Reducing of class sizes is good idea

Thanks for the debate snuki. ==Rebuttal== In response to my argument that small schools don't mean small classes because you could have a smaller school without hiring additional teachers, my opponent says that we should be building new facilities. This doesn't answer the original argument. You could believe in the small school movement and still Vote Con. Also, this proves my point that if we have extra money, it should go to adversity pay, merit pay, higher starting salaries, and other measures to attract higher quality teachers, rather than building a bunch of nice new buildings. New buildings don't teach students; good teachers do. My opponent says something about education level, but that term doesn't have any meaning to me. And my opponent has still yet to provide a single study that smaller class sizes increase test scores, whereas I provide evidence that test scores are higher in larger schools than in smaller schools. My opponent's last responds to my argument that smaller class sizes, without increasing teacher quality, just spread good teachers too thin. His response is, "if we have really good teacher, we should give him good students." That was my point; if you have a really good teacher, give that teacher as many students as possible. Rather than having him teach classes of 10 students, he should be teaching classes of 25, rather than forcing GOOD students into a DIFFERENT classroom with a brand new teacher who isn't as good, all in the name of reducing class sizes. If you take my opponent's argument to its logical extreme, the ideal teaching environment is where the student to teacher ratio is 1:1. But imagine what that would do to teacher quality; each student would receive individual attention, but most of them from someone who nearly flunked out of community college. In contrast, the 99th percentile teachers, even though they are the MOST INCREDIBLE TEACHERS IN THE SYSTEM would only be able to impart wisdom on ONE STUDENT EACH SEMESTER. This is clearly the worst possible system and underutilizes scarce resources, i.e. good teachers. My opponent never answers my refutations to the 3 studies that it is just speculation, not actual observation, and that OUTCOME measures show no improvement. Ultimately, my opponent never answers my Jay P Greene evidence that although class sizes have decreased from 22 students-per-teacher to 16 students-per-teacher over the past 30 years (and spending per pupil has DOUBLED), NAEP scores remain FLAT. We have spent a lot more money and hired 30% more teacher-per-student and STILL there is no improvement. This clearly proves that class size reductions do not increase academic outcomes because hiring new teachers, without changing incentive schemes, just floods the system with a disproportionate number of bad teachers. Remember the Eric Hanushek evidence that to equal the increase in education quality that you get from going from a 50th percentile, average teacher, to a 75th percentile teacher you'd have to cut class sizes in HALF. So if we have extra money, we should funnel it into incentive schemes, like adversity pay, merit pay, and higher starting salaries to attract the best and the brightest into the teaching profession, rather than using the same incentive schemes that fail to attract enough good teachers and then trying to hire MORE teachers (in order to reduce class sizes) from this pool of average-to-poor quality teachers. In fact, look comparatively at how effective money would be. If a starting salary for teachers was $22,000, we could either hire one additional teacher OR offer raises of $7,000 to the 3 best teachers in the school. If we had 50 students and 3 teachers, hiring one more teacher decreases class sizes from 16 to 12.5, OR we could attract (or keep) 3 really good teachers for those substantial $7,000 raises. So not only is getting a higher quality teacher more effective than a class size decrease, but it is also CHEAPER, since giving raises is cheaper than paying another full-time salary. So money goes farther in a merit pay system than when decreasing class sizes. Lastly, remember the evidence that in Texas' merit pay system, the leave rate of the best teachers declined (by around 10%) and the leave rate of the worst teachers increased (by around 30%). This is exactly what we want – an incentive scheme that rewards good teachers and punishes bad ones, convincing good teachers that they can earn a decent living as a teacher (compared to what a smart person could instead earn in the private sector) and convincing bad teachers that they will not get raises for doing absolutely nothing, like they do under the current salary schedule (where you get a raise every few years merely for not dying). So because every standing study in this debate shows that lowering class sizes costs a lot of money, has NO academic benefits, and has opportunity costs, where the money could be better spent to incentive good teachers, I urge a Con vote.