Should States Spend Billions to Reduce Class Sizes? | Hacker News Reader

Should States Spend Billions to Reduce Class Sizes?

fivethirtyeight.com

29 pointstokenadult49 comments

Well, it depends.

You could have a classroom with 70 highly motivated students, and love it. You find this in Africa were teachers are scarce and respected, children are abundant and want to learn.

I went to visit a female friend that leaved everything in Europe(executive in a bug multinational, a good house) to help and teach poor children in Africa. After going there and seeing it myself I understood: those kids were the best students ever and they loved their teachers so much.

On the contrary in wealthy countries it is common to find someone in each class that does not want to study and does not want anybody else in the class to study too. That makes teaching a bad experience.

Do wealthy countries like Iceland have this problem? They have very small class sizes and high-ranking school systems.

Extrapolating anything from Iceland seems dubious. Since it is tiny (300,000) and so culturally and racially homogenous (84% of Icelanders apparently belong to the official state Luthern church).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Iceland

The extensive research by John Hattie shows that reduced class sizes has a small but positive effect on student achievement but relative to other factors, it is very inefficient:

http://visible-learning.org/hattie-ranking-influences-effect...

One explanation to reduced class sizes not having a larger effect is that teachers, given smaller classes, rarely change their practice to optimize for the new situation.

> teachers, given smaller classes, rarely change their practice to optimize for the new situation.

Or maybe that given all of the increased rules, regulation, and standardized testing, they don't have the freedom to.

True. If I remember Hattie correctly, he argues something akin to that reducing class sizes is mostly a political move (it's certainly not research based) — and after spending huge amounts of money on that — there is no political incentive to spend at least as much on retraining teachers.

Also, if some of the money had been spent on professional development instead of reducing class sizes in the first place, his research shows that the effect of that on student achievement had been much, much higher.

Politically, Washington is one of the more interesting places I've ever lived - there's a majority for Massachusetts-style spending, but there's also a majority for Texas-style taxation. Combine that with the voter initiative system and a cultural boundary line that has nothing to do with the state boundary line, and you get one hell of a predictable mess.

I assume the state will eventually tip demographically in favor of the coast and end up resembling California, with high income taxes and a pissed-off but powerless interior, but I've got no idea how long that's going to take.

>I assume the state will eventually tip demographically in favor of the coast and end up resembling California

So do you think that this will be a result natural population growth, migrants from California/Oregon, migrants from other U.S. states, or migrants from other countries? I tried to look up population trends for various counties, but it isn't as straightforward as I had hoped. It seems like there should be a heat map showing population growth per county, so that we could see which counties are growing fastest. Also it would be interesting to look at the population trends east and west of the Cascades. Somewhere this data must exist, I'm surprised that it isn't in an easy to digest form, or that tracking it down hasn't been simple.

I honestly haven't done the research to back up my assumption that the more left-leaning areas west of the Cascades are growing faster than the rest of the state, fueled by migrants from other left-leaning urban areas.

It would be interesting to see population trends and voting behavior changes by county over time.

>>"Hire thousands of new teachers"

If you MUST hire thousands of new teachers, I'd imagine the quality of the teachers would decrease.

I wonder if there's a point where this whole exercise becomes counter-productive. Are two bad teachers > one great teacher?

Maybe we already don't have great teachers. Maybe we're between a global max of a few great teachers and a local max of lots of not-great teachers, sitting in a global min of a few not-great teachers.

Exactly. It should be, are two mediocre teachers better than one mediocre teacher? Yes.

The damage that a bad teacher can do to dozens (or hundreds of students) is incredible, and most of that damage is unrepairable.

But the people in charge only look at things statistically, and will gladly sacrifice those, if they believe the overall results are acceptable.

Bad teachers are bad for many reasons too. Some are incompetent, stupid, visionless, and unable to see what goes on in any child's head (let alone in 30+, each an individual), but some are toxic. Borderline personality disorder, abusive, bullying, dismissive.

