This one, from K12 reform Blog, is just excellent!
Myth: We need smaller class sizes
February 09, 2004
Many people think we need smaller class sizes to improve education.
It seems to be a no-brainer, and what teacher wouldn't want fewer papers to grade?
Spokespeople point to high-performing (private) schools with smaller class sizes, as if to say, "See?" Yes, there will always be overpriced private schools on the Main Line where they boast of a class size of 10 or 15. So what? That's what parents get for their $20,000 yearly tuition.
The sad reality is that public school class sizes have historically never been lower.
We were at a party where we ran into a friend who attended Philadelphia public schools in the 1950s. The discussion turned to class size, and he laughed, "We had 48 kids in our classes, six by eight!" His point was that class size was no big deal, but we were intrigued at how quickly he rolled off the dimensions of the seating plan.
Putting on our deerstalker's hat and cloak, clenching a large Meerschaum pipe in our teeth, we investigated a Philadelphia middle school built in the 1930s, one that was considered overcrowded by 21st century standards.
Picking a classroom at random, we counted the black marks in the hardwood floor, showing where the desks used to be bolted down. We counted six rows of eight.
We wondered, how come this school today (with a maximum class size of 33) could be considered overcrowded with a current population of around 1,300 students, if the classrooms used to support 48 fifty years ago? If the class size were increased to 48, the school population would be around 1,900 students.
For example, where would they put all their stuff? Surely this school couldn't have enough lockers. A quick stroll around the hallways revealed 2,100 lockers, enough for each class of 48 to have five extra.
So why all the drama about overcrowding?
One other detail we noticed gave us a hint: down the middle of all the hallways was a faded yellow line.
It struck us between the eyes. In our classroom teaching experience, there's one quality that can make a class of 33 seem small or a class of 15 seem crowded. Student behavior! A building with 1,900 relatively well-behaved kids may well have felt smaller than 1,300 rambunctious ones, hence 1,300 is "overcrowded."
If "calmly walking on the left" would reduce psychological overcrowding in the hallways, what about the classroom? There's no way you could fit 48 desks if 33 desks barely fit today!
Well, they did fit 48, and that was by bolting them to the floor.
This almost sounds Draconian by today's standards. In fact, in Colleges of Education, the phrase "bolted-down desks" is supposed to conjure up the same cold, industrial imagery as "factory model school."
But, heaven forbid, it worked. It allowed the desks to stay in neat rows, and allowed the room to fit more students. (Today, there is some mysterious repulsive force inside desks that prevent them from staying in "quads" or rows for very long.)
A few other points to note. Back then, we had teacher-directed classrooms, today we have student-centered ones. Back then the teacher was the source of all instruction, today we have "cooperative learning" where the students are supposed to learn from and collaborate with each other.
Today we have "overcrowded" classrooms of 33, back then we had economy of scale with 48.
In Barbarians Inside the Gates, Thomas Sowell pointed out that at PS 161 in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn, students were doing amazingly well. "Professor [Diane] Ravitch found that four-fifths of the third-graders there met state reading standards for their grade. In fact more than one-third of these third-graders met the state reading standards for the sixth grade." (emphasis ours)
He then focuses on the squabbling over class sizes:
At P.S. 161, for example, class sizes range up to 35 children per class. In some of the high-quality black schools I studied 20 years ago, class sizes were even larger.
But smaller class size is a political symbol, as well as a means of creating more jobs for teachers, so it is promoted to the public as a sacred goal and to the union's membership as a trophy of victory.
If all this cynical politicking over education did nothing worse than waste some more money, it would hardly be worth getting upset about. But, for many of the poorest children, education is their one ticket out of poverty. If they miss that train, they miss everything: They are history before they are teenagers.
Yet for decades the same tired actors read their lines from their script, proclaiming that what we really need to solve our educational crisis is smaller class sizes.
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