Why Johnny can't teach

Reason, Dec, 1993 by Jonathan Marshall

Funding is also scarce for really good field research. Most federal research money goes to regional research centers that disseminate information rather than oversee careful experiments.

And yet it is sheer folly not to invest the money to find out what works. The federal government pumps more than $6 billion a year into so-called Chapter I funds, which aid school districts with significant numbers of "disadvantaged" students. One of the chief ways local districts use the money is to reduce class sizes--just about the most expensive possible intervention given the cost of hiring extra teachers and building more facilities. Yet strong teacher lobbies with a stake in new hiring promote class-size reduction as the answer to America's educational needs. As Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Association, declared, "If we're serious about improving learning in America, there's no more important place to begin."

But does it work? For years nearly everyone had an opinion, but nobody really knew until recently because hardly any systematic tests had ever been done to answer the question. Intuitively, it seems obvious that smaller classes should help, yet Japanese students manage to excel in mathematics despite class sizes in the low 40s.

In the mid-'80s, the Tennessee legislature decided it needed a definitive answer. With help from researchers in the state university system, it appropriated $12 million to carry out a bullet-proof test. (The actual research cost less than $1 million; the rest paid for smaller classes.) Known as Project STAR, the study took 7,500 students in grades K-3 and assigned them randomly to three types of classes: normal ones with 23 kids and a single teacher; normal-size classes that included a teacher's aide; and classes with only 15 children per teacher. Teachers were also assigned randomly to avoid bias. Careful, consistent testing tracked the children through these classes and into later years.

The results of Project STAR were fascinating and instructive: Students who attended smaller classes made significant cognitive gains in all subjects, proving for the first time that smaller classes really do aid learning. (In contrast, teacher's aides did not help academic performance at all.) At the same time, however, the performance gains were modest--well below those achieved by several proven teaching methods, such as mastery learning and cooperative learning, that work well in normal-size classes.

As John Folger, professor emeritus at Vanderbilt University, concluded in a review of Project STAR, "the high cost of reducing class size across the board makes it unfeasible. There are other interventions which produce much larger improvements in student achievement for the same or lower costs than would be involved in a substantial reduction in class size." Folger cited Slavin's Success for All as a reading program that produces three to five times the gains of reducing class size.

Praise for the careful experimental design of Project STAR has been almost universal. Orlich calls it "the most significant educational research done in the U.S. during the past 25 years." Slavin, who calls it "an extraordinary experiment that makes most previous research on class size obsolete," notes the irony that "we are willing to spend massive sums on educational services of unknown effect but find it shocking to spend $12 million to find answers to questions at the top of people's list of what we need to know."