And you can't even easily sort them. There's no test that will let you find any of the bad teachers reliably, or a test that will show only the good. If we throw more money at the problem, if we "pay them what they deserve", how do we filter the opportunists?

> In 2012, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled the legislature had failed to uphold its “paramount duty” to fully fund the state’s educational system.

For those in other states who might be wondering why the Court would find that the legislature had a "paramount duty", it's in the State Constitution [1]:

------------------

ARTICLE IX EDUCATION

SECTION 1 PREAMBLE. It is the paramount duty of the state to make ample provision for the education of all children residing within its borders, without distinction or preference on account of race, color, caste, or sex.

SECTION 2 PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM. The legislature shall provide for a general and uniform system of public schools. The public school system shall include common schools, and such high schools, normal schools, and technical schools as may hereafter be established. But the entire revenue derived from the common school fund and the state tax for common schools shall be exclusively applied to the support of the common schools.

------------------

[1] http://leg.wa.gov/LawsAndAgencyRules/Pages/constitution.aspx

>>“We can’t operate under the premise that we’re only willing to spend a certain amount of money on our children’s education.”

Love that! Instead we must operate under the assumption that we're willing and able to spend an infinite amount of money on education!

That kind of brilliant analysis is part of how governments manage to waste tons of money ineffective programs.

You completely misunderstood that point. The real issue is when you focus on 1 number you tend to lump ineffective programs with effective programs and have no idea what to cut or what to focus on.

The important thing is not the $ spent it's the long term ROI on money spent. Consider we could replace some instruction time with high cost videos as it’s not like every classroom really needs a slightly different lecture on the distributive property.

If the ROI is high enough we might be better off paying for education with loans. But if it's to low that's a sure way to long term ruin.

EX: Handing out ice cream for anyone with perfect attendance for a semester. Sure there 'cheap' but pointless = wasteful. Ramp that up to handing out ice-cream every Friday for perfect attendance and you might actually make some difference. But, the cost is probably not worth it. Again, the value is not keeping under some specific number but maintaining positive ROI.

> The initiative will cost nearly $5 billion through 2019, a hefty sum considering that the state’s current two-year budget for public education is around $15 billion....Project STAR is the gold standard in class-size reduction literature because it’s the only randomized study on the issue that’s been conducted since the early 20th century...Florida’s program cost $20 billion over eight years, about the same as the estimates for the Washington initiative. And Project STAR was estimated to cost about $400,000 for each student who eventually went to college, compared to $133,000 for HeadStart. “Reducing class size is one of the most expensive things you can do in education,” Chingos said.

And people keep asking whether we can afford, ethically or financially, to run randomized trials...

Fire administrators, hire teachers.

I used to agree with this mentality, but I've seen first-hand how important a really good principal can be. Over the past three years my kids elementary school has turned around the direction of test scores, teacher attrition, and the overall mood and enthusiasm of the whole school staff.

One great example from last year was when the school was facing budget cuts after a bond failed. Rather than cut any teachers or staff, she was able get a massive PTO fundraising effort to bring in tens of thousands from the local community. She also worked with local businesses to donate thousands of dollars worth of paper, office and maintenance supplies, and even food for some of the fundraising events.

I agree with both of you. Fire some administrators... but not the good principals. :) There appears to be some room for improvement at a level higher than school principal.

I'm just a layman, but I wonder if that sort of ability from a n administrator is exactly the sort of thing that would be less likely to happen with larger and larger administrative staffs?

If you're swamped by your administrative duties, you're unlikely to find the time + energy for the kind of initiatives described here.

Getting rid of the "overhead" is a cop-out. With fewer (administrative) people, you're going to get less administration done - people aren't going to magically do more work. If you can pinpoint those tasks that are relatively unnecessary, you're got a real contribution to make. However, that's often surprisingly tricky, which is why in all kinds of cost-cutting debates people pretend theres this "overhead" that's nicely pre-categorized and ready to cut.

If only it really were that simple.

