Does Class Size Count?

By SARA MOSLE

Schooling: Sara Mosle on students, teaching and schools, from within and beyond the classroom.

As states cut education budgets in response to the nation’s continuing economic woes, student-to-teacher ratios are again on the rise after decades of decline. This resurrects an age-old debate in American education: does class size really matter?
To many educators, the answer seems obvious: Teachers who have fewer students can give each child more attention and tailored instruction. And parents agree. For years, annual surveys conducted by the New York City Department of Education have shown that the top priority of school parents is reducing class size, far outpacing “more effective leadership,” “more teacher training,” “more or better art programs,” “more challenging courses” and both “more preparation for state tests” and “less preparation for state tests.”
But the data on class size is not conclusive, if only because, in the last quarter-century, there’s been just one proper randomized, controlled study in the United States to measure, at sufficient scale, the effect of smaller and larger classes on student achievement. Known as Project STAR, it found that smaller classes do produce lasting gains, especially for economically disadvantaged and minority-group students.
Hiring more teachers, however, is expensive, and some researchers and policy makers insist that reducing class size is not cost-effective, compared with other possible reforms, and has been oversold to schools. They point to states like California and Florida that have spent billions of taxpayer dollars to reduce pupil-to-teacher ratios without, they argue, a commensurate increase in student performance.

Jonathan Alcorn for The New York Times John Marshall High School students study in a crowded World History class in Los Angeles.

Diverse figures including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill Gates have coalesced around a new idea: why not increase class sizes for the best teachers and use the resulting budgetary savings to pay these best teachers more and to help train educators who need improvement? Yes, each class might be bigger on average but at least each child would stand a better chance of having a great teacher, which would-be reformers say is more important.
The proposal is intriguing, and some teachers may be on board. Matthew Chingos, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, has cited a national survey by the journal Education Next and Harvard’s Program on Education Policy and Governance that found that 42 percent of teachers would gladly accept a $10,000 raise to forgo a three-student reduction in class size. Yet perhaps more striking, 47 percent of teachers said they would turn down this substantial pay increase to have just three students fewer in class. It’s unclear if the teachers who want the extra money are the same ones schools hope to retain and reward. But the bigger problem is that class size is already increasing while there still isn’t a mechanism to identify top-flight teachers and offer them more students for more pay; nor is there any assurance that parents, given a choice, would embrace these larger classes for their children.
In addition, while the idea is conceivable at the elementary level, where a single teacher typically teaches all subjects and most schools have several teachers per grade, it’s harder to picture in many junior high or high schools, which may have only one chemistry or American history teacher. Also, how would distinctions between average and exceptional teachers affect collaboration, and how frequently would these ratings be revised? Upending salaries and teachers’ schedules every year could destabilize schools.
Once you start to think about how the plan would play out, it begins to seem fantastical. Certainly, any widespread implementation is years away. Meanwhile, students will continue to languish in ever larger classes.
So here’s a proposal for getting past this familiar stalemate: Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates and other teacher-quality advocates should agree to fight — hard — to keep class sizes small for a limited population of at-risk students. That way economically disadvantaged and minority-group students, who Project STAR undeniably proved can benefit most from low student-to-teacher ratios, won’t have to suffer through larger classes while waiting for better teachers.
In return, advocates of reducing class size agree to support pilot programs for creating more-students-for-more-pay classrooms to see if the plan has any takers among everyday teachers and parents and whether this theory actually works and is cost-effective in the real world.
I don’t think either side is likely to be satisfied with this compromise, but both might have something to gain. Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates need to develop more grass-roots support among parents who distrust many of their reform ideas and who continue to believe that class size counts. Parents would most likely find it reassuring if reformers demonstrated a willingness to phase in such changes only after test districts have demonstrated their effectiveness.
At the same time, education budgets are contracting, and the number of students per teacher is probably going up nationwide no matter what. Organizations like Parents Across America, which has lobbied for indiscriminate and far more costly across-the-board reductions in class size, might help preserve smaller classes for those children who most need them and would demonstrate their willingness to experiment with innovation. One class size need not fit all.