

Should States Spend Billions to Reduce Class Sizes? - tokenadult
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/should-states-spend-billions-to-reduce-class-sizes/

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Htsthbjig
Well, it depends.

You could have a classroom with 70 highly motivated students, and love it. You
find this in Africa were teachers are scarce and respected, children are
abundant and want to learn.

I went to visit a female friend that leaved everything in Europe(executive in
a bug multinational, a good house) to help and teach poor children in Africa.
After going there and seeing it myself I understood: those kids were the best
students ever and they loved their teachers so much.

On the contrary in wealthy countries it is common to find someone in each
class that does not want to study and does not want anybody else in the class
to study too. That makes teaching a bad experience.

~~~
bluedino
Do wealthy countries like Iceland have this problem? They have very small
class sizes and high-ranking school systems.

~~~
xrange
Extrapolating anything from Iceland seems dubious. Since it is tiny (300,000)
and so culturally and racially homogenous (84% of Icelanders apparently belong
to the official state Luthern church).

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iceland](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iceland)

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lemonad
The extensive research by John Hattie shows that reduced class sizes has a
small but positive effect on student achievement but relative to other
factors, it is very inefficient:

[http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-
effect...](http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect-sizes-
learning-achievement/)

One explanation to reduced class sizes not having a larger effect is that
teachers, given smaller classes, rarely change their practice to optimize for
the new situation.

~~~
munificent
> teachers, given smaller classes, rarely change their practice to optimize
> for the new situation.

Or maybe that given all of the increased rules, regulation, and standardized
testing, they don't have the freedom to.

~~~
lemonad
True. If I remember Hattie correctly, he argues something akin to that
reducing class sizes is mostly a political move (it's certainly not research
based) — and after spending huge amounts of money on that — there is no
political incentive to spend at least as much on retraining teachers.

Also, if some of the money had been spent on professional development instead
of reducing class sizes in the first place, his research shows that the effect
of that on student achievement had been much, much higher.

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gyardley
Politically, Washington is one of the more interesting places I've ever lived
- there's a majority for Massachusetts-style spending, but there's also a
majority for Texas-style taxation. Combine that with the voter initiative
system and a cultural boundary line that has nothing to do with the state
boundary line, and you get one hell of a predictable mess.

I assume the state will eventually tip demographically in favor of the coast
and end up resembling California, with high income taxes and a pissed-off but
powerless interior, but I've got no idea how long that's going to take.

~~~
xrange
>I assume the state will eventually tip demographically in favor of the coast
and end up resembling California

So do you think that this will be a result natural population growth, migrants
from California/Oregon, migrants from other U.S. states, or migrants from
other countries? I tried to look up population trends for various counties,
but it isn't as straightforward as I had hoped. It seems like there should be
a heat map showing population growth per county, so that we could see which
counties are growing fastest. Also it would be interesting to look at the
population trends east and west of the Cascades. Somewhere this data must
exist, I'm surprised that it isn't in an easy to digest form, or that tracking
it down hasn't been simple.

~~~
gyardley
I honestly haven't done the research to back up my assumption that the more
left-leaning areas west of the Cascades are growing faster than the rest of
the state, fueled by migrants from other left-leaning urban areas.

It _would_ be interesting to see population trends and voting behavior changes
by county over time.

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breitling
>>"Hire thousands of new teachers"

If you MUST hire thousands of new teachers, I'd imagine the quality of the
teachers would decrease.

I wonder if there's a point where this whole exercise becomes counter-
productive. Are two bad teachers > one great teacher?

~~~
sp332
Maybe we already don't have great teachers. Maybe we're between a global max
of a few great teachers and a local max of lots of not-great teachers, sitting
in a global min of a few not-great teachers.

~~~
bluedino
Exactly. It should be, are two mediocre teachers better than one mediocre
teacher? Yes.

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tzs
> In 2012, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the legislature had failed
> to uphold its “paramount duty” to fully fund the state’s educational system.

For those in other states who might be wondering why the Court would find that
the legislature had a "paramount duty", it's in the State Constitution [1]:

\------------------

ARTICLE IX EDUCATION

SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample
provision for the education of all children residing within its borders,
without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.

SECTION 2 PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. The legislature shall provide for a general
and uniform system of public schools. The public school system shall include
common schools, and such high schools, normal schools, and technical schools
as may hereafter be established. But the entire revenue derived from the
common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively
applied to the support of the common schools.

\------------------

[1]
[http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx](http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx)

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breischl
>>“We can’t operate under the premise that we’re only willing to spend a
certain amount of money on our children’s education.”

Love that! Instead we must operate under the assumption that we're willing and
able to spend an _infinite_ amount of money on education!

