Note to Yglesias: Class Size Matters

At the risk of channeling my inner Bob Somerby, I still don't get how many progressives (call me a liberal) approach education (granted, the phrase 'education reform' usually foreshadows bashing teachers unions).

Hendrik Hertzberg, in the New Yorker, makes a really important observation about assessing teacher performance (italics mine):

...measuring things like which teachers are good is extremely problematic. How do you measure which are the good teachers, short of placing a philosopher of education (or a senior fellow from the Heritage Foundation) in every schoolroom to take notes? Well, you can do it "subjectively," by having principals or other authority figures make the evaluations, or you can do it "objectively," by having kids take tests and comparing the results to I'm not sure what--last year's results? how other, similarly situated kids are doing?

Either way, you've got problems. The subjective approach opens the door to favoritism, cronyism, and brownnosing. The objective approach means having lots of tests and teaching "to" them, with the inevitable accompanying distortions and creativity-crushing. "Accountability" may weed out very bad teachers, but it'll also weed out very good ones, who'll find lines of work that give their talents freer rein.

....Making classes smaller is a totally clear goal, a totally measurable goal, and, conceptually, a totally achievable goal. The same cannot be said of fuzzier concepts like merit and accountability.

Yglesias argues that "creating financial incentives to better fill hard-to-staff positions is going to be a better use of money than creating new positions." Tracking back the link, it appears that science teachers are one of those "hard-to-staff positions." As someone who, at one point, seriously considered becoming a high school teacher, I can tell that economics did not influence my decision to remain in science.

It's not that I'm a particularly altruistic sort. Being a post-doc paid so poorly and was so economically insecure (even without the dreaded prospect of 'teacher tenure') that teaching would have been an economic step up for me in many school districts. While there are many reasons why I decided not to go into non-collegiate teaching, after talking to many teachers, two things ultimately convinced me not to do so.

The first reason was that teachers felt they had relatively little control over what they could teach due to 'teaching to the test'--which, as Hertzberg points out, will be a result of assessing teacher performance (tangential aside: someday, I'll have to write the post that explains, from a statistical perspective, how impossible it is to accurately--as opposed to precisely--measure teacher performance).

The second reason was...wait for it...class sizes.

I knew teachers who regularly had 150 students in five classes. Not only is it incredibly difficult to teach with 35 kids per class (it essentially becomes crowd control), but teaching them well becomes much more difficult. Consider something as simple as a homework assignment. One homework assignment for 150 kids, if it takes four minutes to grade each assignment, is ten hours per week--and that's on top of all the other things teachers are expected to do. That kind of 'drive-by teaching' wasn't the kind of teaching I wanted to do--and I had other options.

Setting up class size in opposition to hiring is a false choice, for that means that we're less likely to attract teachers with other options.

Sometime, I'll have to write the post that explains, from a statistical perspective, how impossible it will be to accurately--as opposed to precisely--measure teacher performance.

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I agree that class size and "teaching to the test" are big issues. Also, teachers are not paid nearly enough - anyone capable of being a good teacher can generally make 2-3 times as much doing something else.

The issue of "academic freedom" for teachers, however, can be double-edged. I agree that teachers tend to shine the most when left to teach things the way that works for them. But what about the teacher that does a wonderful job of inspiring the students and convinces them that ID is the right way to look at things?

I have taught various classes ranging in size from four to 186 at different university levels. I am convinced that the first and best thing to do to increase teaching success is to reduce class size. Without doing that, all else is futile.

By Jim Thomerson (not verified) on 10 Dec 2008 #permalink

I knew teachers who regularly had 150 students in five classes. Not only is it incredibly difficult to teach with 35 kids per class (it essentially becomes crowd control), but teaching them well becomes much more difficult. Consider something as simple as a homework assignment. One homework assignment for 150 kids, if it takes four minutes to grade each assignment, is ten hours per week--and that's on top of all the other things teachers are expected to do.

In Seattle, those class sizes are the norm and I had the same reaction that you did. When I was a post-doc, I visited high school classes for a month as an observer, while I was considering getting a teaching certificate.

After seeing the challenge of all those students, and like you, doing the math to estimate grading time, I decided to go teach at a community college where the conditions would be much more sensible. Of course, it helped that I wouldn't be forfeiting a year's salary, and having to borrow money to pay tuition and child care on top of all that.

Then there is the point (which I did not see addressed, though admittedly I skimmed the quoted text) that not all classes are going to have similarly "gifted" students. My sister's classroom is filled with what the school considers the "troubled" students of that particular grade. Why? Because my sister has a proven track record of being able to bring up their grades (even though this sort of selective placement is not supposed to happen). Yet, even though their test scores are raised, very few of them excel beyond the rest of their grade. So, this "grading them "objectively" on test scores is a load of bullshit at the very get go.

Does every middle-aged guy who's watched too much Jon Stewart have to now randomly inject '...wait for it...' in between parts of a sentence? It's not funny. It's just annoying.

By charles johnson (not verified) on 10 Dec 2008 #permalink

"Academic freedom" is a complete waste with regard to K-12 education (and the first two years of undergrad in most cases). It's primary utility lies in facilitating research and teaching of material that is at the boundaries of the understanding of a field, thus lacking a consensus in the field as to what is is correct and correspondingly what is important to teach. K-12 does not deal with this type of information to any substantial degree. Direct instruction reliably produces better results than other pedagogical methods by having teachers adhere to a rigorously designed, highly scripted lesson plans, thus in cases where it is practical to construct standard lesson plans. It avoids both the teaching to the test problem and the problem of retaining high quality teachers by minimizing the impact of the teacher on instructional quality. The idea of developing best practices then having individual practioners perform their work according to them is uncontroversial in most industries and has been widely used to improve consistency and quality of results, yet it would be politically impossible to broadly implement. Protecting the "academic freedom" to K-12 teachers to control their own lesson plans makes as much sense as protecting the "academic freedom" of factory line workers to assemble the product however they please. Instead, have a system where teachers have broad discretion their individual approaches but any attempt to quantify the impacts of individual teachers approaches is vigorously resisted. Can you really be suprised when a broad refusal to implement any program that quantifies results, standardizes performance expectations, or minimizes labor inputs results in obscenely inefficient outcomes?

PS - Please do write that blog post on why you supposedly can't quantify teacher peformance accurately. I could use a good laugh and I expect you jumping through the intellectual hoops to rationalize that whopper will be amusing.

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ı have followed your writing for a long time.really you have given very successful information.
In spite of my english trouale,I am trying to read and understand your writing.
And ı am following frequently.I hope that you will be with us together with much more scharings.
I hope that your success will go on.