Ted Sizer and the Coalition for Essential Schools often take the focus off of school size per se and put it on pupil load, or what a new book by William Ouchi calls “total student load”–the total number of students teachers have in their current classes.  CES says 80 should be the max. They summarize their goals as:

• Personalized instruction to address individual needs and interests;
• Small schools and classrooms, where teachers and student know each other well and work in an atmosphere of trust and high expectations;
• Multiple assessments based on performance of authentic tasks;
• Democratic and equitable school policies and practice;
• Close community partnerships. (source)

In The Secret of TSL [total student load]: The Revolutionary Discovery that Raises School Performance, fresh off the presses September 1st,  Ouchi acknowledges Sizer and CES’s focus on pupil load and incorporates it into a a theory of district management: Empower principals with the freedom to make more budgetary decisions and they are likely to choose to reduce total pupil load on their teachers (partly by hiring more), which is likely to improve outcomes.

When I sought in writing my book to link class size, school size and the length of time students and teachers stay together, I broadened this idea of pupil or total student load into relationship load. This offered a concept that could

a) clearly communicate the import of total student load

b) act as an umbrella to include class size, school size and length of relationship

c) include the perspective of the student and the parent or guardian as also bearing a load of school relationships that affects their “performance”

d) refocus on the broader concern of schooling as a part of rather than apart from child rearing

So though I applaud Ouchi’s analysis, I think it’s still framed within a conception of schools as “apart from.” His other educational management book is Making Schools Work, whose title echoes an entire discourse around the mantra of using research to find out “what works” in education. “Works what?” is the question we have to remember to ask so as to keep an eye on the assumptions behind all this work.

“What works” is code for what can be shown in random sampling to produce quantified snippets that symbolize educatedness, which in turn loosely prophesies employability or usefulness to economic growth, which in turn signifies American superpowerhood.

What can’t be shown to be true in general (because it isn’t general and never will be) is what works with unique people but not with other unique people, so this educational knowledge that only materializes in specific classrooms is not classified as “what works.” And what works to, say, not neglect students while educating them, doesn’t necessarily lend itself to quantification, thus doesn’t get labeled “what works.” (See my post comparing small classes to crosswalks. They aren’t meant to make traffic more efficient–they’re meant to make traffic more ethical, to correct for the power imbalance between cars and pedestrians.)

But it is possible to use quantitative research to investigate ethical improvement. You can measure, for example, whether crosswalks efficiently improve the ethics of car power. Analogous work gets done in education. It’s not the method per se that’s the problem–it’s the culture of assumptions that surrounds the method and those initiated into it. It’s a means-end question. “Raising school performance” is a questionable end, as is its cloaked sister goal of American economic hegemony. Money is an instrument for more important ends.

If relationship load is an instrument, it’s an instrument only for relationship. If total student load is an instrument, then, it isn’t for “raising school performance” but literally for the total student, the whole child. The Secret of TSL: The Revolutionary Discovery that Raises School Performance. The real secret is not its transcendent instrumentality but its inherent, immanent value.

“Raising school performance” in the abstract or across the board is valueless. It only makes sense within a frame in which there will never be enough–a deep belief in scarcity, a religion of “we are never good enough.” It only makes sense within a competitive frame where raising school the performance of my kid or my nation-economy  has value because I’m assuming others will not get access to this “raise.” More ethical values are (a)  raising school performance where it results in equity across lines of social stigma and (b) raising children.

The complication to how I value equity in and by education is that I don’t believe schooling is necessarily the alchemist’s stone of equity it’s trumped as. Oftentimes it merely serves as a rationalization for inequity because it offered the have-nots their chance, so they must’ve blown it–they more clearly deserve it than the serfs of old.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s no harm in trying for equity in and with schools, but there is harm in doing this in lieu of fixing what’s more endemic to education itself. This would be trying for what’s farther off without getting what’s close and easy: more ethical raising of children. In other words, let’s not sacrifice the definite gains to all children/future adults of a less mass-produced upbringing on the altar of better test scores for kids of color and poor kids. Because there’s no guarantee–much as I’d like there to be–that better test scores will make much of a dent in what holds the marginalized back after graduation.

The goals outlined in my book are thus to help fix primarily (but not exclusively) the problems specifically of schools (unethical relationship loads), and secondarily the problems also manifested in schools (other social justice concerns). Luckily it’s not really an either-or choice because relationship load reduction has been shown to equalize outcomes across social justice fault lines.

Ultimately, though, I could take or leave schools as an instrument as well–keep them or scrap them entirely–so long as I got to my ends-in-themselves of equity and child rearing.

And that’s the best I’ve come up with.

