The Detroit News. It's not uncommon for classrooms in rural Nebraska to have no more than nine pupils for every teacher, while children sometimes gather in crowds of 30 or more for each instructor in Utah and California. When you get 25 kids or more in a class, the workload becomes horrendous and I have to cut corners. And I hate cutting corners. Utah public teachers staged a one-day walkout two months ago to protest overcrowding.
Educators warn that school statistics are treacherous to evaluate.
School districts and state authorities are not uniform in the way they report even such essential information as the number of instructors employed in each school. Scripps Howard obtained data on 83,858 individual elementary and secondary schools that have been open for at least one year and that have regular rather than special education curriculums. Under these assumptions, there was one teacher for every 16.1 students in the United States last year. And I'm sure there is just as much variance between school systems within a state and even within school districts as there is from state to state.