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Texas Education Agency data for the 2011-12 school year show that the number of elementary classes exceeding the 22-1 student-teacher ratio has soared to 8,479 from 2,238 last school year. Texas has had the 22-student cap for kindergarten through fourth-grade classes since 1984, and districts can apply for exemptions for financial reasons. But during the 2011 legislative session, to ease the pain of a roughly $5.4 billion reduction in state financing that did not account for the estimated influx of 170,000 new students over the next two years - and after an attempt to do away with the cap failed - lawmakers made those exemptions easier to obtain. Texas schools, which have shed approximately 25,000 employees this school year, including more than 10,000 teachers, have jumped at the chance to trim costs.

When Shania started third grade at P.S. 148 last fall, she was thrilled to be back at the Queens public school. An outgoing eight-year-old, she said she was happy to be among her friends again, and she had loved her class the previous year. Her second-grade teacher would take the time to explain tricky topics like addition and subtraction one-on-one. She had even been named "student of the month." But since 2007, as the economy has tanked and expenses for public schools have risen, New York City has made principals cut budgets by 13.7 percent. When budgets are cut, teachers are fired and others aren't replaced -- including at P.S. 148, which has lost at least $600,000 and eight teachers since 2010. When teachers are lost, class sizes balloon. Shania had 31 classmates this past school year, compared to 20 the year before.

In today's Washington Post and then on Fordham's site here, Fordham's Mike Petrilli and AEI's Rick Hess write that we are "defining excellence down" by not sufficiently challenging high-achievers. They are concerned that the nation's focus-federal education efforts in particular-will "compromise opportunities for our highest-achieving students." Petrilli and Hess seem to think the federal government is wrong to force schools to have equitable numbers of poor kids in advanced classes because, let's be realistic, the "unseemly reality" that poor kids are way behind and can't hang in tough classes is just a fact. Putting them in tough classes isn't fair to anyone (including our kids who could really reach the moon if these other kids weren't dragging them down).

This paper examines the effect of early childhood investments on college enrollment and degree completion. We use the random assignment in the Project STAR experiment to estimate the effect of smaller classes in primary school on college entry, college choice, and degree completion. We improve on existing work in this area with unusually detailed data on college enrollment spells and the previously unexplored outcome of college degree completion. We find that assignment to a small class increases the probability of attending college by 2.7 percentage points, with effects more than twice as large among blacks. Among those with the lowest ex ante probability of attending college, the effect is 11 percentage points. Smaller classes increase the likelihood of earning a college degree by 1.6 percentage points and shift students towards high-earning fields such as STEM (science, technology, engineering and medicine), business and economics. We confirm the standard finding that test score effects fade out by middle school, but show that test score effects at the time of the experiment are an excellent predictor of long-term improvements in postsecondary outcomes. We compare the costs and impacts of this intervention with other tools for increasing postsecondary attainment, such as Head Start and financial aid, and conclude that early investments are no more cost effective than later investments in boosting adult educational attainment.

Last week at a school board meeting, Kansas City, MO School District superintendent John Covington told the school board that there is no research that supports reduced class size linked to increased student achievement. During the meeting, Covington  cited the views of Bill Gates, who has minimized the importance of class size and suggested that teachers be paid more for teaching larger classes.

Mitt Romney is turning the discussion to education this week, positing a vision for improving schools that might seem counter-intuitive: the push for smaller class sizes, he says, is basically a scheme by unionized teachers to pad their membership. Smaller classes does not make a better education, Romney says. Better teachers and school choice programs like voucher systems do.

Class Warfare:  Inside the fight to Fix America's Schools, Steven Brill's ethically challenged, error ridden, incoherent yet highly illuminating love letter to the corporate education reformers bent on privatizing public education, is an extraordinary and illuminating document and one that, in a sane world, could easily serve as an indictment against the very process and people it was written to lionize. Perhaps, in time, that day will come. Perhaps, indeed, it is closer than we think. In the main, Class Warfare tells the tragic and true story of how a handful of extraordinarily wealthy and ruthless private citizens in league with their corporate and political allies have been able to undermine the democratic process in order to try to remake the public school system in their image:  that is to say, to remake it as another cog in the wheel of the ever more destructive unregulated free market which has brought the globe to the brink of chaos and profited no one but  themselves.

My four children have all attended public schools in our middle-class suburban district. When my oldest was in fourth grade, in 1998, he took the state tests, and I was not even aware of it. Later, he said the tests were kind of fun; he got to miss his regular classes. Six years later, in 2004, our daughter was in fourth grade. Long before the state tests, a letter came home. Prep classes were being offered before and after school. While the sessions were not mandatory, students were strongly urged to attend. Eventually the results were printed in our local newspaper. The news was grim; the nearby districts, in wealthier towns, had creamed us. The following year, our middle school added a mandatory course to prep for the state English test. That 1998/2004 divide - what happened in the interim was the 2002 No Child Left Behind law - should be kept in mind when analyzing a new, widely publicized study that closely tracked 2.5 million students over 20 years to determine whether teachers who helped raise children's test scores have a lasting effect on their lives. The researchers conclude that having such a teacher improved students' odds of going to a good college, the quality of the neighborhoods where they lived and their lifetime earnings.