Not necessarily. To some extent the administrator for an even larger school district/unit is there because of their excellent bullshitting skills.

The laughable part is that the goals that the administration pursues are, at best, tangential to the goals that everyone else has for school systems.

They want their children to have an adequate education... but the principal made sure no one was laid off, and that morale was good among the employees.

I was being flippant in my answer, but there's a nugget of truth to it -- growing up, my school district had maybe 50-60 administrators to run about 25 elementary schools, 12 middle schools, and 8 or so high schools. Each of which had a principal, assistant principal, librarian, etc.

But today, that number is much higher. Mainly because of increased reporting requirements (No Child Left Behind, etc). But also to do things like write grant proposals (the federal Department of Education hadn't been created in my time, and wasn't handing out money)

> it needs to hire thousands of new teachers, counselors, teaching assistants and librarians.

More teachers and assistants I get. Same number of students in smaller classes means more classes which means more teachers (and their assistants). But more counselors and librarians? Those people generally don't have a dedicated class. The librarians are in charge of the library. The smaller class size isn't going to mean more students. So why would you suddenly need more librarians to serve the same books to the same students? Same with counselors. Why would you suddenly need more counselors to counsel the same number of students?

You ask as if there are genuine reasons. Do you not see this is a money grab, and if you don't also pay the librarians and the counselors they aren't going to support the cause?

You'll likely need more schools to handle smaller class sizes or to expand existing schools. If the former, then you'd definitely need additional counselors and librarians since a new school would need its own support services. If the latter, then you only need additional counselors and librarians if the expansion to the school also brings in additional students and doesn't just spread the existing students across more rooms. On the other hand, you may need to expand the library to accommodate more classes needing access to it simultaneously. I know my high school had two libraries largely for that reason (also because it was a poorly designed building, but the space was well utilized for social studies and English courses).

Since opening a new school has far more cost than just hiring more teachers, it didn't even occur to me that it would have been the route they would take. But I do realize that a new school facility is going to need a full set of faculty to support it. That includes principals, janitors, admins, etc. I just assumed they'd be expanding existing schools with "portables" and such.

It's not like schools are full of empty rooms. If you're going to reduce class size by hiring more teachers that means you're also going to need more room, that will probably translate to more schools.

More schools need more of everything that makes a school run.

> The smaller class size isn't going to mean more students

Larger class sizes are in part because of more students and no money spent on growth.

Well, in the district where my mom is a school psychologist, she is essentially responsible for about 4-5000 students spread across 4 schools. Part of her job is to screen kids for special education. Most of her day is spent convincing teachers in various schools that Timmy doesn't have a learning disability just because he acts out occasionally, and that even if he did a Special Ed classroom may well cripple him for the rest of his life. She only has about a day per week per school to administer assessments, provide classroom seminars, and manage confused teachers.

Librarians have a similar problem. Many districts in Washington can't afford even one per school anymore. The library in those districts is either closed or at reduced capacity if the librarian is not in.

I voted for I1135 mainly because it would increase funding for classified staff again, and not because it reduced class sizes.

Then this article is a poorly written piece. It makes no mention of that. I'm not in WA so I've no clue what was in that initiative. But the article sure does make it sound like it was just for reduced class sizes. I feel like the author is against it and her bias is seeping through.

Japan and Korea, famous for their high-achieving students, are also famous for another thing: huge class sizes. Larger than those in the USA.

Sure, classes are different, teachers are different, but the culture to push your kids to succeed is different as well. The parents are to blame for so many of the problems in our schools. I'm guessing parents in Japan and Korea don't go to a kids school and fight the teacher when they have bad grades.

Even a 1:1 teacher-student ratio would not improve education if that teacher cannot respond and adapt to the needs of the student. If that teacher is bound by a common curriculum and testing regime, or an otherwise rigid administration, you might as well teach with a bunch of robots.