That kind of brilliant analysis is part of how governments manage to waste
tons of money ineffective programs.

~~~
Retric
You completely misunderstood that point. The real issue is when you focus on 1
number you tend to lump ineffective programs with effective programs and have
no idea what to cut or what to focus on.

The important thing is not the $ spent it's the long term ROI on money spent.
Consider we could replace some instruction time with high cost videos as it’s
not like every classroom really needs a slightly different lecture on the
distributive property.

If the ROI is high enough we might be better off paying for education with
loans. But if it's to low that's a sure way to long term ruin.

EX: Handing out ice cream for anyone with perfect attendance for a semester.
Sure there 'cheap' but pointless = wasteful. Ramp that up to handing out ice-
cream every Friday for perfect attendance and you might actually make some
difference. But, the cost is probably not worth it. Again, the value is not
keeping under some specific number but maintaining positive ROI.

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gwern
> The initiative will cost nearly $5 billion through 2019, a hefty sum
> considering that the state’s current two-year budget for public education is
> around $15 billion....Project STAR is the gold standard in class-size
> reduction literature because it’s the only randomized study on the issue
> that’s been conducted since the early 20th century...Florida’s program cost
> $20 billion over eight years, about the same as the estimates for the
> Washington initiative. And Project STAR was estimated to cost about $400,000
> for each student who eventually went to college, compared to $133,000 for
> HeadStart. “Reducing class size is one of the most expensive things you can
> do in education,” Chingos said.

And people keep asking whether we can afford, ethically or financially, to run
randomized trials...

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chiph
Fire administrators, hire teachers.

~~~
jobu
I used to agree with this mentality, but I've seen first-hand how important a
really good principal can be. Over the past three years my kids elementary
school has turned around the direction of test scores, teacher attrition, and
the overall mood and enthusiasm of the whole school staff.

One great example from last year was when the school was facing budget cuts
after a bond failed. Rather than cut any teachers or staff, she was able get a
massive PTO fundraising effort to bring in tens of thousands from the local
community. She also worked with local businesses to donate thousands of
dollars worth of paper, office and maintenance supplies, and even food for
some of the fundraising events.

~~~
ep103
I'm just a layman, but I wonder if that sort of ability from a n administrator
is exactly the sort of thing that would be less likely to happen with larger
and larger administrative staffs?

~~~
emn13
If you're swamped by your administrative duties, you're unlikely to find the
time + energy for the kind of initiatives described here.

Getting rid of the "overhead" is a cop-out. With fewer (administrative)
people, you're going to get less administration done - people aren't going to
magically do more work. If you can pinpoint those tasks that are relatively
unnecessary, you're got a real contribution to make. However, that's often
surprisingly tricky, which is why in all kinds of cost-cutting debates people
pretend theres this "overhead" that's nicely pre-categorized and ready to cut.

If only it really were that simple.

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jack-r-abbit
> _it needs to hire thousands of new teachers, counselors, teaching assistants
> and librarians._

More teachers and assistants I get. Same number of students in smaller classes
means more classes which means more teachers (and their assistants). But more
counselors and librarians? Those people generally don't have a dedicated
class. The librarians are in charge of the library. The smaller class size
isn't going to mean more students. So why would you suddenly need more
librarians to serve the same books to the same students? Same with counselors.
Why would you suddenly need more counselors to counsel the same number of
students?

~~~
Jtsummers
You'll likely need more schools to handle smaller class sizes or to expand
existing schools. If the former, then you'd definitely need additional
counselors and librarians since a new school would need its own support
services. If the latter, then you only need additional counselors and
librarians if the expansion to the school also brings in additional students
and doesn't just spread the existing students across more rooms. On the other
hand, you may need to expand the library to accommodate more classes needing
access to it simultaneously. I know my high school had two libraries largely
for that reason (also because it was a poorly designed building, but the space
was well utilized for social studies and English courses).

~~~
jack-r-abbit
Since opening a new school has far more cost than just hiring more teachers,
it didn't even occur to me that it would have been the route they would take.
But I do realize that a new school facility is going to need a full set of
faculty to support it. That includes principals, janitors, admins, etc. I just
assumed they'd be expanding existing schools with "portables" and such.

------
bluedino
Japan and Korea, famous for their high-achieving students, are also famous for
another thing: huge class sizes. Larger than those in the USA.

Sure, classes are different, teachers are different, but the culture to push
your kids to succeed is different as well. The parents are to blame for so
many of the problems in our schools. I'm guessing parents in Japan and Korea
don't go to a kids school and fight the teacher when they have bad grades.

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logfromblammo
Even a 1:1 teacher-student ratio would not improve education if that teacher
cannot respond and adapt to the needs of the student. If that teacher is bound
by a common curriculum and testing regime, or an otherwise rigid
administration, you might as well teach with a bunch of robots.

Bring on the anecdote. Math is taught by very different methods now than those
I remember, and I shudder to think about what is being taught in class now
when my child can do a homework worksheet and get every single question on it
completely wrong. And the reason, as far as I can tell, is because the
curriculum is sometimes using logarithms and decimal-shift operations to teach
multiplication and division. They are literally teaching kids to simulate the
mechanical processes behind slide rules and abacuses in their brains in lieu
of just memorizing the multiplication table. The entire system seems
constructed around the complete avoidance of rote memorization.

