The perennial, “We have a teacher shortage!” canard has a younger and equally bogus sibling known as, “Children do better in a small class setting!” In fact, lower class size is very often on the list of demands when teachers go out on strike. Most recently educators in Columbus, OH, Mahomet, IL, and Seattle, WA struck, and smaller classes were part of the negotiating package in each district.
The Seattle strike, which locked students out for a week, also had the teachers union insisting on more mental health and social workers, and their demands were met. Looking at the big picture, we see that compared to 2013-2014, the school district now has 1,725 fewer students, but 1,711 more employees. At this time, there are 7,010 employees for the district’s 48,784 students.
Nationally, class size has been shrinking over time. Since 1921, the student-to-teacher ratio has been reduced from 33:1 to 16:1.
Other data showing the efficacy of the class-size hawks comes from Benjamin Scafidi, who in 2017 released the results of a study on the “staffing surge” in public education. The researcher and economics professor found that between 1950 and 2015, the number of teachers in the U.S. increased about 2.5 times faster than the uptick in students. Even more stunning is the fact that the hiring of other education employees – administrators, teacher aides, counselors, social workers, etc. – rose more than 7 times the increase in students.
Using a narrower time frame, Mike Antonucci, director of the Education Intelligence Agency, adds that between 2008 and 2016, student enrollment was flat, but the teaching force grew from 3.4 million to over 3.8 million, a 12.4% bump. Also, during that time period, “the number of vice principals and assistant principals grew by 8.3 percent. Instructional coordinators and curriculum specialists increased by 10.5 percent, and there was between 5 and 12 percent growth in the number of nurses, psychologists, speech therapists, and special education aides.”
Then, just a few weeks ago, Chad Alderman, Policy Director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University, noted that all but three states lowered student-teacher ratios during the Covid pandemic. Alderman adds that staffing levels hit all-time highs in 2020-2021, with the typical public school district employing 135 people for every 1,000 students it served.
So what has all this class size shrinkage done for students?
Absolutely nothing.
An extensive analysis on the subject was done by Hoover Institution senior fellow and economist Eric Hanushek in 1998. He examined 277 different studies on the effect of teacher-pupil ratios and class-size averages on student achievement, and found that 15% of the studies did show an improvement in achievement, while 72% found no effect at all, and 13% found that reducing class size had a negative effect on achievement. While Hanushek admits that in some cases, children might benefit from a small-class environment, there is no way “to describe a priori situations where reduced class size will be beneficial.”
In 2018, a meta-analysis released by Danish researchers reported that 127 studies have been done on small class size in 41 different countries, and found at best the evidence suggests a small effect on reading achievement, but at the same time a negative, but statistically insignificant, effect on mathematics.
So the question becomes, “Why wouldn’t class size matter?” It’s primarily because when class sizes shrink, more classes are needed, and more teachers are hired to teach them. Assuming that the added teachers are of average capabilities, it would lower teacher quality if the existing teachers were talented. And this gets to the heart of the matter. When the teacher pool is increased, you get more bodies in the classroom. Not more talented bodies. Just bodies.
Imagine if a Major League All-Star Game roster was increased to 70 players from the current 35, you would certainly see a diminution in quality. The same is true in education.
The Jaime Escalante case is instructive. Probably the most acclaimed teacher of our time, his calculus class was extremely popular at Garfield High in East Los Angeles. In 1983, the number of his students passing the A.P. calculus test more than doubled. That year 33 students took the exam and 30 of them passed.
Going well beyond the 35-student limit set by the teacher union contract, some of his classes had more than 50 supposedly “unteachable” students, and the teachers union complained. Rather than submit to the union, Escalante moved on to teach elsewhere. In just a few years after his departure, the number of AP calculus students at Garfield who passed their exams dropped by more than 80%.
Which brings us to the chief villain. It should not come as a surprise that the prime evangelists for smaller class sizes are the teachers unions, whose bosses insist that they want a lower student-teacher ratio because it helps “the children.” This is rubbish. The unions want smaller class sizes because hiring more dues-paying teachers increases their bottom line. The result is that teachers become blindly interchangeable, which is a terrible thing to do to children, and highly unfair to good teachers.
All this is well documented in “The Widget Effect,” a report released in 2009 by The New Teacher Project which found that effective teachers are the key to student success, “yet our school systems treat all teachers as interchangeable parts, not professionals.”
The researchers explain that just about all public school teachers “are rated good or great,” and “poor performance goes unaddressed.” Half of the districts studied had not “dismissed a single tenured teacher for poor performance in the past five years.” Additionally, low expectations for beginning teachers “translate into benign neglect in the classroom and a toothless tenure process.” Less than 1% of all teachers receive unsatisfactory ratings, making it impossible to identify truly exceptional ones.
