Matthew Yglesias has a a very interesting graph that illustrates how the pupil-teacher ratio has decline since 1970. Go on over and take a look at it. He draws one reasonable conclusion, namely, that reducing class size hasn’t been terribly effective in improving public school education and then makes a poor suggestion:
The better approach for any given lump of teacher compensation money is to plow it into ensuring that you’re recruiting and retaining the best possible teachers. In other words, just pay the teachers you have more money and hope that generates more and better applicants for positions in the future.
On pupil-teacher ratio anybody familiar with the literature knows that’s the case. Reducing very large classes to smaller classes will help. For ordinary students reducing class sizes below some moderate level doesn’t do much and, as you can see, what we’ve done over the last 40 years is reduce moderate class sizes to smaller class sizes. Much more than 40 years ago in the first school I attended class sizes ranged from about 45 to about 60 students. I don’t mean grade levels. I mean class sizes. 45 to 60 kids in a room. Cutting that to 25 kids in a room was a big improvement. Reducing the number farther to 15—not so much.
As to his other suggestion consider the following graph:
As you can see teacher salaries have risen sharply in current dollars. The increase has outpaced inflation and in recent years has been more than twice the rate of inflation. Or, in other words, we’ve been following MY’s suggestion for decades.
Next suggestion, please.
MY’s chart doesn’t look credible to me. The student/teacher ratio in public schools is certainly not commonly under 1:16. I think special education teachers or other supporting teaching positions are masking the reality of class sizes.
I don’t dispute a trend, but I think it’s far more muted.
The value of an ivy league education right there. What an amazingly contradictory dope.
I might look this up later, but I think grade school class sizes for in the 1970s were around 32. For my kids it’s around 24.
Parents want smaller class sizes and I expect it’s because they feel the schools are not orderly; that the smaller sizes give the teachers more ability to ensure discipline.
Steve, there was a movie about it: If you pay for it, they will come.
It was a supernatural tale.
Heh
Frankly, I doubt it. Mainstreaming has changed that.
I think a more likely explanation is that kids aren’t as concentrated in cities, etc. as they were years ago. I think I mentioned in an earlier post that the number of students enrolled in Chicago schools has dropped sharply over the last decade as the number of CPS employees has risen. I haven’t been able to disaggregate who’s being hired but at least some of the difference probably results in smaller class sizes.
“Frankly, I doubt it. Mainstreaming has changed that.”
All of our local schools have special programs for kids on the autistic spectrum. These are small classes with several specialty teachers. Local schools often have specialists in reading and speech disorders. I would bet that the classes are a bit smaller, with special needs kids accounting for at least half of that change in ratio.
“The better approach for any given lump of teacher compensation money is to plow it into ensuring that you’re recruiting and retaining the best possible teachers.”
I think he was probably influenced by a trip to the Nordic countries, especially Finland. They tend to pay their teachers more and treat teaching as a prestige job. Finland leads the world on test scores with its highly paid, unionized teachers. OTOH, it may just be less childhood poverty at work.
Steve
I can only speak for my own school, a mid-western K-4 elementary school. Class size averages about 20 except for the special ed teacher with 7 kids. Additionally, we have a title 1 reading teacher, plus PE and music. Not sure if those would bring the average down.
In many aspects of life we have increasing degrees of control over time (time shifting) and location (cell phones, etc…) . We have more choice over who we deal with, who we see, who we associate with. We’ve incorporated technological breakthroughs (the internet) into our businesses.
None of this is true of schools.
Schools violate rules of common sense. For example, if you want a teenager to perform well, don’t wake him up at 6:30 am and insist he rush to school where he’ll spend at least 7 hours, usually followed by 3-5 hours of homework, plus resume-padding extracurriculars, so that he ends up getting six hours of sleep before being yanked out of bed at 6:30 am.
I don’t think class size is nearly as important to the end result as is simple exhaustion, time-wasting assignments, irrelevant classes, inefficient shuffling of bodies hither and yon, teachers competing to see who can pile on more work, pernicious parents and their credentialing obsessions and an abject refusal to acknowledge that we are in the 21st century not the 19th.
As a side not I give the graduation speech at a high school next month. Oh, they’ll be so glad they asked me.
Not sure if I’ve mentioned this, but I’m working as a substitute teacher. As luck would have it, a substitute special ed teacher for part of this week.
I think PD Shaw is correct about special ed driving down the statistics. At least if my district is any indication. The district mainstreams for all but the slowest, but the end result is that special ed teachers end up teaching a bunch of kids part of the day instead of a few kids most of the day. So the other day I was in charge of a rotating group of 2-6 kids (except for an hour where I had 13 kids and a half-hour with only one kid) and doing some in-class work in another teacher’s classroom.
On a different day I was teaching the really handicapped kids. This involved two teachers in a classroom of nine or so. A “homeroom teacher” and then an itinerant subject-specific teacher. Next to me was a teacher doing what I did in the previous paragraph.
On a different day, I was teaching a regular class but was located in an adjoining room with special ed. Same sort of thing there except with two teachers and kids coming in and out throughout the day.
Thus far I have not seen any regular classrooms with fewer than 20 students.