Education Reform: Don't Blame the Teachers

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Private Schools have shown a continued ability to educate and better prepare students for college compared to public schools. Why?

Do private schools attract consistently better teachers?

Do private schools have more curricular freedom?

Do private schools have a preselected demographic of higher performing students and more dedicated parents?

The answer to each of these questions might be yes. However, private school educators will always perform at a higher level due to one central characteristic of private school culture: smaller class size.

The student-to-teacher ratio is an important indicator as to whether a teacher and a class of students will succeed. With increasing student-to-teacher numbers, efficacy diminishes in a fairly direct statistical relationship.

A greater ratio of students per teacher roughly equates with less learning per student.

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In today's world we are all aware of the idea that when individuals "multitask", their performance on each task weakens. If we drive and talk on the phone both our driving and our conversational abilities lessen.

When our focus is split between disparate actions we are incapable of performing at a high level. In other words, if we juggle ten eggs at a time, a mess of broken egg shells and sticky yoke is inevitable. However, if we juggle only one egg at a time, the possibility of dropping the egg nears zero.

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Teachers are expected to juggle multiple tasks in a given class period. And, truth be told, some individuals are incapable of learning to juggle.

There is a threshold for even the greatest of jugglers, which stands to reason. How could things be otherwise? Obviously, there is a number of objects and tasks, some physical limit to how much one person can juggle at one time.

In public schools today, teachers are asked to instruct groups of children with 35 students at a time. This is asking too much.

If the juggler starts with 35 eggs and drops ten, we can hardly blame him.

What we need to do is pay attention to the research that suggests the optimal classroom limit is at most 25 and probably as low as 15 students per teacher.

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Because teachers are the classroom managers, the ones in charge of the actual education of our children, they are the natural target for blame when the education system fails. In the context of this argument we can see clearly that if people are asked to do the impossible, failure is inevitable. We cannot blame the teacher for poor student test scores if that teacher is asked to instruct 35 needy children.

If the optimal upper limit for teacher effectiveness is 25 students, then a teacher dealing with a classroom of 35 students is 40% over the effective limit.

This does not mean that test scores will go up 40% if class size is limited to a more optimal number. But it does mean that teacher effectiveness will rise.

Another beneficial off-shoot of lower class size is renewed teacher accountability.

As we've shown when the teacher is over-burdened like an overwhelmed juggler, we cannot blame them for failure. There is no way to know if the problem is the teacher or if the problem is the number of students.

When class size can no longer be blamed for teacher inefficiency, then we can better understand where the failure is taking place, why it is happening, and how to fix it.
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For a counter-point to the argument presented here, see this article.
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Source:
https://labspublish.associatedcontent.com/cms_edit_article.shtml?page=2&content_type_id=2530067