Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Sunday, April 30, 2006
Maybe class size doesn’t matter
Andrew Rotherham, the author of the Eduwonk blog, argued in a column in Sunday’s New York Daily News that a smaller class size by itself will not help kids learn. He says the class size debate has distracted us from the real issue, which is the need for more high quality teachers.
Rotherham, formerly of the Progressive Policy Institute, is part of a movement of Democrats (Bill Clinton was prominent among this group) who have broken with the traditional view that the primary problem with public schools is underfunding and have favored Republican-backed solutions like standards and school choice. Regardless of your political orientation, you’ll probably find Eduwonk an interesting read most of the time. It’s also worth reading The Quick and the Ed, a sister blog to Eduwonk written by the policy team at Rotherham’s Education Sector think tank.
Rotherham’s solution to the teacher quality problem involves pushing aside unions, who catch most of the blame in his Daily News piece for the problems of hiring, firing and nurturing new teachers.
Teacher quality is, indeed, a major issue, and one that has gotten more attention with the No Child Left Behind requirement that all teachers be “highly qualified.” And while reducing class size is not cheap, it is a simpler problem to solve than finding a way to get more smart, motivated folks to become teachers. And in education, it’s usually the easy road that our policy makers choose.
So I wonder, how could the money now being spent to reduce class size in many school districts be better spent to somehow improve teacher quality? And can teacher quality be improved without near impossible approach of simply vaporizing unions?
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