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"Class Size: What Research Says and What It Means for State Policy argues that increasing average class size by one student will save about 2% of total education spending with negligible impact on academic achievement. It justifies this conclusion on the basis that Class-Size Reduction (CSR) is not particularly effective and is not as cost-effective as other reforms. However, this conclusion is based on a misleading review of the CSR research literature. The report puts too much emphasis on studies that are of poor quality or that do not focus on settings that are particularly relevant to the debate on class-size policy in the United States. It argues that class-size reduction is less cost-effective than other reform policies, but it bases this contention on an incomplete accounting of the benefits of smaller classes and an uncritical, unexamined list of alternative policies. The report's estimates of the potential cost savings are flawed as, in reality, schools cannot structurally reduce class size by only one student. Well-documented and long-term non-academic gains from CSR are not addressed. Likewise, the recommendation for releasing the ―least effective‖ teachers assumes a valid way of making such determinations is available. "

Incomplete: How Middle Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade is a new report from Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based policy think tank. The report aims to convince parents, taxpayers and policymakers that they should be as concerned about middle-class schools not making the grade as they are about the failures of the nation's large, poor, urban school districts. But, the report suffers from egregious methodological flaws invalidating nearly every bold conclusion drawn by its authors. First, the report classifies as middle class any school or district where the share of children qualifying for free or reduced-priced lunch falls between 25% and 75%. Seemingly unknown to the authors, this classification includes as middle class some of the poorest urban centers in the country, such as Detroit and Philadelphia. But, even setting aside the crude classification of middle class, none of the report's major conclusions are actually supported by the data tables provided. The report concludes, for instance, that middle-class schools perform much less well than the general public, parents and taxpayers believe they do. But, the tables throughout the report invariably show that the schools they classify as "middle class" fall precisely where one would expect them to-in the middle-between higher- and lower-income schools. 

It's been a busy week.  On Wednesday there was a spirited rally on the steps of Tweed to protest the continued cuts to school budgets, the loss of art, music & afterschool program, and the sharp increases in class sizes; a good summary of the event is on the  Ed Vox blog.  There were great speeches by parents and elected officials, and I met a large contingent from PS  217 in Roosevelt Island, protesting Kindergarten classes of 28 and 5th grade classes of 34, even though there are empty rooms in the building.   On Thursday, I joined a UFT press conference at Murry Bergtraum HS, where Michael Mulgrew  reported  on the 7,000 classes that violate the union limits, with more than 250,000 students sitting (or standing) in these oversized classes during the first ten days of school.  (Contractual class size limits - already far too large - are 25 students in Kindergarten; 32 students in grades 1-6:  33 students in non-title I MS; 30 in Title I MS; 34 students in HS; and 50 students in gym.)

A growing body of research has examined how cultural capital, recently broadened to include not only high-status cultural activities but also a range of different parenting practices, influences children's educational success. Most of this research assumes that parents' current class location is the starting point of class transmission. However, does the ability of parents to pass advantages to their children, particularly through specific cultural practices, depend solely on their current class location or also on their class of origin? The authors address this question by defining social background as a combination of parents' cur- rent class location and their own family backgrounds. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics and its Child Development Supplement, the authors examine how different categories of social back- ground are related to parenting practices and children's academic achievement. The results offer novel insights into the transmission of class advantage across generations and inform debates about the complex processes of cultural reproduction and cultural mobility.

Will the bigger classes affect achievement? Results from just a single year suggest they will. The UFT Research Dept. looked at fourth grade, where class sizes rose an average of about one-half a child (0.47) last year. Then we divided the fourth grade into schools where class size rose more than the average, and schools where it rose less, and looked at their achievement in math. The difference was pronounced. While the majority of schools improved in math last year, schools where 4th grade class sizes rose by less than the average improved two percentage points more than schools that had larger-than-average class size increases.

Bill Gates, Arne Duncan, and some of the other presiding education reform yahoos have started to question the benefits of smaller class sizes. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson deserves some credit for a semi-acknowledgement of the importance of smaller class sizes in this Q&A with Bill Turque. She states that at least some kids should have smaller classes, however she repeats the notion that it's better to have a class of forty students with one effective teacher than a class of twenty students with an ineffective teacher. Now, she's not completely wrong, but I would issue several caveats to go with her generalization.