Bring on the anecdote. Math is taught by very different methods now than those I remember, and I shudder to think about what is being taught in class now when my child can do a homework worksheet and get every single question on it completely wrong. And the reason, as far as I can tell, is because the curriculum is sometimes using logarithms and decimal-shift operations to teach multiplication and division. They are literally teaching kids to simulate the mechanical processes behind slide rules and abacuses in their brains in lieu of just memorizing the multiplication table. The entire system seems constructed around the complete avoidance of rote memorization.

But that is how I learned to multiply. Memorization of the multiplication table from 0x0 to 9x9 was absolutely required. You could not progress at all if you could not quickly look up any of those 100 numbers. 55, really, thanks to multiplication being a commutative operation. Or 36 if you could also remember that 0xn=0 and 1xn=n.

Rather than ask kids to memorize and index those 36 numbers for quick recall, I see piles of nonsense about "compatible numbers" and "reasonable numbers" and other concepts of dubious value outside the narrow context of quickly selecting the correct answer in a multiple-choice test, without actually doing the work.

I actually had to teach my child that the exact answer to a math question is, in fact, a reasonable estimate.

To top it off, judging from Feynman's anecdote about being on a textbook selection committee, this same nonsense, or cleverly repackaged iterations of it, has continued unabated for decades. Wakalixes make it go. Wakalixes pay the bills. Wakalixes extract the tax dollars and deliver it to the rent-seeker. And the students continue to learn, or fail, largely based upon whether their individual teachers care more than the median amount.

The economics of public education create too wide of a separation between the interests of the student and the signers of the checks. No matter how hard you push on that rope, the load will barely move. Adding more money will not help when there is already very little connection between the amount spent and the observed outcomes.

That is a question that should be asked directly to those that will be providing the money to be spent.

But luckily we live in a democracy and those who don't contribute a dime get to choose how much I should contribute to this. Less work for me. Less money too. But at least government employees get a nice pension so it's all worth it. Plus if we didn't do it this way then there's no other way at all - it's the government's way or the highway.

God bless democracy.

We live in a democratic republic, you elect the folks who make those decisions. If you lived in a pure democracy, you'd get a say in every decision.

Thanks, I was not aware.

So yes, as you put it so eloquently, this system is set in stone and it's pointless to think of better ways to manage these problems.

So indeed, we should spend not only billions, but trillions. And if it doesn't work then we should up the ante and go to quadrillions. Then I think it will work.

> Thanks, I was not aware.

Probably because you needed a smaller class size in civics/history/social studies class so the teacher could spend more time making sure everyone actually learned the material.

Stop poisoning the well with your snark. It's one thing to disagree with how things are run and propose an alternative, but just satirizing the positions of your imaginary opponents while being rude towards the people who do comment impedes everyone's ability to have a constructive discussion.

When I propose alternatives I get downvoted. Just look at my past comments.

This forum is not for constructive discussion (which would imply accepting any valid argument, not simply censoring them by downvoting).

This forum is for patting on each others back for being statists. So I'm just fitting in.

When I get good enough with my snark it will be indistinguishable from the actual arguments I used to argue against and be downvoted for.

So be patient, I'll get there.

Actually, I-1351 was a Washington State citizen's initiative, not a bill passed by the legislature.

http://sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/initiatives/FinalText_57...

...whether these citizen's initiatives have been captured by special-interest groups is another question.

> But at least government employees get a nice pension so it's all worth it.

Educators get poor pay, somewhat decent benefits, and an ok pension. Their working conditions (especially for new teachers, and this is largely the problem with retaining them) are pretty crappy. They put in 7-8 hours of instruction time a day. After 3rd or 4th grade (in many states) they're teaching a specific subject area, so they have 100+ students they see each day. That's 100+ papers to grade, exams to grade, parents to contact for various reasons. And they have to do all that in their planning period and after school hours. That's effectively two full-time jobs that they get paid (depending on the state, for a new teacher with just a bachelor's degree) between $25k and $40k to do. They can get extra money by sponsoring clubs or coaching sports teams. But then that eats into the time they have to spend on the academics they're hired to teach, and puts them up to 2 full-time jobs and one half-time job (depending on the number of clubs or particular sport).

