Gladwell v. Hertzberg
Two of my New Yorker heroes, Malcolm Gladwell and Hendrik Hertzberg both recently wrote about fixing public schools, and came to two different conclusions.
Gladwell, in his article Most Likely to Succeed:
Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a “bad” school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher. Teacher effects are also much stronger than class-size effects. You’d have to cut the average class almost in half to get the same boost that you’d get if you switched from an average teacher to a teacher in the eighty-fifth percentile. And remember that a good teacher costs as much as an average one, whereas halving class size would require that you build twice as many classrooms and hire twice as many teachers.
Hertzberg, on the other hand, writes in his blog post, Size Matters:
Short of abolishing the whole crazy system of local school boards financed by local property taxes and replacing it with an all-powerful national Ministry of Education financed by the federal income tax, I’ve always believed that the best feasible “educational reform” is, precisely, smaller class sizes.
This is not hard to understand. Every teacher and every student knows that the smaller the class, the better the learning environment. Each kid gets more attention. Discipline and control are far easier to achieve. Disruptive kids have less scope for mischief. Teachers are happier and more likely to stay in the profession.
Hertzberg also notes that his way has the important advantage of being objectively measurable. True, and I do hate to throw money at stuff that isn’t measurable, but in my 16 years of school and however many teachers and professors that is, I only had four great teachers (four!), and it was obvious who they were. The subject and the class size were insignificant factors, they made the material great. Bad teachers, on the other hand, could work one-on-one with the most interesting material on the planet and still suck the life right out of the learning experience.
(To be fair, I probably had as many truly sucky teachers as great ones. The rest were in between, scattered along the curve.)
In short, in my experience a good teacher can overcome a large class size but there’s no redeeming a bad teacher. Teacher quality is everything, and good teachers are rare. If a genie popped out of the lamp and said to me, “you can either bump all teachers up a notch in skill, so sucky to poor, poor to average, average to good, good to great or you can keep the current teacher bell curve but halve all the class sizes, but you can’t have both,” it’s such an easy choice it feels pointless to even frame the hypothetical. Give me better teachers any day of the week, and on Sundays too.
(Besides, you know genies: you say you want to halve class sizes and suddenly half the students in the world are dead or worse, inevitably including your own, and then Rod Serling comes out and says something pithy.)