"Congratulations to Carol Burris, co-author of the principal letter critiquing the APPR, the new NY state teacher evaluation system. Her school, South Side HS in Rockville Center, was just named the second best high school in the state, according to US News and World Report, and it is one of few non-selective relatively diverse schools on the list. Here is her explanation: "We do great things by challenging all kids, supporting them and not sorting them." It also can't hurt that her school has average class sizes of 17 (in math) to 23 (in social studies), according to its NYS report card. Carol adds: The typical class sizes for math, science and English are a bit higher than shown because we have every other day support classes in those subjects for kids who need them and those are twelve or fewer. We also keep our repeater classes (kids who failed Regents) under 12. You will never find an academic class in my school over 29 and 29 is rare. Last year we were 16% free and reduced price lunch, and when kids have small class sizes, lots of support and high expectations they do very well. Below, see her recent letter to the NY Board of Regents, regarding their new proposal to create three different kinds of diplomas: CTE (vocational), regular and STEM. Carol explains: "No matter how you cut it, it is tracking and we have a history of segregated classrooms that resulted from that practice. This is not an argument against CTE programs or STEM programs. This is an argument for preparing all of our children for college and career, and not watering down expectations and hope by forcing kids prematurely down different paths""

I may not be able to prove that my literature class makes a difference in my students' test results, but there is a positive correlation between how much time students spend reading and higher scores. The problem is that low-income students, who begin school with a less-developed vocabulary and are less able to comprehend complex sentences than their more privileged peers, are also less likely to read at home. Many will read only during class time, with a teacher supporting their effort. But those are the same students who are more likely to lose out on literary reading in class in favor of extra test prep. By "using data to inform instruction," as the Department of Education insists we do, we are sorting lower-achieving students into classes that provide less cultural capital than their already more successful peers receive in their more literary classes and depriving students who viscerally understand the violence and despair in Steinbeck's novels of the opportunity to read them. It is ironic, then, that English Language Arts exams are designed for "cultural neutrality." This is supposed to give students a level playing field on the exams, but what it does is bleed our English classes dry. We are trying to teach students to read increasingly complex texts, but they are complex only on the sentence level - not because the ideas they present are complex, not because they are symbolic, allusive or ambiguous. These are literary qualities, and they are more or less absent from testing materials.

"It is a staple of American politics that elected officials routinely frame their appeals to the "middle class." The idea is simple: Since the vast majority of Americans consider themselves members of the middle class, it makes sense to use this label as shorthand for "people like you." The practice of people locating themselves within a class structure - rather than being "assigned" to classes based on particular characteristics, such as income or occupation - is often called "subjective class identification.""

Class size is one of a long list of education-related issues about which arguments rage. Generally speaking, educators want small classes because they allow more individual attention. Those averse to taxes want large classes because they're cheaper. Many think class size makes no important difference. Bill Gates speaks approvingly of one master teacher, alone in a television studio, lecturing millions of kids.

Class Warfare: that's the title Steven Brill gave to his recent book on the state of American education. With such a title, one might think that that Brill's book would investigate how the deep class divisions between America's wealthy class and our poor and working class, a gap that has grown immensely over the last four decades, has harmed our schools and our students. After all, educational research has shown that greatest challenge our schools face is the grinding effect of poverty on so many of the students we teach.

An organization called "The Third Way" released a report last week, in which they present descriptive data on what they call "middle class schools." The primary conclusion of their analysis is that "middle class schools" aren't "making the grade," and that they are "falling short on their most basic 21st century mission: To prepare kids to get a college degree." They also argue that "middle class schools" are largely ignored in our debate and policymaking, and we need a "second phase of school reform" in order to address this deficit. The Wall Street Journal swallowed the report whole, running a story presenting Third Way's findings under the headline "Middle class schools fail to make the grade."

It goes without saying that class identification is complex and my model is simple (and uses cross-sectional data). In addition, the returns to a college degree are substantial. Still, these results suggest that, while college-educated Americans are very likely to identify as middle class or higher, the relationship may have weakened slightly over time. In other words, when it comes to people's perception of their own class position, college is a bit less of a "ticket to the middle class" than it used to be.

