The class size debate is back. One item in the North Carolina Senate’s budget would save taxpayers approximately $323 million by raising class sizes by an average of two students per classroom. Despite protests by the education establishment, the Senate proposal is educationally reasonable and fiscally responsible. The House should leave the Senate’s class-size provisions intact.
Significant reductions in average class size over the last 40 years have not produced corresponding increases in student performance.
Eric Hanushek of the Hoover Institution has pointed out that in 1960, classrooms had an average of nearly 26 students. By 1990, classrooms averaged just over 17 students.
Meantime, last year, the average elementary and middle-school classroom in North Carolina had between 19 and 21 students.
And yet classroom performance has been flat since 1970. Hanushek observes, “It is impossible to detect any overall beneficial effects that are related to these sustained increases in teacher intensity.”
Proponents of lower class-size mandates point to results from Tennessee’s Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project as justification. Between 1985 and 1989, approximately 75 schools randomly assigned students and teachers to large and small classes from kindergarten through third grade. Longitudinal studies of Project STAR indicated that smaller classes improved student performance, but a number of implementation problems may have biased the results. For example, Project STAR likely suffered from the “Hawthorne Effect,” a serious form of bias whereby participants change their behavior (in this instance, students working harder) because they are aware that they are the subjects of a study.
North Carolina’s own experiment with class-size reduction yielded disappointing results. In November 2006, the State Board of Education released the final report of the High Priority Schools Initiative, a four-year, $23 million class-size reduction program targeting low-performing and low-income elementary schools. Researchers found no statistical evidence that smaller class sizes raised student achievement. Between the first and final year of the program, fewer schools met their state testing targets and schools failed to increase student performance significantly on state reading assessments. Even fewer schools met standards under the federal No Child Left Behind law.
A major problem is that many teachers adhere to the same instructional approaches, regardless of the size of the class. In a 2008 study, Adam Gamoran of the University of Wisconsin-Madison found instructional methods employed by teachers varied little, no matter how many students were in a class. Gamoran surmised that any benefits from smaller class sizes were likely the result of students’ perception that the smaller classes were better for them.
North Carolina’s effort to reduce class sizes significantly makes little sense from a cost-benefit perspective. Even those who identify learning gains from smaller class sizes concede that meaningful reductions are often too expensive.
North Carolina’s school districts would have to hire thousands of additional teachers and build new schools or expand existing ones. Given limited financial resources, policy-makers and elected officials should think about giving schools more flexibility in setting class sizes, rather than relying on one-size-fits-all mandates.
Stalwart advocates of class-size reduction also tend to oppose school-choice policies that would allow more traditional public school students to attend charter and private schools. Charter and private schools have much lower class sizes than district schools, so they could absorb additional students more easily without expanding their class sizes to levels considered unacceptable by the education establishment.
And if the backers of class-size reduction were truly serious about reaching their goals, they would promote homeschooling. Last year, North Carolina had 71,566 students enrolled in 38,367 home schools.
You do the math.
Terry Stoops is an education policy analyst at the John Locke Foundation.