The New Reverse Class Struggle

Although Smaller Sizes Are Touted, Some Say Bigger May Be Beneficial

It was 9:45 a.m. on a Wednesday morning. Jane Reiser's mathematics class in Room 18 was stuffed with sixth- and seventh-graders. There were 32 of them, way above the national class size average of 25. Every seat was filled -- 17 girls, 15 boys, all races, all learning styles. A teacher's nightmare.

And yet, despite having so many students, Reiser's class was humming, with everybody paying attention. She held up a few stray socks to introduce a lesson on probabilities with one of those weird questions that interest 11- and 12-year-olds:

If you reach into your sock drawer in the dark, what are the chances you will pull out two the same color?

Billie-Jean Bensen, principal of Herbert Hoover Middle School in Rockville, called Reiser "outstanding," "fabulous" and "truly amazing," able to get great results despite her large class size.

So why, some experts are asking, are educators and politicians so bent on reducing class sizes? Wouldn't it be better to let classes get bigger? Then schools could reduce the number of teachers, keep good ones like Reiser and pay them more.

The idea seems odd to many. But some scholars and administrators say raising class sizes and teacher pay might improve achievement.

Saul Cooperman, a former New Jersey education commissioner, said in the newspaper Education Week recently that if schools established a class size of 30 to 35 in all grades except third grade and below, they would, for the same money, be able to raise the average teacher salary from $50,000 to more than $75,000.

"What I am suggesting is heresy to most people," Cooperman said in the article, "because everybody seems to love smaller classes."

But according to Cooperman, chairman of the Academy for Teaching and Leadership in Far Hills, N.J., those negative reactions would soften once people thought about it. He said even local teacher union leaders would be intrigued. "Unions, first and foremost, are made up of people who operate in their members' interest," he said. "And a 51 percent pay raise is certainly in a union member's interest!"

Chris Whittle, founder and chief executive of the for-profit public school management company Edison Schools, makes a similar point in his new book, "Crash Course: Imagining a Better Future for Public Education." He argues that schools might be able to pay their best teachers as much as $130,000, in part by ending the campaign to make classes smaller and instead have students do some clerical work and spend significant parts of the school day studying on their own.

Whittle acknowledged that virtually all U.S. adults believe that the smaller number of children in a class, the better the educational results. "But ask yourself why you believe this," he wrote. "Which would be better, a bad teacher with 15 kids or a good one with 30?

The most sophisticated study of class size, the Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio project in Tennessee, found that students in smaller classes outscored their larger-class friends on standardized tests. But only when class sizes fell below 18.