Freed - perhaps - of presidential daydreams, freed - perhaps - of desire for another term as mayor, Mr. Bloomberg sounds unburdened by inhibition and convinced that Americans hunger for his insights. Last week he journeyed to M.I.T. to talk entrepreneurship and to distinguish between the private sector (muscular and unsentimental) and the public (flaccid, filled with protesters waving placards and legislators who want only to spend). Then he turned to public school teachers and the silly preoccupation with class size. Most teachers, he said, come from the lowest quarter of their college graduating classes. If he could effect change, he said, "you would cut the number of teachers in half but you would double the compensation of them, and you would weed out all the bad ones and just have good teachers. "Double the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for students."

I've already beaten the issue of the various flaws, misrepresentations and outright data abuse in the Third Way middle class report into the ground on this blog. And it's really about time for that to end. Time to move on. But here is one simple illustration which draws on the same NAEP data compiled and aggregated in the Middle Class report. For anyone reading this post who has not already read my others on the problems with the definition of "Middle Class," and related data abuse & misuse please start there

The second element of the new stupid is Translating Research Simplistically. For two decades, advocates of class-size reduction have referenced the findings from the Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project, a class-size experiment conducted in Tennessee in the late 1980s. Researchers found significant achievement gains for students in small kindergarten classes and additional gains in 1st grade, especially for black students. The results seemed to validate a crowd-pleasing reform and were famously embraced in California, where in 1996 legislators adopted a program to reduce class sizes that cost nearly $800 million in its first year and billions in its first decade. The dollars ultimately yielded disappointing results, however, with the only major evaluation (a joint American Institutes for Research and RAND study) finding no effect on student achievement.

PERHAPS THE VERY best thing about Steven Brill's new book is its title. The phrase "class warfare" has a double meaning, of course, and the book paints very clearly the deep economic cleavages that underlie the fierce education debates within the Democratic Party over such policy issues as charter schools, merit pay for teachers, and the role of poverty in achievement outcomes. In Brill's telling, the education class war pits a heroic group of entrepreneurial philanthropists, highly successful hedge fund billionaires, and idealistic Ivy Leaguers who join Teach for America against somewhat grubby and grasping rank-and-file public school teachers and their union leaders, who often put their own selfish interests above those of the children. In looking out for what is best for low-income and minority students, Brill contends, Wall Street hedge fund managers are a much more reliable ally than the middle-class teachers who educate schoolchildren every day. Brill's worldview is important to understand because it is typical of the outlook of the education "reform" community, including leaders of the Obama administration, and the president himself.

The goal of our recent report "Incomplete: How Middle-Class Schools Aren't Making the Grade" was to jumpstart a national conversation around the state of middle-class schools. Given the response, it looks like we're off to a good start. We've received a wide range of feedback from educators, policymakers, and thought leaders who share a common purpose-getting our kids ready to succeed in the 21st century. Since a portion of the response has focused on our definition of "middle-class" or our approach to school-by-school data, we wanted to take a moment to tackle some of the issues that have been raised.

Many in the forefront of what is called the education reform movement - like Bill Gates, the philanthropist, and Arne Duncan, the nation's education secretary - have attended private schools with small class sizes. Others, like New York's mayor, Michael R. Bloomberg, and its former schools chancellor Joel I. Klein have sent their children to private schools with small class sizes. Imagine if the poorest public school children had the same opportunity. That is what has been happening for several years in this urban district of 130,000 students. Using state money and federal stimulus dollars, San Diego has held class size to 17 in kindergarten through second grade at its 30 poorest schools.

Charles Murray, the author of the much-discussed book, Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 , (and, years ago, the widely discredited volume, The Bell Curve ) has an op-ed in today's New York Times outlining some solutions to the growing class divide that he depicts in Coming Apart .  Among his ideas is to "replace ethnic affirmative action with socioeconomic affirmative action."  Murray writes: "This is a no-brainer. It is absurd, in 2012, to give the son of a black lawyer an advantage in college admissions but not do the same for the son of a white plumber." I've been a long time advocate of class-based affirmative action, going back to my 1996 book, The Remedy: Class, Race and Affirmative Action , so on the one hand I'm pleased by his article, but in other ways I am dismayed.