This is the school year that Florida’s voter-initiative-driven constitutional amendment of 2002 goes into full force.

The amendment requires that by the start of the 2010 school year, core classes not exceed 18 students in prekindergarten through third grades, 22 in grades 4-8 and 25 in high school. Until now, districts were in compliance if they met those limits on a schoolwide average. But next year, they must meet them classroom by classroom.

(Pinellas school superintendent backs more fundamentals, but not the class size amendment. Ron Matus, St Petersburg Times, Friday, August 14, 2009)

This is a unique event because most states have comparable limits for grades K-3 only, if they have limits this low, or have limits at all. (Many states didn’t need such a law to get small classes.) Ron Matus starts this article with a glib summary: “Give the people what they want. Unless research suggests you shouldn’t.” But how do we interpret what “the people” want when what they want is smaller classes? What end are they thinking it will be a means to?

The superintendent of the Pinellas County Schools, where St. Petersburg, Florida sits, thinks she knows what the people want from smaller classes, higher test scores: “I’m not sure there are any statistics out there that says 25 students in the class yields much higher student success than 30 students in the class.” But is it really what’s foremost on the agenda of the 70% of Florida voters that appear to favor paying for smaller classes across grade levels? (http://www.sptimes.com/2006/04/06/State/Smaller_classes_popul.shtml)

Maybe voters think smaller classes are simply more ethical no matter what their outcomes but there is no readily available rhetorical frame in the public sphere that they can use to express that gut feeling. It’s sad that public education spending is so narrowly constrained to questions of efficiency at the expense of ethics.

Take the analogy of road budgets. One might argue that they should be justified only on whether they keep traffic flowing as efficiently as possible. But there is still vast room for spending that is justified on ethics and not efficiency. Crosswalks, speed limit signs, bike lanes and the like are not subjected to protests claiming they are a wasted expenditure that doesn’t increase traffic flow. No one doubts they are necessary ethical measures to limit the negative impacts of vehicular travel.

No one claims these ethical concerns are tangential. Furthermore, there is no pretense to a goal of ever-faster commutes. Nor is there constant rhetoric about how much faster we’d get to work if the city could only find enough competent civil engineers (like in the good old days? like in the countries that are “beating us”?). On the contrary, people accept logically that commutes will get longer as their city gets bigger.

With education the issues are framed so that none of this line of thinking holds true: The mainstream frame of public education spending is that ethical concerns get in the way of the prime concern of seeking ever-increasing efficiency. And, unlike with traffic in cities, big is equated with efficiency from the get-go!

This is partly made possible by the discourse of “schools in crisis,” “failing schools,” and the like. If it’s going to hell in a hand basket, then we’ve got no time for ethical concerns, right?

What this translates to, to return to the analogy, is no space to discuss speed limits or crosswalks, only the fast lane. After all, if it’s an emergency, who’s worried about the speed limit? People should know damn well to stay out of the crosswalks when the ambulance of public education comes screaming down the street of civic discussion.

This framing of educational expenditures is so pervasive that even sincere advocates of class size reduction feel compelled to justify their arguments around increased learning rather than ethical checks on the negative impacts of schooling. This is how rhetorical frames work on us: they orient us to an issue with a certain set of assumptions that we never think to question.

Let’s have the courage to argue for smaller classes on non-”educational” grounds.