Besides cost, the most common argument against smaller classes is that it would lower teacher quality by bringing in new teachers. In my book I offer several refutations of this. My main response is that new teachers brought on through class size reduction will be instantly better because the job will be easier and the teaching force will stay better because frustration attrition will go down.
Another argument I brought up is that the percentage of K-12 teachers per capita approximately doubled in response to the baby boom and then stayed steady since its end. And yet I’ve never seen anyone try to argue that teaching got worse between 1950 and 1970. Here’s my source: http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2006/03/art3full.pdf
Indeed I point out in the book that the teaching force simultaneously became more likely to hold graduate degrees during that same time span.
This brings us to the issue of higher ed, which is my main point here:
It struck me recently that another educational trend could be scapegoated by this same logic that assumes there are a finite number of smart-enough/educated-enough people available to fill teaching posts. What of the trend to send more people to college? Couldn’t that be a significant brain-drain on K-12 teaching if more teachers are needed in higher ed? I went back to the same Bureau of Labor Statistics report and found that college and university teachers grew constantly as a percentage of the population over the last century. Since 1960 it appears to have tripled, and the trend has shown an acceleration since 1990.
Couldn’t this be one place where the coveted “best and the brightest” potential K-12 teachers are going? The ones who are so good that class size doesn’t matter? Yet often the same people who argue that we will dilute the quality of the K-12 teaching force if we try class size reduction are also those arguing that we must send still more of our workforce to college to be ready for “the information jobs of the future.” Those aims might be in competition.
Add to that this question: Couldn’t teaching be one of those information jobs? If we are sending an increasing percentage of our students to college, why is it supposed that there is some finite and ungrowable number of people smart-enough/educated-enough to be teachers? Either the initial assumption of a finite supply is wrong, or higher education actually does nothing to make people smarter or more educated, which would leave the goals of intensifying K-12 education and universalizing K-16 both pointless endeavors.
The definitely non-pointless endeavor would be not to neglect our kids with large classes, to do education more ethically—rather than race off into fantasies of the infinite perfectibility of the human being, which at bottom reveal their belief that people are currently stupid and will stay that way until “saved.”