Class sizes in New York City public schools are the most bloated they have been in a decade, as budget cuts have sliced teachers from the system, the teachers union said Thursday. The city acknowledged that final class-size numbers would show more crowded classrooms, but it blamed a $1.7 billion drop in state and federal aid.

Middle-class public schools educate the majority of U.S. students but pay lower teacher salaries, have larger class sizes and spend less per pupil than low-income and wealthy schools, according to a report to be issued Monday.

"The growing role of class in academic success has taken experts by surprise since it follows decades of equal opportunity efforts and counters racial trends, where differences have narrowed. It adds to fears over recent evidence suggesting that low-income Americans have lower chances of upward mobility than counterparts in Canada and Western Europe. Thirty years ago, there was a 31 percentage point difference between the share of prosperous and poor Americans who earned bachelor's degrees, according to Martha J. Bailey and Susan M. Dynarski of the University of Michigan. Now the gap is 45 points. While both groups improved their odds of finishing college, the affluent improved much more, widening their sizable lead."

Leaders of the Milwaukee teachers union are campaigning for members to sacrifice a week's worth of their pay to help reduce class sizes next year in Milwaukee Public Schools, if legislation allowing them a window of time to negotiate a salary reduction is signed by Gov. Scott Walker. The MPS Children's Week Campaign, which will be discussed with the Milwaukee Teachers' Education Association membership beginning Saturday, is asking educators to give up 2.6% of their salary next year, or about five days of pay, to allow for class-size relief.

President Obama, you do appear to be a thoughtful man. If you disagree with what Romney said, you should rein in your own Education Secretary and ask him to take back his erroneous statements on the subject.  Even more importantly, if you respect the priorities of parents and teachers as well as the best education research, you will immediately restore the $620 million in your budget that districts can use for class size reduction.

Here in NYC, while expanding the bureaucracy, increasing spending on education by 50 percent and raising teacher salaries by 40 percent, Bloomberg has also managed to eliminate thousands of teaching positions.  Class sizes this year in the early grades are the largest they have been in eleven years. The result?  Student achievement has stagnated.

So, I've seen on more than a few occasions these last few weeks references to the recent Dobbie and Fryer article on NYC charter schools as the latest evidence that money doesn't matter in schools. That costly stuff like class size, or  overall measures of total per pupil expenditures are simply unimportant, and can easily be replaced/substituted with no-cost alternatives like those employed in no excuses charter schools (like high expectations, tutoring, additional time, and wrap-around services). I'll set aside the issue that many of these supposedly more effective alternatives do, in fact, have cost implications. Instead, I'll focus my critique on whether this Dobbie/Fryer study provides any substantive evidence that money doesn't matter - either broadly, or in the narrower context of looking specifically at NYC charter schools.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that if it were up to him, he'd double class size and fire the 50 percent of teachers who are in the bottom half of effectiveness ratings:  "doubl[ing] the class size with a better teacher is a good deal for the students." Bloomberg, in his inimitable way, breezily insulted 80,000 teachers to make a point unsubstantiated by any social-science evidence.

According to the survey, three quarters of elementary schools, 61 percent of middle schools and 59 percent of high schools had increased class sizes. Slightly less than half of schools across the board reported having fewer teachers than in the previous year, with one quarter of those schools maintaining or increasing their student population.

"The U.S. working class was slow to respond to the hard times it faced during and after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Finally, however, in February, 2011, workers in Wisconsin began the famous uprising that electrified the country, revolting in large numbers against Governor Scott Walker's efforts to destroy the state's public employee labor unions.  A few months later, the Occupy Wall Street movement, which supported many working class efforts, spread from New York City to the rest of the nation and the world. Then, in September 2012, Chicago's public school teachers struck, in defiance of Mayor Rahm Emmanuel's attempt to destroy the teachers' union and put the city's schools firmly on the path of neoliberal austerity and privatization. These three rebellions shared the growing awareness that economic and political power in the United States are firmly in the hands of a tiny minority of fantastically wealthy individuals whose avarice knows no bounds. These titans of finance want to eviscerate working men and women, making them as insecure as possible and wholly dependent on the dog-eat-dog logic of the marketplace, while at the same time converting any and all aspects of life into opportunities for capital accumulation."

Third Way has posted a response to my critique in which they argue that their analysis do not suffer the egregious flaws my review indicates. Specifically, they bring up my reference to the fact that whenever they are using a "district" level of analysis, they include the Detroit City Schools in their entirety in their sample of "middle class." They argue that they did not do this, but rather only included the middle class schools in Detroit.

After three years of budget cuts, the city's schools started the year with more oversize classes than at any time in the last decade, according to data collected by the United Federation of Teachers.