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.