And on the subject of tenure – or as more accurately “permanence” – throughout most of the country, it is just about impossible to fire a teacher. In California, for example, permanence is attained after just two years on the job, and on average, just 2.2 of the state’s 300,000 “permanent” teachers (0.0008%) are dismissed for unprofessional conduct or unsatisfactory performance in any given year.
As a teacher, I liked small classes. Why wouldn’t I? There were fewer papers to grade, report cards to fill out, and parents to deal with. In other words, small class size made life easier for me. But I never deluded myself into thinking that my students were getting a superior education when I was teaching 15 or 20 instead of 25 of them. It is true that there are a few exceptions like certain special education classes where the kids need more individual attention. But, by and large, the smaller-is-better meme is baloney. Like everywhere else in life, in teaching, quality trumps quantity.
Larry Sand, a former classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.
I graduated HS in 1970 and just thinking about how many we had in ALL of our classes brings me to the conclusion that it must have been 30 to 40! There were at least five rows and about 8 desks per row! It’s not the NUMBER of students in the class – it’s the DESIRE to LEARN and to TEACH! I think the vast majority of us had TWO PARENTS at home who probably took great interest in our ATTENDANCE and GRADES. My parents did not even have sixth grade educations so they really never helped me WITH my homework and studying but they insisted I did it! Our class time was utilized in LEARNING the subject at hand. We learned about sex and the other stuff like God intended – in the back seats of cars!
So the question becomes, “Why wouldn’t class size doesn’t matter?”
Editors evidently don’t matter, either.
I taught for 40 years; 10 in public school and the last 30 in a private Christian school. I left the public schools because I saw them forcing teachers to adhere to a sin based worldview and a silencing of other worldviews and saw many (not all) teachers who did as little as they could in the classroom be protected by the teachers unions. The teachers union protects teachers and fights for less work, more pay, and better benefits for teachers with virtually no regard for students. Don’t let their rhetoric fool you, its all about the teachers.
I used to ask for bigger classes as they provided for more student interaction and diversity of viewpoints. Good teachers help students learn no matter how many students are in the class but other factors also influence this. The inner-city jobs I had were tough because the single-parent, young mother households, where no one cared about an education make it tough to convince a student that the causes of WW I are important, especially when they have no idea if they are going to eat that night.
Education bloat from the exponential increase in administrators and counselors of every sort has driven the cost through the roof and with no evidence that this helps kids learn.
Needless to say I am a supporter of school choice and a competitive market in education. If the government allowed a students money to follow him/her to the school of their choice I bet we would see a mass exodus from public schools. Th unions and democrat’s won’t let that happen and that only hurts the kids, and the nation in the long run
This is a different world, guys. Most of the kids are on their cell phones or tuned out with ear buds.
Try teaching anything in a room of 40 students.
At least with 20-25, you have a chance to get through.
Democrats have already destroyed our schools.
And Class Size does matter, unless you’re just an arm chair critic.
I was a teacher for years and never had a problem with large classes.
Does class size matter?
That will depend on what you want the teacher to do.
I taught (Secondary Math) for ten years in the Hawaii DOE. I learned not to grade classwork (it’s an opportunity for risk-free practice) and not to assign homework (who knows who does it?). I based my grades on a sum of weekly quizzes (1/2 of the grade) and a quarter or semester final (1/2 of the grade).
I would not have minded an Algebra II class of fifty students.
If you want the English teacher to read and correct at all levels, from spelling and punctuation to overall organization of the argument, student work every day, six periods of 10 students per class would be a heavy load.
I agree. Good observation. Context, degree of intensity, speed of teaching and learning, and the subject, matters on how you teach and to how many students at one time. You can’t have a one-size-fits-all approach to effective teaching or learning. But a government school with a huge bureaucracy and teacher’s union is the least likely situation for adaptation and innovation in education.
Class size doesn’t matter (up to a number of maybe 60 although loud speakers and an auditorium can make it possible for more) if the students are capable and hungry to learn and the teacher eager, capable, and free to teach.
Such a situation requires freedom and the personal responsibility of the student to pay for his education himself and the teacher to EARN his income himself by proving he’s worth the students money.
It requires a FREE MARKET of education.
A union’s primary objective is to perpetuate the union. Ignore all the rhetoric coming out of the mouth of union officials. Unions strive to take over whatever institution “employs” them. Over time they become so entrenched the only was to get rid of them is to “destroy the host” and try to start over again. What I witnessed, working union jobs, is how the rank and file, in unison, hold the mindset that the employer is screwing them. No matter how high the wage, how beneficent the perks or how watered down the work load is, they are being screwed by the man. This comes down from the top and is readily accepted because who doesn’t want more pay, more benefits and less work?