Mike Klonsky of the Small Schools Workshop runs a good education blog, Small Talk, whose “small” refers to school size, but he commented recently on small classes.

For more than a decade now, I’ve been hearing from right-wing think-tankers, like Fordham’s Checker Finn, Mike Petrilli, and the Hoover Institute’s Eric Hanushek, that class size doesn’t matter. The research, they claim, shows little benefit to student achievement scores by reducing the number of students in a class. With class sizes in L.A. high schools soaring to 50 per class and Brooklyn kids being squeezed into classrooms with a shoehorn, Finn and his crew have suddenly grown quiet on the topic.

Two comments:

a) It’s true that the media are actually noticing class size for once. NPR’s All Things Considered ran a piece on Thursday.

b) If we didn’t keep letting the likes of Finn and Hanushek set the frame for what research ought to be about (test scores, achievement narrowly defined) fewer might have listened to them thus far.

This is a similar problem to what led the waning of interest in the small schools movement. Klonsky rightly criticizes how “ownership society” discourses corrupted the small schools movement (example). But so did test score pipe dreams it couldn’t fulfill.

If this is a nascent small classes movement we’re seeing, let’s not poison it with the same faulty goals. Read my book for what I mean by better goals.

The photo Mike borrows from the LA Times shows two kids sitting on a filing cabinet at the back of the room. There’s an irony to the photo. One of the things I noticed in my research for the book was a pattern in the cover photos on education books. When they picture students it is never anywhere close to an average class-size-worth. It is always an ethically sized group of kids. If a whole class were depicted on the cover it would depersonalize the kids, make them look neglected, unhappy; make the reader feel uncomfortable or perhaps disinterested. The gist of these observations is that what is true with cover photos seems also to be true with the daily lives of the students and teachers they depict.

The irony is that even this photo pictures only eight visible kids and only four faces. It’s the filing cabinet that does all the work. There’s still something taboo or ineffectual about actually taking a wide angle shot of the 50+ kids. Somehow you just don’t care about a group of that many people they way you care about someone close up. And that’s the whole point, ain’t it?

Kent School District near Seattle just settled with teachers to end a strike for lower class size limits and support for teachers with the largest classes and pupil loads.

To get class sizes reduced, [the teachers] accepted a slightly lower compensation package in the two-year contract they overwhelmingly approved Monday morning.

(Kent teachers settle; class-size issue to live on. Though the Kent teachers strike has ended and schools were reopening Tuesday, teachers inside and beyond the Kent School District vowed to continue fighting for smaller classes. Nancy Bartley and Linda Shaw. Seattle Times, 9/15/09)

A great victory in lean times.

In my book I reference the class size research of Peter Blatchford as an example of research too focused on test scores:

Far too many studies seem to assume (perhaps rightly) that policymakers will snicker at discussions of attitude, morale, or emotional well-being. Hence, most research on class size reduction centers unflinchingly on test scores. Nonetheless, Blatchford himself noted, “It may be that a smaller class size allows a teacher to approach children in a more personalized and more humanistic way, but this would be hard to measure and then enter into statistical analysis!” (2003, p. 160). The exclamation point is his. Other researchers have made similar comments as postscripts to their studies, for example:

It should be noted that these enrichments to the curriculum may not be reflected in evaluations of class-size effects. Typically, achievement tests in reading and mathematics are used to evaluate outcomes. This narrow definition of achievement overlooks learning in other academic areas, areas which may be valued by consumers of education. Also, many of the enrichment areas are intended to promote positive attitudes, enthusiasm, and overall learning skills. These factors may have long-term effects not in evidence on short-term achievement tests. Research in education may be misled by its focus on short-term achievement outcomes. (Cahen et al., 1983, p. 206)

Nevertheless, most research continues to be misled in this way and to make only minor acknowledgments of the possibility. (pages 123-124)

Kudos to Peter Blatchford! Turns out he has followed up on this acknowledgment (since my book researched had stopped) and began to do class size research that looks inside the black box rather than simply looking at the easily measurable outputs from that box.

There has been a tendency to assume that links between class size and academic attainment are primary, and that links with classroom interactions are secondary. But it is important that pupils engage in work in classrooms and important that interactions with teachers are work focussed and where possible individualised, irrespective of whether we can show that these obviously cause changes in measured test scores. The quantity and type of interactions with teachers, and the degree of attention in class, are therefore important ‘outcomes’ in their own right.

