Does Class Size Count?

[elleng]

Diverse figures including Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York and Bill Gates have coalesced around a new idea: why not increase class sizes for the best teachers and use the resulting budgetary savings to pay these best teachers more and to help train educators who need improvement? Yes, each class might be bigger on average but at least each child would stand a better chance of having a great teacher, which would-be reformers say is more important. . .

So here’s a proposal for getting past this familiar stalemate: Secretary Duncan, Mayor Bloomberg and Mr. Gates and other teacher-quality advocates should agree to fight — hard — to keep class sizes small for a limited population of at-risk students. That way economically disadvantaged and minority-group students, who Project STAR undeniably proved can benefit most from low student-to-teacher ratios, won’t have to suffer through larger classes while waiting for better teachers.

In return, advocates of reducing class size agree to support pilot programs for creating more-students-for-more-pay classrooms to see if the plan has any takers among everyday teachers and parents and whether this theory actually works and is cost-effective in the real world.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/04/does-class-size-count/?hp