God bless democracy for fucking over yet another generation of students by cutting corners on education. Something we decided a few hundred years ago was one of the government's primary responsibilities.

perhaps that was a poor decision to make it the government's responsibility.

But you see, that it is the government's job to provide education is a decision that has been made way in the past and it's way over our heads the reasons for it. We should just accept that it's better. You don't want kids to go without education, right? And if the government is not providing it then no one can provide it.

For instance, the private industry can't provide accessible education for the poor because everyone that works in the private industry only does it for money and profit, which are bad things. But people that work for the government do it out of the good in their hearts (they don't care about the cushy job and the benefits at all).

So because it's impossible to gather round a bunch of kids in front of a $20 blackboard on some public space and teach them some skills, we need to spend $5 Billion (I actually think that's not enough, it should be at least $6.2 Billion) to hire more librarians.

How can you not see that this is the true way?

> Educators get poor pay, somewhat decent benefits, and an ok pension

I hear this relatively frequently (my wife is a teacher and so are many of our friends), but I disagree. I think saying it is "poor" depends on what you compare it against.

The median earnings for a bachelors degree in the US is about $58k. In my county in MD, a teacher 10 years into their career makes $50k. Although, at this point teachers are required to get a masters.The masters scale goes all the way to $82k at 30 years.

IMHO, the pay is fairly well in line with the norm. If count the benefits and pension, which are better than the norm, then you could argue it is quite good.

Starting pay for teachers by state, averaged (varies district to district) [0]. DC (admittedly, not actually a state, but a separate entity so should be counted here) is the highest at $51,539. The rest are mostly well below that mark. Since pay for teachers is primarily time and not merit based, I searched for a few specific examples. In the state of GA you can find what an individual is paid by the state if you know their name. I found a friend with 9 or 10 years experience who's only making $41k (no masters degree). Another friend, same job and county, making some $47k with about 15 years of experience. Same county, elementary school teacher with 1 or 2 years experience made $30k. I've run out of teachers I know in that district.

This is, for this county, "good" pay. This is not, for the level of responsibility and time commitment required of them, good pay. They're expected to maintain their certifications on their own time. They're expected to remain current on the field they teach on their own time. They're expected to finish their masters degree on their own time and dime. All with less than $50k income and having families.

$82k for a professional after 30 years with a masters degree is not "good pay". It's ok pay. It's certainly enough to keep them out of debt, I'd hope, but it's not going to make up for the 12+ hour workdays they'll have spent most of their adult life dealing with. And it takes 30 years to get to that point in your state. Do they get tuition assistance for that masters degree? What's the average cost and how much of that pay raise is actually spent dealing with the debt incurred in paying for the degree?

[0] http://www.nea.org/home/2012-2013-average-starting-teacher-s...

EDIT: The teachers I looked up teach in the same district so they're getting the same locality adjustments so it's an apples-to-apples comparison. Going one county north results in boosted pay, but it's simultaneously a wealthier county and scarier (violent crime in schools) county.

Another fact that many commenters on this thread have overlooked is that U.S. schools operate about 175 days per year (compare that to 240 days for 52 weeks minus 10 holidays minus 10 vacation days).

http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/sass/tables/sass0708_035_s1s.asp

>it's not going to make up for the 12+ hour workdays they'll have spent most of their adult life dealing with.

I know several teachers and I don't know a single one, (except for coaches who get paid to work longer), that works anywhere near 12 hour days on average--not even close.

A quick google search backs me up. This study by the BLS shows that on average they work around 40 hours per week when they work (this includes time working at home). [1]

Furthermore, teachers only work 190 days out of the year, so they end up working far less on average than other professionals.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2008/03/art4full.pdf

But over the years, teachers have been expected to supply more and more of their class materials at their own expense. I'm not saying that puts them at "fast food" level wages... but it does need to be taken into account when we talk about how much teachers make. They spend a non-trivial amount of their income to support their job.

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