But that is how I learned to multiply. Memorization of the multiplication
table from 0x0 to 9x9 was absolutely required. You could not progress at all
if you could not quickly look up any of those 100 numbers. 55, really, thanks
to multiplication being a commutative operation. Or 36 if you could also
remember that 0xn=0 and 1xn=n.

Rather than ask kids to memorize and index those 36 numbers for quick recall,
I see piles of nonsense about "compatible numbers" and "reasonable numbers"
and other concepts of dubious value outside the narrow context of quickly
selecting the correct answer in a multiple-choice test, without actually doing
the work.

I actually had to teach my child that the exact answer to a math question is,
in fact, a reasonable estimate.

To top it off, judging from Feynman's anecdote about being on a textbook
selection committee, this same nonsense, or cleverly repackaged iterations of
it, has continued unabated for decades. Wakalixes make it go. Wakalixes pay
the bills. Wakalixes extract the tax dollars and deliver it to the rent-
seeker. And the students continue to learn, or fail, largely based upon
whether their individual teachers care more than the median amount.

The economics of public education create too wide of a separation between the
interests of the student and the signers of the checks. No matter how hard you
push on that rope, the load will barely move. Adding more money will not help
when there is already very little connection between the amount spent and the
observed outcomes.

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innguest
That is a question that should be asked directly to those that will be
providing the money to be spent.

But luckily we live in a democracy and those who don't contribute a dime get
to choose how much I should contribute to this. Less work for me. Less money
too. But at least government employees get a nice pension so it's all worth
it. Plus if we didn't do it this way then there's no other way at all - it's
the government's way or the highway.

God bless democracy.

~~~
Jtsummers
> But at least government employees get a nice pension so it's all worth it.

Educators get poor pay, somewhat decent benefits, and an ok pension. Their
working conditions (especially for new teachers, and this is largely the
problem with retaining them) are pretty crappy. They put in 7-8 hours of
instruction time a day. After 3rd or 4th grade (in many states) they're
teaching a specific subject area, so they have 100+ students they see each
day. That's 100+ papers to grade, exams to grade, parents to contact for
various reasons. And they have to do all that in their planning period and
after school hours. That's effectively two full-time jobs that they get paid
(depending on the state, for a new teacher with just a bachelor's degree)
between $25k and $40k to do. They can get extra money by sponsoring clubs or
coaching sports teams. But then that eats into the time they have to spend on
the academics they're hired to teach, and puts them up to 2 full-time jobs and
one half-time job (depending on the number of clubs or particular sport).

God bless democracy for fucking over yet another generation of students by
cutting corners on education. Something we decided a few hundred years ago was
one of the government's primary responsibilities.

~~~
vkjv
> Educators get poor pay, somewhat decent benefits, and an ok pension

I hear this relatively frequently (my wife is a teacher and so are many of our
friends), but I disagree. I think saying it is "poor" depends on what you
compare it against.

The median earnings for a bachelors degree in the US is about $58k. In my
county in MD, a teacher 10 years into their career makes $50k. Although, at
this point teachers are required to get a masters.The masters scale goes all
the way to $82k at 30 years.

IMHO, the pay is fairly well in line with the norm. If count the benefits and
pension, which are better than the norm, then you could argue it is quite
good.

~~~
Jtsummers
Starting pay for teachers by state, averaged (varies district to district)
[0]. DC (admittedly, not actually a state, but a separate entity so should be
counted here) is the highest at $51,539. The rest are mostly well below that
mark. Since pay for teachers is primarily time and not merit based, I searched
for a few specific examples. In the state of GA you can find what an
individual is paid by the state if you know their name. I found a friend with
9 or 10 years experience who's only making $41k (no masters degree). Another
friend, same job and county, making some $47k with about 15 years of
experience. Same county, elementary school teacher with 1 or 2 years
experience made $30k. I've run out of teachers I know in that district.

This is, for this county, "good" pay. This is not, for the level of
responsibility and time commitment required of them, good pay. They're
expected to maintain their certifications on their own time. They're expected
to remain current on the field they teach on their own time. They're expected
to finish their masters degree on their own time and dime. All with less than
$50k income and having families.

$82k for a professional after 30 years with a masters degree is not "good
pay". It's ok pay. It's certainly enough to keep them out of debt, I'd hope,
but it's not going to make up for the 12+ hour workdays they'll have spent
most of their adult life dealing with. And it takes 30 years to get to that
point in your state. Do they get tuition assistance for that masters degree?
What's the average cost and how much of that pay raise is actually spent
dealing with the debt incurred in paying for the degree?

[0] [http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-
teacher-s...](http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-teacher-
salary.html)

EDIT: The teachers I looked up teach in the same district so they're getting
the same locality adjustments so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. Going
one county north results in boosted pay, but it's simultaneously a wealthier
county and scarier (violent crime in schools) county.

~~~
xrange
Another fact that many commenters on this thread have overlooked is that U.S.
schools operate about 175 days per year (compare that to 240 days for 52 weeks
minus 10 holidays minus 10 vacation days).

[http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp](http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp)

