Currently in New Zealand there is a debate on class sizes. The government want to make budget cuts and reducing the number of teachers has been announced. Most school teachers are paid for by the government.
The Teaching Union and Boards of Trustees are outraged. Smaller classes = greater individual attention = better education for each child.
Yet Asian schools average 33-35 pupils per classroom and produce highly educated children.
So is this small = good one of those truisms? Sounds correct but is plain wrong?
What WhyNot said. Large reductions in class size can pay off in the early grades. Small reductions or those done in later grades have much less effect. Sometimes, in some places.
These debates always focus on class size, but a related, and important, phenomena is teacher load. I really don’t have any problem teaching 35 in a class, and I don’t see a huge difference in my actual classroom effectiveness. But what happens in the classroom is really just the tip of the iceberg: it’s the outside of school tutoring, grading, and planning that really determine my overall effectiveness, and those are impacted by the total number of students I teach, not so much by how many bodies are in the class at any one time.
We all picked up an extra class this year. On paper, it looks like “Yay! Class sizes stayed the same despite brutal budget cuts!”. In reality, there’s less time for planning and grading, and more to grade and plan (that extra class is often a different one from the others). This means a lot less individual attention and tutoring outside of school because teachers are too busy just keeping the most basic paperwork type tasks done. There is very little innovative planning and lots of interesting lessons have disappeared because no one has time to set anything up: it becomes all about keeping kids busy and filling up the day instead of teaching.
Small class sizes will generally hurt student education at first. The reason is that it takes about 2 years for a teacher to become maximally effective. Since small classes mean new teachers that means more students being taught by rookie teachers. Thus student education suffers. The evidence that small class sizes help student education at all is very poor, so unless the class sizes are really huge there is unlikely to be any thing beneficial that will counteract the effect of the new teachers.
Teachers are helped by low class sizes, as has already been mentioned it reduces teacher workload. It also increases the number of teachers who can lobby the government for higher salaries. Also more teachers means more union dues and thus the teacher’s unions will fight it tooth and nail.
What is it with you anti-union people? Does it not enter your little mind that maybe teachers unions actually care about quality schools? It’s okay to disagree about how to get there, but why can’t we at least agree that the majority of players have the benefit of the school children in mind?
Teacher’s unions care about themselves first and the students second. They are like everyone else in that regard. I used to work in schools everyone there is made from the same crooked timber as the rest of humanity , nobody gets issued a halo and pair of wings with their teaching certificate.
If by “already mentioned” you mean my post, then you no, I didn’t claim it reduces teacher workload. Teacher workload is pretty stable: a person that is going to put in 40 hour weeks will put in 40 hour weeks, a person who is going to work 80 hours a week will work 80 hours. When you increase the amount of time a teacher spends in the classroom and the total number of students they teacher, you reduce the teacher attention per capita.
I’ve taught a class with 9 students and I’ve taught multiple classes with the state max of 38 students.
Below a certain point - say, 18 or so students - smaller classes don’t help the kids or even me. There’s a certain amount peer-to-peer interaction that helps spark classroom involvement, and the kids can actually do better work when I’m not constantly hovering.
Thirty-eight kids, though, is insane. About the only way to teach a 38 student class is with a bullwhip and pith helmet, and even then most lesson plans devolve to lecturing, the least effective form of teaching. It’s simply a logistics problem, especially when most classrooms aren’t built to handle that kind of population. Realistic assessments are lost, because grading 38 essays or projects to an effective rubric for each class takes far too much time. Any teacher not willing to spend an extra 20 hours grading each assessment has to cut back to less effective testing methods - like multiple choice questions.
The other thing I don’t see addressed is that different subjects have different limits. With extra prep and effort, I can teach MacBeth to a class of 35 kids - even when we’re short on chairs. Trying to teach Sculpture I to 38 kids was a nightmare. It would be a nightmare in a science lab, a woodshop, or any “hands on” subject. Yet, 38 kids in PE would be considered a fair-to-middling class and undersized if it were band.
I don’t have an answer, other than saying it’s more complex than most people think.
Start on page 1 here, and explain the flaws in their meta-analysis of the research, please. If you’d like, you may choose just one or two paragraphs to focus on for discussion.
I know this is a lot, but you’ve made sweeping unsubstantiated claims about the evidence about small class sizes. On the contrary, I think the evidence for significantly smaller class sizes over multiple years is very, very strong. The evidence for your conspiracy theories about nefarious teachers unions promoting fraudulent research in order to increase their political power? Let’s just say I’ll examine that evidence when it’s offered.
I am a member of the largest teacher union in the United States. I take exception to your unsubstantiated statement. Teachers are not “like everyone else in that regard”. We care a great deal about things greater than ourselves. However, I will ask that if teachers don’t stand up for themselves, who will?
The studies mentioned in the link are not conclusive at all. It is no suprise that an organization called class size matters would only show results of studies that support small class sizes. This can be hard to study since you have to do so many regressions to try to account for all of the confounding variables. The more regressions you do the more likely it is that error is introduced into the data. There have been around 270 studies done nationally, 15% find good outcomes, 13% find bad outcomes, and 72% find no significant effects. It is probable that the good and bad outcomes are just products of data mining. Here is the paper (pdf)
The best data is state or country wide. In 1970 teacher students ratios nationally were 14-1, now they are 8-1 and scores have not improved at all. If shrinking class sizes did not work in America, what is it about New Zealand that will make it work better?
More recently California spent 20 billion dollars to reduce class sizes starting in 1996 and no improvements have been found. Likewise Florida in 2002 made a similar effort costing 16 billion dollars and no improvements were shown. From the link LHOD provided : While average achievement scores of all
elementary grades have increased each
year since the state testing program began
in 1997–1998, the statewide pattern of
exposure to CSR does not match the
pattern of achievement score increase, so
“no strong relationship can be inferred
between achievement and CSR.”
There was “no strong association”
between the number of years spent in
CSR classrooms
Smaller class sizes don’t always work because the teacher continues as if they were in front of a large class.
Over time, capable children gain excellence compared with their peers in larger school classes. However the children who struggle, are at the low end, do not appear to show any improvement.
Children will work co-operatively and educate each other provided the classroom is calm and encouraging.