(Do low attaining and younger students benefit most from small classes? Results from a systematic observation study of class size effects on pupil classroom engagement and teacher pupil interaction Peter Blatchford, Paul Bassett and Penelope Brown, 2008,  p. 24)

Let me note from the outset that the subjects were British and that there is no disaggregation by race or other possibly significant cultural factors. The paper finds some common sense results like the fact that individual interactions with the teach skyrocket (exponentially):

Similar results are found for pupils being the focus of the teacher’s attention. (There’s a book about that!) Meanwhile, time on task rises more linearly:

When the data is disaggregated by student achievement level, there are some stunning results suggesting that it is the low and mid achieving students who need the teacher’s attention (as indicated by off task behavior) and the highest achieving that seem to just need the teacher to get out of their way. The irony is, of course, that the highest achieving students are often tracked into (or their parents pay their way into) exclusive programs and schools with smaller class sizes!

elementary:

secondary:

Similar graphs depict how likely it is that teachers spend time on negative behavior with students from each achievement level. (Curiously, the researchers do not report the aggregate correlation between class size and their “teacher deal with negative behaviour” coding.) That high and medium actually go down with larger class size might reflect that teachers simply opt to let higher achieving kids get away with more and focus on reigning in the lower achieving kids. I describe this in the book as a process where in larger classes teachers tend to divide the class into allies and adversaries. The researchers write,

We feel that these results on on and off task behaviour are significant because they show that the problem of large classes, especially in older pupils, is particularly marked for the pupils who are already attaining at lower levels, and that it, in turn, is associated with teachers seeking to control this kind of behaviour. It is easy to see how these two kinds of behaviours can become self reinforcing, exacerbating each other and making the situation worse. In contrast, smaller classes seem to allow an environment in which low attainers are not only less off task but are less likely to receive corrective talk from their teachers. This appears to be a more productive educational environment. (23)

And then there are results that are ambiguous in import. First, there is less student-to-student interaction as classes get smaller, whether its on or off task interaction. “It seems likely that with more pupils in the classroom there is less of the teacher’s individual attention available and this presumably means that pupils come to interact more with each other instead, in both acceptable and unacceptable ways” (23). My response to this would be that (a) we probably need to remind and train teachers to keep doing group work in small classes, and (b) we need to make sure not to glamorize peer cooperation that is out of balance with adult attention. (See chapter 4 of my book.)

Second, teachers appear to spend less time actually “teaching” the class in the traditional sense. According to the researchers, “in smaller classes pupils get more individual attention, while in larger classes they spend more time listening to the teacher talk to the whole class. They are perhaps getting more educational input, but this is at the expense of it being largely passive and as part of a large group” (22).

elementary:

secondary:

This could perhaps explain why the test scores don’t skyrocket in the same way other indicators do. Perhaps teachers can accomplish the same amount more efficiently and don’t necessarily feel the need to make small classes learn more just because they could. The “more! better! faster!” discourses we have been bombarded with would say these teachers are being lazy, are squandering the opportunity to beat the [fill in competitors here]. I plan to focus my doctoral research around questioning this response. Why more? Why better? Why faster? Instead, I want to propose that more equal is the only real urgency. And Blatchford, Bassett and Brown’s research suggests that more equal (as opposed to better than)  is precisely the tendency inherent in class size reduction.

Internet research is funny because you often have to sift through a discourse with similar key words that’s not what you’re looking for, a discourse often much more frequently used. This imbalance can often have an ironic twist.

For example, when I was researching the importance for kids of  “adult attention” for my book, I had to sift through a mountain of articles about adult attention deficit disorder. I liked the irony so much that I named one of the chapters “Adult Attention Deficit” as a punny way to highlight how there is a deficit of adults paying attention to kids in schools. The reason the irony works so well is that AAD as a psychological idea is focused entirely on adults being able to pay attention to things for their own benefit. Thus,  an overwhelming majority of the time the words “adult attention” are used, they portray adults as in need rather than kids as in need of adults.

Part of the idea of this blog was to make available on the web some running commentary on class size issues in the news that didn’t just reduce the issue back down to test scores. That has meant sifting through keyword searches that reveal a similar ironic trend: a much used discourse in advertising education to adults that urges them to hurry and sign up because “class size is limited” or assures them the class will be effective because “class size will be limited to” some number (vastly smaller than public K-12 classes).

This recent article from North Carolina, for example, lets the reader know about a required course for all teachers and substitutes in the state. “Class size is limited. Early registration is suggested” (”Required teacher course offered at UNCA,” Asheville Citizen-Times, August 31, 2009). Will the classes those teachers teach be limited in size?

That’s not actually a rhetorical question. Another recent article from North Carolina claims the state recently removed class size limits in grades 4 to 12, but I haven’t yet found any confirmation of the removal or the prior limits.