Class Size

What’s the ideal class size? Parents in independent schools turn purple and yell if there are too many students in a class—more than 12, 15, or 24. Public schools are under constant pressure to reduce class sizes, and we’re supposed to be outraged that poor-performing districts pack more than 30 children into one classroom.

But parents will do almost anything—and pay twice as much, sometimes—to get their children, the very next year, into universities in which introductory class sizes run in the hundreds!

One of the best graduate students I have had, an articulate and well-educated young woman from India, during a discussion of class size, announced calmly, “Well, my smallest elementary school class was 65 students.”

Research may show that there is some ideal class size (maybe it’s a class of one… Aristotle tutoring Alexander the Great). But any ideal class size likely depends on how education is conducted. If we assume that education must consist of 45 minute periods followed by a bell and a change to some unrelated activity (regardless of where we were in the previous class), taught from a textbook in which every fact sits next to every other fact, meaning drained by sameness, taught by a teacher specialist who doesn’t really talk to other teachers, who sees students a few periods a week for a year and then no more, who doesn’t know her students from the local community because she can’t afford to live there and commutes from another town, then we may well scream when class sizes get “too big” and performance fades. If education is an agribusiness, then the efficiencies of agribusiness will apply.

If education is more successfully like organic farming, however, then different values and different efficiencies will apply, and what we think we know of class size may have to be tossed.

Current research points more to SCHOOL size as a factor in educational success—the best schools are those in which each teacher can know each student’s name (and vice versa). And there’s a rush to carve up large schools—following a misguided century of centralization—into smaller “learning communities” of between 200 and 300 students. But the same arguments about agribusiness and organic farming apply here, too—it’s in the system we’ve got that schools perform best at this particular size.

We need to examine the fruits of our system—do we really want a bland, easily shipped but juiceless harvest, disaffected and genetically modified? Thankfully, the harvest is our kids, who grow up to thank us—or rebuke us—for the way they were raised. Everything we need to know is right in front of us.