Class size reductions are no panacea

As North Carolina and most other states face declining revenues for public education, it's a good time to take a second look at one of the sacred cows of education policy — smaller class sizes. The current debate was sparked by an op-ed column in the Washington Post by Eva Moskowitz, who runs a charter school company in New York City. Her Sunday column contends that the drive to reduce class sizes takes money away from other educational needs, including modern technology and even paper. School budgets aren't getting bigger, so when a state legislature, in its infinite wisdom and spurred by teacher unions eager to create more jobs for members, mandates a cut of four or five students from each class, money that could be used for better books, better teacher salaries, better classroom equipment, etc. instead has to go to pay for more teachers.

Throughout the last two decades, North Carolina has mandated smaller classes as a sort of guaranteed cure-all for education problems. The initial logic is compelling: Lower student-teacher ratios allow teachers to devote more time to each student. But that thinking is misleading. Does it really benefit a struggling student if his classroom has 18 students instead of 22? Does that teacher's small additional fraction of time per student really amount to anything?

As Moskowitz points out, the costs of smaller class sizes — another five or six teachers per school — can be spent more effectively on other educational improvements. This is real money. A school that has to hire five more teachers to meet state-mandated class size reductions will have to spend $200,000 or more in pay and benefits. Multiply that by thousands of schools across the state, and you can see one reason why the state education budget is in trouble. Gov. Bev Perdue, a long-time advocate of class size reductions and a darling of the N.C. Association of Educators, refuses to reconsider class size reductions as she struggles to find funding for public schools.

Class size reductions also cause problems for principals and local school boards. If class size reductions require creation of a new class in each grade, principals have to find space to hold those classes in schools that were designed based on larger class sizes. Some schools have been forced to hold classes in rooms designed as cafeterias or teacher lounges, and many counties have been forced to add onto schools or move in mobile classrooms. Even if the state covers the costs of additional teachers required to meet lower class sizes, local governments are stuck with the expense of creating the space for those classes.

This trend is based on the dubious assumption that reducing class size, even by two or three students, will have a positive impact on student achievement. The biggest impact, however, has been to increase job opportunities for education majors, and that impact, more than benefits to students, is what has driven this trend.

It's time to reconsider how we go about improving education. Moskowitz's column should be required reading.