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?
