Don’t Cut Class (Size)

Public education receives many failing grades these days, but politicians who have not done their homework think they have found an easy way to give themselves a pass. It is called cutting class size.

The appeal of smaller classes is powerful. Parents are attracted by the idea of more individualized attention for their children. It seems reasonable to assume that more individual attention will improve students’ academic achievement. Teachers envisage more manageable classrooms and a drop in their marking load, mentoring, and extra-curricular demands. Unions salivate at the prospect of more teachers to pay them dues.

US President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and Ontario Premier Mike Harris all see it as a winning policy. In his recent State of the Union address, Clinton vowed to hire 100,000 new teachers by the year 2000. In Britain, Blair is struggling to cut class sizes in government-run primary schools. In Ontario, the Harris Government has provided $1.2 billion over three years for a Class Size Protection Fund.

They are by no means the first. Canadian education history reveals that cutting class size is anything but a new phenomenon. Between 1960 and 1986, the student/teacher ratio in our public schools fell by nearly 30 percent, from 26 to 18.5.¹ Today, there are 17 primary students and 19.7 secondary students, respectively, for every teacher.² How much lower do we need or want to go?

Considerable effort has been expended researching whether or not smaller classes result in higher student achievement. In Education in Canada, Simon Fraser University economist Stephen Easton reviewed 112 studies of the impact that student/teacher ratios had on student performance. Easton identified nine studies which found a significantly positive impact, 14 studies that found a significantly negative impact, and 89 studies that found no statistically significant effect either way.³

More recently, in 1998, University of Rochester economist Eric Hanushek reviewed 277 studies examining the relationship between class size and student achievement.⁴ The results were comparable to Easton’s analysis: 15 percent of the studies revealed a significantly positive relationship, 13 percent of the studies revealed a significantly negative relationship, and 72 percent of the studies found no statistically significant relationship at all.

Hanushek concludes that, “In sum, while policies to reduce class size may enjoy popular political appeal, such policies are very expensive and, according to the evidence, quite ineffective.”⁵

Hanushek’s analysis also casts specific light on the state of Tennessee’s highly touted “Project STAR” experiment. Between 1985 and 1990, Tennessee students were randomly assigned either to large (21-25 students) or to small (13-17 students) classes and remained there from kindergarten through Grade 3. Student achievement measurements taken at the end of each year revealed no class-size based statistically significant improvement above the kindergarten level.

Our own history reveals anything but a positive correlation between declining student/teacher ratios and improving student achievement, parental satisfaction, or government/teachers’ union relations. Over the past 25 years, survey research reveals a steady deterioration in public confidence in public education.⁶ Frustratingly, international comparisons show that Canadian student achievement has remained poor despite an overwhelming increase in the demand for skilled graduates.⁷

Increasing the number of teachers contributed to a 75 percent increase in the real cost of education from 1960 to 1982⁸ and, since then, in many provinces education spending has continued to climb. Interestingly, as their public school tax bill has risen, the percentage of families opting out of public education has also risen. The percentage of families choosing private schools doubled over the past three decades, while the number choosing home schooling as an educational option is growing rapidly.⁹

Why such growth in private schooling? Simply stated, parents want control over their children’s education. Parents are disillusioned with public management of the education system; as parents, they want the final say as to whether or not a small class is more important for their child than, for example, an enriched art or technology program. These preferences are inherently dissimilar: no “one best system” can satisfy them all, no matter how much more taxpayer money is devoted to public education or how many more teachers the schools employ.

If public education is not to become obsolete, systemic reform is necessary for it to become accountable. If schools were freed to make their own decisions about how to spend their public subsidies, they could be held accountable for their students’ achievement. Charter school legislation, for example, such as Alberta has enacted, would give other Canadian educators the ability to opt out of school board control, and to accept the key ingredient missing from the public school system: accountability to parents.

Evidence from charter school experiences in Alberta,¹⁰ the United States, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom clearly demonstrates that these schools can spur innovation, academic improvement, and increased parental satisfaction. Charter schools empower principals, teachers, and parents—the people who know children best—to devise new solutions to the variety of educational problems students face. In return, charter schools are held accountable for how well their students perform.

Today, tinkering with student/teacher ratios in the public education system is analogous to the great national effort to improve the horse in the 1890s. It misses the point: the public education monopoly is no longer able to meet our society’s educational demands. Public school monopoly is an inefficient, recalcitrant creature that should be put out to pasture.

If public education is to survive, it must undergo a structural overhaul. Unfortunately, reform efforts to date, such as smaller class sizes, have been superficial and of dubious merit. In the long term, they have proven unsatisfactory for policy makers and parents, alike. As the National Center for Policy Analysis’s Bruce Bartlett suggests, “lower[ing] class size may not provide voters with the payoff they hope for.”¹¹

Rather, education policies should free educators to create public schools that respond to the demands of today’s parents who want choice, control, innovation, and accountability from their children’s schools. Charter school legislation would be the first substantive step in this direction.

Notes

1Stephen T. Easton (1988), Education in Canada (Vancouver: The Fraser Institute), p. 47.

2Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (1998), Education at a Glance: OECD Indicators, p. 31.

3Easton, p. 69.

4Eric Hanushek, “The Evidence on Class Size,” in Susan E. Mayer and Paul Peterson (eds.), Earning and Learning: How Schools Matter (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution), forthcoming.

5Hanushek, Abstract.

6Neil Guppy and Scott Davies (1997), Understanding the Declining Confidence of Canadians in Public Education, paper presented at the 1997 Meetings of the American Sociological Association, Toronto, Ontario, August.

7Thomas T. Schweitzer (1995), The State of Education in Canada (Ottawa: IRPP), p. 39.

8Statistics Canada data presented in Stephen Easton’s Education in Canada show that the real cost of education rose 300 percent during this period, and that the decline in the student/teacher ratio accounted for 25 percent of that increase.

9Guppy and Davies, p. 4.

10See Beverly Lynn Bosetti (1998), Canada’s Charter Schools (Kelowna: Society for the Advancement of Excellence in Education).

11Bruce Bartlett, “Reducing Class Size Doesn’t Improve Test Scores,” National Center for Policy Analysis, November 2, 1998.