 35th to the 42nd percentile ... still leaving them well below average.

Or Maybe Too Small?

Class size is invariably discussed in terms of classes being too big. But many classes are too small. Increasing the student-teacher ratio in those classes would save money that could be spent in situations where smaller classes could be proven useful.

During World War II, the U.S. Army taught typing in rooms so large the instructor--a non-certified soldier-teacher--used a microphone and students listened on headphones. Typing is a mechanical skill, requiring only repetition until it becomes a habit.

A public school not only could do this, at least one has. In the 1960s, Melbourne, Florida High School assigned one typing teacher to a class of 125 students, five classes per day, for a daily student-load of 625. Principal B. Frank Brown said, "The surprising thing is that we never thought of this before."

The most common teaching method to this day is the lecture. A high school teacher may have six classes per day of 25 students (I used to have about 33). Presenting a lecture six times, once to each class, is highly inefficient. Would it not be better for the teacher to give the lecture once to the 150 students as a group, and have five periods available for other purposes?

Even if the vast sums of money to do so were available, it makes no sense to spend money across the board on a fad that has failed to prove itself effective. To spend billions of dollars on an ineffective practice consumes funds that could be better used where there are demonstrated needs, or on reforms proven to be effective.

David W. Kirkpatrick is senior education fellow for the U.S. Freedom Foundation. http://www.schoolreport.com

For more information ...

Class-Size Effects in School Systems Around the World: Evidence from Between-Grade Variation in TIMSS. Estimates the effect of class size on student performance in 18 countries, combining school fixed effects and instrumental variables to identify random class-size variation between two adjacent grades within individual schools. Smaller classes exhibit beneficial effects only in countries with relatively low teacher salaries. (Program on Education Policy and Governance, February 2002, 64pp.)

Go to www.heartland.org and use PolicyBot to search for document #12068